Back Step

Back Step doesn’t just tell a good tale; the development of the book, itself, makes its story all the more fascinating.

This historical novel about a marine from the 1980s who unexpectedly travels back in time to Colonial America was originally written by Master Gunnery Sergeant Burnard Winburn. But when he died, the manuscript was unfinished. His stepdaughter, Marilyn Beverly Worley, recognized a good story in the incomplete pages and knew that one day it must somehow be completed and shared with the world. But how?

Over a decade later, when her hairdresser mentioned another client, Ralph Bates, who was an author and a Marine, Worley didn’t think much about it—but this complete stranger to her family would turn out to be the writer who seamlessly finished her stepfather’s novel.

In Back Step, when a freak combination of nature and science transports John Williams back in time to pre–Revolutionary War America, he decides he can help the colonists shape the future—without altering it beyond recognition. Experience with him the fears and dreams of both patriots and everyday people in the American colonies as war brews, the United States Marine Corps takes its first steps in the world, and a new nation is conceived in liberty.

Burnard Winburn, USMC MGYSGT (ret), was born in Hartsville, South Carolina, in 1938. A high school dropout, he went on to join the US Marine Corps and served for thirty years before retiring at the highest enlisted rank-master gunnery sergeant. In his two Vietnam tours, he was wounded three times but rejected multiple Purple Heart medals because he considered his nonlife threatening shrapnel injuries unworthy of honor when a fellow Marine lost an arm in the same explosion.

After declining a request to extend his service for another six months because it would have delayed a fellow Marine's promotion, Winburn retired. He later received a hand-delivered Presidential Citation recognizing his contribution to the US Marine Corps. An honorable, highly respected, and much-loved Marine, husband, and father, he died in 2002, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript that would eventually become Back Step.