As someone who has not read a ton of "war related" books, I did enjoy this one. However, I do think it is meant for a very specific audience - and there is nothing wrong with that at all. Those who are interested in the Vietnam war and also religion would be fascinated by the story that was told. I do wish there was a little bit more character development - especially with the Holy Man. Mainly because we never truly learn why exactly he left the priesthood to pursue other holy ideals. It was an interesting read overall.

To Hunt a Holy Man by Michael Fletcher is a wonderful novel that related to my personal history, and my past and present interests. It expanded my current view of the world although I have had this view for decades.

The novel is about an officer in the US Army Military Police (MP) in Vietnam in 1971. First Lieutenant Frank X. Coletrane, Cole, enlisted in the Army and had his initial training at Fort Ord, California. That was my location of training and military specialty in 1971, except I was an enlisted man sent to Heidelberg Germany and later to Berlin never deployed to Vietnam. Fletcher’s knowledge of military jargon and attitudes is true to the military lives we lived in the early 1970s. I was raised a Catholic like Cole.

Cole’s MP mission was to go out in the field to capture and arrest deserters from wartime Vietnam. Thailand had R&R centers for soldiers that provided a break from their duties in Vietnam. On occasion, some military personnel would fail to return from R&R and desert in Thailand.

Cole is assigned a desertion case of a Catholic Chaplain, Father Mordechai Goodcut, who decided he had enough of the violence and evil of War and stayed in Thailand after his R&R to join the holy men in a remote Thai Temple. Cole eagerly sets out to track the Captain down and bring him back to the war zone. He must be accompanied by a Thai police officer to provide translations and arrest the deserter. Cole is a loner who is proud that he has never before failed in such an assignment. He resents the mandatory association with the Thai officer, Major Panthip Siriwongdee, but carries on with his mission. Deserters anger Cole because of his hatred of their immoral dereliction of duty, abandoning fellow warriors who are in harm’s way. His Catholic upbringing has left him with an undercurrent of righteous belief in action.

The novel becomes a wonderful confluence of war and peace, Catholicism and Buddhism, and individual violence and insight, as Cole enters the country and religious culture of Thailand. The fates of Cole, Mordechai, and Panthip play out in the fabled confluence of the Ping and Mun rivers near Ubon and the Bowonniwet Buddhist Temple above the waters.

What is the holiest characteristic in both religions that can resolve the dilemma of hunter and prey in a peaceful country so close to an international warzone? I enjoyed very much reading this well-written, informative, emotionally, and spiritually powerful novel. ( )

This is the book that I chose to accompany me on my Thanksgiving travels. It was a very good decision. The story centers on a hard-nosed military man charged with
returning an AWOL priest back to Vietnam to face charges. The journey leads to unexpected physical and spiritual places. The last few chapters contain a beauty that I am not going to attempt to explain, but which will stay with me. Highly recommend.

My thanks to the author, Michael Fletcher, for my copy of this book. ( )

Let me get the negatives out of the way: i) there are some typos, such as "waive" for "wave", no apostrophe for possessives (at times), and "tenant" for "tenet", just to name a few; ii) as the rear cover mentions, there is "edgy language", with swearing on almost every page whenever the main character, Lt. Coltrane, is involved. This swearing could have been cut down to make it more bearable; and iii) some parts of the plot are left unexplained, like why his friend would do something terrible.

But the positives far outweigh the negatives. Michael Fletcher knows how to tell a story, and tell it well--his prose and storytelling got me involved in the story even when I flinched at the language. The title was intriguing, and was one of the reasons why I wanted a copy of the story. Indeed, this is Lt. Coltrane's hunt for a holy man, an army priest who has gone AWOL, but it becomes actually a metaphor for his own spiritual hunt for "holiness", so to speak. It becomes a story about his transformation from harsh, swearing military bounty hunter to a gentler, forgiven and forgiving man. The descriptions of the setting show that Fletcher knew or knows this area of Thailand well, and, even more so, he knows the culture and the language well, giving the story an authentic touch. I was pleasantly surprised by this story, with its spiritual underpinnings to a war story. ( )

Fletcher's book is a well-intentioned novel, but it falls somewhere short of its goals, that is to say, to show the processes of transformation on its three main characters. Descriptions of the setting abound, but what is lacking is a description - or a presentation - of the forces that push the characters to change. There's little to nothing that helps the reader understand why father Goodcut leaves both the priesthood and the army, to end up as a novice in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. The same can be said about Lt. Coltrane and his switch from walking "military cowboy" stereotype to a redeemed Catholic man. Perhaps, the more unintelligible transformation is that of Major Panthip, a US born and educated Thai police officer who while being initially adverse to Lt. Coltrane and everything he represents, without much of a rationale ends up abandoning her stance and falling for him.
In some ways, the novel reads like a draft of what could be, if instead of focusing on descriptions of Thailand, its geography and its culture, the text were to concentrate on the actual inner life of the characters, particularly given the fact that they are all, to a degree, placed in a setting to which they do not belong. It does not help either, that the time line feels at times, rushed.

All that said, the novel offers readers a glimpse of a writer who, given the time and the theme, can surprise them with a compelling and cohesive narrative.