Books by Pete Booth  


FORMER NAVY FIGHTER PILOT, AIRCRAFT CARRIER SKIPPER 
AND CIVILIAN SHIP'S MASTER TURNED SMALL-TIME AUTHOR.


 

War Novel

Humble in Victory is a great read with a covey of powerful and believable characters, a fast-moving plot that grabs the reader at every turn and some tough lessons of what combat readiness really means.  Strap it on!  You won’t be disappointed!  By far and away, it’s the best novel I’ve read in a lifetime of reading some good ones. Published on 9/11/01, it looks ahead to 2010 and a gender-equal U.S. Navy engaged in deadly combat against the trio of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran seeking control of the Caspian Sea oil.  It’s all about real Americans doing the tough job for Navy and country with honor, patriotism, courage and sacrifice.  4,500 sold with thousands of happy readers!  As most of the author’s assumptions have come true, the reader may find him or herself somewhat uncomfortable.   The one-liner on my business card states simply, “Humble in Victory—a prescient war-at-sea novel circa 2010.”  

 

True Faith and Allegiance cover

True Faith and Allegiance captures the spirit and intensity of the Cold War from the mid-fifties to the mid-eighties, a period of indescribable danger to our nation and the word—the most perilous in the history of the US.  The journals are viewed through the eyes of several thousand real sailors and aviators doing the tough job for Navy and nation 24/7 with whom I was proud to have served. 280 scanned photos and documents bring this easy-to-read journals of the Cold War into sharp focus and vivid reality.  Strap on a Phantom jet; catapult into a black-assed night and catch an arresting wire on a gyrating flight deck; experience the horror and carnage of the Forrestal fire; peek into the inner-sanctums at the highest levels of the Pentagon; ride the captain’s chair on a super carrier and relive the foibles of a destroyer ensign on a learning fast-track.  Published 2006  

 

 

 

Sea Buoy cover

 

Sea Buoy Outbound is a page-turning, fast-read, chock-full of real lessons and ideas that will stimulate the most jaded of maritime professionals or those with an abiding interest in men, sea and ships.  The author is both a Naval Officer with extensive sea time and a civilian mariner with a sizable dollop of civilian maritime experience.  420 pages and 200 scans of places, ships and shipmates, civilian and Navy.  Half Navy and half civilian maritime experiences including accidents at sea, Forrestal fire, destroyer ensign, carrier command, getting the civilian license, second mate on a cruise ship, American Cruise Lines honcho, master of research ships in the far, winter North Atlantic and drug interdiction in the Pacific.   The romance of the sea is in full bloom!  Published 2009

Here's the prologue:
“As the ship wends its way toward the open sea, drops off the pilot, cranks the engines to sea speed and leaves the sea buoy to port, one can almost touch the sense of what might be, of mini-adventures to come in the voyage.  Magically, the ship becomes cleaner, the crew more relaxed; the watch teams settle in and we all look forward to the knowing swell of the ocean, the wind on the bridge wing and, if lucky, a world-class sunset broad on the starboard bow.”

 

Aircraft Carrier Command:  Commanding any warship takes the finest sense of knowledge, experience and leadership.  A carrier, even more so given that only about eight are ready for sea out of our eleven nuclear powered carries; each represents an irreplaceable national asset.  In some 445 pages, this book lays out the basics of command in a brief first section, followed by a host of bold-faced pragmatics in running an incredibly complex operation.  This is followed by a detailed analysis of two-dozen case histories of groundings, fires and collisions with no holds barred.  Finally, are some 100 pages of command commentary by 38 seasoned carrier and combatant former commanding officers--how about 150 years of sea-command?  This latter section is the meat of the book and one that any ship captain, flag officer or future OOD is invited to study, dissect, agree, disagree or modify, for absolutes in command are few and far between.  Great reader comments.  The second edition was published in 2013 featuring a sixty-page appendix with a great foreword by the head of Naval Aviation, VADM David Buss.  Included are five more case studies of maritime miscues that ought not to have happened, led by the infamous hot-dogging master of the Costa Concordia.  And finally, are additional inputs from more recent carrier COs and three former super CAGs.  Several pages of unbelievable reader comments are tacked on to the final pages of the new edition.  The book has found its way into the inner sanctums of all of our carriers, including use at the Surface Warfare School in Newport.  The most repetitive comment by former carrier commanding officers is along the lines of “I wish I had had something like this back then!”

 

Carolyn, Her Family and Friends, germinated around 1993 when Pete was master of an ocean-going “research ship” operating about one-hundred miles out in the Pacific Ocean off Columbia.  The waters were calm, the weather idyllic.  Compared to his previous civilian sea stints operating throughout the North Atlantic, this was paradise.  On many a day, he would spend an hour or so on a weather deck just abaft the bridge composing what he thought at the time would be An Ode To Carolyn.  For the first time in our married lives over, at the time, some thirty-four years, Pete had time to think back on all we had done, the tough times, but more and more, the happy times.  Many of the stanzas in this original ode, perhaps forty or so, came from these daily séances, the seas benign, the warm ocean breezes wafting softly over the steel decks of Pete’s tough little ship.  He pasted them into a small booklet with photos on one page and several stanzas of the ode facing.  And, there it ended.
 
Years later, after publication of his first book, a novel, Pete had gotten the writing bug and became more adept at the amazing software available for his IMac computer wherein scanning, formats and dragging, markedly simplified putting a book together.  So began the present Carolyn, morphing from the pasted-in photos and simple verses into something grander, more permanent with the potential, perhaps, of becoming something Laurie and Renee might treasure as they and their kids migrated along life’s winding roads.  As contrasted to all four of Pete’s books, Carolyn would be in color.  Only a few would be printed and, obviously, not for sale, just for family and close friends.