This is a story of healing and redemption.
“For anyone who wishes to fully examine that most emblematic of American wars, In the Year of the Rabbit is essential reading.”—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer-winning author of Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“Surprises abound! Go get it…you too, will be enthralled.”—Kev Richardson, Author of Pacific Paradox and My Red Cross
Cameraman Brendan Leary survived the ambush of the Big Buddha Bicycle Race—but Tukada, his star-crossed lover, did not.
So Leary returns to combat, and when his gunship is shot down, he survives again, hiking out of the jungle with Harley Baker, the guitar-playing door gunner he both loves and hates.
Leary is finally discharged but remains in Thailand, ordained as a Buddhist monk embarking on a pilgrimage through the wastelands of Laos, haunted by what locals call pii tai hong—the restless, unhappy ghosts of his doomed crewmates.
In the Year of the Rabbit honors three groups missing from accounts of the Vietnam War—the air commandos who risked death flying night after night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the active-duty airmen who risked prison by joining the GI antiwar movement, and the people of neutral Laos, whose lives and country were devastated.
“...captures the soul of an American Combat Cameraman...”—Colonel Frank A. Titus (USAF, Retired), former Instructor of International Humanitarian Law with the United Nations-New York
“...brings the reader into the hidden world of Buddhist monastic life with such skill that you get to live it... ”—Jason Siff, author of Unlearning Meditation and Seeking Nibbana in Sri Lanka
In the Year of the Rabbit continues Brendan Leary’s story, one that began with The Big Buddha Bicycle Race, a Silver Medalist for Literary Fiction with the Military Writers Society of America.