John Michael Finn was a professor of physics at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. When he was a graduate student, he was drafted and sent with the Fourth Infantry Division of the U.S. Army to the Central Highlands of Vietnam for two years. His book Ghost Tracks is a collection of flashbacks that he put into historical context and on which he had reflected for thirty years. Sent first as a rifleman, he was later assigned to the Public Information Office. He was the author of more than ninety scholarly papers on nuclear physics, as well as numerous presentations at national and international physics conferences.