Bøger af Philip Mcbride

The story of the Callahan Expedition has slept in a dusty corner of Texas Ranger history for over 160 years . Until now, until this novel-A Different Country Entirely.In 1855, across the southwest edge of Texas, settlers live in daily fear of the savage raids by Apache warriors. After their depredations, the Apaches outrun their pursuers to cross the Rio Grande River to the safe haven of Mexico, where the U.S. Army and the Texas Rangers are forbidden.In October, Captain James Callahan and 115 Rangers ignore the international border to follow the Apache band that killed the young son of a Methodist preacher. Forewarned of the Texan invaders, the Mexican army waits by the Rio Escondido.Undeterred, Callahan's outnumbered mounted Rangers charge the Mexican cavalry, lances against Colt revolvers. After the bloody clash, pursuers become the prey.Hear the voices of Caroline, a ravaged woman taken by the Apaches; a runaway slave named Thompson; Texas Rangers McKean and Gunn; Mexican Colonel Menchaca; and Captain Callahan himself. Their tale is sometimes brutal, sometimes poignant, and compelling to the last word.

Defiant Honor 1864 completes the three-book Civil War series about Captain John McBee and the 5th Texas Infantry Regiment in the Texas Brigade of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. By the spring of 1864, the war is slipping away from General Lee. Grant is moving towards Richmond with a huge army. In May, newly promoted Major John McBee and the 5th Texas Infantry enter the battle at the Wilderness under the eyes of General Lee. Major McBee is wounded in battle a second time. Two weeks later, McBee's body servant Levi finds himself with McBee's old company in the trenches at Spotsylvania. Levi faces the conundrum of either fighting with McBee's men or standing out of the way. Confined to a Richmond hospital, McBee again encounters Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin. By June, the siege of Richmond and Petersburg has begun. The 22nd Regiment of US Colored Troops earn their first battle honors. The town of Lexington is occupied by Union soldiers, and the campus of the Virginia Military Institute is shelled by Federal artillery, then sacked by Union soldiers. Faith McBee is hunted as a Confederate spy. The occupation ends, but the pursuit of Faith McBee brings armed Union soldiers into the McBee home in the dead of night. The summer winds down, and the soldiers of the 5th Texas endure the heat, filth, and constant danger of trench warfare around Richmond. Major McBee reluctantly again accepts a clandestine errand for Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin. This time, the job for Samuelson causes McBee to contact the agent of a blockade running ship. McBee is stunned that Luvenia McNeill, a lady he knew in Galveston before the war, is that agent, and worse, must become a guest in the McBee house in Lexington. In late September, the 5th Texas and the 22nd Regiment of US Colored Troops battle over the earthworks at New Market Heights. Levi must decide whether or not to fight against other black men. John McBee and Faith's first husband, Lieutenant Adam Samuelson, now an officer in the 22nd USCT, slash their way through their inevitable violent confrontation. In October, the surviving 5th Texas soldiers make their last charge at Darbytown Road, a bloody final zenith for the Texas Brigade, Lee's Grenadier Guards. The mission for Secretary of State Benjamin stretches into November, and sets the McBee family on paths they will walk after the war.

Captain John McBee's war in 1863 starts on an icy road in Virginia and reaches through four states to end brutally in the frozen mountains of southeastern Kentucky. In January, three dozen new recruits arrive to northern Virginia, green as grass, needing a firm hand at drill. Meanwhile, a hundred miles away in Lexington, Faith Samuelson is an uninvited houseguest about to give birth to twins. After General Stonewall Jackson's tragic death in May, his burial brings thousands of mourners to Lexington, including Captain McBee and the Confederate officer who is Faith's other husband. In the shadow of the funeral procession, violence and death result. John McBee leaves Lexington burdened with the conflicting duties of commanding men at war and protecting his threatened family. Finding unexpected help in his own army camp, the captain shoves aside his personal trials as Lee's army invades Pennsylvania in June. At Gettysburg, for the first time, the Texans are beaten back, unable to fight their way up among the boulders and drive the Union infantry off the crest of Little Round Top. While the army is recovering from its defeat at Gettysburg, Captain McBee's chance afternoon encounter on a train with the Confederacy's Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin, turns into a frenzied night of fight and flight. On loan to General Bragg's Army of Tennessee, General Longstreet's Corps, including the 'Bloody Fifth' Texas Infantry, takes a nine-day train ride, ending in Georgia at Chickamauga Station. There the Texas Brigade is again thrown into battle, offered the chance to redeem themselves as Lee's Grenadiers. As snow falls, intrigue hounds Captain McBee and Faith when a Union spy master matches wits with Secretary Benjamin. The couple becomes ensnared in a web of deceit and killing during Confederate partisan leader Champ Ferguson's winter war in southern Kentucky. Redeeming Honor is the second book in the Captain McBee Civil War trilogy.

