I was up today before 0400. Sleep is a challenge. Since 1966, it always has been
When I sleep, my subconscious takes me to times and places I don’t want to revisit. That’s why I’m sitting here at 0519 writing this blog post when I should be trying to slumber for another hour or two.
When I’m awake, I seldom think about that time or talk about what happened over there.
Before I sighed and surrendered to escape the demons waiting to pounce if I attempted to sleep again, I left the bed, thinking about the vital and dangerous job I had driving a Jeep in Vietnam and one specific day after one of our gun companies had been seriously hit.
Serving as a 2531 Field Radio Operator with the 1st Marine Tank Battalion in 1966, meant I was likely driving an M151 MUTT configured as an MRC-83 or MRC-110 communication jeep, stripped down, no armor, for maximum speed and visibility without doors or a weapons mount. We often drove along muddy, unpaved roads with a high risk of landmines or ambushes. The space behind the two front seats was filled with a combat radio. One of our M48 Pattonshad hit a one of those IEDs, powerful enough to lift an almost 51-ton tank into the air before it dropped back down, blowing off its tracks. They crew survived with broken ear drums.
The next day, I drove that jeep to Charlie Company’s forward operating base, racing down one of those muddy one lane roads through a jungle behind a tanker truck carying a full load of fuel for the gun company’s tanks. They needed a resupply because the fuel they’d had blew up the night before when their base was overrun, ending in Martines fighting hand to hand with knives in their skivvies in the rain and mud.
I drove the jeep. A staff sergeant sat in the other seat making himself as small as possible as bullets snapped past us through the open cab.
During Donald John Trump’s first year in the White House, I received an old fashioned, unsigned letter in the mail with no return address. The postage stamp revealed it had been mailed from Florida. I live in California.
It said, “We Know where you live?”
After Trump won the 2024 election, the same or another Trump loyalist MAGA member sent me an email or left a comment on one of my blogs warning me to “Leave the Country or Sleep!”
UPDATED July 19, 2026: After a day or two and a few hours learning how to talk to an AI, this is the new cover for The Patriot Oath. So new, I haven’t had time to replace the old cover on the book’s Amazon page yet. That will happen later today and take time for Amazon to process before it appears.
ORIGINAL POST STARTS HERE
Here’s the final cover. I had to learn how to talk to an AI first and I’m a slow learner. But I finally got there and haven’t had time to replace the old cover on the books Amazon page yet.
“The primary reason to update a successful thriller series is to drive new sales by aligning the books with evolving design trends and online discovery habits, such as those on social platforms. This ‘rebranding’ strategy expands the target demographic and boosts visual recognition.” SOURCE: Jane Friedman
I think Book Leopardoffers a one-stop shop for authors to not only come up with a new book cover working with the site’s AI generator, but to provide a list of benefits that, in the past, took “me” years, months and weeks to learn while using multiple sites and never-ending research to produce.
At this time, my focus is the new covers for all three books in the series, and I’m still learning to work with their AI. The wordless cover above is for The Patriot Oath. The text was there from the beginning, and then I asked the AI to remove the words.
I think asking the AI to do that will make it easier to add a public domain image of George Washington Crossing the Delaware, similar to how it was done on The Patriot Oath’s original cover. Most, who have read the book, may not know the image is there. It’s sort of camouflaged in the background behind the word OATH and my name. For me, that image is symbolic and readers don’t have to know it’s there.
George Washington was the first person to take the presidential oath to protect the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic, but he did not write it himself. The specific language of the presidential oath was drafted and proposed during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 by delegates James Madison and George Mason.
As soon as “George Washington Crossing the Delaware” is added to the background near the bottom of the new cover image above, I’ll ask Book Leopard’s AI to put the words listed below back.
A JOSH KAVANAGH THRILLER THE PATRIOT OATH & LLOYD LOFTHOUSE
If that goes smoothly, George Washington will be in his boat, lurking in the shadows behind my name.
Here’s what Book Leopard offers for the price of one credit (at this time $49).
