Flying Through Midnight
A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions Over Laos During the Vietnam War
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Riveting, novelistic, and startlingly candid, John T. Halliday's combat memoir begins in 1970, when Halliday has just landed in the middle of the Vietnam War, primed to begin his assignment with the 606th 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 United States 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 was utterly unprepared for the horrors of war. On his first mission, Halliday's C-123 aircraft dodges more than a thousand antiaircraft shells, and that is just the beginning. 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.
Using frank, true-to-life dialogue, potent imagery, and classic 1970s song lyrics, Halliday deftly describes the fraught Laotian skies and re-creates his struggle to navigate the frustrating Air Force bureaucracy, the deprivations of a remote base far from home and his young wife, and his fight to preserve his sanity. The resulting nonfiction narrative vividly captures not only the intricate, distorted culture of war but also the essence of the Vietnam veteran's experience of this troubled era.
A powerhouse fusion of pathos and humor, brutal realism and intimate reflection, Flying Through Midnight is a landmark contribution to war literature, revealing previously top-secret intelligence on the 606th's night missions. Fast-paced, thrilling, and bitingly intelligent, Halliday 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Suspense around every corner.
An Amazing account of dangerous flying over enemy territory at night and many times horrible weather. You will have a hard time putting this book down.
Wonderful read!
One of the best aviation books I've ever read! I picked up this book and for two weeks I couldn't put it down. Highly recommended!!
Text formatting errors
I am disappointed in the text formatting errors in this ebook. The price of "Flying Through Midnight" is higher than most, so the text formatting should be correct.
There is no space between a standard font word and the following italicized word and there are a lot of italicized words. Every third page in the sample contains this error.
As the ebook publisher of "World Voyagers", I am fully aware of what is necessary to create a properly formatted ebook.
The content is very good and I am still planning to buy it. Too bad about the distracting text errors.