RogerBW's Blog

Robert Mason flew Hueys for a year in Vietnam. This is his story.

One suspects that it isn't always a reliable story. The book wasn't started until more than ten years after Mason got back, and even by his own account his mind hadn't been in great shape during that time. Still, he doesn't paint himself as any sort of great hero, just a guy thrown into a nonsensical war who happens to be pretty good at what he does.

Things kick off in 1964-1965 with flight training, then (after a brief misleading posting to a VIP-carrying unit in Washington DC) it's off for a year in Vietnam. My perspective on that particular war is generally a high-level one: this push, that retreat, the other failure. Mason was on the sharp end as a warrant officer pilot, first with the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and later with the 48th Aviation Company, and knew no more about the big picture than the public back in the USA; he was fed the same lies about inevitable victory and having the bad guys on the run.

The book recalls many of the standard clichés of Vietnam, possibly because many of those clichés were inspired by it and similar memoirs: the minimal accommodations, the casual looting of anything not nailed down, the higher-ups who seem completely disconnected from the actual business of fighting the war, the boredom interspersed with brutality, the gradually increasing load of stress and Mason's descent from enthusiasm into first cynicism and later hallucination.

But there's also some fine technical material about flying, particularly some of the tricks one can do with a heavy-rotored helicopter (and indeed how much more effective that turboshaft engine was compared with the piston-engined trainers): chopping light tree branches, rolling takeoffs, working the machine loose from bogs, and increasingly in the background the tick sounds of enemy fire hitting the aircraft.

The writing style is clear and straightforward, essentially a recounting of events, with occasional post facto commentary. Mason makes no attempt to justify his, or the USA's, actions: the book's just about what he did, and how he felt about it. There's horror here, but it's not so much in the grisly descriptions as in the author's self-defensively flattened reactions to them. I defy anyone to read this book and then continue to conflate "supporting the troops" with "supporting every military adventure the government advocates".

This is not at all a cheerful book, but it's a very good one.