The Hunters<\/em> (1956). An almost painfully beautiful novel about the aerial dogfights between American F-86 jets and Russian MIGS over the Yalu River during the Korean War. Salter, himself a combat fighter pilot veteran of that war, focuses on Captain Cleve Connell and his troubled quest for excellence. There is just a taste of the author\u2019s psychological acumen in this description of Connell\u2019s response to friends who asked him why, after eight years, he still stayed in the service. He struggled with an answer:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\u2026sick of the stars and bored of speed on those nights in the great black sea, the surf of which was cities bubbling on the wave, listening to the others who were up, two unseen killers perhaps, calling themselves Butcher Red and seeking themselves in the darkness, he had tried to think of one \u2013 brief, understandable \u2013 but never could. It was all a secret life, lived alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"excerpt","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2407,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","castos_file_data":"","podmotor_file_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}