On August 21, 1967, a Navy bomber with no guns was running at treetop height over North Vietnam with eight MiGs behind it. Of the two men aboard, one would be dead within minutes. The other would not be seen again for 2,032 days. Sixteen years earlier, both of the boys at the center of this story were sophomores at Sac City High School in Iowa, running the school's movie projectors - a job that got them out of class. The yearbook called them "the famous class skippers."
Max Otto was the one the town kept an eye on: the boy who blew the tip off a finger with an M-80, who learned to fly at the grass strip outside town, and who went off a county road at speed six weeks after graduation with a pistol on the front seat. Jimmy Buckley seemed already pointed somewhere good - three-sport letterman, pressed khakis, "God's gift to women," said the same yearbook.
In November 1955 they joined the Navy four days apart.
Max spent his career landing the A-3 Skywarrior, the heaviest airplane ever flown routinely from a carrier deck and one built with no ejection seats, and teaching other men to bring it aboard. Jimmy flew the A-6 Intruder off
USS Constellation into the most heavily defended airspace on earth.
Then came the rail yard north of Hanoi. A missile took the squadron commander on the run-in. Weather closed the way home to the sea. The MiGs came down out of the overcast, and the fight went to the ridges, pushing north toward the Chinese border.
Only one man came back to tell what happened on that hillside. Bob Flynn, the bombardier/navigator in Jimmy's cockpit, ejected at six hundred miles an hour with a broken back and spent five and a half years as a prisoner of the People's Republic of China - nearly all of it alone. He carried home a truth that belonged to a family in Nebraska who had been told only that their husband and father was missing.
Built from family letters, hometown newspapers, Navy deck logs, National Archives records, and the memories of the people who were there,
The Projector Boys follows two boys from a county-seat town in Iowa to the flight decks of
USS Enterprise and
USS Constellation, to a cell in Beijing, and to a grave at Arlington eight and a half years later.
It is a story about small towns, airplanes, friendship, and what a country asks of the young men it sends up.
Includes photographs and documents from newspapers, government records, and family collections.
