West Point is a geographical location that was of critical importance during the Revolutionary War, the site of our nation’s first military academy, and the commissioning source of thousands of Army, Army Air Corps, Air Force, and even some Navy and Marine Corps officers who have led our nation’s young men, and now women, in battle since the Academy’s founding on March 16, 1802 by President Thomas Jefferson.

This volume contains a very selective military history of the United States that focuses on the Revolutionary War and the contributions of West Point graduates to subsequent wars, but with an emphasis on some of the lesser known persons and events of the past 250 years or so. It also touches upon many of the customs and traditions of the West Point experience.

Many chapters include the stories of unsung or forgotten heroes and heroines. Men like John Stark, Daniel Morgan, Eleazer Derby Wood, Benjamin L.E. Bonneville, Oliver Otis Howard, Henry Ossian Flipper, Calvin Pearl Titus, Charles Young, Norman D. Cota, and Donald W. Holleder plus women like the Warner sisters, Laura Walker, and Emily Perez. One of the final chapters, however, deals with—in the kindest sense of the term—a few rogues of West Point like Edgar Allan Poe, James McNeil Whistler, Hugh S. Johnson, and The Mole.

In 1965, a young Special Forces officer, originally from Chicago, and a young woman from North Carolina meet by chance. Her father was wounded at Pearl Harbor aboard the USS Nevada but fought the duration of World War II aboard another battleship. By the time that they meet, Mike has served in South Korea and fought in South Vietnam, where he was wounded and decorated for valor. By that time, however, Gloria already had lost her father while she still was in her early teens. After some initial difficulties, eventually they are married while Mike is an assistant professor at West Point. They go on to have three children; and Mike is stationed in Kansas, South Korea (again), Washington state, and Alaska, where he commands an infantry battalion. Finally, he is assigned to advise a National Guard brigade headquartered in New York City, but the story suddenly unravels. Mike takes ill while in New York and is hospitalized, but his illness appears to have occurred much earlier and during a different assignment there. Their marriage and the other duty assignments that followed apparently were the product of Mike’s vivid imagination. Then after a prolonged, frequently comatose hospital stay, he quietly dies in his sleep, leaving a complex mystery to be solved. And the mystery only becomes more complicated in the months that follow, forcing the investigation into his death and a few graves to be reopened.