The Story Behind the Story
This book began on a helicopter in Afghanistan. I was following an Air Force flight surgeon for an article I was writing and had caught a ride with a Dust-Off crew. Those are the rescue teams that fly under the motto “Unarmed and Unafraid.” We took off from Bagram on a mission to pick up combat wounded at a forward operating base. We would climb a small mountain range and then drop into a fertile valley, and repeat over and over. The day was clear, and the view out the open doors of the chopper was beautiful.
Terry Jones spent six years in the Army Reserve, taught for several years at Yale and practiced law in New York and Connecticut. He has visited Afghanistan several times as a civilian journalist, earning an Emmy Award in 2013 for his work on the documentary "Aeromedical". He lives in the Boston area.
I wondered how the people living in those stunning, green valleys managed during the past decades of almost continuous war. That led to wondering whether any place in the States had endured years of continuous, large-scale war.
The wars against Native Americans were long and brutal, but were dispersed over space and time and did not involve fighting units numbering in the tens of thousands. That left the Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and only the Civil War produced years of continuous back and forth by opposing armies over the same ground.
The most sustained fighting of the Civil War was in the Shenandoah Valley and the lands east and north of Richmond. That means I follow Virginians who went with the Confederacy - soldiers and their wives, relatives and slaves. None has entered history, but they all helped make it.
The major characters all fought together or were related, and they crossed paths throughout the war. Their intimacy lends immediacy to the quotations from their letters, diaries and post-war writings, and it makes these people as compelling as the best fictional characters.
This is, of course, a story of war and of battles. But, it is also a story of the home front as much as the battle front. A story of the collapse of slavery in Virginia and the collapse of the society that risked everything to defend it.
It is our past. It is true. And, it reads like a novel.