CHAPTER ONE

Leavenworth, Kansas

National Military Cemetery

October 15

There was so much pain and loss it was nearly beyond Ty Dempsey’s ability to bear. More than an hour had passed since the grave had been covered, yet there sat his mother, silently adjusting a wreath and several arrangements of flowers against his brother’s headstone. He had to turn away, but even then, the sights of the cemetery were overwhelming.

White crosses marched into the distance at every angle, stony-white and cold. Sunlight, forcing its way through the cloudy autumn sky, proclaimed that death was commander on this parade ground. Of all the pages of honor that might be written about the fallen, none would mask the reality that so many had been so futilely wasted, and for what? Liberty? Failed political ambitions? The latter was the claim of the ever-present cynics.

“America has no business being over there and this is what we get,” was the fatalistic pragmatism the elite had taken hold of, and that view had prevailed in the media. The last presidential election proved it. A“cut our losses” Vietnam rerun was the inevitable result, practically discounting the sacrificial death for home and country made by thousands.

A sigh was all Ty could manage as he waited a short distance away from his kneeling mother, Martha. Though only thirty-two, he’d accumulated six years of experience as a pastor. He thought he’d gone through every emotional extreme life had to offer. Taking care of others, feeling their grief, their joy, their anger, and even their disillusionment was his calling. But nothing had prepared him for this depth of pain.

Ty’s brother, Nathan J. Dempsey had been killed just last week at age twenty-three, one of the final casualties of a haphazard withdrawal from the Middle East.

Next to Nathan’s resting place another fresh bouquet leaned against a cross, the marker of an old soldier gone on to be with his maker just two years before. Jimmy Dempsey had died at age sixty-four from a cancer whose deadly seed had been sown in his body while he fought to survive the jungles of Vietnam.

Ty still mourned the death of his father, a man who’d been so adversely affected that even his family had been kept at an emotional arm’s length for decades. Though he’d given a gallant effort, he could never break the vice-like grip of battle and death that had brutally held him for all these years. In the end, the aftereffects of the old war brought closure to his suffering, both physically and men