Flying through midnight

the long version

Novelistic and candid, Halliday's combat memoir begins in 1970, when Halliday has just landed in the middle of the Vietnam War, primed to begin his assignment with Special Operations. 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 Nixon firmly denies that the United States 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. 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.--From publisher description.