TIMESTEP

About the Book

In 1965, a young Special Forces officer, originally from Chicago, and a young woman from North Carolina meet by chance. Her father was wounded at Pearl Harbor aboard the USS Nevada but fought the duration of World War II aboard another battleship. By the time that they meet, Mike has served in South Korea and fought in South Vietnam, where he was wounded and decorated for valor. By that time, however, Gloria already had lost her father while she still was in her early teens. After some initial difficulties, eventually they are married while Mike is an assistant professor at West Point. They go on to have three children; and Mike is stationed in Kansas, South Korea (again), Washington state, and Alaska, where he commands an infantry battalion. Finally, he is assigned to advise a National Guard brigade headquartered in New York City, but the story suddenly unravels. Mike takes ill while in New York and is hospitalized, but his illness appears to have occurred much earlier and during a different assignment there. Their marriage and the other duty assignments that followed apparently were the product of Mike’s vivid imagination. Then after a prolonged, frequently comatose hospital stay, he quietly dies in his sleep, leaving a complex mystery to be solved. And the mystery only becomes more complicated in the months that follow, forcing the investigation into his death and a few graves to be reopened.

About the Author

Julian Michael Olejniczak is a career infantry officer who served combat tours in Vietnam with Special Forces and the Vietnamese Rangers and two unaccompanied tours with an infantry division in South Korea. Stateside, he taught literature and philosophy at West Point and offensive tactics at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In the interior of Alaska, he commanded an arctic light infantry battalion and later advised a National Guard brigade in New York. He earned a master of arts degree in literature from the University of Wisconsin and a joint MBA and law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After practicing corporate law in Nashville, he returned to West Point as vice president for alumni publications. His military decorations include the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. He also is the author of To Be a Soldier: A Selective American Military History.