What the Grass Holds: A Novel of Two Wars, One Family

In November 1965, in the Ia Drang Valley, Sergeant Corwin Adair makes a decision that costs a nineteen year old private his life. That night he starts a letter home explaining it. He never finishes deciding whether to send it.Forty four years later, his grandson Milo is holding a besieged patrol base in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, with a radio operator who shares the name of his grandfather's own RTO, a coincidence that unsettles him more than he can explain. When Milo's grandmother finally mails him the sealed letter she has kept, unopened, for eight years, he has to decide what it means to inherit a war he never fought.Woven through both men's stories is the side of the Ia Drang battle American war fiction rarely shows in full: a former schoolteacher named Thanh and the colonel who commands him, running their own arithmetic on the same battle, paying for it in the same currency.What the Grass Holds moves between two valleys and two wars to ask a single question neither soldier can fully answer: what belongs on the official record, and what does a man carry alone for the rest of his life.For readers of Matterhorn, All the Light We Cannot See, and The Sympathizer. Includes a reading group guide.