In the early nineties I had an amazing conversation with my father while visiting the huge museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. On this occasion, after walking through a B24 static display, he actually talked about his time flying out of India during WWII. This was the first time he ever talked about his war, so even a mention of mine seemed inappropriate. It wasn’t until my company commander, Arlie Deaton (219th Aviation Company) and my dear friend John Pappas, for whom I flew at the end of my year in Vietnam, passed away that I felt I had permission to, and needed to, talk about the months I spent in the Central Highlands. The result is a memoir about Vietnam, flying for MACVSOG into Laos and Cambodia, flying for Western and Delta Airlines, growing up on Long Island, and learning from a Vietnamese Nun what love really means.

It took five years to write Only the Light Moves. The title is from a poem by Leonora Carrington.”We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed. Only the light moves.” I had to wait until  the mission I flew, Operation Ford Drum, was declassified, about fifteen years ago, before I could speak about what I did. Within the pages are some of the very best times and many of the very worst times I have ever experienced. I am not political. I pass no judgment on the rightness or wrongness of the war. My opinion on this subject belongs to me. 

The manuscript was purchased by Pen and Sword Publishing, a British company, and is available to pre-order through Amazon. It should be released in early December. I am very proud of what I’ve been able to do, and very grateful for the help I have received from writing groups and workshops, and friends who read my early drafts. I hope you’ll consider reading this.

Order Only the Light Moves on Amazon

Description from Amazon:

Only the Light Moves tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old US Army pilot who volunteered to fly covert S.O.G., or Studies and Observations Group, reconnaissance missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a region that came to represent not only the United States’ war with Vietnam, but also the “secret war” with Laos and Cambodia.

But this is not simply a war story; it is a love story about flying. Captain Francis A. Doherty spent every day for ten months above the jungle battlefield in a Cessna O-1 Bird Dog. The first all-metal fixed-wing aircraft ordered for and by the United States Army following the Army Air Forces’ separation from it in 1947, the single-engine Bird Dog was a liaison and observation aircraft. And for this role, it was completely unarmed.

It was from the cockpit of a Bird Dog that Captain Doherty observed this illusive war, perhaps searching out enemy troop movements or calling down waiting F-4 Phantoms to strike a new target. It was a war in which he followed his father’s footsteps in his dream to become a pilot, and where he learned a compassion that extended both to his comrades and the civilians caught in the middle of that terrible war.

In Only the Light Moves Captain Doherty only reveals the highs and lows of his year at war in Vietnam but expands beyond his time in the conflict. He explores the emotional struggle he and his comrades faced after they returned home, reconciliations with lost faith, and the incredible impact of war on families.

We are also given an insight into Francis’ subsequent journey to becoming a commercial airline pilot. His story makes no effort to glorify the violence that took the lives of so many. There are no broad stroke proclamations about the war, only a very personal, sensitive account of a terrible conflict seen through the eyes of a then young pilot in the air, illuminating the reality and the cost of when one’s country decides to go to war.

Frank Doherty also has a story in Vietnam to Western Airlines Volume II