Twelve and Twenty - A Vietnam War Novel

Book excerpt: The title connotes the tour of duty for a US Marine in Vietnam, for twelve months and twenty days. PFC Sean P. O’Hara embarks upon an adventure that would change his life forever. Twelve and Twenty is a riveting novel that takes place in the jungles of Southeast Asia and the quagmire of the Vietnam War. In a graphic and haunting naturalistic style, James Toomey adroitly tells the story of the madness of war and the paradox of valor in the early summer of 1968 in the Republic of Vietnam. With great skill, Colonel Toomey has created a page-turner. It reveals the arduous and sometimes horrific life of an infantry marine serving his country in a sustained and unpopular ground war. That war changed the country, and that change was not for the better. The book honestly and graphically presents the minute-to-minute, day-to-day, week-to-week dichotomy of insipid drudgery and violent combat that almost instantaneously transforms an Ivy League candidate into a highly trained, coldhearted killing machine. The psychological scars of these hellacious 385 days in 1968 and 1969 will never go away. O’Hara, during the course of his tour, is given a ribald and Mephistophelian education in life that he never would receive at Harvard. A macabre curriculum that included the sight of his fellow marines blown to bits; innocent indigenous villagers tortured by their own countrymen; commercial lust sold by adolescent prostitutes in Bangkok, Thailand. Lastly the ultimate, final examination, which is the manic-depressive phenomenon of an otherwise kind and gentle person having to kill other human beings to survive. O’Hara passed the exam physically but not mentally, and he will never be the same again! There is no glory in war, only heartache and despair.