Patricia Murphy Minch

A typical “Army Brat,” by age nineteen, Patricia Murphy Minch had lived in twenty homes in half a dozen different states as well as in Europe and the Far East. Because her father, a U.S. Army officer, never “wasted” accrued vacation time, she’d also traveled extensively beyond those locales. With an insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge, Colonel Murphy sought to experience everything he read about in his many guidebooks. And where he went, the family went too.

An avid reader from a young age, Ms. Minch absorbed her father’s lust for life. In the early grades, she demonstrated an affinity for the written word and, encouraged by both parents, wrote fanciful childhood stories about the places they saw and the people they met. Imaginative and artistic by nature, she often illustrated her stories with sketches or photographs.

A National Merit Scholarship finalist in 1958, Ms. Minch first attended the University of Texas at El Paso and then the University of California at Berkeley.

Marriage and motherhood did not dampen her enthusiasm and creative nature. When her first child was assigned to a public kindergarten with limited resources, she organized fund-raisers, solicited donations, and marshaled work crews to correct faulty drainage, refurbish equipment, and landscape the playground in accordance with her own design. She collected books and drew posters to encourage reading in her child’s classroom.

As her children grew, in addition to remaining active in their school activities, she took specialized qualifying courses and then spent thirteen years as a self-employed editor for court reporters. The wide-ranging subject matter of depositions and court transcripts—everything from personal injury, medicine, will contests and family law to criminal matters of all types—added to her knowledge in many disparate fields, a bird’s-eye view into the larger world.

In retirement, Ms. Minch turned to woodworking, genealogy, gardening, and landscape design, and for a time became an antiques collector/dealer. But she never stopped writing. Spurred by an interest in California Gold Rush history, she wrote feature articles for her local newspaper and a book about a local gold miner who came to California from Rhode Island in 1849. She received an honorable mention for “Writing Paisley,” her very first entry into a national writing competition.

Her current book, The Luckiest Guerrilla: A True Tale of Love, War and the Army, had its genesis in an unexpected discovery in 2005. Following the death of her widowed mother, she came across two cardboard boxes in the dusty storeroom of her parents’ retirement home in Arizona. The boxes, unopened in decades, contained hundreds of her parents’ personal letters, official-looking documents, photographs, and mementoes covering the period 1937-1946. While she’d known since childhood that her father had been a guerrilla in North Luzon in the Philippines during World War II and had been missing in action and presumed dead for several years, the details of his service remained obscure. Now she had a peephole into the past. Fascinated, Ms. Minch transcribed the letters and read dozens of books her parents had collected about the war, but still questions remained. She broadened her research, only to discover some of the information contained in widely cited, more recent accounts was inaccurate or misleading. The Luckiest Guerrilla is her attempt to augment, clarify, and correct the official record while at the same time providing a readable and entertaining account of this obscure segment of World War II.

Patricia Murphy Minch currently lives with her husband, a retired college professor and Air Force veteran, in Northern California.

Information regarding this book and her other writings can be found at patriciaminch.com. Contact her at guerrilladaughter@gmail.com.