Mark Berent: 14 books

It is with good reason that Mark Berent has consistently received this kind of praise. Berent, himself a highly decorated pilot, has seen his share of action, having served in the Air Force for more than twenty years and survived three tours of Vietnam. In his three previous novels, all a part of...

Mark Berent’s first two novels of three extraordinary men in the midst of the Vietnam conflict, Rolling Thunder and Steel Tiger, met with widespread critical acclaim. The New York Times Book Review called Rolling Thunder an “unusually arresting book” and named it one of its “Notable Books’...

In Storm Flight, the intense conclusion to Berent’s Wings of War saga, the action is touched off by a daring raid on the Son Tay prisoner-of-war camp that reveals some startling information. With American prisoners in terrible jeopardy and crucial national secrets in danger of being discovered,...

Five months after we left them in Rolling Thunder, Steel Tiger brings back USAF Major Court Bannister, Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Wolf Lochert, and USAF First Lieutenant Toby Parker, now scattered to their new posts: Bannister in Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Wolf...

Mark Berent is a well-known author of many Vietnam airwar books and articles. In this article he recounts the people and events that motivated him to write. As he says:"They're out there now, somewhere beyond our eyes, beyond the clouds, rolling and soaring in towering cathedrals flying beautiful airplanes that need only the fuel of their love. These are the men I honor...

Combat fighter pilot Mark Berent writes of a dragon-shaped karst mountain in Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail that bristles with physical and psychological danger. He writes of it as he first saw it on an F-4 FAC mission from Ubon RTAFB in 1969. Then he adds an excerpt from "Phantom Leader," one of his historical fiction books about war and politics in the Vietnam era.

Rolling Thunder is an historical novel about the decisive role politics played during the Vietnam War. Its characters range from men in the field to the Pentagon and the White House. Fighter pilots and Special Forces warriors try to do their best but are hampered by President Johnson, Secretary of...

As the Vietnam war interdiction campaign spread to North Vietnam, Laos, and eventually Cambodia, the slow moving FACs in their small prop planes began to encounter intense ground fire. It was then, in 1967, that the jet FACs began to take over in high threat areas. A former commander of the famed 8th Tac Fighter Wing Wolf FACs poignantly reminisces about these men and the mission.

The weather, the built-in hazards of night refueling, target identification, and the mountains hiding in the dark are all enemies- and of course, there's the enemy, too. These pilots have a saying, "And if the big guns don't get you, the black karst will." But then back on top in the moonlight,...

In January of 1973 we in the Defense Attaché Office in the American Embassy, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, found ourselves in an unusual situation. In Vietnam, all US forces were ordered to cease fighting and that included air assets as well as the ground troops. Yet we had authorized air support until August 15. This article is about what occurred during that time.

Until the day a friendly FAC presented us combat pilots with a mascot, all any of us knew about snakes was that they were slimy creatures that could poison you, eat you, twist your bones, or crush you at their leisure. But that was before we came to know and love our squadron's resident reptile, whose name was ... RAMROD

"The Graduate" is a short story about a retired fighter pilot who, at 74, went back to college, Cowboy College, that is.

This is a hilarious tale of an Air Force combat fighter pilot in Vietnam who goes out on patrol with a special forces team he has supported many times from the air. Seeing the pilot is having a hard time keeping up, one of the Chinese mercenaries called Nungs, says to the team leader, "Let's kill the Dai Uy." Dai Uy is Vietnamese for captain.Read on to see what happened.

We were college freshmen who built a stockcar and raced it on flat dirt tracks. We had no training, no introduction or safety briefs. We learned the hard way how it was in the Minnesota Stock Car Racing Association in those early days. What does Pretty Don’t Win suggest? Not what you think. Read on.