Driven by great personal loss and a fierce dedication to his young nation, Henry Wallis leaves his family farm to fight for the Confederacy. He befriends Chickasaw warrior leader Tushka Chukilissa and trusted commander Drysdale Mattison, and, with a fearless band of Chickasaw warrior-soldiers, the three fight valiantly under the command of legendary Nathan Bedford Forrest. But when a fight-to-the-death encounter with a Yankee officer strands the two of them at the Chickasaw village of Yakni-ammona, Henry finds his world has turned upside-down. An unlikely connection with the enemy officer reveals the shared hopes and wounds of a divided nation. . . and Henry's love for this new-found culture—and a woman—challenges his commitments. In these pages you will fight with Henry and First Platoon through the bloodiest battles of the Civil Wilson Creek, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Brice’s Cross Roads, and more. You will know the dread of the fight to come; feel every blow of the saber; hear the crack of every musket, the roar of every cannon, as First Platoon cuts, slashes, and ambushes its way through a near-forgotten place and time. Then watch as fates converge in a disaster on the Mississippi River that was overshadowed by other events of its day—a gut-wrenching, heartbreaking tragedy that seems more fiction than fact, so awful was it in its irony. Feel the courage, the friendship, the loss that emerge from a climax that will leave you reeling—and remember forever its stories that echo still, long after the moment.