GLENRIO, book 9 of my series, “Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle,” is a novel talking about warrior trauma, romance, and love. Yes, it is possible to escape the remembered horrors of war. Both the warriors who survive and the people waiting when they come home may be able to put the thousand pieces back together again—through unexpected romance and healing love.
Warrior trauma: nightmares, hallucinations, and fears; paralyzing images, wanting to forget, and trying to find a way out of the past. Soldiers who come home physically intact, but emotionally shattered. Mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, girlfriends and boyfriends: all grieving, because they do not know where their loved ones who went off to war could be; or because their loved ones come back different and cannot talk about it. Roman legionnaires, Napoleonic grenadiers, Pickett’s chargers, Germans in the trenches on the Western Front, American sailors in the Pacific watching kamikazes coming shipside, Russian conscripts gathering their dead in Bakhmut—it is all the same: warrior trauma. No good guys, no bad guys. Most of them young men marched off to die by old men, in the name of some glorious cause.
Colm O’Gorman, the main man in GLENRIO, is returning home to his mother in the Texas Panhandle after more than a decade serving in two wars—World War II and Korea. He is suffering from warrior trauma. He saw indescribable horrors and lost his beloved Korean girlfriend. Marta Maria Trujillo, the main woman in GLENRIO, has been waiting in her family’s café on the New Mexico side of the TX-NM state line for her boyfriend who died on a Normandy beach, and she will not—cannot—accept the fact that he is never coming back. She is suffering from the same warrior trauma as Colm.
Whether by fate, by providence, or by chance, they meet when Colm gets off a Greyhound from California to eat in Marta Maria’s Santa Rosa Café. He does not get back on the bus. He sees in her his Korean beloved, and she sees in him her New Mexican lover. An unexpected romance begins. That is what my story in GLENRIO is all about. Their romance will lead to a saving love. She will save him from suicide and will make it possible for him to come home from war. He will save her from inconsolable grief and make it possible for her to fall in love again. That is what GLENRIO will show.
Warrior trauma is not the only trauma in my GLENRIO. In it, there are other different but likewise debilitating traumas, unexpected romances, and saving loves. A fifteen-year-old named Mary Kay appears in the café claiming that Colm is her father. He accepts her and puts her to work. At school, she falls in love with Mike, whose love will help her overcome the trauma from the death of her mother and from growing up without a father. A pregnant young Black woman named Michelle shows up at the café penniless and abandoned by the white boy who seduced her. A young white cowboy nicknamed Little Joe unexpectedly encounters her and falls in love with her. He romances her and will eventually help her overcome her mistrust of men, especially white men.
Trauma, especially warrior trauma, never goes away. It is ever remembered, even if suppressed. But it can be assuaged by romance and love. Colm will always be haunted by the wars in Europe and Korea. Marta Maria tearfully visits the grave of her fiancé who died in France. But mutual love will keep Colm from suicide and Marta Maria from despair. That is what GLENRIO tells us.