There’s been a long silence between my last two posts. I’d like to apologize … and explain why.

Living in West Virginia now, we got slammed by the June 29^th derecho. Susie and I were on the eastbound Amtrak that day, heading up to Connecticut to see our children and granddaughter. The storm – 600 miles long with winds up to 80mph – was actually chasing us east, but we didn’t know it. In Virginia, we saw the westbound Amtrak pass us; later, I learned that the train was stopped by downed trees in West Virginia and that 320 passengers sat on the train for 20 hours waiting for crews to clear the track.

When we got home five days later, we found that a big oak had crashed across our driveway, five others were down around the house, and a dozen more trees had been blown over on a ridgeline just behind our house. Some had been uprooted, but many trees were just sheared off midway, leading 20-foot-tall stumps.

Mercifully, the house and garden were undamaged.

However, we were without power for 13 days and without internet/cable/telephone for 15 days. In fact, our main power line was repaired by 10 emergency crews on loan from New Orleans.

So it has taken some time to catch up on the many things that needed to be done while we were without power, phone and internet. And that also explains the long silence.

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I’d also like to fill you in on an ambitious campaign by my publisher, Idyll Arbor Press, to get copies of my latest book, Faces of Combat: PTSD & TBI, into the hands of as many veterans as possible.

Idyll Arbor is sending a copy of my book to every VFW state headquarters.  And it promises to donate one book to a VFW post for every book it sells.

So if you haven’t read Faces of Combat, this is a great time to do so. If you buy a copy today, Idyll Arbor will send a free book to a VFW post where it can be help vets and their families understand the emotional and neurological injuries they may have brought home from combat.

Or if you’ve already been moved by Faces of Combat and want to make a donation, Idyll Arbor has an even better offer. “If someone wants to buy a few books to donate somewhere, we’ll give them a 50% discount and send out the same number of books to VFWs,” says my publisher, Tom Blaschko. “It’s like getting four books to people who can use them for the price of one.”

So please help us get more of these books into the hands of vets and their families.