War For the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam
War For the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam book cover

War For the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam

Paperback – May 3, 2005

by
Price
$11.43
Format
Paperback
Pages
288
Publisher
Berkley
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0425202449
Dimensions
6 x 5 x 9 inches
Weight
12 ounces

Description

From Booklist Retired air force lieutenant colonel Cobleigh devotes his solid memoir to recounting his two tours of combat duty in Vietnam, flying F-4 Phantoms. His missions mixed patrolling for MiGs (he never scored a kill) and making tactical strikes, not infrequently on targets that were hard to identify, harder to hit, not worth hitting even if he got lucky, and definitely not worth losing planes and pilots for. Much of the book edgily presents the effects of the rules of engagement and other limitations imposed by Washington on generals who didn't feel enough loyalty to their men to protest. Other parts of it touch on life in the comparatively benign environment of a base in Thailand, which came, however, with ethical dilemmas about accepting the intimate hospitality of Thai hostesses. And a good part of it portrays the F-4 Phantom, one of the great fighting aircraft of the twentieth century, now fading into history and from air force rosters. Roland Green Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Inside the Mind of a Fighter Pilot Fighter pilots aren't known for their literary prowess and only a few, Richard S. Bach and James Salter come to mind, produce books beyond the "There I was..." xa0genre. Fighter pilots are also unfazed by the prospect of failure, so, I launched two sorties into the rarefied air of books; War for the Hell of it, an account of all the fun I had losing the Vietnam War, and The Pilot, an aviation/adventure novel. My qualifications for such writing missions? xa0I flew the F-104, F-4, A-4, Jaguar, and the F-16. I was an instructor at the USAF Weapons school, the USN Top Gun school, the Royal Air Force Weapons Instructor school and I also flew with the French Air Force and the Imperial Iranian Air Force, including 375 combat missions. It is a task best left to the reader to judge my literary ability, despite War forthe Hell of It achieving Amazon bestseller ranking. In my writing, I try to put on the page what it's like to be a fighter pilot, not just what fighter pilots do in the air. Biography Ed Cobleigh, born in New Orleans and raised in Chattanooga, earned an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a Masters in Management from USC. As a USAF fighter pilot, he flew the F-104, F-4, A-4, Jaguar, and F-16 aircraft.xa0 He instructed and flew with the USAF FighterWeapons School, US Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun), the Royal Air Force Qualified Weapons Instructor Course (Jaguar), the French Air Force, and the Imperial Iranian Air Force. He logged 375 combat missions over Vietnam, earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses and the Air Medal. His first book, War for theHell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam, is an Amazon bestseller. Read more

Features & Highlights

  • Fast Eddie Tells It Like It Was
  • What's it like to fight an unwinnable war in the air? How hard is the F-4 Phantom to fly? How does Mach 2 feel? What do you do when the Bad Guys are shooting at you?  In this Amazon bestseller, Lt/Col Ed "Fast Eddie" Cobleigh shares his experiences in a deeply personal account of a fighter pilot's life, one filled with moral ambiguities and military absurdities offset by the absolute thrills of flying a fighter plane.  Using well-crafted prose to put you in the Phantom's cockpit, Cobleigh recounts the tragic loss of his wingman, life at his base in exotic Thailand, the need to trust his reflexes, eyesight, aggressiveness, and his survival instincts in the heat of combat. This is a unique look into a combat fighter pilot's mind.  Nothing is held back. It's all here, the highs and lows of 375 combat missions, the dangers of adrenaline addiction, and ultimately, the return.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(571)
★★★★
25%
(476)
★★★
15%
(285)
★★
7%
(133)
★
23%
(438)

Most Helpful Reviews

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What the Captain means is...

Combat memoirs get written years after the events. During that time the bad gets erased in memory and the glory gets accentuated. It's way too easy to forget the puking at the back of the revetment and remember the John Wayne swagger that you never really had at the time. Heroism comes so easy in retrospect and from the safety of a position in front of a word processor screen that it is rare to really read honest admissions of the things that went bump and bang in those deadly nights. Ed Cobleigh (another Fast Eddie)tells about the war as it was in an assault on all of the senses. Sights, sounds, smells and feels come at you from all of the unusual places of a combat environment with a skill that few aviation writers have brought to the table before.

I've been disappointed in way too many fighter pilot memoirs that turned out to be self-aggrandizment coated in public relations hogwash. This book is different. It's real. It's visceral. It's the way it was and the way I remember it as well.

It wasn't a good war, but it was the only one we had and Ed Cobleigh went and did what was asked of him and hundreds like him. He shows very clearly what was good and what was bad about the conflict. This is must reading if one is ever going to hope to get a glimpse of the madness of that war. And, it ain't fiction.
26 people found this helpful
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Putting Men in the Machines

Vietnam-era combat pilots are too often overlooked. Their bombing campaign was one of our nation's costliest air offensives. Yet, for most Americans, it's the "grunts" on the ground who remain the face of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Perhaps that's because so many Vietnam aviation narratives concentrate on technical details at the expense of human experience. In "War for the Hell of It," Ed Cobleigh has given us an arresting emotional account of one pilot's personal war.

Forget "The Right Stuff." Cobleigh pierces that popular image and takes us inside the helmet of a USAF fighter pilot, circa 1969. His memoir is much more than airspeed and avionics, operations and ordnance. This is a book about warriors; the author just happens to fight his war from the cockpit of an F-4 Phantom II fighter-bomber.

