Working with SEAL Team 3

Welcome to my Monday. I've just released Book 3 in the SEAL Brotherhood series, SEAL Under Covers.

I enjoy writing novels in a series, something that seems to come naturally to me. I've created characters of SEAL Team 3 and then utilize secondary characters from one book and make them the hero in another. In real life, men join and leave the Teams all the time. So adding another  member is not only easy, it mimics what happens in real life.

Though there is a real SEAL Team 3, the stories and the characters are purely fictitious.  But, as one Team guy said to me, "If you can imagine it, it probably happened."

In SEAL Under Covers, I have a SEAL Sniper, SO Armando Guzman, who is unsure he is ever going to find true love in his life, like some of his other Brothers have. He has killed not only enemy combatants, but innocents, and this weighs on him heavily. Trust is an important issue to him. He tries to do his job without thinking about the mistakes he might have made. Thinking could get him killed.

On the heroine's side, I wanted to explore the realm of abusive relationships, where the heroine allowed  herself to be charmed by and then caught in an abusive fling with a fellow cop. And what's worse, she has to work with this same man to complete the mission. In her own way, she is trying to do her job without thinking about how much this relationship damaged her. She's trying to prove to herself and her superiors that she is up to the task and can work effectively without letting her emotions interfere.

I have another five books plotted out in the series. We've planned a special vacation later this fall, on a cruise ship, which will be the setting for Book 4. But shhh, don't tell anyone, okay? Just between you and me.

The excerpt I've chosen today isn't from a love scene, about the hero and the heroine or even about the plot. Just a slice of life of some of the secondary characters. Gunny is a former Marine who owns an old run-down gym the Team Guys frequent, where the barbells are rusty and you throw them on the floor, not "place" them. Hope you enjoy this nibble from SEAL Under Covers:

Gunny greeted his son, Sanouk Wattanapanit, at the San Diego airport with Kyle and Armando at his back. Armando felt like they were standing in on the old former Marine’s wedding procession or an official award of valor citation. The tall well-muscled boy of twenty-two was handsome, with Eurasian features and smooth light brown complexion. But his ears identified him as one of Gunny’s offspring. The protuberances stood out and were probably as useful as large, flat handles on a bowling ball. 

Gunny’s first words were, “Holy shit. You look just like your mother.”

Armando noticed the boy’s embarrassment as he bowed slightly and gazed down at his supersized feet, encrusted in torn canvas sneakers without laces. When he finally looked up, Sanouk’s smile became heartbreakingly respectful and contrite.

“Father, I have been waiting my whole lifetime to meet you.” His English was perfect, flawless, with just a hint of accent. He’d been well schooled, Armando thought.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Gunny blurted out. “I thought we’d have to be, like, doing sign language, and I was wondering how that was going to work out.”

Armando shared a smirk with Kyle, and knew his Team Leader had entertained the same thoughts. The sign language obviously hadn’t stopped Gunny from knocking Sanouk’s mother up, after he married her, of course.

As the awkward seconds drifted away, Gunny finally asked his son The Question. “So, how is she?”

“She is named Amornpan, and she is well. I have a stepfather she married soon after you left.”

This brought a scowl to Gunny’s face. He grunted acceptance and stepped back a bit when the boy came forward to give him a hug. The young man towered over Gunny by several inches, and though Gunny stiffly accepted the gesture, the boy tenderly held his biological father and patted his back. “Thank you for my life,” he whispered over Gunny’s shoulder.

Armando knew about the loss of a parent. His own father had been gunned down in the line of duty in Puerto Rico shortly before his mother moved him and his sister to L.A. Being the surviving family of a murdered cop wasn’t especially safe in Puerto Rico. Armando struggled with the loss all during his teenage years, years he did things he wasn’t proud of. He made it into manhood with an overwhelming need for revenge, and a desire to protect good people. It was stashed away in the back of the SEAL’s psyche along with his lost childhood. But, as limited as his own father’s time had been, he couldn’t imagine not having known his father at all, like this boy.

Gunny’s hacking cough interrupted his son’s hug. He pulled out a handkerchief with trembling hands, placing it over his mouth. “Sorry,” he mumbled, trying to hide bloody remnants of an earlier coughing attack.

Sanouk eyed the red stain on the handkerchief with alarm, and then drilled a worried look into the two SEALs. “You are my father’s friends?”

“Glad to meet you,” Kyle said as he extended his hand. “Perhaps you can talk some sense into your father. I’m Kyle.”

