No Reason For Dying:
A Reluctant Combat Pilot's Confession of Hypocrisy, Infidelity and War Retired airline Captain Brian Howard Settles spent the first two years of his life in a Nebraska orphanage, a less-than-auspicious beginning for a bi-racial child born into a deeply segregated world. The divorce of his adoptive parents fueled a deepening sense of abandonment and feelings of not being good enough. Propelled by the neediness for greater self-esteem, he embarked on the path to becoming a fighter pilot that would carry him into the skies above war-torn Vietnam a few short years later.

As he risked his life in Vietnam for a questionable American foreign policy in Southeast Asia, Settles continued to wrestle with the isolation from his convictions and the disenchantment of dying in an unpopular war. His personal struggles were amplified by the palpable, yet surreal horrors of war and dying. In gripping detail, the writer details the daily gloried terror of flying fighter combat missions, the tragic loss of pilot classmates and the camaraderie of fellowship that aided survival of the nightmare. In the air, Settles secretly battled the demons of his childhood; on the ground his defensive machismo manifested itself in a lifestyle that racked him with the guilt of his infidelity in the face of the hypocrisy of his double standard. As fellow crew members and classmates continued becoming combat casualties, Settles became increasingly doubtful about his own survival, a reality he could not share with his bride and family who were back home faithfully praying for his safe return. His wartime experiences in Vietnam and their behavioral impact on his later life are sure to ring all-too-familiar to veterans of the Gulf War and the war on terror, and it's this universality of war's horror that is poignantly captured in the pages of No Reason for Dying. Settles is a warrior-poet whose ruthless honesty and courage in revealing the often shameful secrets of his past skillfully illustrate how a man can survive incredible odds to live a life of purpose and strength in being true to himself.

Read what successful authors have to say about this book:

"Read this page-turner by a man who has fully lived the last half of the twentieth century in our America, wrestled with it, survived, failed, confessed, regretted, examined, and finally triumphed-and so much of that took place in the year he was a fighter pilot in Vietnam. This book, about war and men, men and women, racial and personal conflicts, asks questions and offers insights as valuable today as they were forty years ago. In NO REASON FOR DYING, Brian Settles tells all: you will live the life of a fighter pilot who flew 200 combat missions in Vietnam, a love-obsessed young man, a philosopher, a writer, thinker, brave warrior, a lover of peace, a man who has lived to write his story without flinching, facing the wind."
 
Clyde Edgerton- Novelist and author of The Floatplane Notebooks and The Bible Salesman

"Brian Howard Settles has written a powerful book, No Reason For Dying about his experience as one of the few black fighter pilots in the Vietnam War.  It is a truly courageous, brutally honest story of his struggle to confront his own character flaws and to balance his ambivalence about the war with the demand of loyalty from the military and his fellow pilots. Intertwined in the story is his own struggle for racial identity as the abandoned son of a black father and white mother which makes him an outcast in both black and white worlds. Faced with the constant fear of death as a fighter pilot in the combat zone, accommodating the social and political divergences between black and white worlds, his struggle to find his place emerges in dramatic relief."