Thirteen Months: War Memoir with Love

Mike Murray

Grace – This is a hell of a collection of stories, the sweetest and most harrowing book I have read. Mike Murray is a friend, a former U.S. Marine now living in Los Angeles. His stories, lifted from real-life experience, tell the tales of a small unit of marines deployed in Vietnamese villages on the battlelines of war. Mike’s writing conveys humanity with no ego, no self-aggrandizement, no false humility. His work echoes – or maybe its his work I now hear echoing in the works of others – with the best of his literary predecessors: the clarity of Hemingway, the humanity (there’s that word again!) of Vonnegut, the candor and menace of Remarque, and, naturally, the surreal beauty and horror of O’Brien and Heineman. None of these associations entered my mind as I read “Thirteen Months.” I was too transfixed and “locked” into the stories with their on-edge, heart-pounding times under fire, restful times under the sun, playful times with Joe and Be, Vietnamese children growing up tragically quick. “Thirteen Months” was brought to life as a printed book thanks to Mike Murray’s friend Khanh, the daughter of Sy Doan, one of Vietnam’s greatest living writers.