During the Vietnam War era, two or three tours to one man’s name would have been considered unusual.

Retired Col. Robert Graham, 90, served four tours, and they are the main focus of his new book, “One of the Few: A True Account of Courage and Stepping into the Fight.”

After initially enlisting in 1953, Graham went through basic training and then flight school. He then spent the next 26 years as a fighter pilot.

The book begins in 1961, years before the United States military became directly involved in Vietnam. But Graham was there in 1962 with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and he began to understand the people of the region.

From there, the story escalates dramatically.

The Vietnam War

Graham described the situation in the skies of North Vietnam during the war as being more complicated than that over Berlin during World War II. Over the course of his four tours, Graham saw more combat than the average pilot, and even participated in Operation Rolling Thunder.

“That particular time frame was incredibly active. Four combat tours gives you — counting hospital time — almost four years of being shot at, so there’s a lot of action throughout those stories, as the stories were developing,” Graham said.

Graham knows that the Vietnam War was not especially popular, so, in “One of the Few,” he aimed to clarify a few of the war’s points through his very unique perspective.

“I tried to write the book from the standpoint of my vision from the cockpit. It’s not a military history,” Graham said.

In addition to his time in Southeast Asia, Graham was in the Middle East in the early 1970s at the height of Black September.

The book coincides with a hectic time in world history, with upheaval occurring across the globe from Indonesia to Greece. While others are able to view this time period from the safety of thousands of miles and decades away, Graham’s experience was far more immediate and intense.

“Everybody talked about the Cold War, but from my perspective, the Cold War wasn’t very cold. The coldest it ever got was lukewarm,” Graham said.

Graham would change a lot during his time in war. In 1962, he was in his late 20s. By the end of the book’s events, he was pushing 40. Indeed, he spent a transformative period of his adult life in brutal combat. And then, he needed to come back home.“When you get on the airplane and fly back from Vietnam to your family in the States, essentially, two days later, you’re going to have to convert yourself to whatever you were when you were in a gunfight to whatever you need to be when you go back to a more normalized life in the United States. You have to make that transition,” Graham said. “If you spend your life living in the past, and you don’t make that transition, you end up in a rubber room.”

Reflection in retirement

Graham expects “One of the Few” to be his one and only book. Mining through the memories of his service so many years later was a challenge in some spots, especially considering the difference between his combat and civilian lives.

“When I became a civilian, my younger self got put away in a closet along with the uniforms, and I became a much different person,” Graham said.

At the conclusion of his service — which officially came in 1982 — Graham entered the investment business. He also began recording some of his wartime memories on audio tape, which would go on to serve as the basis for “One of the Few.”

Still, his stories were too aplenty to be captured within an oral history, especially during his time of active service. Graham’s service — and its nature — was additionally difficult to explain to his children, which is why he wanted to capture his memories in audio form in the first place. The book, in a sense, is serving as “almost a letter of apology” to his family.

From his family’s perspective, an apology is unnecessary.

“When my dad was in Vietnam and Turkey and doing his thing, we understood as a family that what he was doing was important,” Graham’s daughter, Liz, said. “He always instilled in us that you had to leave the world a better place than you found it.”

In addition to the heaviness of the material, Graham needed to make the stories accessible and interesting, which proved easier said than done. Many of his stories are graphic, and others are classified.

Editing notes from outside the Grahams’ immediate circle proved to be valuable. These notes encouraged him to reconsider the framing of some stories and find the levity and humor in some of the moments that were no laughing matter in the moment.

And, of course, he needed to make the writing engaging in order to separate his work from something more dry or coldly academic.

“They don’t capture the spirit, the emotion, all of that,” Graham said of many Vietnam War books. “And the reason they don’t is because the people who are writing the books weren’t there.”

Book release

The book launch ended up being a bigger gathering than expected.

The positive response to the book has been more all-encompassing than anticipated as well, though some readers have a hard time picturing the Bob they know now as the fighter pilot he was 60 years ago. That part has even been hard for Bob. He said that while he likes and admires his younger self for living on the survival level, he probably wouldn’t invite him over to a cocktail party.

The book is also available for purchase on Amazon. Readers can also visit colonelrobertjgraham.com to read cut content from the book.