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Title details for Flying Through Midnight by John T. Halliday - Available

Flying Through Midnight

A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions Over Laos During the Vietnam War

by John T. Halliday
William Dufris
Audiobook
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A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions Over Laos During the Vietnam War


Like Jarhead, We Were Soldiers Once..., and Young, John T. Halliday's combat memoir is gripping, novelistic, and startlingly candid, taking readers through the devastating trials and hard-won victories of flying in the Vietnam War.


The year is 1970, and John T. Halliday has just landed in the middle of the Vietnam War, primed to begin his assignment with the 606 Special Operations Squadron. But there's a catch: He's stationed in a kind of no-man's-land. No one on his base flies with ID, patches, or rank. Even as Richard Nixon firmly denies reporters' charges that the U.S. has forces in Laos, Halliday realizes that from his base in Thailand, he will be flying top-secret black ops night missions over the Laotian Ho Chi Minh Trail.


A naive yet thoughtful twenty-four-year-old, Halliday is utterly unprepared for the horrors of war. On his first mission, Halliday's aircraft dodges more than a thousand anti-aircraft shells. Nothing is as he expected-not the operations, not the way his shell-shocked fellow pilots look and act, and certainly not the squadron's daredevil, seat-of-one's-pants approach to piloting. But before long, Halliday has become one of those seasoned and shell-shocked pilots and finds himself in a desperate search for a way to elude certain death.


A powerhouse fusion of pathos and humor, brutal realism and intimate reflection, Flying Through Midnight is a landmark contribution to Vietnam War literature, revealing previously top-secret intelligence on the 606' s night missions. Fast-paced, thrilling, and bitingly intelligent, Halliday's writing illuminates it all: the heart-pounding air battles, the close friendships, the crippling fear, and the astonishing final escape that made the telling of it possible.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    December 15, 2005

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400121861
      • File size: 445042 KB
      • Duration: 15:27:10

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 5, 2005
      When now-retired lieutenant colonel Halliday reported for duty as a 24-year-old air force officer with the 606th Special Operations Squadron at a U.S.A.F. base in Thailand in 1970, he thought he'd be hauling cargo to Thai air bases. But as the first-time author recounts in this gripping memoir, he was ordered to fly a C-123 on top-secret nighttime combat missions instead. Assigned to an operation nicknamed "Candlesticks" for the flares the pilots dropped to illuminate enemy targets, Halliday played his role in this hush-hush part of the Vietnam War by bombing along the Laotian part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. With snappy prose, machine-gun-fast dialogue and techno-pilot speak, he recreates his forays with immediacy. The heart of the book is Halliday's blow-by-blow chronicle of the amazing midnight crash landing he made on an unlit airstrip in treacherous mountainous territory in Long Tien—no-man's-land in northern Laos. There, he and his crew were greeted by initially suspicious U.S. forces and commanding general "Bang-Pow" of the Royal Laotian Army. This dramatic, firsthand war story from a veteran who earned an Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions barrels toward the heroic climax with novelistic momentum. Agent, Liza Dawson.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 6, 2006
      If a major part of any good reading of a memoir is engendering the belief that the reader's voice could, theoretically speaking, belong to the person who had actually lived through those events, Dufris's reading of Halliday's Vietnam War memoir fails on all counts. Halliday's account of his service flying top-secret missions over Laos combines war reportage with accounts of jovial military camaraderie straight out of a 1930s Hollywood film, and Dufris's mannered, overenthusiastic reading fails to convey any of the grit or good humor of Halliday's story. Grasping onto each anecdote like a drowning man clinging to a lifeboat, Dufris manages to suck out all of the meager energy of Halliday's already familiar narrative. One is left wishing for a more nuanced, careful, low-key reading, in the hopes that such an approach might have been able to salvage some of the value of Halliday's war stories. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 5).

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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