Book Spotlight - Combat

 Combat is the book I wasn't sure I would be able to finish. When I wrote Survivor the struggle was being open enough to share my story, even a fictionalized version of it, with the world. Fish I worked on and it made me emotional because I felt so much for the young girl at the center of the conflicts within the book. Crash I shared last week was difficult because I saw the main character as a secondary and found it difficult to connect with him for a long time. But Combat was a different animal altogether.

When people discuss PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, most times they are referring to someone in the military. They are by far the largest group recognized with the symptoms of the syndrome and most statistics are from that group including the twenty two veterans per day on average that commit suicide because of PTSD. The problem with Combat was that I don't have any military experience or close connection in my life. Those who know me might question that because members of my family served and my husband in a veteran but my family never discussed anything and my husband doesn't suffer from PTSD nor did he serve in combat directly. He has shared the experiences he can but they aren't related to what happened in the book.

Instead I reached out to local groups and explained what I was working on and asked if anyone would be willing to talk to me about their experience and how it effected them. Understandably, not many took me up on it. There were a couple men who met me for coffee and talked about what they had seen and done. My goal was to make the book believable enough to have it make sense but not so realistic it would trigger someone. I ran the ideas and sections of the story by these men at every step and was able to take their feedback to find a balance that would work. I know there are so many elements I didn't include and a number of issues I did not address. It was hard working to tell a story I couldn't relate to and also trying to use research to do justice to what I learned from these brave men who were willing to open up about such painful memories in order to give me a tiny glance into their world.

I am grateful to those that helped and will always respect their request to stay anonymous. I wish I could publicly thank them and find a way to support them in their journeys as they work to recover and find where they fit into the world they now occupy. I hope I showed them the respect they deserve and represented their world in a way that may show others like me even the smallest glimpse of a world we are lucky to never experience for ourselves.