Synopsis:
The War That Couldn't Wait is a searing World War II novel about legacy, sacrifice, and the lines we cross to carry each other home.
When sixteen-year-old Melvin Cornedge forges enlistment papers and storms Omaha Beach with the 29th Infantry, he isn't chasing glory?he's chasing the trail of his father, Sergeant Marvyn Cornedge, believed missing in action. What begins as a reckless act of love becomes a brutal crucible as Melvin fights through the shattered towns of Normandy, bound to a promise no one asked him to keep.
Guided by the gruff but loyal Corporal Waylon, Melvin encounters the true cost of war: bullet-riddled villages, broken bodies, and a brotherhood stitched together by grit and grief. Along the way, fragments of Marvyn's story emerge?an act of sacrifice, a medic's testimony, and a note scribbled in pain.
When a discharge order arrives near Saint-Laurent-de-Cuves, it's not just Melvin's body that returns home, but the weight of everything he's carried: his father's dog tags, a letter folded in blood, and the ashes of a boyhood lost in the mud of France.
Years later, Melvin's son, James, will uncover the silence between those men and give it voice?because some wars don't end when the fighting does. Some live on in memory, passed from father to son?not as wounds, but as quiet acts of love that outlast the battlefield.