And in what appeared to be a forgotten war half a world away from home, Franzak and his colleagues struggled to stay motivated and do their job providing air cover to soldiers patrolling the inhospitable terrain.

But what should have been a standard six-month deployment soon turned to a yearlong ordeal as the Iraq conflict intensified. The squadron was the first to base Harriers in Bagram in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Michael 'Zak' Franzak was an AV-8B Marine Corps Harrier pilot who served as executive officer of VMA-513, 'The Flying Nightmares,' while deployed in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003.

Winner of the 2012 Colby Award and the first Afghanistan memoir ever to be written by a Marine Harrier pilot, A Nightmare's Prayer portrays the realities of war in the twenty-first century, taking a unique and powerful perspective on combat in Afghanistan as told by a former enlisted man turned officer.

The book will be the first written by the pilot of a Harrier, those low-flying planes that support foot soldiers. … Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will publish A Nightmare's Prayer, by Marine pilot Michael Franzak. … Gilbert Gottfried will write a book for St. The Puppy Diaries will be pubished next year. The book spins off a column she wrote on the Times' website. Jill Abramson of The New York Times will write a book for Holt about the year she spent raising a golden retriever puppy named Scout. The book was written in 1935, has never been out of print - probably helped along in that regard by John Huston's legendary film adaptation in 1948 - and doesn't date in the least.

To say it ends badly is like saying Rosebud was a sled. Traven's utterly unsparing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, It's the story of three down-and-out Americans on a hunt for gold in Mexico. Along with Michael Herr's Dispatches, it's probably the definitive Vietnam book.Īlso reissued is B. O'Brien's book is a series of short stories about an Army unit in Vietnam, and it really is as good as its reputation indicates. It seems like O'Brien's book has been around forever, because it shaped what had been a lot of half-formed ideas about Vietnam, as did, in another medium, Oliver Stone's Platoon, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Tim O'Brien's modern classic The Things They Carried has been republished in a 20th anniversary edition by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

A Nightmare's Prayer by Michael Franzak