Down Along the Piney by John Mort


John Mort, one of America’s premier storytellers, served in the Vietnam War with the First Cavalry Division. His story, “Hog Whisperer,” received the 2013 Spur Award for best short story from the Western Writers of America.  Mort writes edge-of the seat fictional masterpieces, presenting characters for us to root for and cherish, as well as the other kind. They are all-American people who breathe on the page—people we wish we knew, people we do know, or people we are happy we have yet to encounter.

Mort’s latest collection, Down Along the Piney: Ozark Stories (University of Notre Dame Press, 186 pp., $50, hardcover; $20, paper) contains thirteen fine stories, including “Hog Whisperer.” Some of these tales are so lively and dense that it’s difficult to believe they aren’t novels as so much happens in the course of each story. “Hog Whisperer” is one of those stellar stories.

Another one that is rich and full of the intent and accomplishment of a novel is “Pitchblende,” the first in the collection. We are introduced by the narrator to his father, known as “the Colonel,” in the first paragraph. He is a larger-than-life character who intends to run the lives of his entire family. His wife is not up for that, so she departs.

The Colonel was gone during most of that family’s life, serving in various wars around the planet. He disgraced himself—or thought he did—in the Korean War, after which his career was as good as over due to events that were beyond his control. That is often the nature of war. No more promotions were there, so the old man left the military and spent the rest of his life trying to strike it rich finding uranium in the form of pitchblende.

He dug big holes in the ground with his Cat, which was as close to his old Sherman tank as he could get on his property, which becomes known as Bald Mountain because of what he and his Cat do to the surface of the land and to the trees.

My favorite sentence in this story is: “That’s because they ain’t no uranium in Missouri.” Just sticky, old soft coal that’s worthless.


John Mort

The story’s hero graduated from high school, joined the Army, and learned to fly helicopters.

“I was a warrant officer,” he says. “I was a pilot, and twice I was shot down. Who knows why, but the bullets flew all around me, and I was never touched.”

There’s lots of war in the stories in this fine book, including the Vietnam War. “Take the Man Out and Shoot Him” alone is worth the price of admission.

If you have even the vaguest love of fine short stories or want to read great stories about people and war, buy this book. It will not disappoint.

—David Willson

The Illegal by John Mort

John Mort served as an infantryman, often walking point, with the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam in 1969-70. He has written several worthy works out of that war experience, including the novel Soldier in Paradise, which won the W.Y. Boyd Award for best military fiction in 1999.

His latest novel, The Illegal (Southeast Missouri State University, 270 pp., $15, paper), is not directly about the Vietnam War, but there is a vividly portrayed Vietnam veteran in the book, a man named Abraham Potts, “a bald irritable black man bound to a wheelchair,” as Mort describes him.

“I’m a disabled veteran,” the novel’s main character, Mario Oliveros, says. He goes on to say: “Senor Abraham Potts had reason to be angry, but that did not make him wise.”  That is a typical observation from Oliveros, who is always riveting, from the first page until the last. Vietnam veterans are a recurring leitmotif in this novel.

John Mort

Mario Oliveros fully inhabits this book, which often seems less contemporary than post-apocalyptic in tone and content. He is on the run for most of the novel, trying to make it as in illegal in America after being left for dead in the river that separates the United States and Mexico. Through no fault of his own, he is a soldier without a country, dead in Mexico, and not acknowledged to be a person in America.

Our hero battles to find existence and love in the United States, a country that is a mystery to him even though he speaks excellent English and is an educated man. His willingness to do anything to survive, including to wander forty days in the desert wilderness with a toe eaten off by a boar hog, insures that he is not going to fail in America.

His journey shows us the underbelly of the American Dream. And, indeed, sometimes it seems all underbelly. He sleeps under bridges and steals clothes to keep from having to wander naked.

Hogs play a large part in this book, and so does Walmart. In fact, Walmart plays such a large role that the store almost figures as one of the main characters.

Mort does a brilliant job making this book engrossing and often exciting. He is brilliant at creating characters the reader roots for—as well as characters we don’t root for. I was sad when the book ended and I could no longer follow Mario Oliveros’s odyssey.

I’d love to read another novel about him. I wonder how he will do in Canada—yet another mysterious country to figure out. Good luck to him.

—David Willson


Don’t Mean Nothin: Vietnam War Stories by John Mort

















—David Willson