Book reviews: Two Souls Indivisible, Afterburner: Naval Aviators

http://www.washtimes.com/books/20041...3756-5796r.htm

Vietnam: The war that will not end
Published November 14, 2004


Much more uplifting is Two Souls Indivisible: The Friendship That
Saved Two POWs in Vietnam by James S. Hirsch (Houghton Mifflin,
ISBN:0618273484 ) Mr. Hirsch is a skilled journalist writing about two
aviator prisoners of war, one white, the other black, who were tossed
in the same filthy, rancid, rat-ridden cell in the obvious hope by the
North Vietnamese, that their racial difference would produce hate and
destruction.
The enemy erred, and both believe their survival was based on the
nearly symbiotic relationship they formed. The white was a Navy junior
officer, jet aircraft flight navigator Porter Halyburton, and the
black was Air Force field grade officer, jet fighter pilot Fred
Cherry. The latter had numerous serious injuries that grounded him for
life when he was repatriated, and it was Halyburton who helped nurse
him to survival.
The gift was repaid over the years the men were together. Cherry
earned his wings in 1952, one of the first black aviators to do so in
the racial integration era. Cherry's career was marked by prejudice
which he overcame because of his outstanding skill as a fighter pilot.
This is a heartwarming book. One admonition: Hirsch informs us in
"1964 the Kennedy administration, seeking to thwart the
Communist insurgency in Indochina . . . . called for air raids
into North Vietnam . . . . inching America into a full-scale but
undeclared war."
I am sure the author knows Kennedy died in November 1963 --
everybody alive on Nov. 22,1963 knows where he or she was that dark
day. One expects better from editors at a major house like Houghton
Mifflin.

John Darrell Sherwood's Afterburner: Naval Aviators and the
Vietnam War (New York University Press, ISBN:081479842X) is an
exceptionally well written, well documented, fast moving account of
the aircrews on Yankee Station that helped keep the United States in
the war.
Understand, dear reader, airpower was the reason the United States
could endure the Vietnam War for 12 years. Short of employing
airplanes to destroy North Vietnam, apparently a political
impossibility, aircraft carrier airplanes (and their Air Force
counterparts) could ensure the war would not be lost militarily by
damaging the adversary's logistics and guaranteeing by air to ground
attacks that outposts like An Loc, Kham Duc and Khe Sanh did not
become an American Dien Bien Phu. This is an exciting book and
deserves to be read widely.