Outstanding memoir of a fighter pilot; laced with technical jargon and acronym hell. The author does a great job of fighter pilot. The meat of the book was indeed the thrilling, terrifying and deadly combat missions. Hampton makes my service in the many-motor Air Force feel like shoe sales and I disagree that the choice of a non-fighter pilot CSAF is a bad thing. As he opines--not everyone is a fighter pilot. ( )

Great book, honest and with a lot of tactical details ( )

Actual Rating: 3.5 Stars

A fascinating read and look into the life of a fighter pilot. The amount of training, intelligence, and risk that goes into it is startling, but it makes you thankful when they are on your side.

Hampton's recount of his many combat missions send you on a thrilling ride. His writing flowed and the fast paced action rarely had a dull moment. At times I felt his cockiness and general condescension toward non pilots was a little much, but he did admit that some fighter pilots have this mentality, himself included. ( )

I am a fan of aviation and military history that is focused on aviation. Thus the reason that I wanted to check this book out. I found this book very informative and Mr. Hampton has a talent for story telling. Even though what he is sharing about are real life events. He makes the reader feel like they are viewing everything though his eyes. This is what I liked so much about this book.

Reading this book I did not feel like events or information was glossed over to hide. With other military type books, you get the sense that there are thing that the author can not share. I do understand due to confidentiality but at the same time, I do want to know up to the point that the author can not divulge certain information what the conditions were like that the author experienced. This is the reason I read these books. So again with this book, I felt like I got my money’s worth. For anyone who is not well versed in aviation terminology, you will still have a good time reading this book. Mr. Hampton explains things well and if you forget what an acronym stands for there is a nice glossary in the back of the book for reference. Viper Pilot soars the skies and is a thrilling read! ( )

I bought this for my 15 year old son who has a particular interest these days in books about combat and war, in Iraq and Afghanistan. For my part, the only war stories that have ever really interested me involve airplanes. So I thought I could get something we'd both like.

The story of Dan Hampton's air force career is filled with cockpit narratives of electronic warfare and aerial combat, and much discussion of training and education and career building in the air force. It's also VERY full of Dan Hampton, because he is a fighter pilot, and there is nothing that fighter pilots are more full of than themselves. That's just the way it is with those guys - if you have a problem with it, then don't spend time with their stories. You get to be a fighter pilot by believing you are God's gift to the military and then being able to prove it in a jet, beating out many, many other similarly cocky competitors. On the way, you become a Bush admiring, Arab-trashing, loud-mouthed military guy, and when you're all done, if you write a book, you are not shy about sharing the amazingness of you with the reader.

(As a democratic socialist and anti-imperialist I choose not to reconcile my dislike of American imperialism with my interest in stories about military aviation, technology and combat. Some contradictions must remain unresolved.)

That said, the idea of whipping an F-16 through the sky, dodging missiles and attacking ground radars, is fun to imagine. I guess the problem here is that air warfare is ultimately a three dimensional art/game/fight, and rendering it in a one dimensional string of words is just hard to do well. Unless you can see the action in three dimensions, and only to that extent, it is difficult to fully assimilate the reality that is being conveyed. Hampton does an OK job in this respect but maintaining positional and situational awareness is difficult for the reader.

True, an inordinate and unnatural love of military acronyms will help. But unless you've paid attention, at least at an amateur level, to the variety of SAM types, gun types, aircraft types, and the like, the distinctions upon which the author's life, and this narrative depend, this book may seem impossibly obscure. Sad to say, I have paid attention to those details so the narrative is fully coherent to me on that level.

I doubt that my son will pick it up when I toss it on his desk, casually, so as not to suggest that I care one way or another if he reads it, and all the while secretly hoping that he does read it. I think he is attracted to the camaraderie of the ground combat war stories he reads - this is a story of a lone wolf. Maybe his lack of interest would be a good thing - I've been trading off the encouragement of reading (anything, even war stories) against exposing him to the world of militarism. But in the end, if I have to choose I'd rather risk the militarism if that's what draws him into reading and more reading. There's plenty of time for him to sort out his real political and moral beliefs in the future.

If I hadn't had a lifelong fascination with airplanes I probably wouldn't have stuck this one out. But I did and I do and it was a moderately interesting telling of a 20 year career that concluded in about 2004 in Iraq, as a Wild Weasel anti-missile fighting F-16CJ pilot. It's readable enough if you're into that kind of thing. ( )