“And I’m Armando.” They both took turns shaking the boy’s firm grasp. Gunny continued to cough.

“You are unwell?” Sanouk asked his father.

“Rot of the flesh. Nothing more.” It was Gunny’s standard answer whenever he didn’t want to explain himself to a stranger. Armando hoped the coming days would give Gunny a new reason for living. He was hoping the boy could convince Gunny to go back to the doctor for treatment.

Crowds from the arriving planes were shifting all around the group. Sanouk picked up a computer case and slung it over his right shoulder. “I have bags,” he said as he started to follow the signs to baggage claim. Obviously, the boy was used to traveling.

Father and son walked next to each other in awkward silence as Kyle and Armando trailed behind. Sanouk carried himself like an athlete. His long limbs appeared powerful despite the lithe gait. Unlike other Thai men Armando had met, Sanouk had a western frame, not only in height, but thickness, too. And from the shape of his broad shoulders and long arms, Armando could tell he was in perfect physical condition and probably worked out on a regular basis.

“He’s not at all like what I expected,” Kyle whispered to Armando.

“No shit.”

“Thank God he must take after his mother,” Kyle continued.

“Yeah. Except for the Dumbo ears.”

The two SEALs chuckled, causing Gunny to turn and give them a worried frown.

Armando thought it odd Gunny was suddenly lost for words. He noticed the side-glances the older man gave his son, checking him out whenever the boy looked elsewhere. Since Gunny had always been a loner, it was odd to see the early forms of attachment, the fatherly bonds Armando knew were unfamiliar to Gunny. He’d spent years making wisecracks about the women he had married and children he must have fathered.

The baggage turnstile coughed up Sanouk’s bags like one of Gunny’s attacks. Armando was surprised the two bags consisted of an overstuffed black duffel and a set of golf clubs, which Gunny tried to pick up but Kyle grabbed away from him.

Everything was piled into Kyle’s black Hummer. Sanouk rode shotgun admiring the vehicle. He was every bit the typical American kid, and when Kyle turned on some hip hop, Sanouk began to make some dance moves.

Gunny was breathing heavily as he sat next to Armando in the back seat. His eyes watered from the coughing or something else welling up inside. Armando guessed it was the latter. The old Marine couldn’t stop staring at his son.

Sharon Hamilton

Life is one fool thing after another.

Love is two fool things after each other.

Sharon's Blog ** Sharon's Website ** Facebook**Twitter

Front Toward Heroes

“When you say something, make sure you have said it.” E.B. White

A quote almost every author has seen. To me, that means every word you write has to have meaning, or it’s wasted.  Wasting words is wasting a chance to make an impact. Why write if you can’t make some kind of an impact?

I want to talk about my novel, Finding Mercy today, about the brutal and graphic scenes that have received both criticism and praise.

Why did I write them?

Good question.

How many of you have a family member who has been in combat? Everyone has heard someone mention that father, grandfather, sister, brother, someone who doesn’t talk about what happened while they were in battle.

PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We all know what it is, but we might not understand exactly how it affects someone and why. Often those who suffer from this condition can’t talk about it. I have seen this in members of my family, my grandfather, my son. I have seen my son climb off a bus after months of heavy combat, go straight to a grocery store and buy several baskets of food. I have seen him up, night after night, cooking more food than any of us physically could eat, desperately grasping for anything to take his mind off what happened “over there.” I have seen the “thousand yard stare”, where you know they are somewhere else, trapped in a living nightmare.

I have talked to a service member who served in EOD, disarming ordnance, who kept a diary. They would hand that notebook over to be read when anyone asked what was going on in their head. They did this because they couldn’t talk about what they saw. They didn’t want to try to recall the events. When they woke up in a sweat, screaming, they’d grab the notebook and write it down, force it to the page and in a way, from their mind. Through that notebook, I discovered that they not only disarmed bombs, they investigated after one went off, after lives were taken in a most gruesome manner, and they were often the first on the scene to witness the carnage, seeing things no person would ever want to. Or could ever forget.

I have heard week after week, of the suicides of young service members unable to come to terms with what they saw and did. So when I wrote about a hero suffering from PTSD, I wanted to try to bring out a fraction of what caused his pain, and in doing so, bring awareness to readers of a growing epidemic in our service men and women. It is not a condition just defined by four letters, it is one of the worst wounds a service member can suffer and many need help they are not getting. This happens because they either don’t know how to seek someone out that can help them, or because they can’t. It’s important we recognize the signs and symptoms, so we can do what they can’t do themselves.
Help them.

