airplanes Make Me bitter. Well, Now i know

I'm almost done with Beyond the Call of Duty.  Chapter 12 is where he tells about the rescue for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Which, really, is the only part I cared about in the first place.  In a book of 16 Chapters, three Appendices, transcripts of eye witness accounts, citation of the award ceremony, a list of Mr. Fisher's awards, and a breakdown of the Vietnam War...I only needed chapters 12 - 15. 

Well, now I know.

For the record, I do like Bernie - he and his family seem like really fun people.  The kind of people you'd want in your extended family.  Bernie would be a very cool grandpa. 

His book just wasn't written for readers like me.  There was a pretty specific audience in mind when the book was put together.  I should have known after reading one of the reviews on the back of the book:

"I love airplanes and I love airplane stories; but this book is about more than airplanes. After finishing Beyond the Call of Duty I have a new hero.  Bernie Fisher's daring mission under fire in Vietnam had me on the edge of my seat."

Yeah...that doesn't sound like me at all.

Mr Fisher is, no doubt, a hero.  And his "daring mission under fire in Vietnam" was incredible.  But the airplanes...oh man, too many airplanes. That's great that he's passionate about planes, but cut me some slack!
Everyone has different passions, and that's fine. Airplanes aren't one of mine, and that's fine, too.  And now I know that reading 160+ pages about airplanes was a bad idea.  Fine, fine, fine.

I'll tell you one thing that's not fine.  The book is littered with sentences that follow an extremely irritating formula: "It was really ________ to (verb) ___________."  Over and over these sentences would show up.  Examples:

"It was really amazing to see (fill in your own blank)"
"It was really beautiful to see (the sunset or something)"
"It was really scary to (lose power in his airplane or somesuch)"
"It was really interesting to (you get the point)"

It was killing me!  Come on, Bernie, let's get some new sentence structures going on here!  More than that, the co-author, Jerry Borrowman, who has written several books including other biographies, really should have noticed this obnoxious pattern and fixed it.  Let's see some of those writing skillz put to work, Jerry! What are we paying you for?

Maybe they did it to keep continuity in the book, to make it feel like Bernie was talking to his audience, not writing a report to them.  Maybe they wanted to keep Bernie's image as a simple, Idaho-loving, family man. After all, he was the first Air Force serviceman from the Vietnam War to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Not only that, but the Medal of Honor is usually given posthumously, and our boy Fisher was alive and well to receive it in person.   It would be easy to get all uppity about something like that, or for readers to worship him for it.  Simple sentence structure is consistent with Bernie's humble disposition.

I wish they would have found another way to get that across, though, cuz it drove me up the wall.