He grew up in Nashville with very few reasons to think things would turn out well. He enlisted at 18. Earned the Scout Sniper tab. Did two combat tours in Iraq and came home carrying things nobody had told him how to put down. He spent years trying to figure out who he was without the uniform. He works now as a veterans advocate in upstate South Carolina, walking into county jails to sit with other veterans who ended up exactly where he was afraid he would.

Lima Charlie is his first book. He didn't write it to impress anyone. He wrote it because he knows what it's like to run out of reasons, and he knows other people are sitting in that same quiet right now. It covers everything: where he came from, what boot camp and Scout Sniper School built him into, what two combat tours actually looked like from the inside, and what it took to come home and build something worth keeping. It's about what you give up to become dangerous and the harder work of becoming a person again.

Lima Charlie is military radio code for loud and clear. When a transmission comes through Lima Charlie, the signal is clean. No static. No interference. Nothing is lost between the sender and the receiver. For most of his life, the signal was broken. He knew how to be a weapon. He knew how to be a Marine, a sniper, a cop. But knowing who he actually was underneath all of that, and saying it out loud without anything in the way, took him twenty years and everything that happened along the way to get there. This book is that transmission. All of it, the way it actually happened and the way it actually felt. For himself. For his kids. For anyone out there carrying something heavy and wondering if it is ever going to get quiet enough to hear themselves think. It does. That is what Lima Charlie means. The signal gets through.