Kids into books: Hatchet - The Truth

Author: Gary Paulsen

Age: 10+ years

Illustrator: Mark Taylor

Publisher: Macmillan, $14.95


Everything else - the three passengers, who couldn't have known what hit them, the seats, the wings, the fuselage, everything - was torn and flattened and shattered. The bodies simply did not exist, not even as bits of pieces, and the investigative team finally gave up trying to make any sense of the crash. The debris, mechanical and human, extended from the ridge where the plane had first struck, spreading out in an oval a hundred yards wide and a quarter of a mile long. Most of the wreckage was in quarter- or half-dollar sized pieces. Had the pilot flown a mere six feet higher, he would have been safe. Instead, the image of the destruction that resulted from a full-speed collision with the ground came back to me when I later wrote the scene in Hatchet.

I had seen other plane wrecks. I saw fighters crash when I was in the military - spectacular crashes, sometimes with the pilot dying, though more often ejecting safely - but those were extreme events with extreme machines and the dynamics would not necessarily apply here. Jet fighters at work, training or fighting, are always, always pushing their performance envelope, as are the pilots - they must be that way to stay alive in combat.