Ladies and gentlemen, friends, shipmates:

Naval Aviation, which for me was A-6 Intruders, was the great adventure of my life. It was one of those rare instances in life when the reality lives up to its advanced billing. Actually, the reality was better than anything I dreamed it could be. I have certainly had other great adventures, including marriage, the practice of law, fatherhood, civilian flying and writing. Still, naval aviation was…….

Well, let me tell you about it. I was awe-struck by my instructors in flight school. They were mostly fleet pilots doing an instructor tour, except for a few plow-backs who desperately wanted to get to the fleet, and many were combat veterans. They were really old, positively geriatric, in their mid-to late twenties mostly, with a few old crocks in their early thirties.

They were warm and fuzzy, touchy-feely guys. I remember one flight I had in basic training in a T-2 Buckeye, with an instructor who was trying to teach me the nuances of basic instruments. I was trying to make all those little needles behave and grossly over-controlling with a death grip on the stick when my instructor in the back seat grabbed the stick and started bucking the airplane. “You don’t have to be smart to do this,” he said, and whack, whack, whack, with the stick. “If I had any goddamn brains I wouldn’t be here.” Whack, whack, whack. “Now stop trying to squeeze the black juice out of the fuckin’ stick. Use your fingers.” Whack, whack, whack. “Your airplane.”

I thought those guys owned the ground they walked on, and I wanted to be one of them.

After the west coast RAG, VA-128, I reported to VA-196, the Main Battery. On our first cruise to WESTPAC aboard USS Enterprise, I realized that I had finally made it into this Band of Brothers, this fraternity of those who were willing and could and did. It was a self-selected group. All those who didn’t want it or couldn’t do it had dropped out, or been washed out or killed somewhere along the way.

A-6s were something special because they carried a crew of two. That meant the A-6 squadrons were large, with many diverse personalities. Later, when I tried to write a novel about the experience, that wonderful human zoo gave me plenty of inspiration.

No doubt your naval aviation adventures were very similar to mine. The young nugget pilots and BNs, the old fart lieutenant commanders, and the fossil commanders were almost universally from blue-collar or middle-class families. Naval Aviation was a step up in life for all of us. To my delight, I fit right in. I had grown up in a coal town in central West Virginia; I knew that no matter what happened, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days grubbing out a meager living in the coalfields. That ambition kept me motivated all the way. Not that we were making big bucks in the Navy, because we weren’t. Still, we were all a part of something larger than we were individually; we served in the United States Navy and Marine Corps, and we served our nation.

Truthfully, I feel blessed that life gave me that opportunity. And I feel sorry for all of those young men who found a reason to take the easy course, who didn’t see or appreciate the challenges of naval aviation that demanded the best that was in them every single day, from flying, counseling sailors, pretending to give guidance to chiefs, wrestling with the supply system and the paperwork, to horsing around with friends in the ready room and ashore. Later, for me, came a flight instructor’s tour at VA-128 and a tour as an assistant catapult and arresting gear officer aboard USS Nimitz. Every day I was called upon to give the best I had.

I loved the Navy and would have probably stayed in until they kicked me out if I had only had a wife who was willing to share the adventure. Mine wasn’t. So after nine years of active duty I pulled the plug, went to law school, became a lawyer and ultimately got into writing.

It was in 1984, after a divorce, when I had plenty of spare time and absolutely no money, that I finally decided to put butt in chair and write that story of what naval aviation was like during my two Vietnam cruises. The flying, the dying, the fear, the exhilaration I felt in a cockpit with the stick and throttles in my hands and the rudder pedals beneath my feet, the insanity of the Vietnam War, the truly marvelous young men I shared it with… all of it. I only wish that I had been a better, more experienced writer, but I wasn’t. Still, I had lived it and tried to capture it. I was willing to fail. You can’t be a writer unless you are willing to fail.

