One Day in a Long War: May 10, 1972 Air War, North Vietnam

Rarely has there been a work conveying so viscerally the fear, the courage, the sheer excitement of air-to-air battle. In One Day in Long War the internationally respected historians Jeffrey Ethell and Alfred Price chronicle May 10, 1972, the launch of Linebacker, a highly classified, huge-scale Navy and Air Force surprise operation marking the resumption of U.S. bombing raids on North Vietnam. One Day in a Long War records firsthand accounts of almost one hundred eyewitnesses, analyzes cockpit voice recordings and draws from official documents, many declassified for the first time, to tell its story. During May 10 an elite corps of American fighter pilots - many of them first-generation Top Gun graduates - few more than 330 sorties against major transportation centers around Hanoi and Haiphong. But the Vietnamese fought back with ninety-three ground-to-air missiles and forty MIG fighters. What words are spoken are spoken in the cockpit of a Phantom as the crew prepares to engage to engage MIGs closing in at nearly one thousand miles per hour? What thoughts go through the mind of a pilot struggling to hold his crippled plane in the air for one minute longer, to get clear of enemy territory so he and his crewman can parachute into the sea? How does it feel to be in a Phantom running in to attack the notorious Paul Dourmer Bridge at Hanoi with laser-guided bombs as missile streak through the formation? And what tactics would enable a force of sixteen of these fighter bombers to carry out such an attack without he loss of a single plane? One Day in a Long War is a definitive reconstruction of the most intensive air combat of the Vietnam conflict.