Forgiveness Another Philosophy Novel

The life of one boy who experiences a brutal event that leads him to decide to join the military draft in 1967. This pushes him into a world he did not create but must endure. He survives Vietnam and follows a law enforcement career.



As his life experiences mature his mind, he eventually seeks higher education and befriends his philosophy instructor. He explores the big questions within philosophy that have little in the way of final answers. When his estranged father passes, he is inescapably forced to reflect on the nature of forgiveness both for his own shortcomings and those who have wronged him.  

“The problem of free will follows closely from the mind/body problem.  We generally believe that there is such a thing as genuine free will by which a human moral agent makes decisions and bears the responsibility for those decisions.  Of course, this infers a level of maturity and the ability to understand right from wrong.  Philosophers who have endorsed the claim there is only a chemically induced material basis for everything including our mental states seem stuck with the problem of explaining genuine free will.”




“The young marines that made up the bulk of the rifle companies in Vietnam had learned one important lesson.  They were close to the DMZ which separated North and South Vietnam. They renamed it the Dead Marine Zone…’it don’t mean nothing’ became the ubiquitous idiom that the young marines used excessively to express a universal sense of resignation, despair, and outright irony.”




(Pete talking with his estranged sister now 23). “You think mom told me that!  She just said you went on a trip and she didn’t know when you would get back.  It wasn’t until you came home from Vietnam and I was 7 years old that she told me about you going in the service.  She said she didn’t want to worry me!  Worry me! I was worried every single day!  In that moment, Pete understood how it had been for her.  PTSD had been officially recognized four years earlier…he was aware of PTSD and its symptoms.  And he knew he had most of them and he was sure his little sister had her version of this same awful malady.”