Introducing Rick Vossman: The Story Behind A Brotherhood’s Promise

Every debut novel comes from somewhere. For me, that somewhere is two decades of lived experience — as a soldier, a storyteller, and a Jacksonville, Florida local who’s spent countless hours finding clarity on the water. With the release of A Brotherhood’s Promise, the first installment in my new Brotherhood series, I’m turning that experience into fiction that asks some of the biggest questions a person can ask about loyalty, honor, and what we owe each other.

A Life That Shaped the Story

I’m not writing about the military from the outside looking in. I served in the United States Army infantry, rising from a non-commissioned to a commissioned officer — a journey that gave me a rare, dual vantage point on leadership, brotherhood, and what it actually takes to hold a unit together under the pressure of combat. I was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal, a Bronze Star, two Army Commendation Medals, four Army Achievement Medals, the Southwest Asia Service Medal, and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge — decorations that reflect not just time served, but time spent in the kind of moments that test a person’s character.

After leaving active duty, I channeled that same instinct for clarity and structure into a career as an instructional designer, authoring hundreds of training programs for organizations across the for-profit and non-profit worlds. It’s a background that informs my writing: a storyteller who understands not just what happened in the moments he’s drawing from, but how to walk a reader through them with what I hope is precision and purpose.

A Jacksonville Story, In More Ways Than One

Jacksonville is my home, and the city shows up throughout his first novel. I’m very fond of paddling the waterways by kayak, tracing the same rivers and marshes that quietly shape the setting and rhythm of my writing. There’s something fitting about that. Jacksonville is a city built where a great river meets the sea — a place of convergence, transition, and quiet resilience. Those same qualities run through the Brotherhood series, where characters are constantly navigating the space between who they were in uniform and who they’ve become in civilian life.

My hope is that, like many authors, writing from what is familiar — geographically and emotionally — gives the series a grounded authenticity that’s hard to manufacture. The setting isn’t just a backdrop; it’s part of how the story breathes.

Meet Chad Grayson

At the center of the Brotherhood series is Chad Grayson, a protagonist shaped by the same world I have experienced: the infantry, the bonds forged under fire, and the long, complicated road home. Across the series, Chad’s story becomes a vehicle for exploring some of the most enduring questions in human experience — the kind that don’t come with easy answers. Promises and loyalty sit at the heart of it all. What does it mean to make a vow to someone when the stakes are life and death — and what does it cost to keep that vow years later, far from the battlefield, when the world has moved on but the bond hasn’t? Good versus evil is never treated as simple in Chad’s world. He serves as a lens into the moral gray areas that anyone who has served — or led others — knows all too well: the decisions that don’t have a clean right answer, and the toll of making them anyway. And running underneath it all is the theme of reckoning — the idea that the past doesn’t stay in the past. Choices made in one chapter of life have a way of resurfacing

in the next, demanding to be faced rather than outrun.

A Series Just Beginning

For readers looking for fiction with genuine weight behind it, this is a series worth watching. Stay tuned for more from the Brotherhood series, including deeper dives into the characters, themes, and the Jacksonville setting that ties it all together in the first novel.