Look and Listen

Biography

Like his protagonist in his first novel Point Deception Jim Gilliam ran away from home to join the Coast Guard at the tender age of 14. He had his share of adventures in the Coast Guard, but was medically retired after being struck by a DWI driver in 1966. He knocked around for a few years before enrolling at University of Houston then transferring to the Baylor College of Medicine Physician Assistant Program graduating in 1974. In 1978 he entered on active duty with the Army as an airborne combat physician assistant. He left the Army in 1986, to practice as a surgical physician assistant in Philadelphia, Wilmington, DE, and New York state. In 2001 he joined the Navy Military Sealift Command as a civilian mariner physician assistant. He started writing his first novel Point Deception on a long deployment to the Persian Gulf. He retired from MSC in February 2010 and now lives with his wife Laura in Warwick, NY where he is presently writing the sequel to Point Deception, titled: The Campeche Reprisal.

Inspiration

Jim Gilliam started his novel Point Deception as a fictionalized autobiography which, almost immediately, became a Coast Guard story dedicated to the men and women of our nation's smallest, oldest, and proudest sea service. It is a story that needed to be told. For instance, few people know that the Coast Guard was involved in Vietnam. The truth is that the Coast Guard has been, and continues to be, involved in every armed conflict that America has been involved in since its inception as the Revenue Marine in August of 1790.