Dog Tags and Ghost Roads is a poetry collection about military service as both a calling and a haunting, moving from enlistment and duty into combat, homecoming, healing, and legacy. D.C. “Buddy” Lee writes from a place of deep reverence for veterans, families, faith, brotherhood, and the invisible weight that follows people long after the uniform comes off. The book begins with the solemnity of “The Oath” and “For God and Country,” then widens into the dust, salt, fear, and fellowship of service before settling into some of its most affecting terrain: the kitchen-table quiet of coming home, the startled body that still hears war in a slammed door, and the slow mercy of therapy, love, and ordinary mornings.

What moved me most was the book’s emotional honesty about what service costs. Lee doesn’t treat sacrifice as a clean, polished word. He lets it drag sand into the house. In “The Echoes of Service,” honor becomes heavy enough to make breathing hurt, and in “Where Shadows Wait,” home is warm but not simple, because safety feels like a language the veteran has forgotten. Those moments stayed with me because they feel intimate rather than ceremonial. I believed the wife’s hand on the shoulder, the daughter’s laughter in the kitchen, the veteran sitting on the edge of the bed watching the dark. The best pieces in the collection understand that war doesn’t always announce itself with gunfire. Sometimes it lives in a hallway, a cup of coffee, a flinch.

The writing has a strong, thunderous pulse, full of flags, storms, steel, salt, sacred vows, and ghosts. At times, that grand register gives the poems real force, especially in the sea poems like “Underway,” “Run Silent, Run Deep,” and “A Life in Salt and Wind,” where Lee’s Navy background brings texture and authority. I loved those sensory touches: brine, deck, whistle, harbor, anchor, tide. The collection uses repeated images of fire, bone, flame, honor, and eternal watchfulness. When Lee lets the poem breathe in a specific room with a specific person, the book becomes richer and more piercing.

I felt that Dog Tags and Ghost Roads is interested in bearing witness, and there’s something earnest and worthy in that. Its ideas are rooted in respect, resilience, faith, service, and the conviction that healing is not weakness but another form of courage. This is a heartfelt, reverent book with its strongest power in the places where public honor meets private pain, and I’d recommend it especially to veterans, military families, caregivers, and readers who want poetry that speaks openly about duty, trauma, love, and the long road home.

Pages: 92 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0DST3795Y