Air University Review, May-June 1971
It’s late in the last quarter of the Army-Navy game. At this point I’m watching the television screen out of sheer loyalty. It has not been a satisfying afternoon.
My roommate laughs. She’s cuddled up in her chair with Charlie Flood’s newest book, War of the Innocents. She has a lot of different laughs. After 26 years of listening, I can interpret the tone of this chuckle and guess just where she is in Charlie’s book.
Sure enough—page 133—on the girls of the Far East: “Their bodies are lovely: Their skin is warm gold satin. They are agile . . . Asian young women make their American counter-parts look as if they have arthritis.”
But be not misled. There is little in War of the Innocents on the more pleasant aspects of the Far East. Charlie Flood uses his remarkable ability to write simply but descriptively to give the reader the best feel yet for the war in Vietnam.
Charlie had a really great year in Vietnam. A novelist and newsman, he was adopted by the 3lst Tactical Fighter Wing. He flew with the wing from Florida across the Pacific to Tuy Hoa Air Base in the fall of 1966. Tuy Hoa was his home base for a year. During this time he flew many combat missions in the back seat of the F-100F. He flew forward air control missions in the back seat of an O-2. He went on civic action patrols and helped to dispense pills. He went on armed helicopter missions and crash-landed once. He braved all the perils of Saigon and emerged unscathed. He patrolled with the ARVN. He traveled and lived and even “fought fiercely” with the Dragoons of the Fourth Infantry Division. And more.
This book, War of the Innocents,* is Charlie Flood’s account of his year in Vietnam. It is beautifully written. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad. It is exciting. It keeps moving. Cliché: He tells it like it is.
Therefore, this book is for
—all men who have flown with the 31st Tac Ftr Wing,
—all men who have served with the 31st Tac Ftr Wing,
—all men of the Seventh Air Force,
—all men of all services in Vietnam,
—their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers,
—their women, sons, daughters,
—and people who are fond of simple, declarative sentences.
But this book is not for
—hawks who want reassurance that we are winning or can win in Vietnam,
—doves who want reassurance that the game is not worth the candle or that we
are losing in Vietnam.
Charlie doesn’t editorialize—not directly, anyway. The people he meets speak their own pieces in his book. Through their eyes, you, the reader, see the war as they see it-one piece at a time.
That’s the only way to understand the war in Vietnam—one piece at a time. As an example, Charlie was talking to Tom Lynch, Dragoon Commander, at a muddy fire base in the Central Highlands. Here is Charlie’s account of the conversation:
“How’s your work going?” Tom asked me.
I told Tom that as I looked at all my notes, as I added up my own experience in the past seven months, I was struck with the difficulty of what I had undertaken. Had I joined this very division in England on the eve of D-Day in World War II, I would have, assuming I survived, been able to recount a story of movement—across the Channel in the invasion, into Normandy, the liberation of Paris, the Rhine crossing, the fighting across Germany, and, eventually, victory. Here it was first one muddy hilltop and then another, one F-100 mission and another and another, all from the same base. Saigon did not move. I simply shuttled back and forth between largely repetitive situations.
“That’s what your book should be about,” Tom said sharply. “Nobody understands that. This is a formless situation. That’s what your book should be about—the formlessness and frustration."
"All right," I said, "but how do you want a beautifully constructed book about a completely formless situation?"
Charlie Flood succeeded.
I was particularly delighted by this book because Tuy Hoa was also my home for a year. And I knew Charlie Flood—not well enough, though.
I wish I’d been perceptive enough to appreciate Charlie when I met him. I arrived in Tuy Hoa in November of 1967. I remember meeting him—plaster cast and all. While he had been on an evening stroll with some American advisers and Vietnamese troops, the locally assigned Korean artillerymen, with their customary abandon, had fired some investigative rounds at them. In a wild dive to safety, Charlie had broken his wrist.
The other thing I remember about Charlie was the typically lumpy look that seems to characterize the civilian wearing a fatigue uniform.
And to his eyes, I’m sure I was equally unimpressive. As he says in his book, after nearly a year there one develops the veteran’s disdain for the unproven newcomer. Even though I was enough of a wheel to rate a room in the Taj Mahal, that super hooch which Charlie describes so well, to him I was just another greenhorn. So I looked in vain to find myself in his book.
But I found friends in it, and his descriptions of them made them come alive exactly as I remember them. From this I would guess that equally accurate were the vivid descriptions of other people which made me feel that I actually knew them.
Take Colonel Warren Lewis. He succeeded Colonel Jim Jabara as commander of the 31st Tactical Fighter Wing when Jim was killed in an automobile accident as the wing was preparing to move overseas and go to war. Who could take Jabara’s place? What more respected and experienced fighter pilot than Jim existed? Who could get the 3lst Wing moving again after this numbing loss? Warren Lewis, that’s who. He was not a large man but possessed the generosity of spirit often associated with the very large and strong. He had that aura of leadership that comes naturally to a fortunate few. Compared to Jabara, he was unknown, but a more aggressive fighter pilot I’ve never known. He brought the wing to a new and almost bare base in Vietnam and led it immediately into combat. He usually flew eight or nine missions a week, ending his tour with more missions than he had days overseas. Yet he found time to exert the tightest possible control over all aspects of the operation of a wing. Professionalism was his motto, and that spirit permeated every corner of the base. Charlie Flood’s portrayal of Warren Lewis is a pleasure to read.
