It is impossible to gather enough superlatives into one book to adequately describe the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II. And it really does not mat­ter that the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Phantom H's rollout has come and gone....that it has been over twenty years since a Phantom II first dropped bombs in anger...that at least two generations of USAF fighter pilots will have flown it operationally before it is finally retired. What matters....is that the Phantom II is still one of the best combat airplanes in the world, and will remain so until the next century. The Israelis — who have a finely-honed sense of the weapons needed in an all-out life-and-death struggle — paid the Phantom II the ultimate compliment when asked to compare it to two of the other fighters in their arsenal. If forced to choose between the F-l 5 Eagle, the F-16 Fighting Falcon, and the F-4 Phantom II. a top commander in the Israeli Air Force said. If we could only have one of the three, we would have to take the Phantom, because of it's versatility.
This is a book about United States Air Force Phantom Us in combat and that means Southeast Asia. I have once again relied heavily on the par­ticipants to tell the story....as they saw it from the cockpit This is by no means the complete story of USAF PHANTOMS IN COMBAT It couldn't be. there were just too many Phantoms and too many units which flew it over the span of America's longest war. Thousands of lighter pilots checked out in the Phantom and took it into combat over Southeast Asia. However, I was able to interview what I believe is a cross-section of Phantom pilots, from MiG killers to reconnaissance pilots, from night fighters to POWs. It is their narratives that brings the USAF PHANTOM IN COMBAT into perspective.

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