The Dogged and the Damned; One Soldiers War at Home

A tale inspired by the tragic story of a World War 11 combat soldier suffering the effects of what was, at the time, a little studied psychological impairment that, today, we call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It's about a federal veterans psychiatric hospital and its well-meaning staff. And it's about the soldier's war at home as he repeatedly escaped confinement to live by his wits in the wilds. The story includes the efforts of a county law enforcement agency sometimes bewildered in its ongoing attempts to capture a fugitive the media sensationalized as a "Wild Man." It's a tale of people in a place and at a time when the author came to manhood amid that hospital's nearby valleys and surrounding forest and mountains. Though a novel, what Roland Cheek creates are real people in real circumstances:a story with a message.

There are those who reject the idea that a person can acquire the writing art outside academia. Yet storytellers captured audiences for millenniums before Oxford and Harvard were more than forest enclaves where wild turnips sprout. Dissenters, on the other hand, hold the cloistered academic life to be poor training grounds for the kinds of riveting stories audiences wish to hear or read. Roland Cheek's particular PhD came form God's own university of wild places and wilder things. His doctoral thesis came during three decades of narratives about that wild place and those wilder things; wonders saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt, crafted for Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, Sports Afield. His column was syndicated over two decades to 17 newspapers, and he hosted a radio show to 210,000 listeners airing on 75 stations across America. Then he turned to books: seven novels and six wildlife and adventure nonfiction titles, all self-published to great success, all flavored with real-life experiences.