Print on to what she was doing, to make me sweat in remembering her name -which, for the record, I had remembered. I asked her out that night and the rest is history. It may be cliché to say so but I had found my soul mate.

It wasn’t long before my wife was pregnant with our first child. We weren’t married yet. She looked cute a few months pregnant in that white wedding dress -in true hippie fashion. We jumped through all the hoops and got married in a lavish Catholic church by a drunken Irishman priest. It wasn’t long afterward that I realized a career in construction with its slow season every winter and no benefits was not the perfect job for a family man.

My wife is from a family of five, the daughter of a New York cop and a sister of a New York cop and a Nassau county Corrections Officer. So It wasn’t long until the influence rubbed off and I joined the police academy. I became a Corrections Officer at the state level in Central Florida. This was back in the day when corrections was still transitioning from beat em’ up in broad daylight to the kinder, gentler, more politically correct corrections of today. I did almost eight years in corrections ending up at the county level. In my years in corrections I had seen and been apart of many things. Escapes, riots, rapes of inmates and everything in between. My undoing eventually came not from the job itself but from the politics and evil from those sworn to protect. It was during this time that -as of therapy -I started writing my first full length manuscript aptly titled The Dark Within. Little did I know it would take the next six years to complete this manuscript.

I was basically run out of corrections. It was either I get out or I’d be personally ruined for things I didn’t do. The power of those above me and the rampant way it ran all the way up to those in charge of the local government was staggering. It was the darkest time of my life and it forever changed me and the way I look at the world.

I was now thirty-two years old and looking for another career change. I needed the schooling for such an endeavor but with two children and myself as the major bread winner I had little to no choices. I tried a year of burying phone cables for Sprint but I was putting more money into the business than I was getting out.

That’s when I decided to pursue a lifelong dream and join the Army. I had originally wanted to join back when Bush senior was in office before I was to go to college but I let my parents talk me out of it. One of my more stupid decisions I’ve made in my life. Never being one to adhere to any boundaries I went for it.

I was the oldest one in my platoon and it seemed my Drill Sergeants hated me for it. Having just come from a career in corrections -and being thrust into a situation where I was surrounded by mere kids and where I stuck out like a sore thumb -I felt as if I had imprisoned myself. To add to my melee I was away from my family for nine weeks of basic training and an additional fourteen weeks of advanced individual training. But I was receiving the education I needed to change careers when otherwise I wouldn’t have had the chance. I signed up for four years. My first duty station was Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

During basic training and even during my deployment overseas I continued to write the manuscript, The Dark Within, in my head, on tissue paper, on anything I could get my hands on. My experiences in Afghanistan added flavor to my writings.

Even though I spent countless days and months away from my family and missed our third child’s words and first steps I don’t regret my time in the Army for one minute. I’m proud to have served overseas in Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom. I’m proud to be a combat veteran. I was deployed a year after the attacks of 911 and was the second wave of Army to establish base camp in Bagram, Afghanistan located in the Hindu Kush mountain region.

Flying over in a C17, Afghanistan looked like the moon from above. Bagram is nestled in