Book Leopard is an interactive site where authors/editors guide the site’s AI to generate most of what’s needed to get an already written novel’s draft ready to publish and promote. Still, their AI cannot do the work alone. The author/editor must be part of the process. I think this AI is going to help authors/editors avoid weeks, months and even years of learning, work and eye strain, and get it done in a very short period of time.
The Price of One Credit Gets All of This for One Book
· For any Genre
· A spectacular cover
· An amazing description
· A great subtitle
· 3 Kindle categories
· 3 Amazon paperback categories
· 3 categories for non-Amazon sites
· 7 search keywords
· Attention-grabbing text for advertising
· 12 Kindle categories for targeting Amazon book ads
· 12 paperback categories for targeting Amazon book ads
My review of this realistic, historical action suspense thriller will join hundreds of thousands already on Amazon and Goodreads. Still, how many of those ratings and reviews were written by Vietnam combat vets who were there?
Soon after this novel was released, The Women was mentioned in my VA PTSD support group that meets every Wednesday morning. This support group may differ from many since half are women that served in the Air Force, the Navy, with one a Marine, who served in the Middle East. In combat!
Later that day, I saw The Women at Costco and bought a hardcover.
The main character in this novel is a young Army nurse, and the first half of this brutal combat story mostly takes place in Vietnam. Although Frankie McGrath was an Army nurse saving lives in a field medical unit beyond the front lines, and not behind them, she didn’t fight in combat. Yet she was in combat, every moment, awake or asleep. I’m going to explain what I mean soon.
For me, reading this historical fiction became a triggered journey back in time. And I started losing sleep, waking at the slightest sound. Alert, ready to fight.
Remembering!
And by the time I finished reading, I was angry.
My DD214, a form we get when we leave the military and return to civilian life, had one entry that said I’d gone on one major military operation for a few days during 1966. Yet I was in combat almost daily after climbing down that net (like the kind used on D-Day during World War II) on the side of a Navy transport ship, jumping the last few feet into a landing craft that took us Marines ashore. As we landed, fighting was taking place not that far from our location on the beach. And a few hours later, the first night we were there, my company was hit before we’d finished setting up our base camp. We had no wire surrounding us yet, and none of the bunkers had been completed.
All of Southern Vietnam was a war zone. It didn’t matter if you were inside the wire, in a bunker, we were always in the war. No place was safe. We didn’t have to go out on a major field operation to find the war. It found us almost nightly and sometimes in daylight.
Frankie McGraths’ medical unit was inside the wire, protected by bunkers, almost all the time, yet her unit was also under attack, as VC or North Vietnamese mortar rounds dropped in without warning, looking for random kills.
Like me, McGrath has some close calls inside the bunkers and wire. Like me, she lost friends. Like me, she came home to protestors calling her a baby killer. And she shot no one. Instead, she saved lives, even Vietnamese citizens, including children. She was a nurse. Not a US Marine rifleman. Not a grunt like me.
Some protestor in the story spit on her once she returned to the States. I’d heard about that when I came home in December 1966, but being spit on didn’t happen to me.
McGrath suffered from PTSD as I did, and we still do. Yet when she went to the VA for help, she was told no women served in Vietnam and she couldn’t have PTSD. They sent her back home. When she returned to the VA later, after a traumatic episode of PTSD, and tried to join a group of combat vets to share her trauma with, the men told her she couldn’t stay because she couldn’t be a combat vet. No women served in Vietnam. She left again, with no support.
And yet thousands of military women served in Vietnam.
Maybe what happened to McGrath is like what happened to me.
Her being told women didn’t serve in Vietnam reminded me of something someone working in VA-mental health care said to me after 2005. I don’t remember the exact wording but it was something like, Your PTSD can’t be that bad, since you only went on one military operation.
WTF!
Like McGrath, VC mortar shells dropped into my base camp without warning to kill at random. One time, in daylight, a sniper almost took me out. The round grazing my left ear. An inch further to the right, my body might have been shipped home with a Purple Heart my parents could hang on a wall in the same case the folded US flag arrived in.
Then, unlike McGrath, there were the night patrols and ambushes outside the wire that were not part of a major military operation, that were not mentioned on my DD214.
