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Clearly, the nature of the stories in Chains of the Cosmic Wanderer: A Matter of Significance has already told you much about the author. R.W. Murphy is, for the most part, the person you have seen portrayed. He does indeed consider himself a “redneck-Yankee” with one foot on each side of the Mason-Dixon Line. His first work reflected that in semi-realistic stories.
However, Murphy also has a serious side. For forty years he has been involved with the healthcare side of employee benefits. He has first hand knowledge of virtually every cost control initiative that has been rolled out since 1980. As such, he has felt compelled to pen a very short book on that subject in between his extensive novel work. He has just published "Bending the Curve: An American Healthcare Imperative." He indicates that he made it a length that could be read in less than two hours and priced the ebook version at the cost of a couple of beers.
Mr. Murphy has indeed been a regular, commissioned, U.S. Naval Officer. At last count he has made eighteen trans-oceanic crossings. Fourteen of those were made while on orders for the Navy, seven in ships and seven in aircraft. He has been on every continent but two: Australia and Antarctica. When assigned to Viet Nam in 1972 he was actually only an NROTC midshipman. His commissioning and orders to Africa occurred the next year. He did hold the extremely high security clearances to which his stories refer. Most of the intelligence related tales are based on actual experience. The seriousness of ASW work and nuclear weapons deployment he discusses are also based on real events. Fortunately, the author indicates that, today, the tactical nuclear weapons have been removed from small ships and those deliberations no longer occur with junior officers.
Subsequent to the Navy, he did, in fact, receive an MBA at the University of North Florida. He was also subsequently offered a PhD candidate position by another Florida university in South Florida which he was forced to decline. The law school admission acceptance was to the Stetson University School of Law for a spring semester seat. He was forced to pass on that seat due to the Navy refusing a two week cut on his obligated service. The Harvard course, Skills for the New World of Health Care, with the majority of surgeon students to which he refers, did indeed occur in 2004.
Right out of graduate school, he went to work for a large commercial fishing boat manufacturer in St. Augustine, Florida. Unfortunately, the bottom fell out of the new boat market when the U.S. government eliminated subsidies in the early 1980s. As a result, he subsequently went to work at a major health insurance company. In that capacity, he was assigned to Jacksonville, Nashville, Philadelphia, and ultimately Miami where he was on a new market entry team for an emerging, cutting-edge product. The Miami assignment followed feasibility study work related to the same product in several major US cities while based in Philadelphia. The instability of the health insurance business ultimately led to him working for several employers in South Florida. His depth of knowledge regarding Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Key West and South Florida in general, comes from fifteen years living in that region. He is also a diving instructor and has made many of the Mexican trips upon which his stories are based, as well as thousands of other dives. In addition, he participated as an underwater photographer for the Cousteau Society’s Project Ocean Search 1990 project in Fiji.
Since 1995, Mr. Murphy has been an independent broker/consultant, part-time Master Scuba Diver Trainer with PADI (i.e., the Professional Association of Dive Instructors) and aspiring writer. Over the years, he has had several professional pieces pertaining to the healthcare delivery system published by various technical journals.
Lastly, Mr. Murphy presently offers profound assurances to those who have read Chains that the Black Appendix diary, in fact, does not exist, in a Miami vault or elsewhere (although it is again referenced in CCW: The Action Manifesto. He avers that it is no more than an imaginative construction. Those who know him best have asked that you be reminded to be forewarned when he is so forthcoming! If he suddenly goes to the refrigerator vegetable bin with a sardonic smile on his face, one should consider all bets regarding veracity off! [Sorry to non-readers for the inside baseball allusion to a carrot. Check it out!]
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