The Fighter Pilot's Wife: A Military Family's Story

By Gilberta Guth

Offering an inside look at military family life spanning WWII through the Korean and Vietnam Wars, this memoir not only chronicles the heroism of those in combat, but also that of the wives and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 097686780X
• ISBN13: 9780976867807
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Call Sign Pr
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

An extraordinary and moving "whither thou goest" story

Okay, I just finished this book, and I have to admit that a couple hundred pages into it, I nearly quit reading. I'm not sure why; probably because I wished there were more about Joe Guth himself, and his career, which would have been much more interesting than all the stuff about friends, setting up housekeeping and babies and childcare. Then it suddenly occurred to me that those things are precisely what make up the life and routines of a "good military wife." In 1976 I re-enlisted in the army when I was 32, disillusioned with my teaching career of 5 years. I had a wife and two little boys. I don't think I ever gave enough thought to all the sacrifices and life changes my wife made over the next 5 and a half years. I was too busy with all the new stuff I was learning and getting adjusted to a military life myself. Of course, my wife has told me plenty of times since then about how it was for her, having to uproot herself from our comfy suburban life and travel across country from Michigan to California and adjust to transient and military family quarters more than once. We were separated for nearly a year of the first two years of my training, and my family moved back in with her folks. Our daughter was born in a military hospital in Augsburg, Germany, where my wife learned about keeping her hospital room neat and tidy. Culture shock? Hell, yes! But she persevered and followed me halfway around the world and back. She must have loved me, huh? Well, that's what Gil Guth's book is about - LOVE. She put up with all the moves and inconveniences, as well as the uncertainty and fear that comes with being a pilot's wife. She made a real home for her husband and children wherever they were - California, Japan, France, Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas - so many places. And she kept the kids quiet while he studied for his MBA (on the Air Force's dime)at Georgetown. She made the trips to the ER with the kids, she endured the separations, long and short. She put up with her "strong silent" husband's moodiness and sometimes self-centeredness. And tnen, finally, she nursed him through to the very gut-wrenching, heartbreaking end. This was an old-fashioned wife. If it did nothing else, Gilberta's story made me appreciate my own wife a little more. Think I'll go give her this book to read - and a hug. Thank you so much, Gil, for writing it all down, for sharing this very American and patriotic story. God bless you. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy and Love, War & Polio

She lived the life...of sacrifices

This could have been the story of my mother's life, one dominated by the war in Vietnam. No, she's not an American writer like Gilberta Guth whom I had the pleasure of meeting along with her husband, Howard Pierson, a former adviser to the Vietnamese Air Force. Reading Guth's book gave me a sense of what my mother lived through as the wife of a VNAF Skyraider pilot (my father) and the mother of four children. This is a lovely memoir, an important addition to the literature of war offering perspectives of an often silent but important group called spouses.

Recommended

This book sales along from the opening paragraph. The author lives on an airforce base, and meets and marries a jet pilot. They live on overseas bases and serve in different wars. To some extent she lives the epitomy of the American icon life. Dances and parties in the evening, and each morning her husband, a bona fide warrior, takes off, perhaps never to return. Guth is a talented writer who offers profound insight into the life of the families behind our people serving in wars abroad;