Going Downtown: The War Against Hanoi and Washington

Poykovskiy by Jack Broughton

buy Aurogra online without prescription from canada Orion Books, New York, 1988

$18.95

 

Going Downtown is what the F-105 Thunderchief “Thud” drivers called a bombing mission to Hanoi. The subtitle, The War against Hanoi and Washington, nails the point of the book.

Jack Broughton presents a readable narrative of two faces of the air war against North Vietnam from the perspective a combat fighter-bomber pilot.

Broughton’s qualifications as a fighter pilot appear impeccable. Between his 114 fighter combat missions in the Korean War and the 102 he flew in Vietnam, he lead the elite Thunderbirds, the Air Force’s creme-de-la-creme of pilots and aircraft.

It was after reading Broughton’s first book, Thud Ridge, that Tom Wolfe first detected the fraternity of men that he later deemed had “the right stuff.” Indeed, we find that Broughton and Chuck Yeager, the focus of Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, are contemporaries and friends of many years.

Broughton sets up his credentials, those of the aircraft he and his men take “downtown,” and the civilian and military political structure in a coherent narrative.

His descriptions of the raids against North Vietnam are spell-binding. He has a knack for putting the reader in the Thud’s cockpit. But he also paints a vivid picture of men, never wavering in the face of withering defensive fire, who do their job despite the best efforts of the enemy and their own high command.

He is scathing in his references to “Lyndon” and “Robert,” then President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara. We see the war from the combat fighter pilots perspective, a man who deals with a very harsh reality.

Daily, sometimes even twice daily, he goes to work by literally strapping on a machine loaded with tons of volatile fuel and munitions. He deliberately flies into a space where people will throw everything from rifle bullets to telephone pole-sized SAM missiles at him. His reality is that of a warrior, kill or be killed. It’s not pretty. He doesn’t like it. But that is what his country has sworn him to do. Or did they?

Broughton paints another picture of seemingly arbitrary orders. The fighter jocks can shoot at MiGs as long as they’re in the air. Shooting them on the ground is wrong. Thud drivers can attack SAM — surface-to-air anti-aircraft missile — sites, but only if they’re operational. You know when they’re operational because they have fired one or all of their SAMs at you. And the ships… Well, it’s difficult to understand the written orders in the peace of a ready room let alone make a life-or-death decision based on them within seconds.

That sets the stage for the last battle of Broughton’s 25-year air force career. For this he paints another picture, of an air force general in command of warriors he neither flies with nor has any interest in.

His portrait of Gen. John “Three-Finger Jack” Ryan is something out of bad fiction. Could any air combat officer in Southeast Asia believe that that war could be fought with the tactics that brought World War II home to Nazi Germany?

Going Downtown makes the reader ask himself very uneasy questions about how and why these men, who in their words had been hired “to do good work,” were not allowed to do it in a sensible manner. A modicum of common sense is all that is required to see the failings of leadership. The book gives no good answers, nor was it intended too.

It is Broughton’s personal combat with the system and “Three-Finger Jack” that is the most intriguing. I am looking forward to finding something that gives Ryan’s version of the story.

——————–

Published Sept. 26, 1988 by The Richmond News Leader.

An excerpt from this review was used on the cover of the paperback version of Going Downtown.