Da Nang Diary; A Forward Air Controller's Year of Combat Over Vietnam

New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1990. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. [12], 280, [4] pages. DJ has some wear, tears, soiling and chips. Includes Prologue, Epilogue, and Glossary. Topics covered include Indoctrination of a Rookie; Flying Over the Ho Chi Minh Trail; X-Ray Mission: Laos; Prairie Fire; Rescue at Route 966; Battle Damage; Outside the Envelope; The Covey Bob Dump; All Points of the Compass; Valley of the Shadow of Death; SAR on the Trail; and The Year of Fifty-Three Weeks. Also includes 19 black and white photographs between pages 194 and 195. Colonel Tom Yarborough received the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and other honors. The author became a military historian/author. A decorated Air Force combat pilot, he served tours as the air attaché at the American Embassy in Bangkok, and as liaison officer to the State Department in Washington, DC. After leaving the Air Force became a professor; combat instructor and department chair at Indiana University and history professor at Northern Virginia Community College. His writing background includes the books Da Nang Diary, winner of the Military Writers Society of America Gold Medal for best memoir, and A Shau Valor, a finalist for the 2016 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award. He has also written numerous featured articles published in WWII History, Journal of American History, Vietnam, Aviation History, and The Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly. Derived from a Kirkus review: The tellingly detailed log of an American airman's 53-week year in Southeast Asia. A jet jockey who volunteered for duty as a forward air controller, Yarborough arrived in Vietnam for his initial tour during the spring of 1970. Assigned to Da Nang, the author started off directing aerial strikes against supply convoys, troop concentrations, and allied objectives along the Ho Chi Minh Trail from an OV-10--a turbo-powered observation craft armed only with white-phosphorous rockets to mark targets. Within a couple of months, however, his skills as a pilot and coolness under fire earned him a coveted billet with the so-called Prairie Fire flight. This ultrasecret outfit specialized in covering reconnaissance teams that infiltrated Communist strongholds throughout Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. Flying hundreds of missions over the whole of Indochina, the author was in the thick of scores of engagements far beyond any boundaries that could be considered a traditional front line. Some of Yarborough's toughest battles, though, seem to have been waged against officious rear-echelon martinets who wanted to document the flak damage to his planes, bill him for binoculars lost in action, or otherwise stick to the letter of military law. An absorbing memoir that goes a long way toward explaining the lure of combat for a professional soldier.