WE DARED TO FLY

A pilot in the secret sideshows of the Vietnam War spins tales of unfriendly skies.

Reeder arrived in Vietnam as a captain in the Army, which posted him to a secret aviation unit. Explained one fellow flyer, “We don’t have a mission inside South Vietnam.” Instead, their small, lightly armed Mohawks flew over Laos, North Vietnam, and eventually Cambodia, detecting heat signatures of enemy trucks and troops along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, taking low-altitude surveillance photos, and the like. The low-altitude part of the equation meant constant danger from ground fire: “Today,” Reeder writes of an early mission, “I’d been tracked by a North Vietnamese surface-to-air-missile crew who could have launched a SAM, but didn’t. I could have been blown out of the sky, but wasn’t.” Those constant dangers, and the heavy casualties that the self-designated “Spuds” took, had their effects on the air crews’ nerves, as one might imagine; Reeder writes of a comrade, “It was no wonder he, like many other Spuds, took to heavy drinking.” Reeder recounts plenty of drinkworthy encounters, including flights over the grinding bloodbath the press dubbed “Hamburger Hill” and the smoking ruins of Hue after the Tet Offensive, as well as a few unsettling moments with shadowy CIA operatives. Reeder tends to repeat himself on such things as why his unit got to wear black flight suits and the official smokescreens surrounding his assignments, though he notes forthrightly, “I wondered what all the secrecy was for. North Vietnam knew what we were doing. Their communist Pathet Lao cronies knew as well. We were bombing the hell out of them.” It’s not literature—Tim O’Brien and Phil Caputo needn’t fear competition there—but the book has a few memorable moments.

A serviceable memoir of a little-known corner of America’s misadventure in Indochina.