Unforgotten in the Gulf of Tonkin

Unforgotten in the Gulf of Tonkin: A Tale of Combat Survival and the U.S. Military's Commitment to Leave No One Behind occurs in just 24 hours in 1965. Unforgotten starts in the minutes before Navy Lt. William Sharp dramatically ejects from his F-8 during the Vietnam War, after his jet is hit by enemy fire. Ejecting from a jet going faster than four-hundred miles per hour can be a lethal undertaking. If the ejection doesn’t kill a pilot, it can snap their spine. Sharp made it out alive, one arm injured and useless. After landing in water, Sharp struggled against armed North Vietnamese fishermen while pilots in friendly aircraft, despite having no formal training in combat search and rescue, fended off his attackers, distracting his captors so he could free himself.

A pilot as well as an engineer, Bjorkman writes nail-biting descriptions of air combat and flight. She has the technical know-how to hook readers with descriptions of events in the cockpit and the knack of making the story come alive for both experts and armchair pilots. Unforgotten combines the cockiness and camaraderie of Top Gun with the heroics of Sully to produce a riveting tale of combat rescue in the Gulf of Tonkin. Bjorkman also situates Sharp's story in a bigger picture by giving the reader a personalized history of the U.S. Military's bedrock credo: no man left behind, and by exploring the human fallout from Vietnam through Sharp's growing struggles with PTSD.