ONE OF THE FEW

A retired Air Force fighter pilot recalls his Cold War–era experiences in this debut memoir.

“Knock it off!” the author’s wingman shouts in the opening lines of this memoir by retired fighter pilot Graham. At the age of 44 in 1980, the author was the “Old Man” of the 36th Tactical Fighter Squadron, and he had taken the opportunity on his last ride to engage in a mock dogfight while flying a new model of the F-4E on a training mission off the South Korean coast. The real-life embodiment of the Hollywood Top Gun franchise, Graham spent more than two decades in the Air Force; here, he recounts the exhilarating life of a fighter pilot during the height of American tensions with the Soviet Union. For instance, he describes his experiences with the F-100 Super Sabre—a supersonic fighter with high accident rates that was “unstable” by design—as a “love-hate relationship” in which danger and exhilaration were in constant competition. Initially stationed in Misawa, Japan, in the 1960s with a squadron tasked with nuclear deterrence, the author emphasizes that, from his vantage, the war’s “temperature never got less than warm and above”; he would fly within miles of Vladivostok just to make the Russian “air defense system nervous.” From his initial deployment in East Asia, Graham transitioned to the war in Vietnam, where the author served in a variety of missions following the Tonkin Bay episode that ignited a long-term conflict.

While harrowing accounts of aerial heroism loom large in these passages, the book is at its best when giving a pilot’s view of war. Comparing his career as a fighter pilot to a “love affair,” Graham approached military life with a jocular attituded that he likens to a benched athlete eager to get into the game (“Come on, Coach, put me in!”). He even, in one account, risked going AWOL while in California because he couldn’t wait to get back to Saigon. While the narrative oozes with heroic tales and camaraderie, the author is not afraid to criticize officers “trying unsuccessfully to run the battle from an airconditioned office ten thousand miles away.” The content is generally apolitical (Graham virtually never mentions any president or politician by name), but the author notes that airmen and soldiers had to look out for themselves as “good men getting killed will not make a difference to the politicians at the negotiating table.” Graham also discusses how the tumultuous social and racial climate of the 1970s impacted military life—one anecdote concerns a knife fight between a “Ku Klux Klan guy” and a member of the Black Panther Party. The author’s engaging writing style and love for the planes he flew make for a thrilling read. The text is peppered throughout with hypermasculine inspirational quotes by Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and others. The work includes full-color, high resolution photographs, maps, reproductions of handwritten letters, and other visual elements. While the text runs over 400 total pages, little information is provided about the author’s life before and after the military.

A thrilling joyride through the life of a fighter pilot.