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MISTY: First Person Stories…. Edited
by Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd, Misty 34, USAF, (Ret.) A
review by JD Wetterling
WARNING:
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK if you can’t afford to lose a night’s sleep.
It’s been 34 years since I came home from 268 combat missions in an
F-100 in South Vietnam and Laos.
Like 99% of Vietnam vets, I proudly served, put it behind me and life has
been grand. Then
I bought MISTY. Now it’s way past my bedtime, my alarmed wife says I look like
a deer in the headlights and wants to know if she should call 911.
If that sounds like hyperbole, then you’ve never experienced the terror
and ecstasy of being shot and missed. I
know many of the Misty’s, some very well, and at one time I intimately knew
that F-100 they flew.
And for the last several hours I have been back in that cramped cockpit.
I’ve seen the dim red glow of the instrument panel, heard the muffled
whine of spinning turbine blades deep in her belly, and smelled that aromatic
combination of burnt hydraulic fluid and stale sweat.
And I’m wound tighter than a two-dollar hack watch.
Reading MISTY is like being there. The
Vietnam War’s Commando Sabre operation, call sign MISTY, was a volunteer
mission with knee-knocking loss rates.
MISTY will grab you by the…whatever it was we used to say…and not let
go, till your face hits the page in exhaustion.
It’s six-dozen first person accounts of heroes who literally jinked in
the crosshairs of enemy weapons systems 4-5 hours or more every mission.
Vietnam was before smart bombs and stand off weapons, where the airborne
hunter had to get down in the weeds to shoot the bear, and sometimes he got the
bear and sometimes the bear got him.
Misty’s spent 90% of their time inside the enemy's air defense envelope, and found targets
where the rest of us saw only elephant grass. In this age when revisionist history is high fashion, read the truth in the heroes’ own words while it can still be found. I had the great honor to speak at a Misty reunion a few years ago. I think—God is my witness—it was the greatest concentration of heroes in the flesh ever assembled to break bread, with the possible exception of those endless, excruciating nights when Medal-of-Honor winner, Bud Day (Misty 1) dined alone in his POW cell. Read their stories and you will know why America is the longest running experiment in freedom in the history of mankind. And you’ll give thanks to God that you were born in the same country they were. You may buy this book at: Barnes & Noble, Amazon
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