Flying Through Midnight

By: John T. Halliday

Narrated by: William Dufris

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 24-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.

©2005 John T. Halliday (P)2005 Tantor Media, Inc.

Critic reviews

"With snappy prose, machine-gun-fast dialogue, and techno-pilot speak, he recreates his forays with immediacy." (Publishers Weekly)

Flying Through Midnight

This is a gripping, moving and fascinating book. I recommend it for anyone who enjoys military history and wants to study it by living though an extremely perilous experience. The frustrations of Vietnam and sometime the irritating psychological weakness, of the author are well explained. Also there is some advice on how to be a great pilot which would also be good advice on how to be good at most if not all of life's endeavors.

A pilots book

JT tells a great narrative of working these old great relics of the past in war time environment. Kept me up at night reliving the story

Genius

Well written in so many senses. Stick with it, and it will melt your hair.

Loved it, a real must listen!!

Few books have been able to hold me the way that this book has. It would be OK if it were fiction, but the fact that it is non-fiction really drew me into the story.

Very entertaining

This is a great audiobook - a really fun listen. I'm a pilot (amateur) and even I could anticipate the causes of the failures and/or problems the aircraft and crew experienced without having to have discussions with other crew members (fuel gauges, cross-feed, etc). So, I imagine a lot of the discussions were literary devices for the benefit of educating the reader. Some of it seemed a little too over the top to be true and some was pretty hammy but none of that really takes away from the story. Also, from a historical perspective, this is a side of the war that doesn't get much press so it was very educational when coupled with some extra research.