Preface

Don’t spit on me,

A combat vet

Who proudly served in Nam.

I didn’t start that goddamn war.

I didn’t make the bombs.

Instead I did what I was told.

I fought to keep us free.

A patriot. A warrior bold.

Why did you curse at me?

You shook your fist and yelled at me,

A soldier called “deranged.”

I left that war

That goddamn war

A man forever changed.

A half-million American men and women served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Of that number, 58,220 died. Of that number, over three hundred thousand were wounded. Some weapons cut through their body tissue. Others sliced into the minds and hearts of these young soldiers, soldiers who would carry their scars well beyond the rice paddies and jungles of South East Asia.

A Thousand Daggers tells the stories of a handful of veterans who ended up on a psychiatric ward in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Montana. Their stories are fiction, but their experiences are not.

Civil War General Sherman reportedly said, “War is hell.”

The fictional characters in this novel lend painful proof to Sherman’s statement. A Thousand Daggers showcases the conflicts of tortured vets who are “forever changed,” veterans who have paid the price for having gone where angels fear to tread, and who continue to struggle to embrace sanity in an insane world—a world that can feel exactly like Hell.