Military Legal

Celebrating the people who honor interpreting, enforcing, and modifying that meaning, within the Rule of Law, though, is very much my intent. For those reasons, and another, Upholding the Constitution as a title, fit these categories of poems better than simply saying poems for "Legal" or "Firefighters" or "Law Enforcement."

Heroes is the second story in the Harry Waters series and the immediate sequel to Islands of No Return. Sometimes, whatever you do, the world conspires against you. In Heroes we find Harry fighting for his freedom, his career, against alcoholism, and to preserve what is left of his nightmare-ravaged sanity. On trial for murdering his best friend, Harry stands condemned by the man who was responsible for leaving his men to die in the deserts of Iraq. And worse, damned by the testimony of the woman he loves.

During his fourth tour in Iraq, Retired Captain Ryan Bennington, like many soldiers of his time, was fighting a faceless enemy. A split-second decision could mean the difference between killing an innocent civilian or losing an entire platoon to a suicide bomber. Ryan survives the war and comes home to conquer PTSD and chronic employment, only to be arrested for following the orders of his commander.

Much has been written about America's war in Vietnam, and an enduring and troubling subtext is the composition of the body of soldiers that made up the US troop deployment: from the initially well-trained and disciplined group of largely elite units that served in the mid-sixties to what has been termed an "armed mob" by the end of that decade and into the early 1970s.