60 VIETNAM
An Air America Pilot’s Flight
Back to His ‘Spook’ Years
All pilots, regardless of service—in this
Vietnam War veteran’s experience—have
one common trait: They can’t keep from
telling outlandish war stories. Inevitably
using their hands to simulate air-to-air
combat, pilots dramatically relate breath-
less stories, typically beginning: “There I
was at 5,000 feet, dangling from my mic
cord, MiGs swooshing left of me, missiles
streaking right of me, and 20 mm shells
exploding everywhere!” It’s a compulsion
running in their blood, embedded in their
“pilot DNA,” separating them from us
mundane, ground-pounding, grunts and
cannon-cockers.
Neil Hansen’s engrossing memoir
Flight, however, avoids the standard pilot
clichés—there is nothing stereotypical
about the exciting “war stories” deftly
recounted in this book. Hansen’s riveting
prose describes his adventures as an Air
America civilian pilot for the CIA’s clan-
destine Southeast Asia airline during the
1950-76 “secret air war” in Laos and Cam-
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scene of countless U.S. covert operations.
Bored stiff as a company pilot in De-troit, Hansen joined Air America in 1964
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Orient. Patriotism, “God and Country,”
didn’t enter into his decision.
There is “an allure so mystical it bor-
ders on madness for those who play the
game of war with abandon,” he writes.
“Machismo propelled those whose exis-
tence was spurred by bursts of excitement
that pushed life to its apex. Whoring and
sensual pleasures were but peripheral
perks...[But, most of us] were not hung
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hooked on the wine of war.”
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to 1975, logging 29,000 hours (9,000 of
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cret combat zone). He was nicknamed
“Weird” by fellow pilots for his bizarre
behavior (although in the cockpit Han-
sen was “all business, all the time”), and
his irreverent memoir certainly validates
that sobriquet.
Co-authored by veteran aviation writer
Luann Grosscup, Flight offers readers
Weird’s detailed page-turning account of
ÆaQVO]VLMZKW^MZ¹[XWWSºUQ[[QWV[_Q\Pconventional operations after early 1948 gen-
erally had as their immediate objective the
destruction of transit sites, the degradation of
material resources. [The French] were trying
to let their own position breathe by keeping
Viet Minh bands back and the roads open.”
Eventually the French position in Co-
chinchina began to crumble. Continued de-
mands for manpower in the north, coupled
with an ever-expanding Viet Minh main force
in the south, compelled the French to abandon
large swathes of the region in the summer of- Gen. Pierre Boyer de Latour, hastily dis-
patched to Indochina that summer, concluded
that his forces had to prioritize the political
and economic core of Cochinchina, which in-
cluded Saigon and surrounding areas.
Waddell, exploiting an extraordinary
array of French-language sources, recounts
the minimalist strategy Latour and his suc-
cessor, Gen. Charles-Marie Chanson, ad-
opted while reversing French fortunes on
the ground in the south. Pragmatic veterans
of colonial warfare, the two commanders
erected a system of defenses, raised local re-
Flight: An Air
America Pilot’s
Story of Adventure,
Descent and
Redemption
By Neil Graham Hansen
and Luann Grosscup
History Publishing,
2019cruits, forged alliances with powerful religious sects and used their
ground and riverine forces to impose a devastating economic blockade
on the Viet Minh. These measures complemented the short, sharp
raids French mobile forces mounted against the enemy’s rice stock-
piles and arms manufacturing facilities.
Rigidly committed to Maoist theories on revolutionary war, the
Viet Minh—under charismatic communist leader Gen. Nguyen Binh—
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well-trained battalions attacked the very center of Cochinchina,
threatening French power in the region. Chanson, however, crushed
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chinchina part of the war, as Waddell deftly explains.
;QOVQÅKIV\TaIn the Year of the Tiger examines this unheralded
French victory within the context of the Cold War. “The American
war for Vietnam and the context in which it would be fought would
be determined by the dynamics of French success during the First
Indochina War,” Waddell writes. “Had France lost both northern and
southern portions of the country, the American war for South Viet-
nam might not have occurred at all.”
Waddell also challenges aspects of the existing orthodoxy—that a
communist victory was inevitable, an independent “South Vietnam”
was little more than a historical aberration—and in so doing presents
a thoroughly illuminating, refreshingly balanced interpretation of the
French war for Indochina.
—Warren Wilkins