Every army trails a shadow. Sherman’s army called their foragers bummers—detachments sent out to strip the countryside of food and forage, which was policy. But behind the sanctioned foragers came something else: stragglers, deserters from both sides, escaped criminals, men who’d discovered that a world without law suited them. They preyed on civilians in the army’s wake, and they answered to nobody.

This is documented history. Georgia in the winter of 1864 was full of men in blue uniforms, gray uniforms, and no uniforms at all, robbing the same farms Sherman’s columns had already picked over—except the farms weren’t always empty, and these men didn’t operate under orders or restraint. The civilians in that corridor, most of them women, children, old men, and the enslaved, faced them alone. The Confederacy’s authority had collapsed. The Union army had marched on. Nobody was coming.

In my Special Forces career I saw versions of this in more than one country: the dangerous period isn’t only the battle, it’s the vacuum after the front passes through. Predators find vacuums. It’s what they’re for.

That’s the historical space where Howl lives. The pack at the center of the novel—escaped Andersonville Raiders led by a former guard with a sniper rifle—isn’t an invention out of thin air. It’s a concentration of something real that roamed that corridor. Sherman can’t detach a brigade to chase ghosts through the swamps. So he sends three men instead.

One is a frontier marksman who owes him nothing and everything. One is a rule follower. The third is the reason they succeed.

Howl is available on Amazon. https://amzn.to/40WYgfJ