Company of Stone: A Memoir with John Rixey Moore

John Rixey Moore is the product of two old southern families from Virginia and South Carolina, but he grew up in the bi-lingual environment of the oil fields in Venezuela where his father worked as a petroleum engineer.

He graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Philosophy at the height of the Vietnam War and chose to enlist in the military rather than risk the consequences of waiting for the draft. He joined the Special Forces and served in Vietnam where he ran deep penetration interdiction and assassination missions for the CIA into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam until he was wounded the third time and sent home.

Soon after leaving the dig, he found shelter in a monastery from a series of winter storms that kept him inside for several weeks, and by the time the weather cleared, he had found a way to help the kitchen staff in the monastery scullery.  During this time and in this quiet place, he was able to begin putting the war behind him. Along with his work both within and around the 14th able to spend many hours in the library with its huge collection of old books and coal burning fire places. He has written about some of the unusual personalities he encountered there.

His acting career eventually took him to California, where he lives, writes, studies lines, and practices the fiddle in the mountains north of Los Angeles and drives into the city for business. He runs a writers group that meets each week in Studio City, and he has had two memoirs published. One, called Hostage of Paradox, is an account of the terrible months he served in Special Operations in Southeast Asia, and the second, called Company of Stone, is about his time in the monastery and then the gold mine.