Children of the Sun
A veteran has returned from a devastating American war in a country on the other side of the world. He brought back the demons of war . . . and he can’t get rid of them.
His girlfriend struggles to help him to come home, to find peace, to start a family. But she can never free him from the war that forever torments him.
They are both black West Indians, living on the American island of Saint Croix in the Caribbean. Nick, drafted at the age of eighteen, fought in the white man’s war in Vietnam, a war which destroyed his life. He lost his best friend from high school, Leroy, Angelique’s brother, missing in action on a night patrol somewhere in the jungle of Vietnam. Once the star on the high school basketball team—an exuberant teenager who dreamed of one day becoming the high school coach—Nicholas Cruz cannot free himself from his guilt and his rage.
Angelique watches with anguish as the big-hearted man she once loved evolves into a demolitions expert fighting his own war to save his people.
An American submarine, armed with nuclear missiles, moors at the island’s Navy Pier, making Saint Croix, as Angelique knows, a first strike target. The last war was real; the next war, when it begins, will also be very real.
Angelique meets a white engineer who works at the island’s oil refinery. Her bitterness toward white Americans diminishes when she learns more about his background. A friendship grows, though it triggers Nick’s explosive rage.
Sosha is a Polish refugee from Hitler’s war whose twig-thin fingers carve voluptuous sculptures in West Indian mahogany. She bestows her blessing upon Angelique and Karl, two victims of war who have found a love free of racism.
But can Sosha, a survivor of Hitler’s madness, protect them from the nuclear weapons which threaten their island, and the entire planet?
And can anyone stop Nicholas Cruz on the night that the U.S. Navy provides him with the ultimate weapon?
Today, roughly 12,000 nuclear warheads are maintained around the world by a variety of governments. The war in Ukraine has put many of them on high alert.
May we demand, and build, a better peace.