Balance of Night: a military procedural

Sometimes the reward is getting out alive. A Marine Corps KC-130 Hercules aerial tanker aircraft carrying 36 marines has plenty of fuel on a dark night over the storm tossed South Pacific until a desperately low fuel Navy Hornet fighter arrives. Risk everyone so no one is left behind? The requirements for success are perfection in calculations, airmanship, nerve, and luck.

Christmas and marines are on liberty in Brisbane, Australia and the Gold Coast. If only half the truth is told of how good it was the marines will still be called liars when they return to Okinawa.

There can be great risk in defending the right of free passage in international waters, particularly if those waters are claimed by North Korea. The United States Navy deliberately sails into harm's way to assert the right of free passage, on the high seas, for every nation. Sailors and marines man the ships and aircraft necessary to protect the fleet as it asserts the right in dangerous waters.

Peacetime is not war, except for the casualties. A benign environment in a non-combatant evacuation south east of the Strait of Malacca turns to war for the handful of marines involved.

Flavius Josephus stated the philosophy of the Roman legions of antiquity: "The drills are bloodless battles and the battles are bloody drills." The succinct and echoing words of the Marine D.I. are: "the more you sweat in peace the less you bleed in war." Every marine knows this to be true.

Some marines can justify leaving another marine to the mercy of wrongful court martial but cannot leave a marine to die on the battlefield. A marine lacking moral courage is not necessarily a marine lacking physical courage. Only one attribute may be needed for promotion.

This novel is a modern military procedural. The duties, demands, and procedures described in this novel are factual within the realm of literary license. The novel revolves around the routine yet demanding service in a Marine Corps KC-130 Hercules aircraft squadron in what is considered peacetime. The story is the result of the author's sense of the flavor of the times, experiences and situations that could have evolved as told here.