Thomas Happer Taylor

His older brother, John Maxwell Taylor (Jack) was born May 3, 1930.

Soon after his birth, the family moved to Tokyo, where his father, a fluent Japanese linguist, was military attaché.

During World War II, while his father served in North Africa, Taylor and his older brother lived in Fort Bragg, NC, and Arlington, VA, where Mrs. Taylor worked for the Office of Price Administration (OPA) in doling out gasoline ration cards.

Thomas Happer Taylor (December 11, 1934 – October 1, 2017 ) was a highly-decorated veteran of the United States Army, a military historian, an author of seven books, and a champion triathlete.

He served in Vietnam and followed in the footsteps of his father, General Maxwell Taylor.

Taylor was born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the second son of Lydia Happer and Maxwell Davenport Taylor.

Two company commanders were casualties in that battle, and Taylor inherited B Company, 2nd Battalion, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, called "Strike Force."

Although "parachute" was in the group's name, the soldiers used helicopters exclusively.

Taylor was awarded the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars for valor and the Purple Heart, the latter involving a wound that ended his command of B Company.

After attending high school in Berlin following the Berlin Blockade, Taylor returned to the US, where he graduated from St Albans in Washington, DC He then matriculated to West Point from which he graduated in 1960.

His father remarked about Taylor's undergraduate education: "He did something at the Academy that I could never do. He made the choir."

At the time of his death, he was married to the former Pamela Borgfeldt for 49 years.

After a period in the Special Forces and in the infantry, Taylor volunteered for service in South Vietnam, but was not permitted to begin his tour of duty there until his father Maxwell Taylor completed his service as Ambassador to South Vietnam.

To him, being a Vietnam vet in Berkeley in the 1960s was "like facing the Viet Cong on a second front."

As a teaching assistant his classes were disrupted by window shattering rocks thrown by protestors shouting "War criminal!"

His classes consequently were moved to upper floors.

He arrived in Vietnam as a captain in July 1965, joining the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, (the "Screaming Eagles") which his father had commanded in World War II.

Taylor's first assignment was as the intelligence officer of his brigade.

His commander had felt that his Special Forces training would be an advantage in combatting guerrillas, and this proved to be true.

In September 1965, Taylor participated in the first encounter between a U.S. battalion and a Viet Cong main force battalion.

After returning to the U.S., Taylor wrote A-18 (Crown Publications, 1967) a novel about a Special Forces raid to kill Ho Chi Minh.

Because he was still in the Army, Taylor was subject to Pentagon censorship.

Despite the censors' objection to the author's depiction of sexual seduction, "something unbecoming for an officer to do," A-18 led to a fellowship to the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont.

Eager to take on civilian subjects, Taylor decided to study sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1970 Taylor wrote A Piece of This Country (W. W. Norton) about a black sergeant who found in Vietnam the respect that he was unable to achieve at home.

The book received many positive reviews.

Publishers Weekly called it "a powerful novel."

Writing in The New York Times, Marin Levin observed, "The Byzantine complexities of the Vietnam war are brilliantly sifted in this stunning history of a siege."

The novel, identified by Ken Lopez as one of the 25 best books about the Vietnam War, earned Taylor the George E. Crothers Literary Prize awarded annually by UC Berkeley.

Intermittent employment after graduate school turned Taylor's attention to remunerative prospects in law.

Not wishing to rely so much on his wife, Pamela, a Pan Am stewardess, after he earned a master's degree in sociology, Taylor entered the Hastings College of Law at the University of California in San Francisco.

He was admitted to the State Bar of California in July, 1978.

Graduation led to a legal job with Bechtel, the engineering/construction giant whose best paying jobs were in Saudi Arabia.

There, one of the contracts that Taylor negotiated was with the Bin Laden Group, which was building a city from scratch on the Persian Gulf.

When five of his colleagues were arrested for consuming alcohol, Taylor had to learn elements of sharia law to handle their case.

Meanwhile, he wrote Born of War (McGraw-Hill), a historical novel about Orde Wingate, the controversial British officer who defeated the Italians in Ethiopia and led the famous Chindits in Burma during World War II.

Library Journal commented that the book provided "good historical background in a variety of settings" and that it was "smoothly written."

Born of War was optioned several times by Hollywood executives but was never produced.

In 1982, Taylor's Vietnam past returned in the person of his Vietnamese interpreter, Ben Cai Lam, whose true story of imprisonment and escape rivaled that of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, protagonist of The Killing Fields.

Taylor told the story of Ben Cai Lam in his first nonfiction book, Where the Orange Blooms (McGraw-Hill, 1989).