Memoir follows a reluctant pilot on a conflicted mission

In director Bob Sheridan’s new film adaptation of "Brothers," Sam (Tobey Maguire) returns from the current war in Afghanistan, a broken man. His wife, Grace (Natalie Portman) and his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) are left to pick up his pieces. He goes because he’s the kind of guy who does the right thing and while he is at war he’s asked to do unspeakable things.

Brian H. Settles, a former president of the Highland Park Board of Education during the 1970s, has published No Reason For Dying: A Reluctant Combat Pilot’s Confession of Hypocrisy, Infidelity, and War (2009) about his experiences as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War.

And as an American president announces his plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan during the coming months, Settles writes about the consequences of his decision more than forty years ago to enlist.

“Sadly, even today, patriotic and courageous United States servicemen and women are dying and being maimed while embroiled in another controversial and unpopular military campaign in Iraq,” Settles says in his introduction. “The setting for my story might be in a different time and place, but the stress of combat on service people is universal and unchanging.”

Settles’ war started long before he signed up for the drill team in the Air Force ROTC program at Ball State University, as a light-skinned biracial child growing up adopted in segregated Muncie, Indiana. Not quite fitting in with either black or white students, Settles entered the Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training at Laredo Air Force Base in Texas and graduated as a fighter pilot in the F-4 Phantom jet fighter bomber. He survived 199 combat missions as co-pilot at Da Nang Air Base in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969. He had the misfortune of arriving in Da Nang after it was decided jet fighters had to fly one year rather than 100 missions.

Settles writes his book with an eye for detail, remembering not only his missions, but the interiors of the Show Case Lounge in Hong Kong, where he occasionally escaped combat for R&R.

However his best sections might be his descriptions of his first combat missions with his respected and “cool” first front seater, fighter pilot Major Randy Billington.

“And just like that with no warning, he handed over control of the bird and I knew it was up to me to catch up to lead and get on his wing, flying three foot wingtips separation until we reached level off,” Settles describes his first mission. “It was the crystallized moment in time that eclipsed the pain, struggle and mediocrity of one’s life, leaving him fully face to face with the unimaginable – the extraordinary, I glimpsed a flash of incredible clarity as to life’s magnificence. It aided me in forgetting for a moment where we were going.”

In that instance where he was going was to bomb trucks carrying supplies to the North Vietnamese. After his service was completed, Settles went on to becoming an airline pilot for Eastern Airlines and later in the 1990s worked as a private jet pilot for an Atlanta charter jet airline.

In between those two periods, he worked as Supervisor of Counseling at Rutgers University and was appointed to Assistant Dean, until he went back to flying for Eastern in 1976. He raised two sons with his first wife Celeste Settles Wright who taught in the Highland Park schools for 35 years. Settles now lives in Georgia with his third wife.

He describes his return to the United States when he arrives in Hawaii.

“In awkward optimism, I knelt down on both knees and gently kissed the hot steamy asphalt ramp,” Settles said. “At that point, and not until that point, was I confident to finally exhale and proclaim: ‘I made it.’ Vietnam was in my rearview mirror.”

Let’s hope thousands of young soldiers today will get the same chance to say the same for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Copies of the memoir are at the Highland Park Public Library.