Shadow and Stinger: Developing the AC-119G/K Gunships in the Vietnam War.(Book review)

Shadow and Stinger: Developing the AC-119G/K Gunships in the Vietnam War by William Head. Texas A&M University Press Consortium (http:// www.tamu.edu/upress), John H. Lindsey Building, Lewis Street, 4354 TAMU, College Station, Texas 77843-4354, 2007, 352 pages, $49.95 (hardcover).

Readers love conflict, and author William Head has provided it at every level and turn in this history of the AC-119 gunship's development, deployment, and combat in the Second Indochina War. Not a droning historical narrative, the book dives into the billowing controversy, political indecision, inter-service turbulence, and stormy resistance of senior officers to adding high-tech sensors and side-firing guns to an "old piece of junk" (p. 48) cargo plane. From takeoff, the author punches through Gen William Momyer's …