The Year of My Enlightenment

In 1976 a few moments on a military base leave a young sailor desperately seeking help from a bureaucracy that only wants to ignore him. This novel is based on a true story. After I was discharged from the Navy in February 1977 I drove to my hometown Vevay, Indiana and began writing. Once I had finished, the document went into storage as I tried to get on with my life. Recovery from the events of 1976 was achingly long and seemingly insurmountable. Yet by 2012 a full-fledged reawakening of my life was in motion. In the process of repair, renewal and discovery I began reading the journals of my late mother Patricia Neal. Then on December 28, 2013 former Congressman Andy Jacobs, Jr. died. Those two events convinced me that the time to consummate that decades old manuscript, the story of my life in the Navy, had come.