1942:
When you’re a year removed from lecture halls and your fraternity house, and you find yourself 180 miles south of nowhere in the middle of the Pacific, told to launch off a make-shift aircraft carrier with a catapult that will fire you off the deck at a 45 degree angle into a crosswind while piloting a combat aircraft you’ve had less than 30 days to learn to fly…and if you survive the launch, you’ll fight the best combat aviators in the world who have been shooting down planes since you were on your high school JV teams.
You’re going to be living in the jungle, slowly starving on captured food stocks. You may be five ten, a buck fifty now, but if you survive, you’ll be lucky to be a hundred and twenty pounds. When you’re not in the air every day, you’ll be sniped, bombed, shelled, strafed, and mortared. The enemy’s ground troops are a few thousand yards away, preparing to overrun your make-shift, shell-pocked airfield that in itself is a hazard to use. You’ll be exposed to jungle diseases not even known to Western medicine yet. You’ll be wracked with malaria, doubled over with dysentery.
Your aircraft’s oxygen system will fail and poison you. A hit in the wrong place, and you’ll be covered in superheated engine oil. If you get shot down, you’ll face sharks at sea and death by torture at the enemy’s hands in the jungle.
And some light bird who doesn’t know the basics of overwater navigation, who refuses to share your circumstances, has just told you your mission: buy time with your lives. Die hard. You have one ace in the hole: USMC Captain John L. Smith is your commanding officer. With him at the tip of your spear? All the other stuff is just noise.
Fifty-three days of this to go…then you can go home. For thirty-four years, I’ve wanted to tell this story. Thanks to Hachette, it’ll be in bookstores everywhere, Audible and Amazon this May 14.
The American Warrior 