Flight of the Intruder, by Stephen Coonts

November 3, 2008 by
Filed under: Fiction, historical fiction, military fiction, Steven Coonts 

I am currently reading a book by Stephen Coonts, The Assassin. However, to some extent the reason why I am reading the book is more interesting than the book itself. Not that The Assassin isn’t a good book.

But really, I am reading it because once upon the time, long ago, I read another book by the same author which I really thought was one of the most stunning military fiction novels I had ever encountered. That book was Flight of the Intruder. This was Stephen Coonts’ first book, published in 1986. The setting is the Vietnam War. The year is 1972, a time when the war was still raging but negotiations were under way and it was becoming increasingly obvious that the USA was going to pull out sooner or later.

Flight of the Intruder, by Stephen Coonts

Flight of the Intruder tells the story of fighter pilot Jake Grafton. He is a young naval aviator, very respected by his peers, but still slowly coming apart under the pressures of flying an endless series of extremely hazardous yet useless missions over hostile territory in Vietnam in his A-6 Intruder, a carrier-based attack bomber. This, of course, is exactly what Stephen Coonts himself was doing at that time. So Coonts knows what he is writing about from the inside, and this makes the story and the descriptions sound and feel totally authentic.

Flight of the Intruder is a stunningly honest book. Stephen Coonts really puts the reader inside the very hearts and minds of the pilots drive these powerful, hi-tech machines. To me, he revealed a whole world totally unknown unknown to me about the naval aviators’ fraternity. The book really goes deep beneath the glamorous surface and examines the psychological tolls of war. We meet memorable characters like the young Jake Grafton and his buddies Tiger Cole, The Boxman, Sammy Lundeen, and New Guy. We get a lot of technical information about the A-6 as well as the thinking of pilots in combat situations. We are in the cockpit.

Flight of the Intruder is a story of heroes, with a great plot and lots of drive. A wonderful book which later also became a great movie. And also, I think, a better book in many ways than The Assassin.

You can read reviews of the books in Stephen Coonts’ Tommy Carmellini-series at Leserglede.com.

You can order books by Stephen Coonts from amazon US: Flight of the Intruder, Final Flight, or The Assassin: A Novel. Amazon also carries the movie from 1991 with Willem Dafoe and Danny Glover: Flight of the Intruder.

Or, if you prefer, from amazon UK: Flight of the Intruder, Final Flight, or The Assassin. They also have the movie: Flight Of The Intruder [1991].

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