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Brotherkeeper
Forging friendships, facing suicide, testing the boundaries of love, and taking strong medicine in order to confront the past and discover their future, they travel juxtaposed in time, hidden in the jungles of Nam, the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq surrounded by Americana as they travel down the streets of a small U.S. town arriving on a Native American Reservation in Arizona. Could it be where warriors of all kinds are always welcomed home? Brotherkeeper, a compelling fictional novel about three military families, invites the reader to the battlegrounds and dinner tables of our returning veterans to explore their anguish and triumphs as they navigate re-entry into civilian life. Jake is a marine, a man of honor, who served as a sniper in the Vietnam War, a legacy he carries with him on his chest, full of medals, and in the nightmares he calls dreams. Naomi, his wife, has made Jake promise not to let the Viet Cong enter their home, and for many years, he has lovingly obeyed. Now, something changes. A subtle shift in the weight of the world in response to graphic emails of terrorists killing marines and watching his students go to war, something clicks in the self-imposed cage that he and his wife have carefully built to keep war at bay. With many of his brothers dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, can he truly ever come home? Pax, determined to follow in his father's footsteps and to prove his mom wrong, calls Jake not because he wants to, but a promise is a promise. Jake picking up the receiver, did not know the events that were about to unfold he just knew that Pax deserved the stone cold truth and he won't be getting it from no dammed recruiter. In love and war there is a price to pay for everything. Naomi, the unseen warrior behind the lines, knows that cost, and this time she refuses to watch the ravages of war strip the normalcy from their lives. This time she takes action.
294 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 2013
2 people want to read
About the author
Lawrence Winters
7 books1 follower Larry is a Marine combat Veteran of the Vietnam era. More recently Larry has retired from a 25 year career as counselor at Four Winds Hospital in West Chester New York, where he spent the last decade as the Director of Veteran Treatment. He has experienced and been witness to the difficulties faced by Veterans as they try to reintegrate from a military society to the civilian world. The PTSD experienced by these returning heroes stems from the Moral Dislocation that they experience as they move from Military Society to Civilian Society.
Larry has recently published his second book titled Brotherkeeper. It is the story of the Moral Dislocation faced by our veterans when they return home from war. The story focuses on the enlistment of one young man into the Marines, and the two Marine Veterans who try to guide the youth in making his decision, while they battle the demons that came home from the battlefields with them. “Years of working, living, and sorting out what war has done to myself and those I love, and those I've helped are spun together in this story,” says Larry about his book.
Larry has recently published his second book titled Brotherkeeper. It is the story of the Moral Dislocation faced by our veterans when they return home from war. The story focuses on the enlistment of one young man into the Marines, and the two Marine Veterans who try to guide the youth in making his decision, while they battle the demons that came home from the battlefields with them. “Years of working, living, and sorting out what war has done to myself and those I love, and those I've helped are spun together in this story,” says Larry about his book.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 9, 2014
They can't come home, not truly home, without us.
We are to be, must be, the keepers of our sisters and brothers, and all our soldiers truly are our brothers and sisters.
There is an airless, voiceless void between those who serve and those who stay at home. This is a separation that needs national attention, national bridge building, national commitment, and national compassion.
It is a verity that no one who goes to war comes home the same. Brotherkeeper spells that out, holds nothing back—brings us the void veterans feel; shares with us the vision of some of them seeing themselves as killers; opens the view of the vision of them civilians have as something “other.”
Brotherkeeper slips us down the horrid slope of the abyss their families are so often pulled into by their post-traumatic stress often—PTSD often coupled with addictions such as drinking to try to quiet the monstrous memories ground into their insides.
We raise our young with the overlapping moral standards of our particular faiths with our societal mores. And then, in their late teens, when scientifically we now know that their brains are not yet even fully developed, we send them, they send themselves, to be soldiers, many of the males looking for the question never answered as they were growing up, of how to be a man. Looking for experience, looking for adventure—feeling they will not be the one to not come home; not be the one to come home with TBI, with spinal injuries, without limbs, with a lifetime ahead of endless nightmares and perhaps family conflict, and worse.
