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.
Three Passages
Read a Few Pages First
Three short excerpts from Hack’s first months flying Corsairs with VMF-213 in the Solomons — spoiler-light, and a fair sense of the voice of the book.
Chapter 26 — “VMF-213”
The weave keeps you alive
“If you try to Boom-and-Zoom when you’re already on the bottom, you’re dead. If you try to dogfight a Zero in a phone booth, you’re dead. The only card you have left in your hand is your wingman, your armor plate, and the geometry of that weave. You drill the Thach until it’s pure muscle memory because the day will come when you don’t have the altitude, you don’t have the sun, and the only thing standing between you and a wooden cross in the jungle is trusting that the man flying two hundred yards off your wing will shoot the bastard off your tail before he cuts you in half.”
Cupp picked his coffee back up and took a slow swallow.
“You master the dive-and-zoom so you can rack up tallies. You master the weave so you live long enough to come back to the tent and write a letter home.”
Chapter 28 — “We Break ’Em, We Fix ’Em”
Claiming the jinxed Corsair
Cupp turned to the skipper. “With your permission, Major—mind if I take this crate up and put all this hocus-pocus nonsense to bed once and for all?”
Britt hid an appreciative grin behind his unlit cigar. “By all means, Captain. Take her up and wring her out. Tarman, Jenkins—suit up and fly his wing. You two helped put the beast back together, and nobody in this outfit flies alone.”
Cupp grabbed the cockpit handhold, throwing a defiant glare over his shoulder at the ground crew and pilots watching. “Tell you what, you knuckleheads—if none of you yellowbellies want to fly this bird, that’s fine by me. Major, I’m claiming her! I’ll fly her every damn chance I get, and I’m gonna paint Wichita Belle right across that nose!”
Chapter 30 — “One Day Over Rendova”
Bail out
He banked hard and pulled up, momentarily sliding over the top of the doomed aircraft. “Come on! Bail out! Get out!” Hack shouted into his mask.
His instinct to preserve life collided with the brutal reality of combat, hitting him in the gut like a sledgehammer. “Get—”
A violent clatter-clink-thump rattled through the cockpit—like heavy hail slamming down on a corrugated tin roof.