Havis Dawson, a writer and editor for three decades, is the husband of John Halliday’s literary agent, Liza Dawson.


HD: In February 2004, I groggily stumbled downstairs after 3 a.m., wondering what was keeping Liza up, and found her curled up on the couch engrossed in Flying Through Midnight. When I reminded her that she had a 9 a.m. appointment at her Manhattan offices, she whispered, “Hold on,” and patted the cushion beside her. “Cuddle up – this nonfiction reads more like a novel than anything I’ve ever read. Let me share something beautiful with you.”

John, I snuggled up as she thumbed to a dog-eared page. “Not only does this author write power-packed action scenes, but he can also slip into near-poetry. It is 1970. This flight crew is returning from the grave shift of directing bombing raids and dodging flak over northern Laos. To celebrate still being alive, the author flies down the Mekong River at sunrise at twenty feet --- with the back of the plane open like a picture window. Listen to what he sees:

‘The river now races beneath like a continuous sheet of yellow steel. The trees tower above like Empire State Buildings. A woman wringing laundry on the Laotian side hears us approach, stops mid-wring, looks up, smiles and waves. I see her face clearly and wave back. A white whooping crane leaps off a banyan tree branch and soars away as the river and trees cradle us in serenity. Smoky wisps of steam rise off the water. I turn and fly through two wisps.’

Liza flipped two pages. ‘Shafts of direct sunlight pour in through our eyebrow windows, toasting us like Campfire marshmallows. I look out the back. I watch our lifting body smooth the river like water behind an ocean liner as twin ballerina water spouts formed by our propwash rise thirty feet, pirouette, begin to collapse, but are now reformed again and again from propwash energy . . . spinning, magical, twisting rainbows shepherding us down the river.’ Isn’t that terrific!” she exclaimed.

That’s how I was introduced to Flying Through Midnight. I began reading and lost all objectivity. Your story grabbed me by the throat and never let go. I fell in love with the tale, the characters, and the looming doom of the Bangkok curse. Liza describes your book as an “aviation thriller told in the guise of a memoir, and the first war book for women since Cold Mountain.” My condensed version is, Catch 22 meets Fate Is The Hunter. How would you describe your book? What other reactions have you had? Where did you learn to write? Did you take courses and attend workshops? And who are your literary models?

JH: Your comments humble me. Author John J. Nance describes Flying Through Midnight as the prequel to Cold Mountain, but with airplanes. I see these never-been-told stories as a time capsule of Richard Nixon’s secret air war over Laos. As far as reactions, my publisher Lisa Drew gushed during our first phone call, “I was so engrossed that I nearly missed my subway stop. I had to dash for the closing doors.” She added, “Your story is scary without being gory.”

I taught myself how to write. I’ve never taken a writing course, nor attended any workshops, though author John Nance mentored the project from the start. I kept my 1997 notes when he said there were three important things in storytelling: “Dialogue, dialogue, and dialogue.” John’s books taught me how to write the flying scenes. I didn’t know where or how to begin, so I devoured best-selling adventures: Sebastian Yunger’s The Perfect Storm, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, Doug Stanton’s In Harm’s Way, Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, and Earnest Gann’s Fate is the Hunter, among others. Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing and How to Grow a Novel taught me to edit like a Samurai warrior. And the John Voight/Bruce Dern film Coming Home inspired me to write about the tragedies that befell the families back home.

But these all fell short of capturing my own terror and through-death experience. So I devoured four years of Writer’s Digests. Then Anne Lamott jump-started me with Bird by Bird. But I found the primal, animalistic responses I needed in older books: Jack London’s White Fang, Call of the Wild, and A Piece of Steak, Stephen Cranes’ Red Badge of Courage and The Boat, Poe’s Telltale Heart, and Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, arguably the greatest ghost story ever written.

HD: Men rave over the flying scenes, but women fall in love with your characters. What’s going on here?

JH: I wrote the story for all the women whose husbands, sons, fathers, brothers, and lovers who came home from war as hardened men, unable to share their trans-death experiences. I hope to speak for those thousands of silent voices.

HD: Your description of being forced down at midnight deep behind enemy lines reads like a thriller. That scene forms the book’s first climax. How did you pull all those elements together?

JH: I felt like an archeologist whisk-brooming bits and pieces of dinosaur bones. I’d find an image, a shred of dialogue, but then the trail would turn cold, so I’d set them aside. A week later, I might find unearth a smell, the look of terror on my copilots’ face, or recall the taste of stomach bile, and set those notes aside. It took me a year to whiskbroom the pieces into a coherent monster. The book is interactive; readers have all the information I had to solve this do-or-die riddle. They must decide if their crew of eight lives or dives, as precious seconds tick off.