Or that mad dash with sniper rounds snapping past us while we drove at top speed through the jungle, me in an unarmored jeep with no doors on a one lane dirt road to reach a forward artillery base outside the division perimeter that had been hit hard and needed to be resupplied before they got hit again. While I was there, they got hit again, a rain of mortar shells and rockets, when one Marine lost his life, decapitated by a rocket.
I recommend reading The Womenfor the reality it paints and when you finish the story, read the author’s notes, to learn that about 10,000 women served in Vietnam, many just like McGrath.
The first paragraph says, “Obvious Trump supporters and/or conservatives have sent me emails, accusing me of being unfair regarding former President Trump and attacking American conservatives. They were referring to my thriller The Patriot Oath.”
The menu to the right of Lloyd Lofthouse has three new pages following links from my older blogs that are still on WordPress, and one of the new ones is the new Writer’s Blog:
He’d give his life for his country. But this time, it’s personal.
Josh Kavanagh burns for vengeance. Parachuting with no backup into a lawless area of southern Venezuela, the Special Ops legend is intent on hunting down the rogue agent who put his wife in a coma. But as soon as he gets feet on the ground, the loyal protector discovers he’s dropped into a trap… and a sex trafficking operation run by the Russian mob.
Fighting his way out and desperate to rescue the victims with minimal body count, Josh plans a daring raid on a remote ranch. But after learning the identity of the mastermind behind the hit on a former lover, the talented operative takes the law into his own hands on a hell-bent solo mission for revenge…
Will Josh’s single-minded thirst for justice finish on the wrong side of a gun barrel?
Never for Glory is the pulse-pounding second book in the Josh Kavanagh thriller series. If you like determined heroes, tough conflict ripped from the headlines, and page-turning action, then you’ll love Lloyd Lofthouse’s pursuit of payback.
“Here’s a pull quote from Chuck Yarling’s 1-star review on Amazon. “Once you started reading it, this was one book that was absolutely hard to put down. It has great characters, action galore, and about a group whose mission is to preserve the American republic. That made it hard not to put it my top ten books I read this year!”
“Yes, it was a gem right up to the near-end …”
He fought for his country. Now he’s home and engaged in the deadliest of battles.
Josh Kavanagh eats and breathes loyalty. Wary of how he’ll fit in after a twenty-four-year absence, the Special Forces legend returns to his family’s Montana ranch on an undercover mission. And though he’s anxious to see the high school sweetheart he abandoned a lifetime ago, the dedicated Marine’s greatest concern is tracking down a dangerous neo-Nazi cell.
Juggling unresolved feelings for the woman he left behind, a sister expecting him to avenge her brutal rape, and keeping his own covert activities secret, Josh discovers the threat to the US is bigger than anyone previously thought. And when a member of his team goes MIA and the danger creeps perilously close to home, the talented military man fears he’ll lose everything he holds dear…
With a tangled web of corruption pulling deadly strings, can he blow a conspiracy apart without paying the ultimate price?
The Patriot Oath is the riveting first book in the Josh Kavanagh thriller series. If you like war-hardened heroes, action-packed fight scenes, and powerful political agendas, then you’ll love Lloyd Lofthouse’s gripping adventure.
“Even if 1 percent of cases lead to long Covid, “that’s still a disaster because so many people are still getting infected all the time.” – Vox.com
Original post:
Last week, I had a physical therapy appointment at the VA. Everyone was required to wear masks because many military veterans have compromised immune systems… that may not be the only reason.
This week, I had a follow up exam from an oral surgery (tooth removed about two months ago). The VA does not cover my dental, so my dentists are in the private sector. I have no dental insurance, so I have to pay 100% for that.
No one at that dental office was wearing a mask but me. It seems this dentist’s office and its staff has had enough with COVID, even though COVID isn’t done with us yet.
I complained and kept my mask on. I pointed out that as a combat vet on the Agent Orange list my immune system may be compromised and I’d rather be dead than end up living with Long COVID. I was being nice when I complained. No “F” bombs. No loud rage!
“As of January 16, 2023, 15% of all adults in the US reported having had long COVID symptoms at some point and 6% reported current symptoms.”
Think again if you think your are safe from COVID because you already had it.
“Some people have a false sense of security after getting COVID-19, thinking they can’t get reinfected,” Dr. Varga says. “In truth, anyone may test positive for COVID-19 any number of times.”