Take Pres Flanagan. I came to know Pres fairly well. I knew that Pres’s love affair with the same goon—our ancient C-47—had begun in World War II, before many of the fighter pilots in the 31st had been born. I knew that Pres, for all his bulk and deceptively out-of-condition appearance, was a scratch golfer. I knew that Jackie Cochran was a great friend of Pres and his wife. I knew that Pres had a lovely home and a big cruiser on the Florida coast.
I guess I automatically supposed Pres came from a wealthy family. That’s usually true in those few cases of affluence among the military. Also, Pres had the gentleness and thoughtfulness one automatically associates with good breeding, not the irritating aggressiveness often found in those who single-handedly claw their way up from the bottom.
I had to read War of the Innocents to find out that Pres Flanagan was, contrary to my guess, one of the latter, a self-made man who started with absolutely nothing. Being inherently modest, he’d never mentioned that part of his past to me. But good reporter Flood was able to get the whole story. And what a story it is!
My roommate was particularly delighted with Charlie’s descriptions of flying in an F-100. I’ve been so close to airplanes for so long that I’ve lost the ability to chat about flying in a way that would catch her imagination. What’s routine for me, such as an afterburner exploding into action, would be exciting to my wife. What would be exciting to me, such as the downward flicker of an oil-pressure indicator, would be meaningless to her. So it was through Charlie’s well-recorded reactions to jet fighter flight that my blonde friend really began to understand what it’s all about. She got a further amusing clue from Charlie’s comment (after many jet flights) on his first flight in an O-2, “First take-off I’ve enjoyed.”
Although I was especially interested in those parts of War of the Innocents dealing with the Air Force operation at Tuy Hoa, less than half of the book deals with those matters. After all, from the cockpit of an F-l00 one can get only the vaguest feel for what’s going on down there below the rippled green of the jungle canopy. You have to get hit or see another aircraft hit once in a while to remain convinced that there really is activity—lots of it unfriendly—own there in that hidden world.
Charlie discovered plenty of action the jungle tops. Through the eyes of a friend, he recounts one incident during fire fight:
He [John] told me of a young black soldier who should have been looking for a medic, once they linked up with B Company and the enemy fire was lessening. The man’s bleeding left arm was hanging useless at his side, and he had no helmet. He still had his M-16 in his right hand, and as the Americans formed up to drive into the brushes after the North Vietnamese he walked over to John.
“Gimme your helmet,” he said. “We’re going to assault.”
“You’re going to assault?” John asked, staring at the man’s shattered arm.
“We’re going to assault, man,” the black soldier said.
I stared at John in the quiet, cool bar.
“What did you do?”
John shook his head, still seeing the boy right in front of him. “I gave him my helmet, and he assaulted.”
That’s one of Charlie’s few second-hand stories. He saw a lot of action, probably more than he wanted. He was with B Company of the Dragoons during a fierce fire fight, and his account of this action makes me real happy to be a fighter pilot. Those grunts have it rough. During the height of this action he became aware of a few wounded men who needed help to reach safety. Charlie’s description of his fear fighting his courage rings a familiar bell. Some men rise to dangerous challenges as a reflex—act first and think later. Others can’t help thinking first—” If I go help those guys I’ll probably get shot. . . . Why doesn’t someone else do it? . . . If I don’t go I’ll probably shoot myself.” You work yourself into a fury at those men you must try to save, resenting their putting you in this awful position. Finally you move, you act, and, thank God, you get away with it. But you’re not particularly proud, because you know how frightened you were and how close you came to not acting at all. Charles Flood did force himself to act and help the wounded men to safety.
Later he recounts:
I listened to an amazing variety of stories, as they were matter-of-factly told in the waving firelight. There had been as many battles today as there were men participating.
Still later:
I was sitting with my radiomen friends, drinking C-ration coffee, when the ground began to shake. We rose and saw, on a distant ridge, a series of close-spaced beige geysers rising from the jungle, as if a huge, locomotive were puffing its way past under the trees. It was a B-52 strike, bombs from the eight-engined Strategic Air Command planes raining down unexpectedly in the area where yesterday’s North Vietnamese attackers were pulling back toward their bases across the river in their Cambodian sanctuary. The sound swept over us now, a continuous rolling explosion as half our horizon was spotted with leaping fountains of brown smoke and debris.
How’s that for description? Such descriptions abound in this highly readable account of how it was with all of us in the “formlessness and frustration” of Southeast Asia.
Washington, D.C.
* Charles Bracelen Flood, The War of the Innocents (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. 1970, $7.85), 480 pp.
Colonel F. D. Henderson (USMA; M.A., George Washington University) is Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff, Studies and Analysis, Hq USAF. His overseas tours have been with fighter units in the Philippines and Okinawa in World War II, Japan, Korea, AirCent (Europe), and Vietnam. A graduate of the Air War College, Colonel Henderson has been Aide to the Chief of Staff, USAF, and Vice Commandant, Air Force Academy.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor