Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome

08/06/2026

https://jamesstrauss.com/the-cowardly-lion-volume-seven-chapter-vi/
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume VII, Chapter VI

Relationships begin to form under the beginning of pressure and some potentially terminal circumstance. My well-acted phony credentials show no frayng and remain undetected as I perform roles I never could have expected or believed. The crew of the ship begns to prove to be the most cooperative aTnd efficient group I'd experienced since the Marine Corps, but made up of foreigners and even vagabonds. I began to realize I could not perform the mission alone, and it was likely that the crew, or part of it, would be all I had to work with or failure might be abrupt and more than painful.

I moved through throngs of passengers populating the corridors of the ship. Murmurs of “doctor” came from some of them, as they reacted to my surgical scrubs. I had removed my coat. The temperature maintained inside the vessel hallways was always high, probably to help passengers recover from th...

07/18/2026

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07/18/2026

[email protected]

06/20/2026

THE COWARDLY LION, Volume VII, Chapter III
Accommodating being aboard an adventure/cruise ship becomes a startling and almost shocking education, as life aboard a ship had never been something I'd done or contemplated. The Agency hadn't furnished or funded another agent to accompany me, and I was quickly coming to figure out that I would need some crewmen and women to guide and assist me if I was ever to have a chance to get to the gulag, and then get the kid out of the country. I was overwhelmed, and I knew it. My small supply of gold was not going to go far, and I was surprised that the Agency had funded and tolerated its purchase. That alone told me I was once again on a very special and important mission, but this time without the kind of huge support I'd had in Florida.

My books are all still for sale, and with my recent heart issues, you ought to invest to get signed copies and also to keep me going! I cannot thank you enough!

I learned from Don, my bunkie and fellow de-frocked PhD, that the ship was never referred to as the “MS World Discoverer,” which was painted in black across her white prow and in white across her black stern. Unlike most ships, because of seafaring lore about potential ill fortune, the ship had ...

05/15/2026

THE COWARDLY LION, Volume VII, Chapter I
The world did not explode as a whole, only the microcosmic life I'd built so cleverly yet haphazardly in embracing real-life espionage and social exchange began to shiver and tremble. My life of many braided and living fibers was harshly strummed by the nearly invisible but punishing hand of the CIA. Loaded with iodine, pulled back from a disappearing island, and deliberately reassigned immediately to nautical service up in the Arctic wasn't causing overload...it was overload itself. My arrival in Nome, Alaska, alone at a closed bar, where cleanup becomes a soothing balm of relief. How many layers of my onion-like life must be painfully laid back before any true progress or accomplishment can be allowed to surface...


It has taken a monumental effort, dragging bruised and sometimes broken parts across shoals, given the appearance of fine lips of moving sand, to reach up and make the attempt to edit, design, assemble, and print volumes V and VI to continue the saga has been like staring up into the curl of a closing wall of solid tsunami wave, facing into it and plunging forward. If you like this series and what came before, then throw your heft into this fight to rise to the surface and survive. Buy any or all of my books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, SmashSwords, or order direct: James Strauss, 507 Broad Street, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. 53147

The only ‘accidental’ discharge or ignition of an atomic device on U.S. soil in the history of nuclear weaponry had come to be blamed on me. Not the United States Navy, which was present; not ex-Navy Seal Marcinko, who was present; and not my control officer, who was also distantly present. The ...

04/30/2026

THE COWARDLY LION, Volume VI, Chapter ###III
This is the last chapter of volume VI and the next chapter will begin volume VII.
The mission goes as planned but does not stick cohesively together. Peter Kohler is out of it and then back in, which was hard to accommodate until it happened to me. The event occurs but not conventionally, and the island becomes a place of mere memory and washing sand and sea. I am more than wounded as some plans went far astray from what was expected, and my own state, following detonation, was not one allowing for full recall...only reconstruction from the memories of others, which are not always accurate, either by accident or design. This last chapter concludes volume VI, leaving more mystery which will be investigated deeper as next week's first chapter of the new volume will demonstrate.

Please consider purchasing all the first four volumes as Chuck struggles to get the fifth and now sixth volumes printed and distributed. This series is unlike anything I've ever read, much less written, and has more priority or even classified information than is likely good for me...but it's my birthday on the 30th, and I'm now old enough not to care. You will want to have this collection and then review it when you come across other data that makes the unbelievable events of my life totally believable.

I was on the stern of the Princess, lying across the stern stoop cushion stretching from one side of the hull to the other, a vortex of gentle winds blowing across my body. The aroma of sea brine and the faint, tiny drops of moisture created by the boat’s passage were the only similarities to […...

04/23/2026

THE COWARDLY LION, Volume VI, Chapter ###II

All the horsepower, naval power, money, time, and energy come to the line of departure as the twin Lamborghini-powered Princess makes its landing on Murder Island. As expected, things begin to happen automatically, as Tony hinted they would, and the plan to take care of the errant abandoned device is set up and prepared for detonation. The intensity is sharp, but its edge is placed against a nearly opaque surface. The time to cut the cord or set it off has arrived.

Los Alamos National Laboratory was the facility to which enriched elements were shipped from the Oak Ridge enrichment facility in Tennessee. The gas centrifuge plant is the single largest structure on the planet where all enrichment is performed for atomic or nuclear weapons in the hands of the Unit...

04/18/2026

BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY. Short Story by James Strauss

The game, or rather games of espionage, are not those as portrayed in movies. The home office keeps secrets from field forces and agents, as do the field agents from the home office analysts. This story is about some of those secrets and how field agents both survive and come to trust or distrust one another. This story is not one of fiction, but of a living reality apportioned equally with adaptive capacity and action, while also delivering the pain of lost honor, trust, and friendship. To be a surviving field agent, one must have the absolutely most valuable ability...to possess perseverance. The night comes and stays, but only perseverance many times allows for having the absolute knowledge that dawn is coming once again.

Arch Patton stood on the roof of Hotel St. Gotthard, the only hotel less than half a kilometer from the train station, and overlooking the Bahnhaufstrasse.

04/09/2026

THE COWARDLY LION, Volume VI, Chapter ###I
The intensity of the 'double blind, double secret' mission becomes ever more evident with Kohler becoming a part of the mission. A man in complete violation of the Agency's rules about civilians accompanying active agents on missions. The device becomes real and its retrieval or destruction becomes more arcane by the minute, with everyone wanting to be involved with the mission but wanting also to be a safe distance away should things go catastrophically wrong.

Given the data provided by Peter Kohler, there was no way I could call in a dust off on the island, as I’d planned, using the Huey Cobras. The ‘tube’ that led down into the underground or underground sand repository below the island had to be fragile at its topmost entry. The penetrating round...

04/01/2026

IF YOU GO AWAY...
Op/Ed
By James Strauss

The price of combat in war is not truly understood nor believed if explained by those who went. Television series, war movies, and the slanted military and mass media news continue to disguise the true cost to those who are sent or choose to go into such armed conflict. From actual engaged combat on the ground, there is literally no return, either from ending in a body bag or becoming psychologically killed off to become more of a zombie or a shredded version of what was once a real, thinking, caring, and loving human before engagement. Here is my story and the result, which, if you go, will be your very own.

Opinion/Editorial IF YOU GO AWAY… The country of the United States heads into a ground combat war in the desert, a desert portrayed in Hollywood style in the old Gary Cooper movie called Beau Geste. The setting will not be far off, sand and mountains, and viciously murderous enemies killing his fe...