Cobleigh's account is unsentimental and unsparing. He's a relentless veteran, cold and competent. Over two tours and 375 combat missions he makes mistakes, he hates the enemy, he loses friends, and he copes by resorting to denial and detachment. Yet, for all his hard-won cynicism, Cobleigh refuses to surrender his humanity. This is a book about duty. Winners get out alive, and survivors are obligated to tell the truth.

One reason why Cobleigh's memoir is so compelling is because it's not a straight chronology. Readers who expect dates and specifications will be disappointed. Instead, Cobleigh wisely chooses to tell his story as a series of vignettes that capture vivid on-the-spot impressions. It so happens that the father of one of my high-school classmates served with the USAF in Vietnam. Weapons officer in a Phantom, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross. When he told us war stories, this is what they sounded like.

"War for the Hell of It" resonates with noted Vietnam memoirs like Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and Philip Caputo's "A Rumor of War." If you enjoy this book, you might read Ed Rasimus's "When Thunder Rolled," another fine USAF memoir that covers the same period.

It's past time that these men told their stories. We're fortunate that articulate writers like Cobleigh and Rasimus have decided to share theirs.
14 people found this helpful
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Author's Comments

What was it like to be there? That is the question, sometimes stated, sometimes implied, often asked about the Vietnam War. In my book, I try to answer that. Others have written about the politcal/military history of the war. There have been many books on the ground war and a few on the air war. None that I have read accurately relate what is was like to be there. I focused on the sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of flying and fighting the out-country air war. What was life like as a fighter pilot? I hope my book captures that.
11 people found this helpful
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Almost worth getting fired over

One morning I found myself with a couple hours to kill between my dental appointment and my haircut appointment. So I swang by the bookstore and decided to browse. "War For the Hell of It" caught my eye and, having yet to spend any of my paycheck from the week before, I decided to grab it.

Unable to read it before work that evening, I stuck it in my pocket for reading during my breaks. Boy, was that a mistake. Throughout the week I was sorely tempted to plop myself behind my register and read that book. Completely engrossing and, unlike most fighter pilot memoirs ("I was a complete walking hormone who could just wink my eye and bed any woman I wanted, I shot down seventeen MiGs in one afternoon and singlehandedly won the war..."), I found myself relating to the author. The fact that the book was wonderfully well-written helped immensely as well.

Thankfully, I was blessed with a modicum of self-control, as reading this book while working would certainly have gotten me fired - my employers do not look kindly upon what they call "time theft." Sure, there may be nothing to do but it's important that one LOOK BUSY.

So thank you, Mr. Cobleigh, for adding a great book to my bookshelf that will likely fall apart from extensive use.

Oh, and did you notice that the cover art is of a Naval aviator? You can tell from some of the equipment. Got a good chuckle from that.
8 people found this helpful
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I concur

I served at the same time, in South Vietnam flying F-100s. Fast Eddie nailed it. I guess our time and job made us share more than exactly where we flew. I wish I could write and recollect as well as Cobleigh, but I sure enjoyed looking back.

I kind of lost it at his ending thoughts. Tears were shed for many things, lost comrades, frustration and anger. But, most of all, for the realization that the most intense, and maybe best times of one's life was concluding.

I am ordering more copies for family and friends to help them understand.

A bonus - superior writing and narrative. I hope he writes more. Retiring as an Lt. Col. says he stayed flying. I would like to learn of his decade following, as it changed USAF forever, and I missed it serving my family as a civilian.
6 people found this helpful
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The Real Thing

Ed Cobleigh's account of the Air War in Vietnam, outside of PAC 6, is the best account I have read. I was an F-4E pilot in the same time frame, and flew very much the same type of missions as Cobleigh, including the night stuff, and I can tell you his is the finest description of the combat experiences we all shared at that time.

Very well written, great reflections on the governing rules of engagement, and the insanity as a whole.

I can't recommend this book enough! Get it! Read it! It's the BEST! You can't put it down.

Bob Hanson, Fighter Pilot, Ret.
5 people found this helpful
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Air Emotions

As an Air Force pilot of that era, I believe Ed Cobliegh's account of his experiences in Viet Nam accurately reflect what we all felt during that unfortunate period. Not for what we were tasked to do, but how it was managed and viewed by the folks back home.
This memoir is outstanding in its portrayal of the motions evinced in all of us who served. Read it and enjoy it. The man (Cobliegh) has the guts to tell us, not only how it was, but how it felt. I wish I could meet him one day to say thank you.
2 people found this helpful
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It was like my own diary

I was at Ubon after this was written but kept finding myself saying, "yeah"! It could have been my own diary. Little comments like the smell of Thailand, eating beef salad, zotting (original laser bombing designation). This book what everything I remember about my tour and have highly recommended it to family, friends and those were there as well.
2 people found this helpful
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Good read, and very unusual viewpoint

This book was a very good read -- engaging and interesting. Also, the author's viewpoint was quite unique. I can't recall another book where a pilot talked about exactly why he was there, and why he enjoyed what he was doing, let alone with such honesty. No sugar coating or rationalizing. This one is a keeper.
2 people found this helpful
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Well written, Humorous, Eye opening

While “Fast Eddie” was in the skies over Vietnam, I was safe at home attending school, oblivious to the harsher realities of the Vietnam War. These many years later, I find it eye opening to read his vivid account and catch a glimpse of not only the rush of combat but the tremendous effect it had on those who sacrificed to carry it out at the whims of a politically influenced echelon. I appreciate Ed Cobleigh’s candor and and thank him for including his good humor in the mix. The second edition has an added chapter which helps one to better understand where the trail ended. I’m glad to have read it. I miss the pictures that were in the first edition, but the new book cover is incredible.
1 people found this helpful

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