Tom Garvey, a member of the Green Berets, on patrol with his unit near the village of Buon Ya Soup in Vietnam in 1968. (Photo courtesy of Tom Garvey)

by Sue Ann Rybak

Tom Garvey, a member of the Green Berets who served as an A-Team leader in Vietnam in 1968, recalled bending down over the body of an enemy soldier only to discover he wore a St. Christopher medal like the one his mother had given him.

“Two Mothers praying in different languages to the same God to bring their sons home unharmed,” he wrote in his novel “Many Beaucoup Magics.” “Two sons wearing religious medals, trying to kill one another. In any war, Mothers are the ultimate victims.”

Garvey is the husband of Peggy Garvey, who owns Mango, 8442 Germantown Ave. in Chestnut Hill.

“Many Beaucoup Magics” is based on Garvey’s experiences in Vietnam during the summer of 1968. John McManus, the protagonist in the story is haunted by a morbid premonition, he has before shipping out to war. Browsing the magazine aisle in a pharmacy, he comes across a paperback book entitled “Gemini, 1968, by Sidney Omar, a day-by-day account of the coming year.

McManus, “irresistibly drawn to a possible look into his future,” flips to a random day – Aug. 17. The forecast for the day said the young soldier would face a “mystical burden of some sort.” It went on to say that “the day called for an unpremeditated act of courage, and that he would have to pass some cosmic test, otherwise suffer some dire consequences.”

The anecdote is factual. Garvey, who was born on June 2, 1943, admitted that the book – except for a few name changes and his own personal creative reconstruction of events – is a true story. Initially, he wrote the story in first person, but then later decided to write it in third person.

“I didn't want the reader to realize that the person telling the story would survive the things that were going on,” said Garvey, who grew up in Ridley Park in Delaware County.

He said he decided to name the main character John McManus after a good friend of his who died in 2004.

The oldest of six children, Garvey grew up listening to his uncles and father's friends talk about World War II. Despite attending Pennsylvania Military College (PMC) – now Widener University – at the time, he never planned to join the military.

“I was politically oblivious,” said Garvey, whose father struggled with the guilt of not having fought in World War II. Garvey wrote that his father, despite having a legitimate military deferment for work essential to the war effort, was “haunted by missing out on something that defined his generation.”

Sitting in an American History class at PMC one cold, rainy October morning, Garvey overheard two privileged white kids talking about the war. They said the war was a good thing for the economy and to stem Communism, but they shouldn't have to go. They thought that poor minority kids should fight this war.

He was stunned when one kid added that “It would thin our the herd.”

“They didn't care if they got killed off,” Garvey said. “After that, I just stood up and walked out. I left my coat and books on the desk. I walked in the rain through the streets of Chester to the recruiting office in the post office and volunteered on the spot. When I came home from college that night soaking wet, my mother said, 'What happened to you?'” And I said, ‘I joined the Army,’ and she almost fainted. They couldn't believe it.”

In January 1968, he arrived in Nha Trang, headquarters for the 5th Special Forces. In the book, Garvey describes Nha Trang as “a tropical bay filled with little jungle mountaintops that rose to form small islands rising out of unimaginably blue water. While sand and palm trees lined the shore.”

It was a “war in paradise.” It wasn't what Garvey, or his character McManus, expected.

Eventually, he found himself conducting special operations near the Ia Drang Valley, a place the Vietnamese called “The Valley of a Thousand Ghosts.” Prior to his unit's arrival, he said, “no combat operations had ever gone this close to the border prior to 1965, and when they did it was a disaster.” “The battle was catastrophic,” he added, “and literally thousands of mothers paid the ultimate price: their children would never come home.”

Retired U.S. Army Special Forces Major Jim Morris, who wrote two factual accounts of his experiences in Vietnam, “War Story” and “The Devil's Secret Name” called “Many Beaucoup Magics” a “great” book.

Morris, who received four Purple Hearts for his service in Vietnam, also helped write Disney's Children's movie entitled “Operation Dumbo Drop,” which is based on a true story that deals with a request made by Special Forces to Saigon USAID personnel to move four elephants by helicopter from Ban Me Thuot to a sawmill in Tra Bong to assist a group Montagnards, the indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

“I've spent seven years in New York publishing, most of it editing war books,” wrote Morris in an email to Garvey. “I probably read 1,500 or so. I can barely read one anymore. But yours is great.”

It took Garvey 47 years to write and complete “Many Beaucoup Magics,” which can be purchased at Mango or ordered online at Amazon.com for $9.99.