An Anomalous Founding Work: Stephen Coonts' The Flight of the Intruder

Especially in light of its early appearance (1986), massive success (28 weeks on the New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller list) and Coonts' subsequent long train of sequels continuing the adventures of its protagonist, Jake Grafton, it is so common to treat Stephen Coonts' Flight of the Intruder as a founding work of the techno-thriller genre that few consider how anomalous it is as a work in that category. Typically the techno-thriller is the story of "the next war"; this one was a story of the last, arguably a Vietnam War story that simply happened to be exceptionally heavy on the technological detailing of carrier-based aerial operations during that conflict.

Indeed, the story was in its specific theme particularly connected with post-Vietnam "angst" over the war's ghosts and demons of the sort that helped make Rambo: First Blood Part II the action hit of the decade just the year before, and more generally saturated popular culture at the time. Just as in the film version of Rambo (a very different thing from the book), Vietnam is presented as a war that American servicepersons were not allowed to win—undermined by the lack of will on the part of the very government that sent them, with Grafton and his comrades condemned to flying what he sees as one meaningless sortie after another rather than doing what it would take to achieve a righteous victory over the Red Menace. Following the death of his bombardier/navigator and best friend in one such seemingly pointless run (the A-6 Intruder is a two-person aircraft) Jake decides to personally undertake an action which he believes will redeem the wretched conflict by hitting those truly responsible for the war's misery, during a raid breaking off to mount an unauthorized, rogue strike on Communist Party headquarters in Hanoi (the titular flight).

Clearly expressing and speaking to the same sentiments the Rambo film did, the book goes in quite a different direction, unavoidably given the kind of work that it is. Rambo, after all, was set in the present day, and so involved events by no means settled. This afforded him the latitude to fight and win as an underdog against superior Communist forces, upholding the honor of American arms in the process, while recovering the prisoners of war betrayed by a government that not only did not "let them win" but afterward denied their existence and left them to languish, redeeming both the defeat, and the betrayal. By contrast Coonts' book, being a historical novel and not alternate history, cannot change what happened--at least, not very much. Grafton flies his strike, and then, as he should have from the start given the physical limits of what one Intruder crew could achieve with conventional weapons, proves utterly inconsequential--the bomb causing trivial physical damage to the headquarters and the public condemnation of the attack by the North Vietnamese government brushed off. The result is that Grafton did all that Grafton could do--which in the end amounted to very little. The ultimate meaninglessness of Grafton's strike on Hanoi thus ends up a rejoinder to the fantasies of singlehanded redemption of that war, the would-be aerial Rambo ended up an anti-Rambo, and what some might have hoped would be a wish-fulfillment was instead an occasion for cathartic confrontation with a hard truth.

Described in such terms the story was hardly a natural for continuation in the form of a regular series, especially in the techno-thriller form. Flight arguably derived its effect from having been written about a real historical event by "one who was there," an actual A-6 Intruder pilot during the conflict, and however one regards the novel's politics, the emotional charge of its perception of the war and what it did, or did not, mean. By contrast, not only would continuing the series likely mean a jump of many years into the present, but a shift to far more thoroughly invented scenarios, which could not have the same ring of verisimilitude, the same emotional charge--the more in as the techno-thriller tends so much toward "military procedural" of a less focused and more impersonal type. Of course, Coonts went exactly that route, and scored many more bestsellers in the process--but in retrospect it seems understandable that, certainly to go by their sales and their pop cultural impact, none quite matched the impact of that different and particularly charged first book.