HD: Why did you wait thirty years to write these stories? Have they been published before?

JH: This secret war was still going on when I came home from Thailand in 1971, so I was prohibited from talking. As years passed, the events quicksanded from memory. So, no, these stories have never seen the light of day. Nixon’s secret air war over Laos has gone largely unrecorded, although Laos stands as the most-bombed country in history. More than Germany, Japan, or Vietnam. Even today, Air Force Academy courses ignore those years. So I wanted to capture these stories before they were forever lost. John Nance thought my expose so important, that he assigned it as mandatory reading for his son poised to enter the Academy. As Pearl S. Buck reminds us, “To understand today, you have to search through yesterday.”

HD: You transported me back to this ancient world of 1970 with a poignant literary style I’ve rarely seen. How did you start writing? Did it go smoothly? What was the first time you knew you could write this well?

JH: I wrote junk for months. I’d re-read material I loved a week before and discover that it was dreadful. All I could think of was Snoopy atop his doghouse, typing: “It was a dark and stormy night.” That first year of writing was like crawling down a football field of broken glass. Nothing worked. I struggled to write one page a day. I kept my writings buried in a drawer and didn’t show them to anyone -- afraid they’d laugh. Then I flew a month of Boston all-nighters with generation-younger copilot who was curious why I’d been sequestered in my Parker House room while outside the sunny city beckoned with tourists riding duck boats. I explained that I was carrying the first one hundred pages of a book I was writing, and needed time to edit them. I resisted his requests to read them, thinking he was humoring me. After all, he was five years old at the time of the events. How could he relate? But I reluctantly passed the pages across the radio console. When I phoned him at two p.m. for our scheduled walk to the Boston Commons, he blurted, “Not now! I’m dodging flak. Gimme an hour,” and hung up. I called back at three, four, and five p.m., and heard similar excitement. I was puzzled; I figured he was just being kind. When six p.m. rolled around, I called him: “I’m starving and thirsty. It’s now or never.” When we met in the hallway, his eyes were on fire, but I thought he still might be putting me on. We had a thirty-six-hour layover, so we wrestled two stools at The Littlest Bar In Boston where he peppered me with questions till after midnight and taffy-pulled the rest out of me. That was the first time I realized my words could firework such emotion. That copilot drew me out of my shell and kept me writing at a time my faith in myself was waffling. That was the first time I saw myself as a writer instead of an airline captain.

HD: How do you write?

I failed at audiotapes, writing in legal pads, and typing into my laptop with its blinking cursor, daring me to write great. Then I read a Writer’s Digest article that suggested writing on three-by-five cards. I resisted the idea for months. How could a little card compete with a computer? Well, three-by-five cards were my salvation. I have two safes, a dresser drawer, and a file box chucked full. I storyboarded each scene on the cards, borrowing the concept from how Stephen Spielberg created the Indiana Jones films. For the complex helicopter scene, I spread three hundred cards across two queen-size beds at the Parker House. I’d kaleidoscope each scene over and over, spot holes and duplications, then finally fire up my laptop.

HD: Where and where did you begin? How long did this take to research and write? When did you turn in your final draft?

JH: I never wanted to write this book. I went kicking and screaming into the project, wanting to leave my nightmares dead and buried. But I reluctantly started in the fall of 1997 at the Boston Doubletree Inn on the Charles River near Harvard. I didn’t have to travel far for research – the events lay buried in own memories. I wrote through ’98, ’99, and through 2000. I finished writing during the 2001 Super Bowl, but realized I’d only just begun. I still had to sell it. Then came three years of pratfalls trying to find an agent and publisher who would take a chance on a first-time author. This project has had nine lives. It has survived fried C-drives, the repair center losing my laptop – twice, agents’ doors slammed in my face, a stack of rejections, and my first agent’s abrupt retirement, sending two years of work down the sewer. John Nance and I searched all of 2003 for new representation, but came up empty-handed. My mentor counseled me in December that it might be time to throw in the towel.

