Eye of the Viper: The Making of an F-16 Pilot

An unmarked First Edition " Every year, 1,000 fresh potential pilots undergo the intensive, six-month, 58-flight, $2 million-a-head fighter pilot basic training, where they are pushed to the extreme limits, propelled by the desire to earn their place in a warrior subculture. From the investigative science and medical writer, Peter A. Aleshire, comes Eye of the Viper, an intriguing book about the making of an F-16 fighter pilot. Blending intense human drama with a wealth of information about the world's most expensive, deadly, high-tech Air Force, the book follows a batch of fresh new recruits at Luke Air Force Base, the world's largest fighter wing and the single most important source of fighter pilots that have made the American Air Force virtually unchallenged in the skies, as they experience the exhaustive six-month training process. Get an insider's look at how these rookies face mental and physical demands, exhilaration and failure, joy and pain, sweat and tears while they are transformed into stealthy, fierce, American fighting machines. Each recruit is eager to climb into the jets they love at a moment's notice and fly halfway around the world to drop laser-guided bombs down any smokestack the president specifies. However, only a few select individuals have what it takes to be dubbed "protectors of national security." The stakes are high and only a few will succeed. Historian and writer Peter Aleshire is a senior lecturer in the Department of American Studies at Arizona State University West. He is contributing editor at Phoenix Magazine and writes frequently for a variety of magazines. He has written four history books about the Apache Wars in the Southwest, including The Fox and the Whirlwind, Reaping the Whirlwind, Warrior Woman, and Cochise. He spent 18 years as a science, medical, and investigative reporter at various newspapers before taking up teaching, freelancing, and writing in 1991. He has published hundreds of articles in national and regional magazines, which have won numerous awards. From the Back Cover: Take the best pilots. And the best teachers. Put them through a taut-nerve, adrenaline-infused training program where only a handful of mistakes will lead to dismissal. The stakes are high and few succeed. Hand-picked, pressure-tested, and astronaut gung ho, the young pilots of Eye of the Viper are poised for the toughest assignment of their career: the exhaustive six-month training course at Arizona's Luke Air Force Base, at a cost of $2 million each. Luke, the world's largest fighter wing, is the only F-16 fighter training base in the United States, and each year it produces one thousand pilots who will fly the F-16 from Korea to Afghanistan to Iraq. But being among the elite pilots who are selected for the course is by no means a guarantee that they will earn the right to fly the F-16, perhaps the most agile jet fighter ever sent into combat. Only a few select individuals have what it takes. Award-winning journalist Peter Aleshire, given unprecedented access to the pilots and teachers at Luke, provides a full blast of the rigors and intensity of the course the personalities, the incredible machines, the irreverence, the bravado, and the toughness, not only of the hand-picked students seeking a place in the warrior subculture but of the veteran plots who must teach them how to stay alive. Readers will quickly come to understand the extraordinary mental and physical demands on a modern pilot and the incredible joy and sense of freedom that makes most F-16 pilots describe their single-engine, weapons-laden, needle-nosed jet in terms that sound more like true love or helpless addiction. Eye of the Viper is a frank, ambitious, and eminently entertaining look at the ambitions, fears, frailties, and courage that make or break the young pilots at the exquisitely sensitive controls of a $35-million jet."