"Flight of the Intruder" is a novel about combat flying during the Vietnam war in the early 1970s. The "Intruder" in the title refers to the Navy attack airplane the A-6 'Intruder', and the hero of the book is Jake Grafton, a A-6 pilot. Jake is a member of an A-6 squadron on a carrier sailing near Vietnam coast and flies night bombing missions over North Vietnam. At the start of the story Jake, along with his squadron mates, is frustrated by the way the war is being fought. Risking your life to bomb a "suspected truck park", which looks just like any other part of the jungle, or mud flats labelled a "boat yard", seems hardly worth it. When Jake's buddy and bombardier (the A-6 is a two place airplane) is killed our hero gets really mad and he decides to plan a mission of his own, a mission that "would mean something". How he goes about it and what happens is the main story of the book. The plot is cleverly woven into actual historical events to make it almost possible and the author drives the story forward very well. Once you start the book is hard to put down.
Perhaps the best parts of this book are the descriptions of flying A-6 Intruders in carrier operations and in low level night missions over North Vietnam. You can almost feel the hard turns made to avoid SAMs, and hear the roar of the jets and see the sparks the tail hook makes sliding over the carrier's deck after a "bolter" - that is a landing in which the airplane misses the arresting cables and has to take off and try again. Stephen Coonts knows what he is writing about. He is a navy pilot with over 1600 hours in the A-6 Intruder which includes combat missions over South and North Vietnam and Laos.
The story slows down when the action moves from the air and the carrier to the shore. There is an obligatory romance, but I found it less convincing and distracting to the main plot. As you must know, there was a movie made based on this book, also titled "Flight of the Intruder". I have seen the movie and it wasn't bad, although some of the casting was questionable, but I much preferred the book.
This book is a collection of stories about combat in the air, put together by Stephen Coonts. Most of the stories, except for two, had appeared in other books, although some of those books have been out of print for long time.
The stories are arranged in a rough chronological order, starting with WW I, then moving on to WW II and then to Korea and Vietnam. The first one is about an English pilot who shot down a Zeppelin airship and the last one is about an American Navy pilot fighting in Vietnam.
The bulk of the stories are about pilots who flew and fought in WW II. Pilots from England, America, Germany and Japan are represented. For example, included are selections from "Fly for Your Life", about an English Spitfire ace Robert Tuck, another one from Adolf Galland's book "The First and the Last", about a day on which he was shot down twice.
A couple of the chapters contain descriptions of famous flights and battles of WW II: the Doolitle Tokyo raid, the Battle of Midway and the bombing of Hiroshima.
Since I have already read most of the WW II era books that are excerpted in "War in the Air", I found the chapters about Korea and Vietnam more interesting. The descriptions of helicopter combat flying in Vietnam were hair-raising.
The final chapter "The Last Ace", written by Coonts himself, describes the adventures of the Navy Phantom pilot, who is the last American pilot to win five victories in the air. Coonts speculates that he maybe the last ace, since in today's electronic warfare pilots will not get much chance to dogfight and shoot down other airplanes.