Echoes of Distant Thunder: A Veteran's Story

Echoes of Distant Thunder is a breathtaking saga that begins with the crushing Union defeat on the final day of the Battle of Chickamauga and ends with a life or death confrontation between two sworn enemies in the virgin pine forests of Northern Michigan. This is not the kind of Civil War novel we have come to expect. This book shows us the war in stunning detail through the eyes of a twenty year old artillery soldier. On the bloody fields of Chickamauga Will Castor's artillery battery is over-run by the enemy in fierce hand-to-hand combat, every member of his gun crew, including his best friend are killed and his final violent act of compassion will haunt him for the rest of his life. Caught behind enemy lines with a broken leg and unable to walk, he makes a pact with a war weary Confederate deserter and ends up falling in love with his former enemy's beautiful sister. Will Castor comes home from the Civil War a broken man. This is the story of his journey as he struggles to regain his footing in a world he no longer understands. Along the way he will work in a lumber camp and experience the rough and tumble, and often violent world of the lumberjack. Guilt and alcohol slowly consume him. Guilt from being the only survivor of his gun crew and guilt from killing a Georgia farmer and his son during the hopeless confusion of a fifty thousand man Union army in headlong retreat. When he can go no further, alone in the vast wilderness of North America, five years after the last shot of the Civil War was fired, the war for Will Castor is finally over. Echoes of Distant Thunder will make you laugh and cry. Richly detailed and elegantly written, the characters of Frank Slaughter's novel will draw you in!