Once A Grunt

The Carl D. Hayes Story

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Vietnam, 1968. Carl Hayes is nineteen years old, from Macon, Georgia, and has thirteen months to survive.

Assigned to an infantry squad in the Mekong Delta, Carl carries sixty-one pounds on his back and everything else where it doesn't show. A pebble from a dead friend's hand. Unsent letters in a plastic bag. A photograph of a woman he's not sure will wait. The quiet teachings of a sergeant who speaks in silences and keeps men alive by reading the ground the way other men read books.

Over thirteen months with the 25th Infantry Division, Carl will learn what the jungle sounds like when it has noticed something. He will learn the difference between the letter home and the things that stay in the bag. He will carry men who cannot walk and decisions that cannot be undone and the specific weight of witnessing what happens when good men are asked to do impossible work in a war that does not explain itself.

Once a Grunt is a novel about what men carry into war and what they carry out of it — and about the distance between the two that no letter home can cross.

For readers of Tim O'Brien, Karl Marlantes, and James Webb. For anyone who has served, or loved someone who served, or wanted to understand what the serving cost.