Lives We Might Have Lived releases just after Veterans Day and just before the start of the regular gun deer season in Wisconsin. I didn’t plan this, but it is a perfect time to come out considering one of the main characters is a veteran and deer hunter.

Celebrating and promoting the novel’s depiction of hunting is easy; doing so for its portrayal of a veteran and veterans’ issues is much more challenging. When writing from perspectives not our own, it is crucial to do so responsibly and to, insofar as we can, honor those perspectives and experiences. Waving the bloody shirt to sell my book would be detestable, and so I’m cautious about how much I advertise this aspect of the novel.

But today, on Veterans Day, I think it is appropriate to drop a quick note regarding the massive role soldiers and military tradition play in this novel and acknowledging the men and women who have gone through these things for real.

LWMHL is about a great many things, but few of them animate the events of the story as much as US military history. Leif is a veteran of Afghanistan, a 20+ year conflict in which thousands of Americans died for…well, this is oversimplifying it, but, “nothing.” It has always been easy to celebrate the veterans of WWII because they served what are consensus just causes. But Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other small conflicts besides have had murky objectives, tenuous support, and calamitous results, and so the experience for veterans of those wars has been much more complicated.

What I don’t think is complicated is that veterans deserve our full support, even if the conflicts they participated in deserve our criticism and skepticism, and regardless of the fact that not every veteran served honorably or was ever asked to put it all on the line. We have a diminishing number of navigational points in American society; it would be a failure to lose another by dishonoring veterans.

Leif’s journey takes place in the uneasy spaces modern veterans often occupy, and it drives him in searching for meaning in his life. He sees his service as the defining crossroads between his life and the lives he might have lived. How he responds to that will make all the difference.

I sincerely hope my writing handles veterans’ issues responsibly and honors their service. And, much more importantly, I hope we can all do better in honoring veterans and supporting them in civilian life.

Thank you, veterans, for your service. You’ve been on my mind and in my heart.

Peter