He survived Vietnam. Coming home almost broke him.

It's 1968. A young soldier walks off the plane into an America that doesn't know what to do with him. No parade. No welcome. Just silence - the kind that follows him from the airport to his parents' kitchen to the boxcar his father puts him on the very next day, with one piece of advice: keep moving.

Then he derails.

What follows is a journey no map can chart - through a strange country, a stranger encounter, a woman named Hope, and a missing pilot whose disappearance may be the only way home. As the soldier moves between worlds, the only voice that anchors him is the one he carried out of the jungle: his father's, distilled into one-line truths sharp enough to cut through anything.

Pause before you pursue.

Patience is bittersweet - first bitter, then sweet.

Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go. They only determine where you begin.

DERAILED is a Vietnam veteran's novel about the war that doesn't end when the shooting stops. About fathers and the words they leave behind. About the long ride between who you were and who you might still become - and the quiet, stubborn discipline of hope.

For readers of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Karl Marlantes' What It Is Like to Go to War, and anyone who has ever needed a reason to hold on until tomorrow.

The first volume in Brad Strand's Dare to series.