A Yankee Station Sea Story
By John Bushby
About the Book:
The novelized account of a combat cruise aboard USS Enterprise during the final days of the air war in Vietnam.
The book is based upon real incidents and real people that he encountered during his combat cruise to Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin.
“How to tell what happened to me and the men I knew out there has been one of my most difficult challenges. I have fictionalized the accounts and merged some people and some incidents together to allow the story to flow more easily.”
Prowler Ball is the story of a young Naval Flight Officer encountering the dangerous and sometimes sordid world of flying in combat in a war no one truly understood.
In the pages of the book the reader is taken through a transformation from lurid details of life ashore to the numbing shipboard routine of flying missions around the clock while trying to maintain an edge against complacency and boredom.
The flying scenes actually happened and the life in port and at home speak to the loneliness and stress that the fliers who manned the aircraft deployed against North Vietnamese targets had to endure.
There are no apologies in the story, just a grim recounting of the reality of the war in Vietnam as Bushby experienced it. Like all war stories, it is fact and fiction blended together until it is hard to tell one from the other.
Paperback: Amazon
Kindle: Amazon
About the Author:
John Bushby was born in Westfield, New Jersey in 1948. While attending Westfield High School, he learned to fly, taking lessons at Hadley Airport in South Plainfield. After high school he went to Rider College and graduated in 1970 with a BS.
Directly from college, he entered the US Navy and became a Naval Flight Officer serving with VAQ-131 aboard USS Enterprise in the South China Sea. He flew 67 combat missions before returning to the States.
After the Navy he entered the financial services industry and was a senior officer at several global banks. He has worked in over 30 countries and now resides in Flanders, New Jersey.
John Bushby was introduced to the film noire genre while in grade school. From watching grainy black and white films on an antique Philco television he began to satiate his taste for the genre by reading everything he could find.
Dashiell Hamett, Eric Ambler, Le Carre, Len Deighton, Sax Rohmer, Alan Furst, Philip Kerr and David Downing all have shown him the way of the craft. Bushby has drawn on the experience of over thirty years of global business experience, traveling in and out of Europe and Asia to set the background for his books.
His characters come from the people he has met along the way. Heroes and villains are drawn from casual and close acquaintances, often a mixture of both.
In The Warszaw Express Bushby draws on his experience as a pilot and Naval Flight Officer to describe the lure of flying and the feeling of being in combat. His creation of Harry Braham comes from a distillation of family members caught up in the two world wars.
Bushby lives in Flanders, New Jersey. He is now working on the next in the Harry Braham series of novels.
1985 MBA Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
1970 BS Management, Rider College, Trenton, New Jersey
US Navy: Lieutenant Commander / Naval Flight Officer
The Warszaw Express
About the Book:
As the First World War churns to a close American aviator Harry Braham embarks on a career as one of his country's first professional intelligence agents. Follow him from Paris to the bloody skies of Warsaw as he battles against the Red Army and its quest to dominate Europe.
The Rhinemaiden’s Song
About the Book:
This is the second in the Harry Braham espionage novels. It is 1936 and Hitler is about to put on his biggest show, the Olympics. Behind the scenes the engineers and scientists of the Third Reich are preparing new and very deadly weapons to launch against the world. It is up to Harry Braham to destroy their plans and buy a few more years of peace for the world.
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Shadow Soldiers
About the Book:
In 1939, as the Nazis march across Europe the deadly cat and mouse game of espionage moves to a higher plane. America is technically neutral, but for American Rick Kasten, with family relations in key positions in the Nazi hierarchy, the war becomes very personal.
While the United States postures itself to stay out of the bloodshed and fighting, the effects of the war are brought home to Kasten as he personally witnesses the lengths to which the Nazis go to maintain their stranglehold on the people of Germany and the nations it has conquered. The SS San Cristobal, flagship of his family’s small fleet of steamships becomes the key to helping those without hope flee the clutches of the Gestapo. On his own, and disavowed by Washington Kasten uses his ship to make a difference in the lives of dozens of refugees desperate to leave Europe.
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“I am only one, but I am one. I can't do everything, but I can do something. The something I ought to do, I can do, and by the grace of God, I will.” ~Everett Hale
