Troubled Memories($12.99Value)

Description

Troubled Memories: This fiction book is set in 1975, as Saigon falls and the Vietnam War ends, a four Marine sniper team watches the conflict conclude on a television screen in Okinawa-haunted by the combat they never experienced. When Edwards, Mahoney, Lambert, and Harris receive classified transfer orders to a war on drugs program so secret its designation has been physically erased from all documents, they are deployed to Bangkok, Thailand, to conduct assassination missions under Team Sergeant Welch, a hardened veteran of twenty years of covert warfare. What begins as jungle operations against individual targets descends into moral dilemma when Edwards freezes at the critical moment, unable to execute a man traveling with his wife and two children. Welch completes the massacre without hesitation, then later forces the team to witness and participate in the execution of entire families. His chilling philosophy takes root: "Right doesn't matter. Age doesn't matter. Clean matters. Professional matters." The Marines transform from warriors into executioners, each kill stripping away another layer of their humanity. The final mission brings them to a remote valley where a Laotian general travels with civilian drug bearers and children. Welch orders "no survivors," and the team systematically murders seventeen people in a massacre that will define the rest of their lives. Decades later, Edwards has built a life in Denver with his wife Margaret, but the memories remain. A searing exploration of moral injury, the cost of following orders, and the long road toward redemption, Troubled Memories asks whether a man can ever truly escape the weight of what he has done-or if some memories are too heavy to carry alone.