Like every first novelist, I wrote nights and weekends. Unlike most, I then got lucky; The US Naval Institute was looking for a novel to follow Tom Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October. I had thirty-two rejections in hand when the Naval Institute accepted my little flying story, picked my manuscript from the 150 that had been submitted. The original working title was For Each Other. I thought that title worked rather well, because if we didn’t know what we were fighting for, at least we knew we were fighting for each other. The publisher thought that title smacked too much of a romance novel. They retitled it Flight of the Intruder, and to my absolute amazement, the novel stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 28 weeks.

Fools occasionally ask me if I was Jake Grafton, the hero of the tale. Of course not. The book was the lore of the time and place, and the characters were amalgams of all the people I met in naval aviation. I didn’t want to tell my story—I wanted to tell everyone’s story. One perceptive reviewer noted that all the characters in the book were flawed in some ways and heroes in others. Of course; they were human.

That is not to say I liked everyone I met along the way, because I am no saint and only a saint could do that. I met some jerks and I met some fantastic officers who rose to very high positions in the Navy. But most of the people I met were like me, serving their country, doing the best they could, and eventually, sooner or later, they left the service and got on with the rest of their lives. They were the same type of men who served with George Washington, with U.S. Grant, who fought in the trenches of France, who manned the destroyers and destroyer escorts in the Battle of the Atlantic, who went ashore on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, who manned SBDs and torpedo planes to hit the Japanese task force at Midway. I am so proud that I was one of them.

All of us carry Naval Aviation with us everywhere we go, every day.

Sometimes young men and women ask me if they should join the service. Yes, I always say. It isn’t a lifetime commitment. The experience will enrich your life if you treat every day as an adventure, not a career. If you spend your days sucking up to the boss while worrying about your fittie, you won’t enjoy the challenge and the people. Do something else. Go to truck driving school, or become a plumber, or a politician.

The success of Flight of the Intruder allowed me to become a professional novelist. I have been doing it for thirty years. So far, I have published 36 books: twenty-one solo novels, nine co-authored tales, one work of nonfiction, and five anthologies. One of my novels was published under a pen name, Eve Adams, The Garden of Eden. Three of my novels were actually semi-sci-fi, the Saucer trilogy. If you are a hard-core sci-fi fan, you will be disappointed. The three Saucer tales are flying stories, chase books mixed with political satire.

I am always a bit skeptical when someone tells me they have read everything I ever wrote, because very, very, few people ever found The Garden of Eden, no doubt because the publisher slapped a pen name on it and refused to tell anyone who wrote it. Like most of my old paperbacks, you can buy it on amazon for a penny plus shipping. If you can’t afford a penny for a really terrific book, you should probably get a job as a greeter at Walmart.

My latest literary crime is The Art of War, which was published in February in hardcover, audio and ebook formats. The Chinese plant a nuclear weapon in Norfolk to destroy the Atlantic Fleet, sort of Pearl Harbor II. Fortunately Jake Grafton and Tommy Carmellini manage to once again save the world as we know it from the forces of evil, which is the definition of a thriller.

People ask me, “Of all the books you have written, which is your favorite?” It’s always the next one. My next novel will be published just two months from now, on June 13th; Liberty’s Last Stand. It is perhaps the most politically incorrect book yet to be published in this century. Knowing naval aviators as I do, I think most of you are going to love it. It’s a big book, 178,000 words, a doorstop. President Barry Soetoro declares martial law, and Texas declares its independence. Texas is joined by a handful of other states, and what happens is another American Civil War. You will be delighted to hear that Jake Grafton and Tommy Carmellini manage to save America from its president. Liberty’s Last Stand, available in all formats on June 13. It’s available for preorder now online from amazon and Barnes & Noble, and from your favorite bookstore.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that if you are a fan or disciple of Barack Obama, you should probably avoid this book, which will raise your blood pressure to unacceptable levels.

And since writers write, perhaps I should tell you a little about my next two projects, both non-fiction. We are negotiating a contract for License to Kill, which I wrote with William B. Scott and Mike McDaniel. The manuscript is complete, almost, and will probably be published later this year or early next year. Unfortunately I can’t tell you any more about it at this time. We still have a few more people to talk to and don’t want the buzz to turn them off.

