"Vietnam Combat: An Attack Pilot's Diary" is David E. Leue's way of rounding out his naval career, which began in 1948, when he entered flight training under the U.S. Navy's V-5 Program. He takes the reader from the early 1960s, when he had served aboard an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, successfully completed a course at the Armed Forces Staff College (Norfolk, VA), to extended combat service in Vietnam from the Spring of 1965 to December 1966.

Again Leue has an unerring knack for conveying to the reader the thrills and risks associated with flying high-performance jet aircraft on day and night missions deep inside North Vietnam. Following his Vietnam service, Leue served in a training command, and did staff work in the Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, he retired from the Navy and, between 1985 and 1990, served as a professor at Fresno State University.

This is the author's Korean War memoir. Through his university studies, Leue joined the U.S. Navy's V-5 program, and trained as a fighter pilot, winning his wings in late 1949. He learned to fly the vaunted Chance Vought F4U-4 Corsair of World War II fame and shares with the reader the wealth of his combat experiences aboard aircraft carriers between 1950 and 1952. By the time Leue was tour-expired, he had transitioned to jets, flying the F9F-2 Panther fighter on flak suppression missions against Chinese and North Korean forces.

As a way of rounding out the memoir, Leue shares with the reader in the final chapter the crystallization of his decidedly right-wing views on the Cold War since his service in Korea. This is the first Korean War memoir I've come across and it was very much well-worth reading. Leue takes the reader with him in the cockpit so that you, the reader, can vicariously experience the thrills and hazards of flying and combat.