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Cover of The Projector Boys

The Projector Boys

Two Iowa boys. Two carriers off Vietnam. Two thousand and thirty-two days.

In the spring of 1951, two sophomores at Sac City High School in Iowa ran the school's movie projectors, a job that got them out of class. The yearbook called them the famous class skippers. In November 1955 they joined the Navy four days apart, and the service kept their names adjacent on its list of officers for the next twelve years. Max Otto spent his career landing the A-3 Skywarrior, the heaviest airplane ever flown routinely from a carrier deck and one built without ejection seats. Jimmy Buckley flew the A-6 Intruder off USS Constellation into the most heavily defended airspace on earth. In June 1967 both men were flying from two carriers at the same coordinates in the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 21, 1967, Buckley's Intruder came down inside the People's Republic of China. His bombardier/navigator, Lieutenant Commander Robert J. Flynn, was held two thousand and thirty-two days, nearly all of it in solitary confinement, and spent the next fifty years maintaining an account that contradicted his own government's file. Built from family letters, hometown newspapers, squadron histories and Navy deck logs. Includes photographs and documents.

Genres

Military HistoryBiography

ISBN

9798907974128

Format

Print / Hardback

Contributor

Andy Renk

Author

Andy Renk grew up in Minnesota, the oldest of seven children, and spent a good part of his boyhood making movies with his parents' 8mm camera. Machines that threw pictures onto a wall were the first thing he loved. Airplanes were the second. He studied engineering at Iowa State, where Jimmy Buckley had spent a year, and began his career at McDonnell Douglas while the C-17 Globemaster III was under development. He was there for the airplane's first flight. He later took an MBA at Pepperdine. In the thirty years since, he has built brands, businesses and digital products, and founded ThoughtCloud Digital. He is a student pilot. Max Otto was his uncle. His mother, Polly, is Max's younger sister, and her memory is the spine of this book — a brother who strung a headset across the yard to the neighbor's house so the girls could talk, who blew the tip off a finger with an M-80, who learned to fly at the grass strip outside town and came home from twenty-two years in the Navy without saying much about any of it. She remembers what no archive holds. The archives took longer. The Projector Boys is built from the Sac Sun's Locals column, high school yearbooks and senior wills, squadron histories, carrier deck logs, Pentagon wire releases, and the accounts of men who stood on those flight decks and in those cockpits. Where two sources disagreed, the book says so. Where the record stopped, the book stopped. Nothing in it is imagined. He did not set out to write about the war. He set out to find out who his uncle had been, and found a second boy from the same small town, four days apart in the same enlistment, and a third man who came home from five and a half years in a Chinese prison carrying something a family in Nebraska had waited most of a decade to hear. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, with his wife, Sophia. The Projector Boys is his first book.