The Internet Book Database of Fiction

#	Date	Publisher	Binding	Cover
1	1965-00-00	Random House

Blurb:: Get this picture: Twelve, bearded, filthy American soldier-prisoners in a hidden, isolated, barbed-wire camp in England in the spring of 1944. A Negro, an Indian, ten white men. Of these twelve soldiers, most had been sentenced to die, a few to life at hard labor. Now they have been offered a chance at a pardon, or at any rate an honorable death, if they train for and complete a dangerous mission behind the lines in Fortress Europa before the D-Day invasion. Indian, Negro, whites of various ethnic and regional backgrounds - doomed prisoners given a choice that might be their last chance; locked in a caldron of their past, present, future; united in a forced, possibly noble, commitment and in their own feeble protest of continued rebellion and childish filth ... Who were they, where did they come from, what had they done, what were they going to do? What were their fears, hopes, hates, joys? What were those essential human traits in them, good and evil, which we all share? And of course there had to be other people - lives intertwined, on the fringes and contiguous. Men and women of their past and present. Soldiers who guarded them. Officers who trained them, planned for them, perhaps worried about them, hated and loved them.