Flying Through Midnight

Starred review from September 5, 2005
When now-retired lieutenant colonel Halliday reported for duty as a 24-year-old air force officer with the 606th Special Operations Squadron at a U.S.A.F. base in Thailand in 1970, he thought he'd be hauling cargo to Thai air bases. But as the first-time author recounts in this gripping memoir, he was ordered to fly a C-123 on top-secret nighttime combat missions instead. Assigned to an operation nicknamed "Candlesticks" for the flares the pilots dropped to illuminate enemy targets, Halliday played his role in this hush-hush part of the Vietnam War by bombing along the Laotian part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. With snappy prose, machine-gun-fast dialogue and techno-pilot speak, he recreates his forays with immediacy. The heart of the book is Halliday's blow-by-blow chronicle of the amazing midnight crash landing he made on an unlit airstrip in treacherous mountainous territory in Long Tien—no-man's-land in northern Laos. There, he and his crew were greeted by initially suspicious U.S. forces and commanding general "Bang-Pow" of the Royal Laotian Army. This dramatic, firsthand war story from a veteran who earned an Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions barrels toward the heroic climax with novelistic momentum. Agent, Liza Dawson.

March 6, 2006
If a major part of any good reading of a memoir is engendering the belief that the reader's voice could, theoretically speaking, belong to the person who had actually lived through those events, Dufris's reading of Halliday's Vietnam War memoir fails on all counts. Halliday's account of his service flying top-secret missions over Laos combines war reportage with accounts of jovial military camaraderie straight out of a 1930s Hollywood film, and Dufris's mannered, overenthusiastic reading fails to convey any of the grit or good humor of Halliday's story. Grasping onto each anecdote like a drowning man clinging to a lifeboat, Dufris manages to suck out all of the meager energy of Halliday's already familiar narrative. One is left wishing for a more nuanced, careful, low-key reading, in the hopes that such an approach might have been able to salvage some of the value of Halliday's war stories. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 5).