I was on my own. But I only needed one agent to say yes; I just had to find her. Then in February 2005, Liza called and gushed, “I love your book! Please send me the whole manuscript, and may I have a two-week exclusive?” I was overjoyed, but reminded myself that disappointment comes from great expectations. I FedEx’d it out that day, but didn’t hear from Liza for three weeks. My follow-up voice mails and emails in week four went unanswered. Convinced she was yet another rejection, I left a voice message: Sorry she wasn’t interested, but could she please return my manuscript? Liza called right back, panicked. She’d never received it! Havis, we came a whisker from missing one another. We later discovered that FedEx delivered it to the wrong office. So that March 2004, my guardian angel/agent Liza swooped in and rescued the project from the brink of oblivion. She held an auction that August, and my dear friend and publisher Lisa Drew made the winning bid. I turned in the final draft in November 2004, and Lisa will release it on Veteran’s Day, November 2005. So from the Charles River to publication was eight years.

HD: It is unusual to include music in a book. You must’ve known you risked rejection by including the lyrics. Why’d you take such a big risk?

JH: We were the Woodstock generation dragged off to war, so we duffle-bagged our music along for the trip. The book without the music would be like watching a silent movie; rock and roll was the oxygen tent that kept our souls from suffocating. And the songs were my time portals back to 1970, crowbaring decades-old memories from the rust of my mind. They became the battle hymns for my writing. Someone wrote that music is the shortcut to the heart, so the lyrics are one of the reasons people enjoy even their second read. The Boston Globe wrote: “Vietnam was rock n’ roll made flesh . . . the first war to come with it’s own soundtrack. It was the sheer power of rock, the way it could simultaneously provoke and console, be anthem and escape, that embedded it so deeply.” And author Michael Herr wrote, “Rock and the war had run power off the same circuit for so long, they didn’t even have to fuse.” So I couldn’t leave the music out.

HD: How did you write?

JH: At first, I audiotaped twenty hours of material, then drafted in yellow legal pads, then stared at my laptop’s blinking cursor, and failed. Then I stumbled onto the magic of three-by-five cards. At some point, I became obsessed with writing. My best friend Ken Frazier kidded that the book had become my mistress. I carried three-by-five cards everywhere to corral ancient memories as I was cleaning stalls, making dinner, or driving to the airport. To carve out time to write, I set my alarm for 5 a.m., poured a giant cup of black Folgers, shut my office door, closed the blinds, read the previous day’s work, read the next scene’s three-by-fives, listened to a war tune, dove in, and hoped that the magic would come. I’d write three or four hours – until the pieces I’d been juggling crashed to the floor.

HD: Magic?

JH: The best writing happens when I disappear, let the characters speak for themselves, and try not to control the creative child in the wood cellar of the mind Anne Lamott writes about in Bird by Bird. Ms. Lamott says this subconscious, creative child does the best writing. I became a scribe capturing the movie playing in my head. There were days I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up. The Bangkok dinner party scene that was the launching pad for the Bangkok curse poured out of me in one sitting. I wasn’t writing about being there; I was there.

HD: Did this magic always come?

JH: No. There were dead days when the boy in the cellar wasn’t ready. But I had to sit---every day---to be available if he did have something. If I had to wait, I edited old material, or closed my eyes, played Thailand tunes, and let the images swirl around my memory. When the cellar boy was ready, I couldn’t write fast enough. The fourteen-page author’s notes tumbled out in one sitting.

HD: There’s a Dilbert-esque quality to your narrative. Your publisher Lisa Drew was fascinated at the chasm between the polity-setting senior officers – the desk jockeys – and the throttle jockey pilots dodging flak every night.

JH: I wanted to offer hope and ways of coping for people trapped in institutional madness, and say that they are not alone. One reason we lost that war was the disconnect between the leaders and the junior pilots trying to beat the enemy. I’d never read anything that archived the problem, so I felt it important to include. If we don’t learn from our past, we are doomed to repeat it.

HD: Have you kept in touch with other crewmembers from that fateful night? Do they know this is coming out? Did you use their real names? Whom else did you contact in your research?

JH: These events happened thirty-five years ago, so some are sadly no longer with us. We did not keep in touch---the USAF assignments system scattered us like buckshot. Anyone alive will be surprised. To honor their privacy, I changed all the names. And I limited my research to excavating my own memories.

HD: What became of Nakhon Phanom Air Base?

JH: Nature reclaimed it. Fittingly, the base is now broken concrete and jungle.

HD: In the face of your years of failure, I think I’d’ve quit. What kept you going?

JH: To honor a pledge I made my father to tell these stories. My dad didn’t live to see the book published, but his photo sat perched at the back corner of my desk. Through all the setbacks, his smiling image encouraged, “I believe in you, Son. Keep going. You can do it.” I think the intimacy of the narrative sprang from imagining dancing with my father again as I whispered the stories to him. So, I kept my pledge. I hope it is enough.