Aviation historian Barrett Tillman and I are in the early stages of writing a book about The Dragon’s Jaw: The Thanh Hoa Bridge. I was very reluctant to emotionally go back to Vietnam, so this project dragged for a couple of years. Finally I decided to suck it up and do it while I was still able and many of the men who flew the missions were still above ground to talk to. This evening I am soliciting your help. If you flew one or more missions against the Dragon’s Jaw, which wasn’t dropped into the Ma River until May 10, 1972, or against the associated rail-yard, barracks, SAM or flak sites, we would like to hear from you.

The best way to help would be for you to send me an email detailing your experiences, the squadron, your pilot or BN, the date, other planes involved, basically everything you can remember. I am especially interested in how the mission affected you. Where in the cruise did it come, were you especially worried, how was the flak and SAMs? What was memorable about the mission or missions? In other words, tell me more than date and target. Don’t think this is an English essay; I’ll write the story, that’s what they pay me for, but I need your thoughts and input to do that.

On every table tonight I have placed a stack of my cards. Grab one. It gives my email address and the coonts.com website, which also has an email address. If you lose the card, don’t sweat it. I am ridiculously easy to find; Coonts.com, or if you can’t remember that, and some of us pilots have trouble with the memory thing, which was why we flew with kneeboards and pencils and BNs, you can google me: Stephen Coonts. That will take you to the website, where you can hit the Contact Steve icon. All you have to do is remember how to spell my name. C-o-o-n-t-s.

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NEW Release by Stephen Coonts. THE ART OF WAR. Stephen Coonts’ latest thriller, The Art of War, was published February 2, 2016, by St Martin’s Press.

I’d like to close by telling you about a telephone conversation I had with a former A-6 pilot, Captain Sam Sayers, who flew eleven missions against the bridge, in Alpha strikes and single-plane night missions as a member of VA-85. Many of you will remember Captain Sam, who went on to command the Blue Blasters of VA-34, then the east coast RAG, VA-42. He and his BN Charlie Hawkins were once shot up near Vinh. He made it to the ocean, and when the plane, which was on fire, became uncontrollable, he and Charlie ejected. They were rescued from the ocean by an HU-16 Albatross from Da Nang. I met Sam when he was the technical adviser on the movie Flight of the Intruder and we became good friends and hunting buddies. As he once told me about the movie, “Don’t blame me. I would tell them that they had something wrong and the director would listen respectfully, then say, ‘Duly noted, but we’re making a movie. Now go find a chair in a corner and watch.

I suppose you have all seen the movie at one time or another. At the publicity blast for the opening, the director, John Milius, asked me if I would have done anything differently than he did. I would have opened the movie differently, I said. I would have had Jake and Morg fly the mission, take the bullet, and after landing back aboard ship, I would have had the camera linger on the scene of the corpsmen lifting the BN’s body from the cockpit as the opening credits ran, and I would have showed the blood. A cockpit full of blood, rich red blood, all over everything. The novel and the movie are about blood. As is naval aviation. As is war. The Intruder crews were American warriors riding the hard, sharp, deadly tip of the arrow. Some of them gave their lives, and some of them spent an early stint in hell as prisoners of the North Vietnamese.

I remember standing at my locker aboard Enterprise donning my flight gear for missions up north. Taking off my wedding ring, putting my wallet in the locker, knowing that I might be shot down, killed or captured. You had to be willing to die to do this. I was young, and perhaps foolish, but I was one of those idiots who would rather die than look bad, one of those who would rather die than let my shipmates down, those whose luck was not as good as mine, those who had gone before and paid the ultimate price.

I didn’t get shot down, and obviously I didn’t die. My luck was better than those who did, and believe me, it was only luck. So I tried to tell their story, your story, our story, for all of us. For Each Other.

But I digress……..

I ended my telephone call with Sam Sayers a few weeks ago with a question. “Knowing all you know now about naval aviation and the political mess that was the Vietnam War, if you had it to do over again, would you do it?”

Sam spoke for me, and perhaps all of us, when he said, “Hell, yes!”

Thank you… and God Bless America.