In Finding Mercy, the scene where Sgt. Justin Redway calls for an airstrike on his unit, is purely a work of fiction. The act of valor however, is not. During my time in the service, I met a man who was thrust into this situation, who had to make a split second decision between life and death—expecting that he would not survive, but did. To read about some of these remarkable “real life heroes” please visit this link. Home of the Heroes. You can read each of their stories, from why it was harder to wear the medal than earn it, or why one hero stuffed his in an old shoebox. You can even read stories of true valor about what you do when you run out of bullets and have to defend your ground at all costs.

So why the scene? Why the graphic, heart-wrenching view of a combat medic who makes a split-second decision, believing he will die, only to survive and be forced to live with what he did?

Because I needed my readers to understand what was going on in Justin’s head. Why he ran halfway across the country to hide in the middle of nowhere. Why, when he clawed his way out of the darkness, he reacted to someone prying into his past the way he did. I wanted a story of courage and human grit. I wanted a story that showed not all wounds that need to heal, are visible, but you can learn to live with them. All is not lost. There is hope.

I wanted to tell the story of the silent heroes.

Excerpt from Finding Mercy:

  

          He’d stumbled around until he’d found the radio operator. The kid was dead. He looked over to see a captain, most likely the commander for the Ranger detachment, his leg gone, lying on his belly ten feet from the radio, struggling to breathe. The smear of blood across the dusty ground showed he’d crawled at least twenty feet on his belly, trying to reach the radio. Justin’s gaze followed the trail. The captain’s leg lay under an overturned vehicle, beside a bloody Ka-Bar. Like a coyote caught in a trap, he’d used the teeth of that ugly combat knife and sawed off his leg to get free. It had to have taken him most of the night to finish his surgery.

          Justin rushed to the injured officer’s side. He hooked him under the arms and propped him against a tire. He scanned the man’s body, noticing a belt above the hemorrhaging stump, where the man had tried to make a tourniquet. Justin untied the strip of fabric holding it, and twisted the bar under the woven band, tightening it, before he tied the strip back in place. Once satisfied the bleeding had stopped, he went to work on the man’s chest wound. A deflated lung, but if they could load him on a chopper soon, he’d stand a chance.

          “You’re going to be okay, sir,” Justin said, not entirely convinced he would be. It was a wonder he was even alive. How he’d even survived the pain of what he’d done was amazing. His pulse was weak and he’d lost a lot of blood, but he’d seen men recover from worse, and he’d be the last one to steal this man’s hope.

The officer shook his head and tried to say something, only managing to cough.

          “Don’t try to talk.”

          “Do it,” he said in a gravelly voice, more a death rattle than clear words. Until he’d spoken, Justin hadn’t realized he could. A good sign. He still had fight in him.

          “Easy, sir. Going to get you all patched up as good as new.” Justin pressed the plastic package that had held the dressing against the hole in an attempt to seal it.

          “Call for an airstrike.” The captain wore the thousand-yard stare of a man with one foot in heaven and one on earth. Justin had seen it over and over since the attack, but it was what he saw in his eyes that chilled him far more than anything else he’d witnessed on the battlefield.

          Justin studied the man, assessing for any sign of shock, any reason to believe he didn’t have a clue as to what he’d asked. There were few times a serviceman could disobey an order, one being that the officer wasn’t in his right mind.

          The silver-haired officer waited, his mouth set in a grim line, his face white, eyes clear, and the blank stare gone. All his focus now was directed at Justin. “You heard me, Sergeant. Pick up that radio and do as ordered.”

Justin blinked. God help them all. He hadn’t imagined it. “If I take the pressure off this wound, you’ll die, sir.”

          “Call in the goddamned airstrike. I want that five-ton a smoking hole in the ground. Yesterday.” He tossed a sticky GPS next to him, one Justin hadn’t realized he’d had clutched in his fist. The wounded officer turned toward where the cargo sat, guarded like Fort Knox, coughed, and lifted his chin. “When that sun comes up, we’re done.”

          Was this a situation that called for suicide? Apparently the Ranger thought so.

          “They can’t get reinforcements into the valley. You got to do it.”

          They were all collateral damage, expendable. Whatever was in that convoy, the captain didn’t want the enemy to have it. It had more importance than he’d surmised earlier. A Ranger escort, a company of elite infantry sent in to extract, and more Taliban than Justin had ever seen in one place. Important enough that the Ranger commander had ordered his own death, and the deaths of everyone in the area, to ensure it was destroyed. No man would saw his own leg off and crawl twenty feet if he thought there was another way.

