Patriot Features — Mel Carney
Command at Dawn
Dedicated to all Veterans
Mel has dedicated himself and Command at Dawn to help veterans communicate better with their families and friends. The more the family knows about what their veteran has been through, the better that they will know the veteran.
Mel only wishes that his fellow veterans not leave the legacy: “Dad never talked about the war.”
Please note: This novel is intended for an adult audience.
June 1, 1968, Vietnam — Bravo company was on a mountaintop, two kilometers from Laos. At 1430 hours, mortar rounds moved across their perimeter like the wind. Twenty rounds into the attack, Lt. Scott Ledbetter ran to the command post. The carnage stopped him cold. The commander and several others were lying wounded on the ground, and the forward observer was sitting dead against a stone wall.
With mortar rounds exploding around him, he started calling in artillery. After thirty rounds, the mortars stopped and small arms probes began. Knowing an attack was imminent, he pounded the enemy with rounds long into the night.
In the morning, Scott as the new commanding officer, walked forty-four men off the mountain and onto the rest of the war. The attack cost five men their lives. Twenty-seven were wounded and medevac’d.
In eighteen months, Scott had gone from a civilian in a strife-torn America to a battle-hardened infantry commander. When he came home, he found that soldiers were hated. And to stay sane, he started to write. Command at Dawn is the product of that writing.
“Command at Dawn is the result of writing to keep body and mind headed in the right direction. His writing let him put on paper what was inside of his head and it kept combat from interfering with earning a living.”
Paperback | 978-1-947309-95-1
5.5 x .5 | 380 pages | $19.95
HISTORY / Military / Vietnam War
FICTION / Wary & Military
If you are interested in purchasing the book, Mel will send you an autographed copy of Command at Dawn.
About Mel
Mel returned from Vietnam and found that soldiers were not welcomed in the US. That caused him to bury thoughts of combat, deep. With no professional help he took to writing in his basement office. Writing became his salvation and joy.
Writing let him go back to a time when he rode a white stallion with Roy and Gene, solved the mysteries of Cabin Island and The House on the Cliff with the Hardy Boys, and trailed west with mountain men and cowboys in Zane Grey novels.
Over the years he wrote stories of hitching across the country, drinking from a semi-driver’s bottle of Vodka as they wheeled down a tiny west Texas highway, eating hot beignets at Café Du Monde, sharing cheese and sourdough bread with tourists in a Sausalito park, and sitting around a fountain in San Francisco with a bunch of hippies and talking long into the night. He wrote about everything but combat.
By 2016 Mel had written the above stories and about his pre-combat military experiences. In 2016 a VA psychiatrist helped him remove the cloak of silence that had kept all mention of combat off-limits. Once that cloak was removed, Command at Dawn was on its way to completion.
Re-Claiming the pride
When he came home he was unable to talk with anyone about his combat experiences and over time he lost the pride that he felt in what he had accomplished in combat. He is reclaiming his pride in his combat experiences and as he talks to audiences across the Midwest he reinforces his belief that his unit made a difference while in combat.
If you’d like to contact Mel about giving a presentation to your group you can reach him here command.6.1968@gmail.com.