Halliday, John T. 1946(?)–

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Halliday, John T. 1946(?)–

PERSONAL: Born c. 1946. Hobbies and other interests: Raising Morgan horses.

ADDRESSES: Home—CA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Scribner Publicity Department, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Served in U.S. Air Force for twenty-six years, including active duty during Vietnam and Gulf Wars, retiring as lieutenant colonel; awarded Distinguished Flying Cross; American Airlines, pilot; now retired.

WRITINGS:

Flying through Midnight: A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions over Laos during the Vietnam War (memoir), Scribner (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: John T. Halliday was twenty-four years old in 1970 when he joined the Air Force's 606th Special Operations Squadron in Thailand during the Vietnam War. With little air time to his credit, he expected to fly cargo, but was instead assigned to fly secret missions. He participated in night operation "Candlesticks," so called because of the illuminating flares that were dropped along the Laos side of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, even as the United States denied that action was taking place in that country. Halliday writes in his memoir, Flying through Midnight: A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions over Laos during the Vietnam War that he and the other pilots who flew out of Nakhon Phanom Air Base carried no identification: no patches or name tags were attached to their clothing. "With snappy prose, machine-gun-fast dialogue and technopilot speak, he recreates his forays with immediacy," wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Flying through Midnight "thrilling and sobering."

In an interview with Havis Dawson posted on Halliday's Web site. Dawson asked why he waited thirty years before publishing his story. Halliday replied that "Nixon's 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." Dawson noted that Halliday includes the lyrics of songs in the book. "We were the Woodstock generation dragged off to war, so we duffle-bagged our music along for the trip," said Halliday. "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."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Halliday, John T., Flying through Midnight: A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions over Laos during the Vietnam War, Scribner (New York, NY), 2005.