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Rating: 
Summary: Warriors at work .... but some writing needed
Review: A story about a group of warriors in Vietnam - doing a job that most of us can barely fathom. I did not realize the HAL-3 (Seawolves) Squadron had such action during the Tet Offensive. Mr. Kelly does a decent job of chronicling some of the Seawolves' missions - but his writing lacks the finesse and skill that would have brought this book to another level. It was too much like Rambo using a typewriter. There is more to describing people than using the nicknames and telling us their favorite weapons.
"Chickenhawk" is a much better helicopter chronicle of the Vietnam War, although it doe not involve the Seawolves or the US Navy.
Rating: 
Summary: GREAT Read
Review: Dan "Pegleg" Kelly has written a remarkable work detailing a short time frame in the history of the Navy Seawolves. Factual, detailed, graphic this is an outstanding work.Having been a member of this squadron, knowing some of the men, and knowing of others,that he writes about,I know these men are NOT bigger then life. They are just average American sailors who performed in a role never before conceived and did so with a well above average effort and little public fanfare. These men never numbered more then 250 at any one time and earned the love and respect of the US Navy's famous SEAL teams. The most highly decorated squadron in the history of Naval Aviation, they were a combination of McHale's Navy and Terry and the Pirates. In school they were "jocks" and "geeks". In the fleet they ranged from below to above average sailors. In war, they made Audie Murphy look like a boy scout. One well known SEAL sums up his opinion of these young American men - They have (testicles) that clank when they walk. Good job Dan!
Rating: 
Summary: Reads like fiction
Review: I bought the book because I wanted to know more about the Navy's helicopter gunship role. There is some good information in the book about the birth and day-to-day operations of the HAL-3 warriors. Oddly, however, half of the book consists of stories of SEALs fighting in the jungle. These stories are obviously not first-hand accounts. The stories of the Seawolves' exploits seem to be word-of-mouth as well. Some of the nomenclature of the weapons is consistently incorrect. There's a picture of the author with one of the Seawolf choppers and a crew member in the book but the only place where it's even alluded to that he was a Seawolf is on the back cover. Odd that there's no first-person information on the group and that the book has such an outsider's feel to it.
I guess the thing that bugs me is that the book seems more like a collection of war stories that were told to the author by a few individuals. There doesn't seem to have been much research involved in preparing the book. I don't mean to take anything away from these great men and what they accomplished but this book seems to be a myopic glamorization of death. There are many good books out there but this is written like more like an action novel than a historical presentation of facts. A previous reviewer said it very well when he said it's like Rambo using a typewriter.
To provide some examples, the Seawolves in the book never miss anything. They can fire rockets in specific windows every single time, land them on top of walls that NVA soldiers are climbing over and the door gunners can pick off running troops in streets; all while the pilot is jinking the chopper around the sky. Every combat action mentions bodies being blown to pieces and, during the coverage of the inital Tet offensive into Saigon, Kelly says that the gunners shot NVA troops to pieces while they were in hand-to-hand combat with our Special Forces troops. Kind of hard to believe. As is the fact that the helicopters could fly 120 MPH three feet off the ground through the streets of Saigon and take corners at rull speed. Sorry, but that all seems like quite a stretch.
If you've served in the military or even studied military history at all, you may find it hard to tell what may even be factual. I just looked at the forward again and he thanks a couple of people for telling him stories at a reunion and in similar settings. That's a good reference source but in and of itself doesn't make for a well researched book.
The bottom line is that it lacks authenticity and doesn't do the Seawolves justice. Reading like fiction, it's hard to know what to and what not to believe. In my mind, believing something false is worse than not knowing at all.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: Very compelling book. I had a difficult time putting it down. My friends have read it and they agree it's non-stop action. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes action/war stories. I just ordered Daniel E. Kelly's other book about the Seawolves. I see from this site it should be just as good.
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