Tuesday, January 22, 2013

"The Night Stalkers" by Durant, Hartov, and Johnson

The Night Stalkers

My wife bought me this for Christmas, knowing how much I respect our troops.

It's the story about the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) of the U.S. Army.

In case you don't know, these are the helicopter pilots who take the various Special Forces units into combat, and retrieve them.

I have to say this is a wonderful book. While I enjoy reading books by Matthew Bracken, and Kenneth Royce, those are fiction.

This book is about REAL people getting shot at, wounded, and killed, by REAL bullets.

As Admiral Tarrant says at the end of the movie The Bridges at Toko Ri, "Where Do We Get Such Men"?

Where, indeed..........
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3 comments:

  1. Yep, great book, and that only touches the surface... Lots of ops never will be public.

    ReplyDelete
  2. After I finished reading it, three words popped into my head.....

    Duty

    Honor

    Courage

    One of the guys I used to work with here was a Ranger (Ranger...ALL The Way) who served two tours in Nam.

    He's told me storied that made the hair on the back of my neck go up.

    He would have served three, and been an instructor at Benning, but he got shot up pretty badly towards the end of his second tour.

    They offered him a desk job if he wanted to stay in, but he said he felt he couldn't teach the new guys from behind a desk, so he took a medical discharge.

    After we came out of Chapter 11, we got a new contractor for the helo operations, and they brought a Bell 412 to replace the Bell 230 we used to have.

    The first time he heard if come in to land he froze at the sound of it. He said it brought back a lot of memories, both good and bad.

    ReplyDelete

Keep it civil, please....

Annnnd.....We Got Zip.....

 Total snow was about 6~8", but half o0f it melted as soon as it hit, and we never had more than 3" on the ground at any one time....