The novel Whittled Away is the tale of Corporal Bain Gill and Private Jesús McDonald. In 1862, Bain and Jesús enlist in the Confederate army in San Antonio, Texas, joining fifty-six other Texans as soldiers in the Alamo Rifles-Company K of the Sixth Texas Infantry regiment. The two young friends, not yet twenty when they put on their first uniforms, grew up on ranches on the western edge of civilization, herding stubborn longhorns and always wary of Comanche raiders and rattlesnakes. Naïve, as are new soldiers everywhere, they come of age during the next three years, far from home, experiencing the hardships and horrors of men in combat.This is a story of soldiering, friendship and loss during America's nightmare, the Civil War. For Bain and Jesús it begins with marching to central Arkansas. There, at a river fort called Arkansas Post they endure their first frightful artillery barrage, but also learn first-hand a lesson that in the years ahead will confound the generals of both armies: Soldiers in trenches and behind breastworks usually survive and prevail. But facing a Union force of over 30,000 infantry and several armored gunboats, there is a mass surrender of the 4,000 Rebel defenders of Arkansas Post. Capture leads to a freezing boat ride upriver to prison camp where deprivation, brutality, and disease take a heavy toll. So concludes Part I of Whittled Away, setting the stage for two more years of war.After a short time in prison camp, the Confederates captured at Arkansas Post are part of a prisoner exchange. The Texans are moved by Union trains to Richmond, Virginia, ready to again take up arms for the Confederacy. General Lee is beating the Union army in Virginia, but the men of the Alamo Rifles find that no general wants to accept men who surrendered in their first battle. The survivors of Arkansas Post and prison camp are put on Confederate trains and sent to Tennessee, assigned to an army that has not been victorious. Even there, only one general, Patrick Cleburne, an Irish immigrant from Arkansas, is willing to accept the Arkansas Post veterans. During the next seven months, the Alamo Rifles redeem their stained reputations fighting in three major battles without faltering, even when the rest of the army is in retreat.Part 3 finds Bain and Jesús in Georgia in late spring of 1864 about to begin three months of ongoing fighting during the Atlanta Campaign. All summer the days are marked by brutal weather, ceaseless hardships, and death. The surviving men from San Antonio are being whittled away and there are no replacements. The Confederate well is running dry of men and supplies. Atlanta falls after three intense battles in which the new Confederate commander, General John B. Hood, tries to regain the initiative. He orders his troops out of their defensive breastworks and takes the fight to the huge Union army in aggressive, but futile, attacks. Even more of the men from San Antonio are lost.In Part 4, in the closing months of 1864, General Hood leads his shrunken army back into Tennessee. The handful of men remaining in the Alamo Rifles are among the 20,000 Confederates -more Rebels than were in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg - who are ordered forward to take the Union breastworks at Franklin. Here, Bain and Jesús are in the middle of the attack that wrecks their army. Two weeks later, the survivors of Franklin fight in bitter cold at Nashville in a last vain attempt to win in Tennessee. Whittled Away is grass-roots American military fiction, a thin slice of a vast war, seen through the eyes of a handful of young men who are not very reflective, not particularly brave, nor intentionally heroic. Mostly they carry on and make do, trying to do their duty and one day make it home.

The Texans from Hood's Texas Brigade and other regiments who fought at the Battle of Antietam described their experiences of the battle in personal diaries, interviews, newspaper articles, letters, and speeches. Their words provide a fascinating and harrowing account of the battle, and, for the first time, their stories are compiled into one book.