RED DIRT : A Novel of Indirect Fire (The Way Home Is Closed, Vietnam)

Vietnam, 1968. A hilltop in the Central Highlands. A gun crew of six.

PFC Jack Lowe arrives at Firebase Blackjack with black boots and orders assigning him to Gun Two — an M102 howitzer crewed by men who do not look at him, do not welcome him, and do not explain the rules. The section chief gives him a title and a prohibition: You're Number Three. Don't touch anything until I tell you to touch it.

Over twelve months, Lowe learns the gun. He learns the weight of a thirty-three-pound shell carried ten meters in the dark. He learns the difference between HE and illumination by feel. He learns that the distance between the breech and the impact is seven miles, and that seven miles is the space where the artilleryman lives — close enough to fire, too far to see what the firing does.

He learns the men. Teague, the section chief who speaks in corrections and silences. Reyes, the breech man who plays Shenandoah on a harmonica at dawn. Webb, the charge cutter who names everything because naming is how he holds the fear at arm's length. Vojtek, the gunner whose precision is not a skill but a condition of his existence. And Skaggs, the boy from Harlan County who feeds ham and lima beans to a one-eared dog because the dog is the only thing on the firebase that doesn't require him to pretend he isn't afraid.

Then the regiment comes. And the rounds from April 14th land near a village. And the gun does what the gun does, which is not distinguish.

Red Dirt is a novel about the men who serve indirect fire — who load and aim and pull the lanyard and never see where the steel goes. It is a novel about work and repetition and the slow transformation of a man's hands from the hands that arrived to the hands that leave. It is a novel about what the tour makes, and how the made thing goes home with the man.