Technology can exalt as well as dwarf the individual. The Great War’s machine guns staged a chattering pageant of impersonal slaughter; yet its warplanes brought forth paladins such as Frank Luke, Billy Bishop, and Baron von Richtofen, their decidedly individualistic exploits providing civilian newspaper readers with a pleasant contrast to the muddy anonymity of trench warfare. While the technology of flight has changed—awesomely so—the Lone Warrior mystique endures. Gallant, Anglophilic Argentine jet pilots pummeled British ships while rejoicing in nicknames and mannerisms lifted from old RAF movies, and in the film of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Sam Shepard played test pilot Chuck Yeager as a retrofitted, laconic Westerner (the real hero’s subsequent commercial endorsements were a letdown best reserved for mere “celebrities”). Computers and jet-age refinements, far from reducing combat pilots to the dreaded passivity of “Spam in a can”—a fate anticipated by the test pilots chosen to follow a chimpanzee as Mercury astronauts—simply underline their elite status in dealing with ever more complicated machinery and split-second decisions.
In the world of fiction, it’s the reader who often finds himself swamped by hi-tech. In the first Naval Institute Press megabit, Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, many characters were purest plastic—mere hooks on which their creator carefully pinned expensive military hardware on the way to his denouement. And the hardware also threatens to overwhelm Stephen Coonts’ Vietnam War novel The Flight of the Intruder—at least at first. Bombing and refueling runs feature so much glancing at gauges and screens that we miss the sensations of flight or combat, sea or sky, especially since Coonts sometimes describes instrument activities without forcing us to feel his airmen reacting to them. This is, of course, part of the novel’s bestselling appeal, but it soon ceases to intimidate, while Coonts can view such technology with irony. “There must be some mistake,” jokes the hero’s lady, sitting in his Intruder’s cockpit. “This plane is too complicated for anyone to fly.” And the book’s first death comes when a North Vietnamese peasant hopefully fires his “ancient bolt-action rifle” into the sky—and through a jet’s Plexiglas canopy.
Other early shortcomings of this first novel include awkward dialogue and prose and an initially clumsy love interest; but as we progress, Coonts’ dialogue and characters become more convincing, his prose smoother, his hero’s love genuinely touching. And this hero proves no adolescent Top Gun icon: Vietnam War veteran Coonts worries about the man inside the machine.
It is 1972. Lieutenant Jake Grafton flies a carrier-based A-6A Intruder bomber. He likes flying and accepts combat. But now his hands shake—partly because he knows Americans are dying in raids on unimportant, even worthless targets. Voicing a now-familiar complaint (“We could win the war, you know, if they’d let us”), Grafton evolves a plan to launch a vigilante raid on an unauthorized target worth destroying. It is a premise that might easily serve a stale Rambo fantasy, but Grafton’s exploit proves almost an anti-highlight, of far less concern than its contemplative aftermath: When, asks the author, does a fighting man have the right, or the duty, to disobey orders he knows to be harming his own country’s war effort? Flight of the Intruder, unlike so many aerial sagas, isn’t in trouble when on the ground—or inside its protagonist’s head, as he ponders the morality of bombing.
What you try to do, Jake thought, is to keep it fuzzy in your mind that you kill real people. . . . You see only silent puffs of smoke sometimes and how could they kill anyone? It’s not real. . . . You have bombs and there are no fair fights and you know it’s wrong. . . .
Yet it is not merely the deaths, but above all the frustrating uselessness of his efforts that threatens his self-control: even the bomber crewmen who destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki could reflect on the peace their efforts had made possible.
The qualities thought necessary in combat pilots are probed. Grafton believes himself “addicted to the adrenaline high of taunting death,” fully alive (vague phrase!) only when “naked and running flat out” against SAM’s and tracers. If at times this sounds familiar, like a Howard Hawks movie (“In the profession of flying, a man was good enough or he wasn’t any good at all . . . “), the otherness of the Indochina conflict taints everything for Grafton, who had expected something “like in the books—knights-in-the-sky stuff,” never the kind of “absolutely nutty” war he finds. Perhaps, in telling of a Chinese refugee drowned seeking Hong Kong and freedom, Coonts means to foreshadow the results of losing such a war.
Flight of the Intruder offers a climax of grade-A suspense in which—no easy feat—one genuinely worries about the characters’ fate. Its biggest shock, however, may be the Virginiaborn Grafton’s opinion that the great Robert E. Lee was a “traitor” who nevertheless “had a big rep back in Virginia.” This appalling heresy might be explained by the fact that the author himself hails from West Virginia.
[Flight of the Intruder, by Stephen Coonts, Annapolis; MD: Naval Institute Press; $15.95]
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