The Series
The Books
Book by book, one family, from the first Sunday-afternoon radio bulletin about Pearl Harbor to the last homecoming years later.
Book One
The Seed of Duty
When the radio interrupts a West Texas Sunday with news from Pearl Harbor, the Tarman family's world tilts on its axis. One by one, five of its own answer the call — three sons and two uncles — scattering to the Marines, the Army's paratroopers, the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Seabees, until the farm itself is claimed by the war effort. The Seed of Duty is the story of what a family gives up before anyone fires a shot: sons, uncles, land, and the quiet certainties of a life measured in growing seasons.
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Book Two
The Upside-Down Platoon
Haskell “Hack” Tarman and his best friend Dallas Jenkins set out to become Navy and Marine aviators — and discover that becoming a fighter pilot in wartime America means learning to live inside chaos: a training bureaucracy that reroutes them mid-stream, instructors who've already seen combat, and a program improvising itself one class at a time. The daunting, occasionally absurd pipeline that turns college boys into Marine aviators — before either of them has seen the enemy.
Read three excerpts →
Book Three
The Shield and the Soil
The training is over. Now Hack Tarman flies into the war itself — the Solomons, the Central Pacific, Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge, a carrier flight deck racing north toward Japan. The Shield and the Soil is the story of what combat costs, what it forges, and what's left of a man by the time the shooting stops — and the long road home to a family, and a farm, that changed just as much as he did.