Introducing The Conscript Diaries
Based on real events, the first volume of The Conscript Diaries begins a unique yet universal saga about the savagery of war, the failings and nobility of the human condition and ultimately, the power of love.
Philosophical young conscript Bob Sten, is assigned the seemingly impossible task of searching for and disarming booby traps in the grounds of a French colonial manor set in an isolated rubber plantation north-east of Saigon. Little does he know his life is about to be changed forever by an obsessive love affair with the estate owner Adele Bonnet — a sophisticated woman thirty years his senior.
Spanning four decades this epic saga delves into the past of the enigmatic Bonnet to a time when she was the same age as the young Sten. A British Secret Intelligence Service operative during the closing months of the Spanish Civil War and a Special Operations Executive agent during WWII, she gambles her own life for those of strangers and is pushed to her physical and psychological limits simply to survive.
About the Author
The author served in South Vietnam during 1967-68 as a ‘tunnel rat’ in a combat engineer squadron, he was returned to Australia from active service when his 2-year national service tenure ended and immediately recommenced his self-employment in the building industry.
He was on active operations two days before leaving his squadron at Nui Dat for Australia and in little more than 48 hours he went from war and combat conditions to the peaceful suburbs of his home town, where his ‘bed’ was a three-seater divan in the living room of his parent’s home.
On the advice of his father, who served in the Australian Army during World War II, he kept a diary to record day-to-day events of his experiences, both good and bad, and it is from these extensive memoirs, notations and photographs, that these novels were born. In 2011, on the urging of others, he finally sat down to write a short autobiography of his tour of duty in South Vietnam. ‘A grand adventure! The most exciting, adrenaline-pumping time-of-my-life’. Within a few days of commencing writing, he became convinced that a biography was not the best way to get his story across and changed it to a novel.
Soon that novel became two, than four, and in three years he had written what then became the master manuscript of ‘THE CONSCRIPT DIARIES’, from which each novel is taken.
‘The moment I made the decision to write a novel, the story ‘poured’ out and the words appeared almost non-stop.’ After more than seven years The Conscript Diaries remains a work in progress and currently stands at five considerable novels, each one inter-connected through several decades. Starting at the height of the Vietnam War the story takes the reader into the past to previous conflicts including: The Spanish Civil War, World War II and the French Indochina War, each book relating these events and that of the protagonists’ involvement in them.
Once he began writing, past memories he had kept hidden from the world for forty-three years, surfaced and overtook, not only his writing but his life. The enormity of the task he unwittingly set himself became apparent only as the weeks, months and years rolled by and today, that lid on his personal ‘Pandora’s Box’, remains steadfastly open as the saga of The Conscript Diaries continues.
The completion of the series has become something of a quest and with a firm, dedicated application to write until the entire story is told. He has worked day and night to realise his ambition of seeing his books published.
“This is a legacy, and hopefully one of some lasting value that will pique the interest of book lovers. The greatest achievement of my working life would be that the book-buying public pay their hard-earned money to read my works and that a modern-day George Stevens will convince a brave film industry to turn them into movies. This must surely be the pinnacle of achievement for a novelist.”
BOB STEN
