The discovery of oil in Tinsley, Mississippi, in 1939 captivated the South and has deeply affected the region ever since. At the end of 1940, over 133 wells were flowing, and speculators were drilling holes and staking claims all along the Gulf Coast and its immediate environs. Consequently, the region's economy, ecosystems, and politics have been shaped by black gold since the end of World War II.Alan Cockrell, a petroleum geologist, provides an insider's account of the science of...

A Gulf War memoir that captures the poetry and peril of flight.Within days of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the far reaching arm of American airpower sprang into action. The skyscapes of the North Atlantic, Europe, and the Mediterranean became laced with the contrails of great jets flowing day and night toward the Persian Gulf. From the skies, manpower and material poured onto the bleak sands under the ominous clouds of the gathering storm, and in o...

Reverend Bobby Chatman is a successful television preacher and the United States president's spiritual adviser-though he's hiding a dark secret. Immigrating to the US from Russia, he and his two assistants are deep-cover Russian intelligence operatives who have devised a plan to bring the United States to its knees with just four cruise missiles launched from within its borders.Captain Mark "Suds" Matthews is an F-15 Eagle pilot stationed in Massachusetts. Frustrated with bureaucra...

Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is t****he basis for the 1983 Oscar Award-winning film of the same name and the 8-part Disney+ TV mini-series.From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. "Millions of words have poured ...

Ed Rasimus straps the reader into the cockpit of an F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber in his engaging account of the Rolling Thunder campaign in the skies over North Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1968, more than 330 F-105s were lost—the highest loss rate in Southeast Asia—and many pilots were killed, captured, and wounded because of the Air Force’s disastrous tactics. The descriptions of Rasimus’s one hundred missions, some of the most dangerous of the conflict, will satisfy anyone addicted to...

"In 1963…there was no way I could have known, sitting in a classroom on that beautiful campus in Ohio, that by raising my hand I would be going to war in Vietnam and that I would see things, hear things and do things that most people cannot imagine."--James Joyce. The author was drawn into the United States Army through ROTC, and went through training to fly helicopters in combat over Vietnam. His experiences are notable because he flew both Huey "Slicks" and Huey "Gunships": the former on...

MUSTANG ACE: Memoirs of a P-51 Fighter Pilot by Robert J. Goebel + Easygoing and quick to learn, young Bob Goebel worked his way steadily through the phases of military flight training, and found in himself an aptitude for flight. Following months of rigorous operational flying in Panama, Goebel and his young companions found themselves in North Africa in the spring of 1944 with orders to the 31st Fighter Group in Italy. Just as the novices were about to join, the 31st traded its British-m...

Palace Cobra picks up where Ed Rasimus's critically acclaimed When Thunder Rolled left off. Now he's flying the F-4 Phantom and the attitude is still there.In the waning days of the Vietnam War, Rasimus and his fellow pilots were determined that they were not going be the last to die in a conflict their country had abandoned. They were young fighter pilots fresh from training and experienced aviators who came back to the war again and again, not f...

**A classic from the New York Times bestselling author of The Things They Carried"One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was / is Vietnam."—Minneapolis Star and Tribune**Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year as a foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him to experience combat from behind an infantryman...

Based on audiotapes he recorded during the war and sent home to his family, Randy ZahnÆs Snake Pilot recounts his experiences flying AH-1 Cobra helicopters during the Vietnam War. First deployed in Vietnam in 1967 and loaded with a formidable arsenal of weaponry, the Cobra was the first helicopter designed from inception as an attack aircraft. It dramatically changed the nature of the war in Vietnam by offering the Army, for the first time, its own powerful and highly accurate weapons ...

In 1945 Second Lieutenant Jack Broughton graduated from West Point with the silver pilot wings of a newly commissioned member of the Army Air Corps. Nearly thirty years later, he retired as a full colonel in the United States Air Force, an entity that didn't even exist when he first learned to fly. Along the way Colonel Broughton saw duty in virtually every fighter aircraft the Air Corps and then Air Force had to offer. He experienced the birth and coming of age of the U.S. Air Force and i...

The book starts out picturing a young man who foolishly wants to go to war where he in vision’s himself receiving all these high class medals for heroism but never once taking into account what it is going to take physically and mentally to get those medals. He’s constantly playing a head game within himself and those that surround him. He like so many other young men of past eras are trying to be something that they’re not and that small initial lie grows into a tremendous reputation that...