Flying Through Midnight: A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions over Laos During the Vietnam War

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. (Nov.)