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Forty years after I left the Marine Corp I had quadruple bypass heart surgery. As I was lying in the recovery room after surgery, I realized I had managed to bottle up some very bad memories from the Marine Corp and it was time to finally let it all out. Up to this time, my wife and family only knew I had been in the Marine Corp, that I had been stationed for a while in Okinawa and that I had attended Annapolis with a presidential appointment.
What they didn’t know is why I got the presidential appointment. I decided then to finally unload on my wife and daughter (who was then 38 years old) all the horrible crap that I did and what I had been through. When I met my wife shortly after my discharge, there no way in hell she would have dated me, let alone marry me, if she knew the truth. So I never told her and I never told anyone else except my father-in-law, who was a retired Airforce officer.
Once I told my wife and daughter some of the details they said that I should write it all down and hopefully get it all off my chest and expunge some of my ongoing demons. So that is what I did and then I put it all away in a file for posterity.
I thought about publishing it all online, but two things stopped me; that I had twice signed secrecy agreements forbidding me from making any disclosure of my activities in Laos and North Vietnam and second my fear that I might be arrested for multiple counts of murder.
In 2015 someone suggested that I fictionalize it and turn it into a novel and that is what I have done. With their reviews and suggestions on how to proceed from one friend that was a CIA station chief in Moscow and another that was head of the FBI’s office in London I have weaved my exploits into ORDERS are ORDERS, a fictional novel based on the actual facts.
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