I deliberately stretched out my reading of this book. From the beginning it moved along three different tracks for me, each track getting to me both viscerally and intellectually. The war fighting. The clarity of the apprehension of the things experienced. And finally the times.
The early 1970s had a clean light left to them. It was also a light where there was no chance of cutting the glare. That meant pain. To see clearly in those conditions was to feel pain. But you could get through it if you followed your gut. Ed is an instructor and a desk jockey in the Air Force at the beginning of Palace Cobra, five years past his first tour and a hundred missions over North Vietnam as a fighter pilot, and he wants back into the war. He is the same man throughout, but he knows he belongs in the cockpit of a jet. When I say belongs, I mean wired for it, needing it, and master of it.
I experienced Ed’s experience, and that is good writing. I should say that I experienced what he wanted the reader to experience. You don’t get the pain directly, that must be inferred. It’s a grumble, like a throbbing knee, in the background. It’s diffuse. And there’s no therapy available for it. It’s like aching for a woman who you know does not exist. Something you keep to yourself. (There’s a lost art.)
The eye for detail, the remarkable incandescent memory, the instantaneous life or death reflection, the almost perfect knowledge that strong individuals make great teams and that you want to fly with the best people possible, in the air with you, back on the ground, up the chain of command. Everyone must think five moves ahead, at least, or the waitress will quickly bring that big slice of death right over to you, the pilot.
The man and machine aspects of this are riveting, that’s all I’ll say. But that’s the least of it. There’s the sense of the aviator and his respect for the possibilities and limits of aviation. There’s the warrior who is in the plane to fight, not just out for a spin in the aircraft. There’s flying and then there is combat flying. Hostile ground radar locking onto you. Surface-to-air missiles on your ass and desperately trying to get up it. Anti-aircraft fire munching on airspace like steel teeth. The number of factors that must be mentally integrated at once is astonishing.
The eeriness of a night combat mission was rendered palpable. The deadly claustrophobia of darkness.
The real guys and the fakers. The warriors and the careerists. The politicians and diplomats for whom the warrior is an abstraction. And then there was Roscoe. All the warriors bent their will into one for Roscoe.
I was reading the second book first, as Ed was quick to warn me. I told him that I was going to war with the book I had. Now I’ll go back and read When Thunder Rolled, about the first tour.
Palace Cobra is close work all the way through. There is nary a word wasted along the way. It will focus your attention on things you might never have thought about, or thought you wanted to think about. These things are raised in sharp light into details. This is a book as well about thinking, memory, and the certainties of reality.