FIRST RUNNER UP IN 2019 THE ERIC HOFFER BOOK AWARD LEGACY FICTION CATEGORY!!! On a snowy February day in 2011, 62-year-old Cindy Sweet receives a Facebook message from a dead man-Warrant Officer Ryan Quinlan who supposedly died in Vietnam forty years earlier. He'd been Cindy's fiancé before an RPG took out his "dust-off" chopper, killing all aboard. Cindy, a young combat nurse at the 24th Evacuation Hospital at Long Binh, had been devastated by her loss, but with no other choice, had served out her year in Vietnam-and even found love again.INCENSE & PEPPERMINTS is a novel about patriotism, loyalty, enduring love, unimaginable courage and devastating loss. It's the story of one woman's year in a war zone during the most unpopular war in U.S. history. "With intelligent and absorbing writing, Carole Bellacera places a courageous and inspiring young woman at the intense and dangerous center of the Vietnam War. Bellacera's account of the seventies is heartfelt and real, yet her moving story of love, loss and healing is timeless." --Diane Chamberlain, best-selling author of Necessary Lies"Carole Bellacera's Incense and Peppermints skillfully transports the readers back to the turbulent seventies, and the heartbreak and passions of war, as seen through the eyes of a nurse serving in Vietnam. I couldn't put down Incense and Peppermints." -- Cindy Myers, Author of The View From Here.