Chickenhawk (Chickenhawk - Robert Mason)

Member Name: Pamsy

Product:	Chickenhawk - Robert Mason
Date:	17/07/01 (234 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Plenty of action, Vivid accounts, Detailed

Disadvantages: None

This memoir by a helicopter pilot in Vietnam in 1965-66 is one of the best non-fiction "personal" books to come out of that war, on a par with Michael Herr's Dispatches.

The book begins in 1964 as young Robert Mason begins training as an Army Helicopter Pilot. He returned home a wrecked man after a long time in combat flying over 1,000 missions. He flew with the 1st Air Cav and saw a great deal of action, but the book is just as good on the ground as in the air, giving a remarkably vivid sense of what the experience was like.

The area of operations is mainly in the central area of South Vietnam - Qui Nonh, Kontum, Pleiku - and among Mason's battles were engagements in Happy Valley and the Ia Drang valley, two well known trouble spots where heavy fighting occurred.

He writes very well, has a terrific story to tell, and apart from the remarkably immediate portrait he paints of army life in-country and the general "feel" of the war in the mid-'60s, he also gets you right into the thick of things - I learned stuff I never knew, such as how to fly a Huey out of a clearing only a foot or two wider than the rotor blade circumference (and also exactly why it should be impossible, which makes the feat all the more impressive). Mason's descriptions of the people involved in the conflict, mostly North & South Vietnamese and American, gives a completely authentic insight into their mentality at that time.

It reads like first-rate fiction, but it's all true (though names and personal details have been changed at times).

It was a bestseller back when, and for good reason.

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