          A sinking feeling of doom settled over Justin. No, there’d be no reinforcements. No way could they get here before the fighting started again. It was oh-four-forty, twenty minutes until sunrise, barely enough time for air support to arrive, let alone prepare for the next assault.

          The captain pulled his sidearm. He pointed it at Justin’s head and stared. No, he hadn’t been able to reach the radio with his injury, but that didn’t mean he intended to stop trying. He’d found his means to an end and knew it.

          “I gave you an order—did you understand it?” The weapon slipped from his grip and hit the ground. He didn’t try to reach it again, but just held Justin’s gaze waiting for him to make a choice.

          Justin let go of the dressing, picked up the blood-covered GPS, and crawled over to the radio, staying low to avoid enemy fire. He gave the commander one last look and called in the coordinates. “This is Sergeant Redway with the Two-Fourteen, Bravo Company….” The rest went by as a blur. As soon as he heard “roger,” Justin released the radio. From that point forward, everything seemed hazy. He rolled to sit beside the dead radio operator, leaned against the roof of a M-ATV tactical vehicle, and swallowed hard.

He kicked the GPS away and turned toward the officer, who sucked in a wheezy breath.           “You’re a hero, son. You know it had to be done.”

          Yeah, it did. Justin’s guts knotted. It had been the right thing to do, but it didn’t make killing himself or his friends any easier. They couldn’t go anywhere, only sit here and wait for it to happen. The others—they didn’t even know what was coming.

He clamped his teeth together, doing his best not to call him something that could get him shot. Not that it mattered. They’d all be dead soon enough. They really didn’t have a choice. The cargo must not fall into enemy hands, but did the commander really think he wanted a medal for what he’d done? Posthumously?

          “It would be real bad for everyone if they captured what’s in that truck.”

          “Just what is in that truck?” The cargo again. Everything pointed back to the cargo. What was so fucking important it outweighed the preservation of human life?

          The captain shook his head. “This is a small sacrifice, and I’d willingly pay it ten times over. You would too—if you….” He closed his eyes and his chest stopped moving.

           

Cover Reveal for Hard As You Can (Hard Ink #2)!

By Laura Kaye

Hey guys! I'm super excited to share with you the cover for Hard As You Can (Hard Ink #2), a military romance and my current work in progress! Avon did a photo shoot for this cover. I first saw the raw images in May and about died I thought they were so wonderful. And the finished cover and stepback images are just amazing, too. See what you think:

Here's what it's about:

Ever since hard-bodied, drop-dead-charming Shane McCallan strolled into the dance club where Crystal Dean works, he’s shown a knack for getting beneath her defenses. For her little sister’s sake, Crystal can’t get too close. Until her job and Shane’s mission intersect, and he reveals talents that go deeper than she could have guessed. 

 Shane would never turn his back on a friend in need, especially a former Special Forces teammate running a dangerous, off-the-books operation. Nor can he walk away from Crystal. The gorgeous waitress is hiding secrets she doesn't want him to uncover. Too bad. He’s exactly the man she needs to protect her sister, her life, and her heart. All he has to do is convince her that when something feels this good, you hold on as hard as you can--and never let go.

And here's the cover and stepback images, an interior "second cover":

  

 

Add to GoodReads

Available for Pre-Order from Amazon | B&N 

What do you think???

Book 1, Hard As It Gets, releases November 26! Don't miss either one! Woohoo! Here's the info:

Five dishonored soldiers

Former Special Forces

One last mission

These are the men of Hard Ink

Tall, dark, and lethal...

Trouble just walked into Nicholas Rixey's tattoo parlor. Becca Merritt is warm, sexy, wholesome--pure temptation to a very jaded Nick. He's left his military life behind to become co-owner of Hard Ink Tattoo, but Becca is his ex-commander's daughter. Loyalty won't let him turn her away. Lust has plenty to do with it too.

With her brother presumed kidnapped, Becca needs Nick. She just wasn't expecting to want him so much. As their investigation turns into all-out war with an organized crime ring, only Nick can protect her. And only Becca can heal the scars no one else sees. 

Desire is the easy part. Love is as hard as it gets. Good thing Nick is always up for a challenge...

"Edgy, sexy and full of suspense! A great read from a great new author!" ~ #1 NYT Bestselling Author J.R. Ward on HARD AS IT GETS

Read Chapter 1 of Hard As It Gets

Pre-Order at Amazon | B&N | iTunes

Thanks for reading!

Laura

Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Newsletter SignUp