F-4 in Combat Books

Here are three F-4 in combat in the Vietnam War books you can buy on Amazon:

• The Vietnam Air War: From The Cockpit Col. Dennis Ridnouer.  The Vietnam War is one of the most misunderstood military conflicts in twentieth-century America. Showcasing seventy-two true stories told by American servicemen who fought from the skies, this unique and historically significant collection is a stunning record of the air war in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s.  There is no political agenda. There is no partisan opinion. There is no romanticizing. These are simply tales from the thick of an endlessly complex conflict, raw and uncut, told directly by the men who were foisted into its napalm- and sweat-soaked clutches.  Occasionally funny, sometimes tragic, and often harrowing, these true accounts bring new and personal perspectives to one of the most studied and most maligned wars in America’s history, revealing with no Hollywood glamorizing what the war was really like for members of the US Air Force of all ranks and myriad functions who answered the call to fight.  They saw no choice but to follow the orders they were given. And for better or for worse, by the time they returned, each of them would be changed forever.

• The Vietnam Air War: First Person Col. Dennis Ridnouer.  As Dennis M. (Mike) Ridnouer writes in the foreword of his new oral history, The Vietnam Air War: First Person, over five million missions were flown in the Vietnam War. The many pilots, crew, and support personnel who risked their lives daily don’t deserve to fade into obscurity. Unhappy with the lack of first-person retellings of the war, Ridnouer made it his new mission to preserve these men’s tales of bravery and duty.  The result is more than one hundred stories from the front lines of the war. Air Force Fighter Pilots, Weapon Systems Operators (WSOs), and Electronic Warfare Officers (EWOs), recount their stories of air-to-air engagements, near misses, successes, and failures.  A pilot explains why he buys a drink for every tanker driver he meets. An airman explains what a Thud is. A veteran vividly describes his homecoming.  These stories and others provide a much different account of the war than those found in history books. The pages come alive with perilous missions and skilled maneuvers. Airmen from all walks of life were united during the war, and their tales include stirring accounts of friendship and comradery.

• Green Ink: Memories of a Fighter Pilot by Rear Admiral H. Denny Wisley.  The biography of a navy fighter pilot who started out from immature, shaky beginnings. He found himself in the navy while growing up during Vietnam. He was the first to shoot down two enemy airplanes and flew 350 combat missions during three deployments aboard USS Kitty Hawk. The ledger he kept will bring you right there with him as he recounts many of those more than exciting missions including being shot down near Hanoi. He flew F4 Phantom to 85,000 feet during operational test flights at the McDonnell-Douglas factor in St Louis. Later at VX-4 in Pt Mugu, California he tested the F 14 Tomcat and flew the MiG 21 from Area 51. He went on to command a Fighter Squadron from USS Midway home-ported in Japan and then went on to be Flight Leader and Commanding Officer of the Blue Angels. He went on to Command the aircraft carrier John F Kennedy.