Thunder Over Vietnam: The American Air War in Southeast Asia

The popular conception of the Vietnam War focuses on the ground war—the soldiers and grunts who humped along jungle trails and fought the Vietcong face to face—but an important part of the war was waged in the skies over Southeast Asia, and indeed many of the war’s most well-known figures were pilots, from John McCain and James Stockdale to the unknown men who unleashed napalm hell and who carried out Curtis LeMay’s “bomb them into the Stone Age” doctrine, Lyndon Johnson’s Rolling Thunder, ...