Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War
II. And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had
Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had
rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen
concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his
father's death, a packet of wartime letters to a former
fiancée, and learns of his father's court-martial and
imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his
family's secret history and driven to uncover the truth
about this enigmatic, distant man who'd always refused to
talk about his war.
As he pieces together his father's past through military
archives, letters, and, finally, notes from a memoir his
father wrote while in prison, secretly preserved by the
officer who defended him, Stewart starts to assemble a
dramatic and baffling chain of events. He learns how
Dubin, a JAG lawyer attached to Patton's Third Army and
desperate for combat experience, got more than he
bargained for when he was ordered to arrest Robert Martin,
a wayward OSS officer who, despite his spectacular bravery
with the French Resistance, appeared to be acting on
orders other than his commanders'. In pursuit of Martin,
Dubin and his sergeant are parachuted into Bastogne just
as the Battle of the Bulge reaches its apex. Pressed into
the leadership of a desperately depleted rifle company,
the men are forced to abandon their quest for Martin and
his fiery, maddeningly elusive comrade, Gita, as they
fight for their lives through carnage and chaos the likes
of which Dubin could never have imagined.
In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing
choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the
courtroom, and in love, Stewart gains a closer
understanding of his past, of his father's character, and
of the brutal nature of war itself.