Prowler Ball – A Yankee Station Sea Story is the novelized account of a combat cruise aboard USS Enterprise during the final days of the air war in Vietnam. The book is based upon real incidents and real people that I encountered during my combat cruise to Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin. How to tell what happened to me and the men I knew out there has been one of my most difficult challenges. I have fictionalized the accounts and merged some people and some incidents together to allow the story to flow more easily. Prowler Ball is the story of a young Naval Flight Officer encountering the dangerous and sometimes sordid world of flying in combat in a war no one truly understood.

In the pages of the book the reader is taken through a transformation from lurid details of life ashore to the numbing shipboard routine of flying missions around the clock while trying to maintain an edge against complacency and boredom. The flying scenes actually happened and the life in port and at home speak to the loneliness and stress that the fliers who manned the aircraft deployed against North Vietnamese targets had to endure.

There are no apologies in the story, it  is just a grim recounting of the reality of the war in Vietnam as I experienced it. Like all war stories it is fact and fiction blended together until it is hard to tell one from the other. I hope you like it. It has taken over forty years to put these chapters on paper and in truth, many more could be told.

Prowler Ball is available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.com.