Garren, author of the regional best-seller, The Secret of War: A Dramatic History of Civil War Crime in Western North Carolina, and Mountain Myth: Unionism in Western North Carolina, "holds no
punches" as he exposes abusive and barbaric acts committed by U.S. Army officers. He says, "This is a story that has long needed to be told." The story follows the lives of two
seventeen-year-olds conscripted by Confederate authorities in the last year of the Civil War. The two are sent to Camp Vance in Morganton, North Carolina, as members of the Ninth Battalion,
Confederate Junior Reserves. They and the other boys are without weapons or taining when the camp is raided by Union soldiers. The two boys are captured and taken to the horrific Union prison
at Camp Douglas in Chicago, Illinois. They endure the hardships of prison life until they are at the breaking point. Eventually they join the Union army's Galvanized Regiments to save
themselves, and they end up on the western frontier where fate takes them to California. After serving on the plains and joining the regular army the two are assigned to duty as scouts during
the Modoc War in northern California and southern Oregon. Always, they find themselves fighting for their very survival.
