A Cold War Legacy: A Tribute to Strategic Air Command 1946–1992 by Alwyn T. Lloyd. Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Missoula MT. 2000. $55.00. 760 pages.

This book is required reading.

It is required reading for every SAC crew member who ever sprinted to his airplane in the small hours of the morning, wondering if this alert was the real one. It is required reading for the silent, wonderful enlisted men who worked night and day at slave wages to keep aged birds running in conditions that would have grounded civilian aircraft — men who did their jobs without complaint and without recognition because they understood, in a way that their civilian counterparts never could, what the stakes were.

It is required reading for their families — the wives and children who learned how to do without the man of the house because he was working eighty hours a week, every week, and who never once appeared on a television program to discuss the hardships of the military family, because that was not what SAC families did.

It is required reading for the American public, who could go to bed at night confident that SAC was on duty — who could sleep peacefully because men they would never meet were awake, alert, and ready.

It is required reading, too, for the people of the former Soviet Union, whose leaders were wise enough to recognize that SAC could not be trifled with. The Cold War ended without nuclear exchange in no small part because SAC made the cost of aggression incalculable. That deserves to be remembered.

There is one group for whom this book is not recommended, because it would be wasted on them: the slick-haired, always-smiling news readers — the Rathers, the Jennings, the Brokaws — men who had no idea of military service and only contempt for those who were defending them. They would not understand this book. They would not want to.

Alwyn T. Lloyd has written a 760-page tribute to SAC history in both broad and narrow terms. He defines the lofty goals of the command — the strategic mission, the doctrine, the deterrence theory — and then illustrates those goals with concrete examples drawn from the operational record. He illuminates the strategy with stories of crews, the people who made it real at the flight line and in the alert barns and in the cockpits of aircraft that were sometimes held together by ingenuity and dedication more than by adequate maintenance funding.

The photographs, maps, graphs, and tables are hundreds in number and are magnificent in their pertinence. Tail numbers, missions, unit histories, awards and decorations, record flights and goof-ups — everything is here, documented with the thoroughness that the subject deserves and that SAC's own meticulous record-keeping makes possible.

Pictorial Histories Publishing Company of Missoula, Montana deserves credit for taking the financial risk of a 760-page volume on a subject that the mainstream press has never understood and frequently distorted. They got this one right.

This book should be on the shelves of everyone who has ever been in the Strategic Air Command. It should also be on the shelves of everyone who benefited from SAC's existence — which is to say, everyone who lived through the Cold War in a free country.