Snake Pilot: Flying the Cobra Attack Helicopter in Vietnam

Snake Pilot is exactly what it says on the cover, a memoir of one year flying Cobras in Vietnam. Growing up outside Los Angeles, Zahn always wanted to fly. Air Force pilots were officers and gentlemen, which meant they had a college degree 19 year old Zahn had no patience to get, but the Army would put anybody in helicopters if they could make the cut. Zahn was something of a natural, scoring in the top 10% of his training cohorts, which meant he got Cobras, and the 1st of the 9th, Air Cavalry.

Early in his tour, Zahn bought a portable tape recorder and used it to send audio tapes to his parents, who saved all of them, the archive forming the raw material for this book. The emotional focus is on the friendships he made with his peers, and conflicts with his immediate superiors, paper-pushing careerists who didn’t understand the skill it took to fight and survive in the combat zone.

Cobras mostly worked as the red part of a Pink Team. The Loach scout would fly low and slow, looking for trouble, and when they found it, the Cobra would roll in with rockets and miniguns. Cobras had an important job, protecting, guiding, and killing on behalf of their scouts, and hunting down any other trouble that might come in. The sense of battle is carried by reconstructed dialog; radio calls punctuated with rocket runs and cries for help.

Zahn is a professional helicopter pilot, not a writer, but this memoir has more literary merit than most, with a clear writing style and deep personal honesty about what he felt, and what he fought for. It’s interesting to note that Zahn claims first hand accounts of what I’ve long considered to be urban legends of the Vietnam War, including Russian ‘advisers’ fighting as infantry in South Vietnam, and NVA anti-aircraft gunners chained to their weapons. As far as helicopter pilot memoirs go, Snake Pilot is behind Mills’ Low Level Hell on Loaches, and the incredible Chickenhawk by Robert Mason about Hueys, but it’s a solid read and worth your time.