John Tripp

John Tripp was born in England on the 16th of December 1944 on the night of Germany’s attack on the Ardennes Forest, where his father Captain William Neil Tripp fought as a combat engineer in the RCEME in the British Second Army.He was brought to Canada as a two-year-old boy. His father died of PTSD on his birthday 1948. John grew up as an orphan in Saskatchewan and didn’t meet his mother until 1964 when he joined the Australian forces fighting in Vietnam. He was decorated with the General Service Medal with Vietnam clasp for his part in the fighting around the Mekong Delta.After leaving the service in 1968, he lived homeless on the streets of Vancouver working to help his contemporaries, providing first aid and feeding the homeless he was on intimate terms with through a Vancouver charity called Kool Aid.He never attended university and always wished he could have afforded to go; however, he did work in the hotel and bar industry as a bartender, a bodyguard, and maître d until attending Caribou College in Kamloops, BC, where he studied building construction and went on to work 40 years in the construction industry, first starting as a cabinetmaker and finishing as a project manager.He has a wife and two children in British Columbia but lives alone as a religious recluse, writing to express both feelings and memories and playing his guitars for entertainment between writing and editing. He has been writing for fourteen years.