If you listen, you can hear Satan laughing at the awful things men do to each other. Sometimes it sounds like gunfire, but usually I don’t so much hear it as feel it. When Major Jim Harwood received orders to deploy to Ramadi in 2006, he never believed he would come home so mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically broken. Intelligence officers at his level generally deployed to a desk, but this time it was different. Embedded with a small special operations team outside the wire, Jim comes face-to-face with the evil that runs rampant in war. The repeated moral injuries received mission after mission destroy the humanity at the core of the man he had formerly been. Losses within his team drive a deep sense of guilt and shame. Teetering on the edge of hopelessness and suicide, Jim is unexpectedly called home due to family tragedy.

Deeply scarred both physically and emotionally, Jim faces a future back home he doesn’t recognize or know how to navigate. The world doesn’t understand him, and the world he now faces doesn’t make any sense either. The systems put in place by the military and the VA are failing him. Left with little he can rely on but an equally broken teammate from Iraq, Jim must navigate recovery, accept his altered reality, and find forgiveness for those who destroyed what mattered most.