Chickenhawk

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All the humor notwithstanding, you can’t help noticing that the book gets darker as it progresses. You’re not only witnessing the author’s flying and derring-do, you’re also there as he is being broken as a human being, succumbing first to the various temptations, suffering the consequences and losing his mental health and of course eventually dragging his family into it.

Robert Mason had over 1000 helicopter missions during his year in Vietnam. Some moments were peaceful, many were not. Mason’s gripping memoir . . . proves again that reality is more interesting, and often more terrifying, than fiction.” – Los Angeles Times

reprint stiff wrappers Near Fine small octavo 399pp., Author flew over 1000 combat missions in Vietnam. A Gruesome and often amusing account of a waste of lives and technology. Add this one to my long list of books about the American War in Vietnam. I am the right age to have been drafted for that war, but was not due to a variety of deferments and a high lottery number. The short story is that I was considering fleeing to Canada if I was drafted but never had to make that momentous decision that would have significantly changed my life. I never came to that fork in the road so will always wonder what I would have done if I was actually faced with that choice. I had long wondered what it was like for those who were in Vietnam and this account, by Robert Mason, a helicopter pilot, gives us a good look at the conditions which the troops over there had to work under, as well as the author's questioning of why they were there and how to tell friend from foe. So many shades of grey. The troops on the ground undoubtedly had it far worse than the helicopter pilots did and the accounts of bodies piled up or soldiers missing limbs, was a constant refrain. In chapter nine, "Tension", Mason details his R&R in Taiwan in March 1966 and his decision to volunteer for a transfer out of the "Cav" to another helicopter unit. Can’t blame them, can you?” said the lieutenant. “Every time they do, we clobber the sh1t out of them.’

In an epilogue, Mason sketches out his activities upon returning to the US, including his incarceration for smuggling.

Robert Mason writes about his experience of the brutality of a war he fought when he was young. He wrote about his time in Vietnam in 1965-66. For a while those fighting thought they were winning a war that would go on for years longer and claim many more victims. This is a personal narrative of what I saw in Vietnam and how it affected me. The events all happened; the chronology and geography are correct to the best of my knowledge. The names of the characters . . . have been changed . . . How extraordinarily touching it is that these men who have suffered so much still want to make us better...If I sound just a little overwrought, I defy you to read this straightforward, in many ways underwrought, narrative and feel any differently...filled with the grim humor of men under pressure, filled with details..."