On the first Monday in November 1972, Francis Doherty found himself facing a personnel manager for Western Airlines. He’d spent close to a year flying Army classified missions over Laos and Cambodia in a single-engined Cessna “Bird Dog,” watching the body bags of Special Forces operators stack up at his base while the roster of his fellow pilots continued to attenuate via the seemingly random finger of death from below, AK-47s and Chinese 51-caliber anti-aircraft rifles punching holes in wings, cockpits, bodies, and faces. Now, he wanted to do something very different: hop a Boeing 737 jet from city to city in a job that his father, a 747 pilot during the glamor years at TWA, had nonetheless self-deprecatingly described as being “little more than a bus driver.”
The manager looked him over and said, “Don’t tell me about all your medals or that you got shot at. I don’t care about that.” As it turned out, the fellow was all bark and no bite. Doherty was immediately hired at Western and would spend his career flying there and then for Delta after the two airlines merged. Yet it’s hard to read Only The Light Moves, the broad-ranging autobiography published in 2023 after several years of work with various writing mentors and groups, without concluding that he took the words of that personnel manager permanently to heart.
Perhaps too much so, because this book is at its most entertaining when the author is recounting time spent in the Bird Dog. He volunteers to fly missions against an enemy that can rebuild a destroyed bridge overnight, knock helicopters out of the sky seemingly at will, and even knows his name, taunting him from the ground via his own radio. Doherty takes off and lands in the dark without lights or beacons to guide him, regularly puts his Cessna through loops and spins it was never meant to endure, and, in one memorable interlude, “captures” a soldier on the ground by flying circles around him while taking potshots in his direction with a .38 revolver until the Hueys can arrive. Having confessed to a youthful and egotistical desire to be “the whole Lafayette Escadrille,” he then recounts a slow-motion flying war that would not have been unfamiliar to those famed First World War aviators, even as the Phantoms and Skyraiders scream overhead and deliver death to the targets Doherty has marked with smoke rockets. It’s easy to imagine a very good movie being made from the flying sections, which altogether comprise about half of Only The Light Moves.
The other half is something else entirely, part bildungsroman and part self-indulgence, touching on matters as diverse as childhood sexual abuse, the treatment accorded Vietnam veterans as they returned from the war, and the joy of reconnecting with one’s first love after a lifetime spent apart. All of this can be skimmed or even skipped by readers who are merely interested in the Catch-22 insanity of using 110-mph propeller planes to fight a war in 1970. But to do so would be like searching Trout Fishing In America for tips on tying a fly — you’re missing almost the entire point.
At its heart, this is a book about the obligations we incur, both between family members and among comrades in arms. Doherty becomes a pilot because his largely distant and silent father takes him on a trip in the cockpit of a TWA Super Constellation, but he also hides the decision to enlist from his family until it’s too late for them to object. “I didn’t raise you for this,” his mother sobs, but never does Doherty suggest that he had been raised for anything else. In what is perhaps the book’s defining moment, the author flies to the Air Force base in Pleiku so he can get on a high-powered radio and have a conversation with his father, who is flying overhead in his TWA 747. They have just a few moments to speak, and no one is quite sure what to say. When Doherty comes back home, he’s unable to talk about what he did on his classified missions — but neither is anyone particularly anxious to hear about them, so it’s easy to stay quiet. Not until his grandchildren begin their halting inquiries into his Vietnam service does Doherty come to believe that his is a story that should be told, if only so they can have a larger and more accurate understanding of him than he had of his own parents or grandparents.
Given the constant, if spectral, presence of Francis Doherty Sr. throughout Only The Light Moves, it’s appropriate that I should have become familiar with the book via my own father, a decorated combat Marine who went to high school with the author and who served in Vietnam around the same time. In a letter recommending the book, he laconically noted, “If you’ve seen one firefight, you’ve seen them all. ... There are countless books written on war, and I have read my share. Most tell a story, or try to create a narrative extolling or damning the virtues of war. Very few, in my opinion, challenge the impact that violent combat has on the participants. It’s too often a discussion of tactics and storming beaches.”
There is no bravado in this book. The author is constantly afraid: of the bullets that pepper his Cessna, of the impersonal decisions made by his superiors that put him in harm’s way for no measurable gain. After realizing that his air base has almost no security, he starts checking his plane every morning for improvised booby traps or explosives. His fellow pilots in what the Special Forces soldiers call the “Sneaky Pete Air Force” are terrified as well. There’s a lovely but sorrowful interlude in which Doherty repeatedly comes across another Bird Dog that is just doing random aerobatics over safe territory rather than engaging with the enemy. Should he report the pilot for cowardice even though he desperately wants to spend his own days doing the same thing? What does he owe a man who, like him, volunteered for this duty — and what does that man owe him in return? Before he can make a decision, the other pilot finds him in the mess hall — and what happens next is nothing you’ll find between the covers of any conventionally jingoistic air combat memoir.
My son, who is a 15-year-old lieutenant in the Civil Air Patrol, just finished reading Forever Flying by the late Bob Hoover. It’s the right book for a young pilot to read, being filled with bleeding-edge machinery and derring-do escapades. But it, perhaps purposely, fails to convey the full human experience of serving in combat. That, by contrast, is where Only The Light Moves truly excels. The greatest lesson it teaches is that soldiers and airmen are, first and foremost, ordinary people. Neither a propaganda poster for service nor a cynical dismissal of it, Francis Doherty’s book instead is a genuine service to generations for whom the Vietnam War will be as historically distant as the Lafayette Escadrille.
It’s also a love story, one that Hoover would have recognized because the truest object of the author’s affection is flight itself. On his final day before mandatory retirement as a Delta captain, Doherty ignores the regulations , disables the autopilot, and flies the 767 the whole way on his own. Then he asks the flight attendants to keep everyone seated until he can leave the plane. “Otherwise,” he admits, “the passengers will see me crying.” In retrospect, it’s obvious that the personnel manager at Western Airlines made the correct decision. Francis Doherty was the right man for the job, both as a covert combat pilot and as someone who could be trusted to carry hundreds of souls through a turbulent sky again and again. Telling his own story has been, not to put too fine a point on it, Doherty’s final job — and in this, too, he has excelled.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.
Local News
Comments / 0