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

Like Jarhead and 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 naïve 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.

J.T. Halliday is a retired Boeing 767 captain for American Airlines. He served in the military for twenty-six years and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. A decorated war hero, he logged more than 800 hours of combat time in Southeast Asia and the Gulf War. Halliday lives in Northern California. This is his first book.

"This is a riveting first person account of a pilot and his crew flying night missions in a C-123 over Laos during the Vietnam War. This book must be read by any one interested in the Vietnam War. The air war over Laos was a crucial though secret side show to Vietnam but it was just as brutal. I hated to put the book down because the story was so good."  
-- Former Senator Bob Kerrey, president of The New School University
   Medal of Honor winner
 

"In 1970 a 24-year-old pilot flies over Laos with no identifying papers or patches. His Commander in Chief--Richard Nixon--denies his existence. Now for the first time, John Halliday takes you into the cockpit as he flies his dangerous top-secret missions. A gripping read."
-- James Bradley Author, Flags of Our Fathers & Flyboys


 

"This book goes right to the heart of how a pilot takes responsibility for an aircrew flying secret night missions over Laos during the Vietnam War and controls his fear in the face of terror as the tracers from enemy gunners probe the darkness, it describes the "Catch -22 "craziness of the air war over Laos, and the writer will have you sweating and squirming in the pilot's seat as he attempts to make a terrifying forced landing at night in the jungle mountains of Laos where no quarter is asked and none given. This book is among my top first person narratives of the Vietnam War."
-- Fred Downs, author of The Killing Zone.
 

"Halliday superbly conveys the complex thoughts experienced by combat pilots, and writes vividly of combat flying over Laos." 
-- Col. Robert E. Stoffey, author of Cleared Hot!: A Marine Combat Pilot's Vietnam Diary
 

"Flying Through Midnight is 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. He takes us on a hell of a ride!"-Tom Yarborough, author of Da Nang Diary: A Forward Air Controller's Gunsight View of Combat in Vietnam