THE BLOOD DOES NOT ASK

One Corpsman. Six Days. Every Life in His Hands.

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

One corpsman. Six days. Every life in his hands.

HM3 Rowan steps off a helicopter onto a firebase in the Vietnamese highlands carrying a dead man's medical bag. The canvas is stiff with dried blood. The supplies are half gone. The corpsman before him lasted eleven days.

Rowan is twenty years old. Five months ago he was drawing blood at a naval clinic in Illinois. Now he is the only medic for thirty-eight Marines walking into triple-canopy jungle — and the ceiling is down, the medevac birds can't fly, and the resupply hasn't come in six days.

He has four battle dressings. Two hemostats. One morphine syrette. Zero IV fluid. Zero airways. And the mathematics of the jungle are simple: the blood comes, and the blood does not ask whether you have what you need to stop it.

Over six days, Rowan will treat wounds he was never trained for with supplies that run out faster than the men who need them. He will carry the dying when the helicopters cannot come. He will learn every name in the platoon and lose the ones that the war chooses to subtract. He will face the corpsman's worst question — not can I save this man, but which man do I save when I can only save one.

The Blood Does Not Ask is a novel about the men who go toward the sound. About steady hands and empty bags and the arithmetic of survival when the supplies are gone and the only thing left is the willingness to keep going.

Book Fourteen of The Way Home Is Closed — a series following the soldiers, Marines, corpsmen, and pilots who fought in a war that changed everyone it touched.

For readers of Tim O'Brien, Karl Marlantes, and Denis Johnson.