But he also finds treasure in the story of his early life. His poverty-stricken grade-school years, in the 1950s, with a dysfunctional family always on the move, are narrated in “Timmy: A Boy, An Era, A Family’s Desperate Journey,” part of the “A Mile Beyond” series.
The second in the series, “Dangle Him Purposely: An Autobiographical Novel” ($13.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), brings Tim into the 1960s and the Vietnam War era as his family settles in Chico. Told in the third person, the story divides sharply in two; hijinks, fistfights, and sexual escapades fill Part I, “Vignettes of Adolescence.”
Ah, Chico. “By 1959, the year Tim’s family arrived, a smug optimism pervaded the town. A big election filled the airwaves with Camelot approaching, Y.A. Tittle and John Brodie were throwing for the 49ers, and rock and roll rumbled over KPAY and KHSL.”
Part II, “War and Ruminations,” brings Tim to a strange battlefield; though he yearns for direct combat, his work with psyops means befriending local villagers and showing them cartoons and John Wayne movies. In this part the hijinks, fistfights, and sexual escapades are shrouded in Tim’s first-hand experience of the idiocy of the war. Friends die trying to make inconsequential gains. Locals plead with the Americans not to abandon them; Tim knows they will.
“Then came snapshots of recent memory—of the legless ARVN’s belly oozing, of dead American boys laid out like lumber, of ducking from crackling AKs, of . . . emotions at full throttle, colliding like atoms in a particle accelerator. His reaction was swift and uncaring.”
O’Neill cautions readers not to look for a happy ending, though toward Tim’s time of discharge he is reading the classics and mulling some kind of legal career. In elegant, riveting, sometimes graphic prose, O’Neill chronicles how he became himself, the result of all that dangling.