“In 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 331.4 million people living in the United States; more than three-quarters (77.9%) or 258.3 million were adults, 18 years or older.” You do the math to discover how many adults may be walking around without a mask that are infected with COVID at any given time.
I’ve been reading about the increase in POTS cases associated with COVID infections. POTS is something I’ve never heard of until recently. I went on a COSTCO supply run and was one of a handful of hundreds of shoppers and employees wearing a mask.
As I was shopping, I thought about POTS, a crippling disease that has increased during the COVID pandemic, that most people are pretending is no longer a threat. I even had a couple of maskless shoppers stare at me as if I was the freak because I was wearing a mask.
Still, COVID isn’t done with us yet!
“POTS is marked by orthostatic intolerance, a sudden reduction in blood flow returning to the heart after a person rises or stands. Common symptoms include feeling lightheaded, faint, and having an increased heart-rate after standing. Treatments may include consuming salt tablets, staying hydrated, wearing compression stockings, and taking certain medications.”
Never for Glory is the unfinished sequel of The Patriot Oath. With 25 completed chapters, there are about 10 to 15 left to finish the first draft. The first five chapters have already been presented to two of the four critique groups I belong to. One of the two groups has heard all of The Patriot Oath. The second group hasn’t, and I am getting conflicting constructive criticism from the two groups. One group is suggesting a lot of changes, and the other group familiar with the first novel in the series likes what they’re hearing with little need for massive revisions.
With this post, I’m inviting readers that have read The Patriot Oath to have a look at Never for Glory’s first chapter and, if wiling, to leave comments letting me know what works, what doesn’t. Thank you. If this early preview works, I have another four chapters I’m willing to add to this post later.
Chapter One
After their first HALO jump together in 2002, Josh and Cheéte vanished into the Hindu Kush Mountains, a rugged area covering 160,000 square miles. Their orders had been to search for targets of opportunity, and for weeks they worked alone with little or no support.
Now, in 2019, seventeen years later, they were doing it again. Still, this time their C-130 belonged to The Oath Group, and it was 30,000 feet over Venezuela.
Getting ready for the repeat was like déjà vu all over again. Back then, they were Marine Corps scout snipers serving in Operation Anaconda against al-Qaeda, Taliban insurgents, and members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. That had been their last mission together. Cheéte retired a few months later in 2003.
“I can’t believe my ghillie suit still fits,” Josh said. “It feels the same, hot and heavy. Too bad DARPA wouldn’t let me use that invisible, bulletproof combat suit for this mission. It was perfect last summer for our sortie in Montana.”
Cheéte grunted as he finished squeezing into his old camouflaged ghillie suit. Once he had it on, he looked like an unkempt yeti that needed to lose some weight. “Well, some of us don’t always get what we want. You’ve been out for less than a year so I’m not surprised your suit fits, but I think mine is going to eat me like it’s a starving anaconda.”
They were talking to each other through their helmet’s military-grade communication units.
Josh grinned as he fastened a g-suit around his abdomen and legs, covering most of the camouflaged outfit he wore underneath. Then he manually inflated the g-suit’s five air bladders. The pressure around the muscles would prevent blood from pooling in the feet and legs and push blood pressure up to the heart and brain. The last thing he did was to attach the oxygen mask and tactical goggles.
With a frustrating sigh, huffing, and puffing, Cheéte managed to do the same thing. Once they were on the ground, they’d ditch the gear required for the HALO jump. Their ghillie suits were designed to conceal them from prying eyes.
Like most Marine Corps snipers, they’d made their own unique disguises by hand and, when not in use, stored them in sealed, plastic boxes lined in cotton and kept dry with silica gel packets.
“I’m worried my Christian Crow wife knows about my two other common law wives,” Cheéte said, interrupting Josh’s thoughts.
Josh did a double-take and stared at his old friend. “Whoa! Where the hell did that come from?”
“Well, in case I don’t make it home, I wanted you to know what’s going on in my life. My Christian wife said the only reason for sex is to create children for God. When I said no more kids, she cut me off. There’s no way I’m going without. I refuse to let my demons have an excuse to mess up my nights. What about you?”
