Book excerpt: When a military experiment goes horribly wrong and turns his entire platoon gay, the deeply religious, washed-up General Newman Ginger must learn to love his platoon and himself in order to survive the spiritual, professional and actual war zone he has just entered... General Newman Ginger wants nothing more than to fall asleep each night with a bottle of whiskey and a good war story, but his life of bitter solitude is thrown into chaos when he is ordered to act as a lab rat for top secret weapons testing. The year is 1999, and a kinder, gentler army is developing non-lethal weapons to subdue enemy soldiers humanely. To avoid a court martial, General Ginger agrees to act as a test subject for one of these "soft" weapons: an aphrodisiac bomb. The bomb is supposed to sexually arouse the enemy in order to distract him on the battlefield. However, what appears to be an accidental miscalculation muddles the experiment and the bomb turns the entire makeshift platoon gay. Horrified by his new sexuality, General Ginger begs to be expelled from the platoon to return to his empty but familiar life, to ride out his remaining days in denial. Despite close ties to military brass he is remanded to top-secret barracks where the gay platoon is being held for observation and testing. As platoon members begin to develop mysterious side effects, the arch-Christian Secretary of Defense sends them on a suicide mission in the mountains of a Middle Eastern war zone, and sends warplanes to finish them off should they survive the armed militias and devastating terrain. While attempting to go AWOL, General Ginger stumbles upon the truth- there is no mission. Suddenly offered the chance to escape, and with warplanes bearing down on them, he must choose between his new gay platoon and his past as a loyal, straight, Christian soldier. Love Bomb and the Pink Platoon is the debut novel from award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker Ryan Gielen. His work has been covered by and appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, Gawker, Slate, BookBaby, IndieReader, EBookFriendly, IndieWire, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, CBS and hundreds of local and regional news outlets.