Pilot is harried inside and in flight - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Pilot is harried inside and in flight

In respected author and veteran Bing West’s introduction, he says “A Nightmare’s Prayer” reminds us that flying “is damned hard work” and “there is no lee shore in the sky.”

And there is little surety in retired Marine Lt. Col. Michael Franzak’s mind.

He is in and above Afghanistan as executive officer of Marine Attack Squadron 513 — the “Flying Nightmares.” His deployment is not just about sorties. It’s also about sorting through personal issues, and Franzak is frank. His standards say a pilot cannot err in a cockpit and should not err outside one.

He erred. He admits a “transgression in a dark past.” He fathered a son outside marriage in 1990. His guilt about absentee parenthood returns when he leaves an 11-month-old son for duty in 2002. During war, he confronts himself and a new terrain:

“Thousands of mud homes and buildings ... blended perfectly with empty brown fields, void of life. No cars, no lights, only tiny mud structures and mud walls that partitioned the brown landscape into irregular fallow tracts. I felt as if I had flown back in time.”

The town of Gandomak reminds him of the “4,500 British troops and 10,000 camp followers ambushed there in 1842. There was one survivor. ... Afghanistan and its people were no strangers to war.”

His own future brings frustration to him and to his boss. “I was failing him as an XO, but my ego prevented me from acknowledging it.”

Some readers might think Franzak is simply too hard on himself. For example: Without sleep for 24 hours, he runs in the first Bagram Minefield Marathon. He finished “like an idiot” at 3:39:48. Idiotic? An 8-minute, 35-second pace is enviable.

However, it’s Franzak’s drive — flight — for perfection that keeps the story worthy and restores his self-worth.

Years of training culminate in the air at 600 miles per hour. Against a quick-moving enemy, Franzak hits a “shack” — a bull’s-eye.

“You really saved our ass with that first low pass,” Lightning 21 says from the ground.

Franzak acknowledges his wingman, the tanker aircrew and the artillery, and then thanks God for two things:

“The seconds he gave me and keeping the grunts alive in those seconds ... God had answered a Nightmare’s prayer.”

And Franzak finds relief.

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Huffman is a Military Times book reviewer.