“I have nothing to confess to anyone,” Josh replied.
“Ah, … what about Rachel and Mia?”
A green light came on, signaling that it was time to jump. At the same time, the C-130’s ramp started to yawn open, depressurizing the cabin.
Josh stood, ready to go.
“Well?” Cheéte asked.
“I haven’t had sex with anyone since Rachel was shot in San Francisco and is still in the hospital. So, I’m not that desperate.” Finished, he walked off the aft ramp and dropped from sight, falling 30,000 feet toward the ground.
“Sheesh,” Cheéte hissed. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.” Then he was dropping with his belly pointed toward the ground, his chin lifted up, and his arms and legs spread out for stability.
As Josh fell hard and fast, he thought about Rachel and Mia. He’d lied to Cheéte. He was desperate, explaining why he was losing a lot of sleep. But he disagreed with the crap that sexual frustration was normal. So, shrug and take it in stride.
Bull shit! he thought. He couldn’t remember ever being celibate this long before.
The temptation to keep both of his lovers, as Mia had suggested, was almost overwhelming. But, when he thought about going through with it, he heard Dr. Tate’s voice telling him that would be wrong. Then there was the Christian guilt his mother instilled in him as a child with the Seventh Commandment, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”
He still didn’t understand why his mother started preaching that to him when he was seven. It couldn’t have been because of his crush on Rachel in 2nd grade. He never told anyone about that. There was no way his mother could have known.
To escape the jumble of depressing thoughts stirring up trouble inside his head, he gave himself over to the plunge. Jumping from 30,000 feet felt more like flying than falling. It was windy, loud, and intense. Josh’s senses became wildly alive. That’s why he had an obsession for HALO jumps. The thrill lasted about three times longer than a basic skydiver’s altitude.
With a stable belly-to-earth position, the fastest speed he’d reach was 120 mph. If he wanted to fly faster, he’d shift position so his head was facing the ground and his feet were pointed up. Then he’d drop at 180 mph. Josh had always wondered what it would be like to die like that. Every time he jumped, he’d been tempted to find out.
Checking out of life like that also offered him an easy way to avoid deciding between Rachel and Mia. Because this was a high altitude low open insertion, the main chute was programmed to open automatically at 1,900 feet. If that failed, the reserve chute deployed at 1,000.
The best way to bail out of life would be to use one of his keen-edged combat knives and cut the straps that held the two ‛chutes to his body. He had about a minute left to make that decision.
Was there a better way to die if you were doing something you loved? He started laughing and thought he sounded possessed.
Still, there was Damian Bran, the man they were hunting. He was the one responsible for Rachel living in a hospital, trapped in a coma. Wasn’t that a good enough reason to hang on?
Bran had been a heartless CIA agent for thirty years who left the agency in 2009. He was also known as the Strawman because of his tall, thin stature. Soon after he retired, he’d joined a white supremacist neo-Nazi militia in Montana and ended up working for a ruthless libertarian billionaire, a match made by Mephistopheles.
Josh had been hunting Bran since Rachel had been shot. His efforts to find the former CIA agent had started by putting the man’s wife under surveillance. There had been no calls or texts in or out. Instead, she hadn’t budged from their home in a remote area of Minnesota and didn’t seem to care if she ever saw her husband again.
After The Oath Group’s successful raid in Northwest Montana on that neo-Nazi training camp, Charles Tweet, the billionaire that financed the militia, revealed it was Bran who introduced him to the profitable sex trade. It turned out that the former field agent had started trafficking children years before he left the agency.
Most of the young sex slaves Bran sold to Tweet had ended up working in massage parlors spread across the United States. But some of the most beautiful had suffered a worse fate. If one of them was unfortunate enough to catch the billionaire’s eye, they were doomed.
His last intended victim had been a seventy-six-pound thirteen-year-old Ukrainian girl. The billionaire had slipped a plastic bag over the child’s head while he was raping her. When Cheéte had burst into the underground room where it was taking place, the girl was being suffocated by Tweet, using a method known as erotic asphyxiation.
