Sins of the Fathers (Softcover Book)

On Afghanistan’s front lines, he’s known as Brynner. He’s good at two things — killing the enemy and staying alive. If you’re in trouble, you want Brynner on your side. If you’re causing the trouble, you don’t want him coming after you. But the one man Brynner fears, the near-ghost who lives in his nightmares, isn’t waiting for him on the battlefield.

For Brynner, there’s no going home.

• Authors: Scott McChrystal and Scott Harrup
• Pages: 231
• Weight: 12oz (340 grams)
• Size: 8 3/8" x 5 1/2" x 5/8"
• Material: Paperback or MP3 Download
• Download: 1,203MB (ZIP file)

Afghanistan/2013

It takes only minutes to soft step within a hundred feet of the cave system. Brynner reaches a truck at the camp perimeter, and the warning pings in his head return with greater urgency. One, make that two, of the tires are flat. Nearby, a group of ammo boxes leans precariously as he pushes gently. Empty.

“This is a ghost camp,” McQueen’s whisper crackles into his earpiece.

Parked vehicles, stretched-camo netting, random detritus lying across the ground—all of it just for show. Not a soul is raising an alarm. No one is emerging from the caves.

When the blasts erupt around them, Brynner doesn’t panic. He simply shifts to that more mechanical part of his training that evaluates lines of retreat, potential regrouping points, how best to keep each team member moving toward safety.

But he can’t outthink the men who have studied this riverbed and these caves for weeks, have established the most lethal placements for their explosives up and down the riverbed, and clearly have exercised the forethought to keep the valley under camera surveillance. This is the mother of all IED formations.

It feels as if the concussions come from every direction. Brynner is flying backward, slamming into the ground. He hits with such force he can’t breathe.

A terrible quiet follows the blasts.

This is hell, Brynner thinks.

Vietnam/Somewhere in the '60s

The closest John had come to finding his birth home was on a visit during the ’90s to Thailand. The refugee camp was long gone, but a few elderly Vietnamese expatriates eked out a living in the nearby town. A very old man claimed John looked like a family he had known in a village some fifty miles southeast of Saigon.

And that’s where the story went sideways and Marshall could swear he was standing right there when it happened.

“It” was the arrival of half a dozen black-clad Viet Cong “freedom fighters” on a muggy day in the rice-planting season. They insisted on seeing the village elders immediately.

Their request was simple enough. The village was ideally situated near one of the Mekong’s tributaries and allowed for speedy boat transport. It also lay near enough to the jungles beyond the cultivated acres of rice to facilitate interaction with the silent troops of young men and women who ghosted their way along the trails on missions of death against the Americans.

Certainly, the earnest young visitors insisted, the village would want to do its part in pushing back the American invaders? Certainly the village would be willing to cache the weapons needed to free the region from the Westerners’ filth?

Two elders engaged in the debate did their best to appear sympathetic. But they refused to open the village to weapons storage. After all, they insisted, American patrols were not uncommon. What good would weapons do these visitors if those weapons were seized?

The answer was stoic silence. A momentary stare-down ensued between the VC leader and the older of the two village council members. As the elder man subserviently lowered his gaze, the young man spun on his sandals and quietly ordered his companions to leave with him.

Villagers breathed a collective sigh of relief. There had been no violence. The black-clad troops had kept their Kalashnikovs slung on their shoulders and simply marched back across the rice fields and disappeared into the foliage the way they had come.

On the following afternoon, a line of women and young girls methodically moved across a marshy field pressing rice seedlings into the mud with practiced precision. Just as the sun crested past noon, the third girl from the right end of the line fell forward without a cry.

As the rest of the planters tried to grasp what had happened, the echoing crack of a rifle shot from the tree line caught up with the bullet that had felled their companion. Most of the girl’s face underneath her conical sun hat had exploded onto her mother standing to her left. The mother began to wail.

The VC representatives returned quietly the next day, just as the family was burying the girl. After a few more words with the village elders, they were shown a small granary hut that was sure to suit their purposes.