Somewhere in between: a marine's journey through war, loss, and peace

"In the summer of 2009, on a dusty road in Garmsir, Afghanistan, a roadside bomb killed twenty-one-year-old Corporal Nick Xiarhos. His close friend and fellow Marine, Corporal Andrew Coville, was fighting the same war a few miles away. Coville flew back to the U.S. for the funeral. Then he went back to the war to finish his deployment. But he would spend nearly two decades trying to find his way back home. In the long aftermath of their war, Coville carried the burden of his friend's death with him like a heavy rucksack. From the deserts of Afghanistan to the streets of Massachusetts as a Yarmouth police officer, he did what Marines do-he carried the load quietly, without complaint. He kept Nick's memory alive by living the life Nick no longer could. But beneath the silence were wounds he didn't yet know how to face. They would not heal on their own. By 2017, Coville was beginning to break free of who the war had made him-a trip abroad, a serious relationship, the sense that he might be moving forward. Then, in 2018, a fellow officer was murdered in the line of duty. He stood up beside grieving colleagues while his own old losses came rushing back. Three years later, the killer's trial coincided with America's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan-the country he and Nick had bled for was handed back to the people they had fought. The ghosts Coville had buried away for more than a decade began to resurface. He went out to the garage, opened his old Marine footlocker, and found the journal he had kept at twenty-one. For the first time since Afghanistan, he began to piece the past together. Then, in May 2025, three thousand miles from home, a violent and traumatic near-death experience almost took everything. The reckoning he thought he was nearly finished with had only just begun. Somewhere in Between is the twenty-year story behind that reckoning-a memoir of war and brotherhood, survivor's guilt and the long road home. At its center are three words from Nick Xiarhos's gravestone-Living the Dream-and Coville's unfinished effort to live up to them. With a foreword by Kael Weston, author of The Mirror Test"--