SEVENTY-EIGHT MILES

A Novel of the Chosin Reservoir

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

November 1950. The Chosin Reservoir. The temperature is thirty below zero. The Chinese have sent 120,000 soldiers to kill them. The road south is seventy-eight miles long.

Corporal Oren Lockhart counts everything. Rounds. Steps. Seconds between mortar impacts. Men still breathing after a firefight. He has been counting since Okinawa, since a hillside covered in bodies taught him that numbers are easier than feelings. For seven years, the counting has kept him alive. It has also kept him empty.

Then a nineteen-year-old kid from Omaha named Fisk starts talking about a girl. He talks about her the way some men talk about God — with total conviction and no evidence that the faith is returned. He carries eleven unsent letters in his breast pocket. He has a chipped front tooth and a grin that won't quit. He is everything Lockhart is not: open, afraid, and fully alive.

When the trap closes and the 1st Marine Division is surrounded, Lockhart makes a decision he cannot put into words. This kid walks out. Not for the Corps. Not for the country. For a girl in Omaha and a stack of letters that haven't been mailed.

What follows is a fourteen-day, seventy-eight-mile march through the worst terrain and the worst cold and the worst odds in American military history. A sergeant with an infected arm who refuses to stop walking. A Navy corpsman who talks about his mother's recipes while he stitches men together. A Chinese colonel on the ridgeline who studies the Marines the way a teacher studies students. A bridge that mathematics says should fail. A column of men who keep walking because walking is the only thing left.

And a man who has spent seven years counting the dead — who must now learn to count the living.

From the frozen mountains of North Korea to a church basement in Omaha, Seventy-Eight Miles is a novel about war, endurance, and the slow, hard return to being human.

For readers of The Things They Carried, Matterhorn, and On Desperate Ground.