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If THE NIGHT STALKERS was a novel rather than what it is --- a collection of anecdotes about the hazards of serving under fire in the Army's crack helicopter outfit --- you couldn't ask for a better hero than Mike Grimm. Grimm has a solid jaw, a powerful build, and (as the authors describe him) comes off as a cross between Sergeant Rock and the Silver Surfer. He enters the story as an infantry lieutenant in Vietnam in 1968, fresh out of Officer's Candidate School, and earns the Bronze Star on one of his first patrols when he saves his men from a Viet Cong ambush.
Eight years later, after earning the Distinguished Service Cross, Grimm finds himself in a barracks in Hawaii, thinking about how the Army needs to upgrade its special forces capabilities. His ideas gain momentum after the fiasco at Desert One, where a top-secret mission to save the American hostages in Iran ends in blood and fire when a Marine helicopter collides with a grounded Air Force transport plane. Within months, Mike Grimm shows up in a deserted corner of Fort Campbell to oversee the birth of the Night Stalkers, Army helicopter pilots with a special forces mission.
The next year, Grimm --- now a major, on his way to lieutenant colonel --- is flying a routine training mission over the Tennessee hills, taking his helicopter formation over the nap of the earth at hair-raising speeds. It is just a routine flight, a dog-and-pony show for the brass at the Pentagon to show off the capabilities of the newly-minted unit. But Grimm's "Little Bird" hits a low-hanging power line over the Cumberland River. His co-pilot is thrown in the river, but Grimm is still in the helicopter when it smashes into the steel tower holding up the power lines. Grimm is killed instantly; his is one of the first names on the Night Stalker Memorial Wall. The co-pilot survives and six months later is back flying helicopters, minus a left thumb.
THE NIGHT STALKERS is a book about heroes written by a hero (Michael Durant, a former Night Stalker, was captured by Somali forces after the battle described in Mark Bowden's BLACK HAWK DOWN and dramatized in the Ridley Scott film of the same name). But the heroes are not matchless men of virtue, and some of them do not get to go home to hearth and family at the end of the tale. The "characters" are all recognizably human, trained to fly helicopters and deliver their comrades in Special Forces or Delta to trouble spots in the most dangerous places on earth, arriving on-target in plus or minus 30 seconds.
The book covers the sweep of Night Stalker history, starting with the unit's first mission --- the Grenada invasion (which, to everyone's consternation, starts in the daytime) --- and continuing on to the first days of the second Iraq War. It is organized by conflict and reads much more like a short-story collection, with a new set of characters introduced at the start of each chapter (and some popping up again and again in the narrative). Most of the missions are ones that ordinary civilians know about, despite the secretive special-forces character of the Night Stalkers missions. One infers that many of these stories still cannot be told, although one is an almost-forgotten mission where a ragtag Navy task force guarded American-flagged Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Persian Gulf against Iranian provocation. The Night Stalkers worked with a Navy SEAL commander who took --- of all unlikely things --- a giant barge used to service offshore oil rigs and made it into something of a fortress, or at least a suitable base for the helicopter pilots to pick off overly-ambitious Iranian naval forces.
The book has its weaknesses. It is --- somewhat unavoidably --- tied to, and dependent on, obscure military jargon and acronyms (there's a handy glossary in the back). This is not a real barrier for anyone who has plowed through Tom Clancy's books, but readers without that experience might be lost at times. However, the action sequences are thrilling, and the authors have the real-world expertise to keep the stories gritty and realistic, never over-dramatizing the situations or indulging in hero-worship.
THE NIGHT STALKERS is more than just a good read; it's a reminder of just how dangerous it is for our men and women in uniform to defend our country and what an excellent job they perform in doing so.
--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds (blueduck@gmail.com), who writes the "Northbound" blog at http://www.txreviews.com/blog.
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