Flying through midnight

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…