war

The Second Tour is a Vietnam War novel based on the author's personal experience as a low-level grunt in the Marine Corps. Told as contemporary experimental fiction, it's the story of a murdered Vietnamese girl who comes back to haunt the narrator.

Andrea Staton, an Army Colonel, dedicates her career and her life, to finding the hidden doorway from Earth to the planet Amazon. She is expecting an advanced world that she can learn from, but she is surprised by what appears to be a primitive world that is at war with Gallegos, the closest planet to them.

After nearly a century of restless churning under the oppressive Roman Empire, Hebrew revolutionaries took up arms against the vaunted Roman legions; initial successes chased the Romans from Palestine but unleashed a brutal reprisal. In the spring of 70 CE, the legions set upon Jerusalem and raised their siege engines and ramparts and launched their catapults.

The LRRPs (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol) were the cavalry scouts of the Vietnamese conflict, traveling by helicopter rather than mustangs into remote and unfriendly territory. The mountainous jungles of the central highlands were especially inhospitable, filled with snakes and wild animals, and criss crossed with the tributaries of the Ho Chi Minh trail that lay hidden beneath the thick, triple-canopy jungle foliage. It was the job of small teams of LRRPs to penetrate the ridges and valleys of the rainforest to track and identify enemy activity.

It is a mystical story of warfare of that time with interesting characters. An elite force of catholic knights is ordered by the Pope to drive deep into enemy territory as far as modern-day Iran. The knights were the best trained and most discipline that the Vatican had at the time. The knights encounter many dangers along their expedition. The most dangerous group they encounter is a small group of female virgins from the region of Afghanistan. The knights are forced to battle the dammed of Hell, including Satan himself.

"All slaves have a story to tell. Millions will never get the chance due to death by hanging, lynching and any other forms of murderous torture that were used in those days. Now, I know stories about the Slavery War have been told over and over again, but this one hasn’t been because my great-grandmother was the only survivor of it in all her family. Meaning, she was the last one in my family to be a slave and still alive to tell the story.” ~Nakida