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Flying through Midnight: A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions Over Laos During the Vietnam War Audiobook
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(4.02) - 53 listener ratings
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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.
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"Excellent book covering the activities that "never happened" over Laos during the Vietnam War. A must-read for any Vietnam buff."
— Gabriel (4 out of 5 stars)
Quotes
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“A riveting first-person account of a pilot and his crew flying night missions in a C-123 over Laos during the Vietnam War.”
— Bob Kerrey, Medal of Honor recipient and former US senator -
"A no-holds-barred account of the secret air war over Laos. John Halliday paints a compelling cockpit view of the action, but he also immerses his readers in layer upon layer of sensations and emotions associated with those dangerous nighttime missions.”
— Col. Tom Yarborough, author of Da Nang Diary: A Forward Air Controller’s Gunsight View of Combat in Vietnam
Flying through Midnight Listener Reviews
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" Great book!!! I love memoirs especially ones about pilots. "
— Jared, 3/6/2013
About John T. Halliday
John T. Halliday served in the military for twenty-six years and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. A decorated war hero, he logged more than eight hundred hours of combat time in Southeast Asia and the Gulf War. Halliday lives in Northern California and is a retired Boeing 767 captain.
About William Dufris
William Dufris attended the University of Southern Maine in Portland-Gorham before pursuing a career in voice work in London and then the United States. He has won more than twenty AudioFile Earphones Awards, was voted one of the Best Voices at the End of the Century by AudioFile magazine, and won the prestigious Audie Award in 2012 for best nonfiction narration. He lives with his family in Maine.