Pilot's career one of danger, espionage
By Daniel Wolowicz camarillo@theacorn.com

SURVIVOR- Standing atop the wing of an Douglas AD-6 Skyraider aboard the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, Scott Beat, now a retired lieutenant commander, flew for more than 20 years as a pilot in the Navy. The 80-year-old Camarillo resident shares his war stories in a new memoir published earlier this year.

The title of Scott Beat's recently published 177-page memoir, "So Many Ways to Die: Surviving as a Spy in the Sky," rightly describes the Camarillo man's 20-year career as a pilot in the Navy.

Whether he was flying a large turbojet reconnaissance airplane 150 feet off the water in the Tonkin Gulf in the dead of night to escape four Chinese fighter planes or piloting a U-2 spy plane eleven miles above Russia at the height of the Cold War, Beat's personal stories of his time in the Navy offer a firsthand account of his airborne adventures.

Beat, an 80-year-old Wisconsin native who retired from the Navy as a lieutenant commander in 1973, said he began writing the book in 2000 as a way to share his stories with his two grandsons, Jeffrey, 13, and Jackson, 10.

Shortly after he started writing, Beat realized he needed the help of someone with a trained eye to edit and co-write the book. Beat turned to Jerrie Newman, a family friend and retired English teacher.

"He had quite an adventurous life," Newman said. "So the story was quite a good one."

Chapter by chapter, Newman said, the two set about telling the story of Beat's career from cadet at the United States Naval Academy to decorated officer with more than 18,000 hours as a pilot.

"She is really responsible for the purity of the literature in the book," Beat said of Newman.

Beat said the process of clearing the book through Naval Intelligence Command in Washington, D.C., and shopping for a publishing house took another two years before the selfpublished book first hit shelves in February.

A course at Ventura College on self-publishing helped him understand what it took to bring the book to the doorstep of Dog Ear Publishing in 2006. The Indianapolis-based publishing house has since printed 5,000 copies of the book. Beat said sales have been steady.

The book's start may have been a little slow, but the stories of Beat's adventures begin to gain speed like a jet taxiing for takeoff.

Beat's highly detailed stories about his deathdefying missions are laced with the facts and figures one would expect from a precision pilot. Beat said many of those details, pulled from memory, are backed by the volumes of flight logs he kept during his lengthy career.

Beat even offers a brief account of his fellow Annapolis cadet and future presidential candidate Ross Perot.

The retired officer tells readers about his time as a pilot aboard aircraft carriers, as a commander of highly classified missions to track incoming Russian spacecrafts and as a spy flying miles above Russia.

Although he sympathizes throughout the book with his wife of 54 years, Jan, on the difficulties of being a pilot's wife, Beat offers very little on the effect the high-stress world of military command had on his own emotions.

Those emotions, he said, bubbled over as he wrote the book and thought of the 45 close friends he lost while serving as a carrier pilot.

At times, Beat said, he was forced to stop writing to deal with the memories it brought to the surface.

"I was always brought up that men never cried," Beat said, "and when I wrote that book, I just found myself weeping. Tears pouring down my face at two o'clock in the morning at my desk, and it would be so bad I'd have to stop writing."

Following his time in the Navy, Beat flew charter jets for corporate executives until 1985 when he finally retired his wings.

Beat and his wife have lived in Camarillo for more than 30 years.

The former Navy man will speak about his book at the Camarillo Library, 4101 Las Posas Road, Sun., Aug. 5 at 2 p.m. His book will also be on sale and available for signing.