One More Soldier Reporting for Duty

On December 1, 2015, my father, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph P. Diminick, will retire from the United States Army after 28 years of service. During his career as a soldier, he was deployed to Bosnia as a Peacekeeper, led a battalion command in Oklahoma, taught Philosophy and Military Strategy to Cadets at West Point, spent weeks traveling to the Pentagon to work on some secret dealings, and trained other officers at the War College in Pennsylvania. But above all else and behind the stiff camo uniform, he is my father. Today I stumbled upon an original fiction that honors the men and women of service and that gives insight to the most horrific and genuine of emotions that each one of these individuals feels. We look at soldiers as stone cold beings, fighters of war and bringers of peace. There is more to them, though.

In The Alpha's Angel's journal entry style piece, Of Blood and Honour, Mandy writes from the first person perspective of a soldier fighting a war of both body and mind. The entries are raw, like the ramblings of We Were Soldiers and Forrest Gump. The beginning starts with a poem engraved with heartache and memorial, and gives insight to the emotional core of a soldier who has seen, experienced, and journeyed through unimaginable things. It is a prologue that draws in a reader, putting to their heart a weapon of words. Each part continues on with this soldier recalling a memory that added to who he became and flickering to the present where he lies in a pool of his comrades' blood as war booms around him.

I recommend this piece not only as a reader and fellow writer, but as a child of a soldier who refuses to speak of what he has seen. Never has my father told his war stories to my brothers and sister and I. Never has my father's eyes darken or lighten with memories of what the past 28 years have brought. But if my father has experienced even an iota of what Of Blood and Honour's men and women has faced, then with her writing comes a whole new level of respect for these men and women in uniform across the world.

Hoorah!