A Just Peace

By: Ed Breeding

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Based on a true story about a U.S. Marine veteran, A JUST PEACE takes the reader with Lander Russell, a young man from the North Carolina hill country, during part of him time in the Vietnam War and how that war affected his entire life afterwards. Having sixty-nine confirmed kills while he was in Vietnam, it was the face of his very first kill that continued to haunt him throughout his life, whereby he seldom ever got over two to three hours sleep each night. The other sixty-eight kills were merely numbers to him, and a job that he was sent there to do. Lander’s grandfather had worked under the infamous Al Capone in Chicago during the years of Prohibition, and besides providing moonshine to Al’s organization, the grandfather was also a “hit man” for him. Lander had been very close to his grandfather. After getting home from Vietnam and reading in his deceased grandfather’s old journal, Lander discovered that there was a job awaiting him with ‘The Company’ in Chicago, if he chose to take it. Being an expert marksman and trained to kill in the marines, Lander took the job as a hit man in the southeastern United States, but he could never tell anyone about his job, not even his young wife, family or friends. And that was not a problem for Lander, for he was good at keeping secrets, and that ability would be very beneficial to him when traveling to various gambling casinos where he was making some of his hits, because he met a couple of attractive young men there that gave him cause to question his true sexual desires. The typical hit jobs that Lander did for ‘The Company’ was of casino managers that were skimming money off the top of the casino’s earnings, and when they had been given ample warnings, but continued to do it, that’s when it was Lander’s job to ‘take them out’, and he did! Lander’s primary reason for marrying a woman was so that he could have a son, which he had always wanted, and after a year or so of marriage, Nathan was born. The son was Lander’s only real interest in a home life. He quickly realized that he needed a cover job locally, so he got one at a furniture factory, and because he felt the need to stay busy whenever he was not traveling and doing a job for The Company, he also made and sold moonshine whiskey, bought-repaired and sold guns, one of his passions. The stateside hits that Lander made, which typically consisted of two or three a year, for which he was handsomely paid, they were all fairly routine, without any major problems, but it was a hit that he had to make in the jungle of southern Mexico that would end up being more deadly and horrific than anything he had ever experienced while fighting and killing in Vietnam.