Death in the Sky: The Vietnam War’s Most Hair-Raising Photo
Pilot’s 1968 selfie shows Soviet missile skimming just under his F-105 in the skies above Hanoi
Excerpted from Midair by Craig K. Collins (Lyons Press)
Available here in hardback, paperback, ebook and audiobook.
Read Midair: Foreword|Read Midair: Chapter One|Read Midair: Chapter Two
Whenever Billy Sparks was hungover, which was often, his fellow pilots would yell out, “Hey, Sparky, let me see that aerial map of Hanoi.”
Sparks would then oblige. He had the ability to pull down on one of his lower eyelids, flex a combination of facial muscles, and force his eyeball to bulge gruesomely from its socket. Though Billy’s bulging, bloodshot eye the morning after a long night at Takhli’s Stag Bar was unnerving, pilots viewed it as something of a good-luck talisman. And its resemblance to the air force’s bombing maps of Hanoi was so uncanny as to be satirically hilarious.
In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson crowed, “They can’t even bomb an outhouse without my approval.”
Which, sadly, was true.
And it was clearly no way to run a war.
