Audiobook15 hours
Flying Through Midnight: A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions Over Laos During the Vietnam War
Written by John T. Halliday
Narrated by William Dufris
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
()
About this audiobook
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.
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.
Related to Flying Through Midnight
Related audiobooks
Carrier Pilot Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Run Through the Jungle: Real Adventures in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stalin's Had It Now! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Snake Eater Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Walking Point: An Infantryman's Untold Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5SEAL Warrior: Death in the Dark: Vietnam 1968-1972 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Flying from the Black Hole: The B-52 Navigator-Bombardiers of Vietnam Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sherman Lead: Flying the F-4D Phantom II in Vietnam Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To the Limit: An Air Cav Huey Pilot in Vietnam Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Vietnam Air War: From The Cockpit Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Magnet Ass––And The Stone Cold Truck Hunters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Vietnam Rough Riders: A Convoy Commander's Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Taking Fire: The True Story of a Decorated Chopper Pilot Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Vietnam: A Tale of Two Tours Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Da Nang Diary: A Forward Air Controller's Gunsight View of Flying with SOG Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bloody Sixteen: The USS Oriskany and Air Wing 16 during the Vietnam War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/519 Minutes to Live - Helicopter Combat in Vietnam Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stories From the Secret War: CIA Special Ops in Laos Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5From F-4 Phantom to A-10 Warthog: Memoirs of a Cold War Fighter Pilot Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Angels Three Six: Confessions of a Cold War Fighter Pilot Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Combat Pay Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eyes Behind the Lines: L Company Rangers in Vietnam, 1969 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The B-52 Overture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Red Blood, Black Sand: Fighting Alongside John Basilone from Boot Camp to Iwo Jima Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Swift Boats at War in Vietnam Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5SOG Medic: Stories from Vietnam and Over the Fence Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Catkiller 3-2: An Army Pilot Flying for the Marines in the Vietnam War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tanker Pilot: Lessons from the Cockpit Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Asian History For You
Japan's Infamous Unit 731: Firsthand Accounts of Japan's Wartime Human Experimentation Program Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Code of the Samurai: A Modern Translation of the Bushido Shoshinshu of Taira Shigesuke Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Shogun: The Life and Times of Tokugawa Ieyasu: Japan's Greatest Ruler Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain: History's Unknown Chapters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cold War: A New History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ancient Aliens®: The Official Companion Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Midnight in Chernobyl: The Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago Volume 3: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Miyamoto Musashi: The Life and Legacy of Japan’s Most Legendary Samurai Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Short History of Russia: How the World's Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gulag: A History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Rape of Nanking: The History and Legacy of the Notorious Massacre during the Second Sino-Japanese War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Putin Interviews: Oliver Stone Interviews Vladimir Putin Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Krakatoa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Flying Through Midnight
Rating: 4.607142857142857 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
14 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a weird book. It is autobiographical but it reads like some sort of mind twister. For a reader who does not like authority, this is it. But that is one of the major failings of the book: the suggestion that only fresh-caught lieutenants and captains know how to fly airplanes and engage the bad guys. Maybe the young captain has performed a useful exercise but I'm not there. Are there moments of sheer terror while flying an airplane in combat? I'm sure there are. Is it a wonder so many survive? Yes, I think so.