CENTERLINE

I have a firm rule against using my blogs to hype my own books. Writing your own book review just doesn’t seem right.  But each week (5:25 pm Central) I conduct a 15 minute interview with Dan Cofall and Danny Stewart  on the Wall Street Shuffle radio program. (Heard on 1190 AM in the Dallas-Ft Worth area and on other stations nationwide). I also provide them a blog piece to start our discussion. And this week we will be discussing my new novel, CENTERLINE. So here is the one exception to my rule.

CENTERLINE is a fictional account of a real event – the trip home for wounded warriors who have finished their time in military hospitals and return to their communities for recuperation or discharge. The military medical system may treat patients at a variety of military hospitals depending on their specific need: orthopedics, burn recovery, etc. When they are well enough, they are consolidated at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, for aeromedical evacuation home. They travel by C-130 transport aircraft. Nothing fancy – it is the same aircraft that carries supplies to disasters or troops into combat. But it also carries an experienced medical team and their equipment to provide excellent medical care enroute.

So periodically this large transport aircraft arrives at a local or regional airport--say Lubbock, Texas or Garden City, Kansas—and drops off a wounded warrior headed for recovery at home.  Sometimes there is a big crowd and a band to meet the vet. Sometimes just a small group of family.  Sometime there is no one at all.

My youngest son piloted some of those flights at Christmastime during the Surge in Iraq. He also evacuated wounded from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. My older son deployed to Iraq as did his wife, several more of my family members, and a number of friends. Several of my friends returned wounded, and more returned changed in ways even they don’t quite understand. I have known doctors and nurses who participated in the treatment and evacuation of wounded. And I have known many military mothers and spouses—six in my own family—who have done the job of two parents while waiting out deployments and operations and praying for a safe return.

Given the 37 years I spent in uniform, from high school through retirement as Dean of the National War College, I was especially sensitive to the story of these heroes – those who served, and those who waited at home for an uncertain return. I came to realize that everyone who goes to war is wounded in some way – in the body or in the heart. And I became convinced that this was a story that someone needed to tell.

The result is CENTERLINE: the story of Air Evac 1492, a great but tired transport aircraft carrying 31 souls on board through bad weather, inflight emergencies, and the demons of the past in an effort to get bodies and psyches home to heal and back on center.

          At this point, let me turn to a review provided by Colonel Randall (Randy) Larsen, U.S. Air Force (Ret.). He is the founding director of the Institute for Homeland Security and the author of Our Own Worst Enemy: Asking the Right Questions About Security to Protect You, Your Family, and America (Warner Books, 2007). He retired from the Air Force in July 2000 after serving in both the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force (USAF) for a combined total of 32 years. His flying career, which included 400 combat missions in Vietnam as an officer in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, began as a 19-year-old Cobra pilot. His Air Force service included a tour as commanding officer of the USAF’s fleet of VIP aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Here is what he wrote in Domestic Preparedness http://www.domesticpreparedness.com/Commentary/Viewpoint/DPJ_Book_Review%3a_Centerline/  :  
        David (Dave) McIntyre, a name well known in the field of homeland security, has written his first novel. Many in the U.S. armed forces who have already read the book have highly recommended it.
        The concept of “Centerline” was created when Dave spoke with his son Sam shortly after the young soldier had returned from his second tour flying C-130s in Iraq. Sam told his dad about racing a huge sandstorm to an airbase just outside Baghdad. In most circumstances, he would have diverted, but the medical crew in the back said that several of the aircraft’s more critically injured passengers would die if they did not get to the base’s critical-care facility immediately.
        As Sam talked about landing in what are called zero-zero conditions – i.e., no visibility, either vertically or horizontally – Dave remembered that only five years earlier he had been reluctant to loan the family car to this immature college student. Dave was now listening to a different man – a professional military officer, mature far beyond his years.
       “Centerline” is a fact-based, fictional account of a C-130 flight, and its medical crew, taking wounded warriors home for Christmas. It tells the arresting story of the last leg of that journey through the eyes of the patients, the crew, and the medical caregivers. Each person on board has a unique individual story of hopes, dreams, fears, and even a few regrets as the aircraft wings its human cargo home through dangerously bad weather – frequently punctuated by emotional flashbacks and difficult in-flight emergencies. “Everybody who goes to war gets shot,” one soldier says. “Some in the body. Some in the head. Some in the heart.”
        McIntyre has all of the professional credentials needed to write such an inspiring and insightful novel. He taught English at West Point (and wrote his master’s thesis on American war novels). He also served as the Dean of Academics and Faculty at the U.S. National War College in Washington, D.C. In writing “Centerline,” he worked in close collaboration with Jay Lavender, a Hollywood writer/producer. McIntyre’s two sons – Roy, a third-generation Army ranger, and Sam, a U.S. Air Force pilot who recently returned from his 11th combat deployment – assisted in the technical editing.
        There already are plans to turn “Centerline” into a movie or a television mini-series. Set as it is at Christmas in 2007, there is no doubt that it is destined to become a holiday classic.

You can learn more at CENTERLINE at http://CenterlineTheBook.com or
https://www.facebook.com/CenterlineTheBook