This book was little more than a propaganda piece for the Korean War. It tells the story of the men on a carrier who have to bomb a series of bridges heavily guarded by Russian artillery. Admiral George Tarrant lost his own sons in WWII. He sorta adopts pilot Brubaker who is the age his oldest son would have been. Brubaker is upset that he has to be in Korea risking his life when he has a wife and two daughters and there are all sorts of eligible people in the states who don’t even care that a war is going on. When he discovers he has to go on the Toko-Ri mission, he starts to chicken out, but bathing naked with a Japanese family convinces him that somebody has to be a hero. (I’m not making this up. It was a very strange scene.) He flies the mission, gets shot down and ends his life in a Korean cesspool.

There are other characters, like Beer Barrel, the drunken flag man on the carrier, and Mike Forney, the helicopter pilot who wears a green opera hat.

Here are two quotes to show you what a bizarre book this was:

In a scene where Brubaker puts on the several layers of his flight uniform: Harry Brubaker, who was about to soar into space with a freedom no previous men in history had known, was loaded down with such intolerable burdens that at times he felt he must suffocate; just as many citizens of his world, faced with a chance at freedoms never before dreamed of, felt so oppressed by modern problems and requirements that they were sure they must collapse.

After Brubaker is shot and trying to ditch his plane in the ocean: So they fought to the sea. As if caught in the grip of some atavistic urge that called them back to the safety of the sea after the millions of years during which men had risen from this element, these two pilots nursed their jets away from inhospitable land and out toward the open sea.