The Doom Pussy

Elaine Shepard’s The Doom Pussy is a Vietnam book with a title so gloriously unhelpful that one can only assume several marketing departments fainted and the surviving editor simply pressed ahead. It is not, despite appearances, a work of feline apocalypse, underground erotica, or an experimental novel about a cat with grievances. It is Shepard’s semi-fictional account of American airmen in Vietnam, built from her time as a reporter among the flyers, the bases, the aircraft, the bars, the noise and the peculiar masculine theatre of men going up into the dark with quite reasonable doubts about coming back.

The “Doom Pussy” itself was an aviation patch and phrase tied to those who flew dangerous night missions over North Vietnam: the cat of death, waiting open-mouthed in the sky, which is a surprisingly honest mascot for modern air war. Most units prefer eagles, lightning bolts, heroic animals and other symbols that suggest destiny has nice tailoring. This one appears to say: congratulations, you have flown into the jaws of something with claws, and your reward is a patch, a drink, and possibly a story unsuitable for the chaplain.

Shepard follows the fliers rather than trying to package the whole Vietnam War into one tidy parcel, which was sensible, since Vietnam resisted tidy parcels with almost theatrical commitment. Here are helicopter crews, bomber men, fighter pilots, forward air controllers, base life, mission talk, ribald humour, exhaustion, swagger, fear, boredom, bravado and the strange little rituals by which men make danger administratively repeatable. Aircraft take off, men joke too loudly, briefings happen, engines roar, and somewhere between the runway and the target the romance of aviation becomes a very practical argument with geography, weather, anti-aircraft fire and luck.

What gives the book its odd flavour is that it comes from a woman reporter moving through a world loudly convinced of its own masculinity. Shepard listens, watches, travels with them, catches the talk, the gripes, the obscene jokes, the affectionate insults, the loneliness, the fatalism and the professional competence hiding under all the noise. War here is not polished into solemn marble. It is sweaty, profane, theatrical, frightened, funny in the wrong places, and full of people using language as armour because actual armour is in short supply at several thousand feet.

There is a sharp irony in the air-war setting. These are men with sophisticated machines, advanced weapons, radios, ranks, acronyms and all the expensive apparatus of modern power, yet so much still comes down to nerve, weather, chance, mechanical temper, and whether the night decides to keep its mouth open. The pilots may speak in jargon, but the old truths remain embarrassingly simple: fear travels well, death has excellent range, and courage often sounds suspiciously like a dirty joke told before take-off.

For readers of Vietnam aviation, combat reporting, semi-fictional war writing, aircrew culture, or books with titles that can stop a room dead, The Doom Pussy is a genuinely unusual bit of shelf-fodder. It has Skyraiders, Canberras, helicopters, FAC spotter planes, bases, missions, pilots, reporters, and the whole overheated absurdity of a war being fought by men who could be both technically brilliant and emotionally held together with cigarettes, profanity and momentum.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. No ISBN, because apparently the title had already used up the book’s entire allowance of formal identification. A solid survivor from 1967: aviation, Vietnam, gallows humour, and one of the least forgettable titles ever to loiter on a military-history shelf.

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