Later, during his interrogation, Tweet revealed that Damen Bran had introduced him to that risky erotic method. When the billionaire accidentally murdered his first victim, Bran had shrugged it off and said, “Females were created for two purposes. To give men pleasure, and if they survive, to make babies. Besides, when you’re kidnapping children and selling them for a profit, expect to lose a few. Think of it as collateral damage, a business expense.”
Tweet accepted that justification as gospel and had gone on to murder more than a dozen young girls over the years that followed. Now, the billionaire was in court, fighting to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison. The judge had not approved bail, but his lawyers were claiming the evidence was inadmissible.
The information that pinpointed Bran’s location in Venezuela had come from Mia Belle-Chanson, one of Josh’s best friends and a former lover. To her fans, she was a singer-songwriter and a documentary producer. What her followers didn’t know was what she did away from a studio or stage. Because she’d been kidnapped in Haiti at the age of fourteen to become a sex slave, she now operated a secret network that rescued abducted children all over the world. Josh had met Mia when he and Cheéte had rescued her and several other girls soon after they’d been snatched.
Venezuela was the perfect country for a brute like Bran. After Venezuela’s President, Nicolas Madura’s rise to power in 2013, sex trafficking and child sex tourism had become common, and it was getting worse.
The intel from Mia’s rescue organization reported that Bran was living on an isolated cattle ranch located in Venezuela’s savanna southwest of the Rio Apure River.
Having second thoughts about dying, Josh checked his altimeter to determine how much time he had left to decide one way or the other.
It’s been forty-seven years since I served in Vietnam, and over those years, the few times I’ve been in threatening situations, my thoughts are not of running away or breaking down in tears of fear. Instead, I’m thinking of the fastest way I can kill the person I perceive as a threat. If I’m close enough, I’ll be looking at his throat thinking about digging my teeth in and tearing out his jugular.
In the film “Patton”—played by George C. Scott—there is a scene where the general explodes in anger at troops who were in military hospitals suffering from severe PTSD—known as battle fatigue or shell shock back then. The violence they had experienced had traumatized them severely. But General Patton thought anyone who suffered from PTSD was a coward and a fake.
I think that Russell Ireland, who owns the Big I’s Restaurant in Oxford, Massachusetts, is evidently an uneducated throw back to that World War II era, who does not think a war veteran suffering from PTSD deserves the same respect as a vet who lost body parts and probably also suffers from PTSD.
To Ireland’s way of thinking—just like General Patton—if the injury isn’t physical, it doesn’t count. For example, missing body parts.
I never know when my PTSD is going to flare or what may trigger it. When I’m awake, I’m always vigilant of my surroundings watching for threats.
At night and early morning hours I often wake up and see enemy combatants in the darkness—they seem real but I’ve experienced this so many times over the decades that I often stare at them and maybe use a flashlight I keep by my bed to make sure it isn’t real before I can go back to sleep. And by my side is a .45 caliber Glock automatic with a loaded magazine. In the closet is a pump shotgun. In the gun safe are more weapons and boxes of ammo.
I did not buy these weapons to go hunting. I bought these weapons so I could sleep at night knowing I was prepared for the unexpected that my PTSD keeps reminding me is out there. Watching the daily news also doesn’t help so I avoid it most of the time. Before Vietnam, I read newspapers. After Vietnam, I stopped reading them. Newspapers are filled with reminders of crimes and violence in the United States that may trigger PTSD symptoms.
PTSD wasn’t recognized until the 1980s and then vets started to receive help from the VA. I have carried the dark shadow of my PTSD with me since 1966 and didn’t get any help from the VA until after 2005 when I discovered that I was eligible.
And ignorant idiots like Russell Ireland don’t have any idea about the time bomb they may be triggering when they confront a vet with combat induced PTSD. He may have been fortunate that James Glaser had his trained service dog by his side.
By the way, it’s been forty-seven years since I served in Vietnam and I haven’t killed or physical attacked anyone yet. As for Dr. Phil, I’ve never been impressed by his show. It’s more of a shock and awe thing promoted by Oprah [she’s the billionaire who owns the show] while Dr. Phil acts the guru to an ignorant mob of fools—Dr. Phil’s net worth is estimated to be $200 million or more earned from his show.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
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