Author Lawrence Winters gives us a definitive answer to that question of what a man truly is and it is not in the shaved heads, nor the training to be a soldier.
We refuse to confront the reality Brotherkeeper brings us that military training is basically to learn how to kill the enemy—all the other things that come with said training aside, that is the primary function. Stop the enemy. That this flies in the face of all previously taught; that this generates soul, mind, and heart conflict is set aside. For how serious this disparity between killing and the reality of wanting to is, I suggest you see Dave Grossman's On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. We can dress it all up any way we want to, but that is the bottom line.
We do not offer homecoming rituals, cleansing rituals, reintegration rituals. Too often veterans hear things like “Oh, you're home,” “Get over it and get on with it,” or that seriously brainless inquiry, “What is it like to kill someone?” Mr. Winters answers that question telling us about the two graves that must be torn out of both the soil and the soul.
Mr. Winters' life is devoted to helping bring soldiers truly home and that devotion has led him to study with Native Americans and their rituals of helping to both send the soldier off to war and to bring the warrior home from it.
Brotherkeeper is his offering to you to come to grips with reality. There is no glamour in war; there is killing; there is destruction of not only homes, lives, the earth herself, and the hearts and souls of soldiers.
Brotherkeeper is the story of three Marine families whose men have known war; it is a story of a new generation answering the call—it is a story that this universal and timeless of the insatiable gods of war and those we feed them.
Please, read Brotherkeeper and weep for what we all allow. And then do something about it.
We are to be, must be, the keepers of our sisters and brothers, and all our soldiers truly are our brothers and sisters.
There is an airless, voiceless void between those who serve and those who stay at home. This is a separation that needs national attention, national bridge building, national commitment, and national compassion.
It is a verity that no one who goes to war comes home the same. Brotherkeeper spells that out, holds nothing back—brings us the void veterans feel; shares with us the vision of some of them seeing themselves as killers; opens the view of the vision of them civilians have as something “other.”
Brotherkeeper slips us down the horrid slope of the abyss their families are so often pulled into by their post-traumatic stress often—PTSD often coupled with addictions such as drinking to try to quiet the monstrous memories ground into their insides.
We raise our young with the overlapping moral standards of our particular faiths with our societal mores. And then, in their late teens, when scientifically we now know that their brains are not yet even fully developed, we send them, they send themselves, to be soldiers, many of the males looking for the question never answered as they were growing up, of how to be a man. Looking for experience, looking for adventure—feeling they will not be the one to not come home; not be the one to come home with TBI, with spinal injuries, without limbs, with a lifetime ahead of endless nightmares and perhaps family conflict, and worse.
Author Lawrence Winters gives us a definitive answer to that question of what a man truly is and it is not in the shaved heads, nor the training to be a soldier.
We refuse to confront the reality Brotherkeeper brings us that military training is basically to learn how to kill the enemy—all the other things that come with said training aside, that is the primary function. Stop the enemy. That this flies in the face of all previously taught; that this generates soul, mind, and heart conflict is set aside. For how serious this disparity between killing and the reality of wanting to is, I suggest you see Dave Grossman's On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. We can dress it all up any way we want to, but that is the bottom line.
We do not offer homecoming rituals, cleansing rituals, reintegration rituals. Too often veterans hear things like “Oh, you're home,” “Get over it and get on with it,” or that seriously brainless inquiry, “What is it like to kill someone?” Mr. Winters answers that question telling us about the two graves that must be torn out of both the soil and the soul.
Mr. Winters' life is devoted to helping bring soldiers truly home and that devotion has led him to study with Native Americans and their rituals of helping to both send the soldier off to war and to bring the warrior home from it.
Brotherkeeper is his offering to you to come to grips with reality. There is no glamour in war; there is killing; there is destruction of not only homes, lives, the earth herself, and the hearts and souls of soldiers.
Brotherkeeper is the story of three Marine families whose men have known war; it is a story of a new generation answering the call—it is a story that this universal and timeless of the insatiable gods of war and those we feed them.
Please, read Brotherkeeper and weep for what we all allow. And then do something about it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review