Our Own Little World - Book One

“It was our own little world.”A soldier of the 24th Infantry, remembering Gifu

Book One of the Deuce Four Trilogy.

Gifu, Japan, spring 1949. Behind the gate of Camp Majestic, the all-Black 24th Infantry Regiment has built a world of its own: a band, a boxing team, a ballfield, a town that knows the men by name. Above it sits a white chain of command that has already decided what they are.

Pvt. Cleve Pryor comes up from the rail siding at nineteen, on an enlistment form he signed in his dead father’s name, and wants to belong to it. Second Lt. Cobb arrives to learn a regiment that tests every officer it is given. And First Sergeant Rand, who has served under eleven regimental commanders, watches all of it and enters it in the book he keeps behind his eyes.

Then, on a Sunday in June 1950, word comes from Korea. Within weeks the regiment is crossing to Pusan, and in July its 3d Battalion takes Yech’on, one of the first American victories of the war. The country celebrates it for a week. The Army will spend decades forgetting it.

This is the last peacetime year of a regiment that had served since 1869, and of the men who were about to be asked to carry it into war.

Thirty chapters in three parts. The 24th Infantry was real, and every dated event in these pages is drawn from the record. A chapter-by-chapter accounting of what is documented and what is invented, with sources, stands at the back of the book.

EPUB edition. Read it on any e-reader, tablet, phone or computer.