“It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
— William Tecumseh Sherman
Introduction to Howl: WT Sherman’s Monster Hunters
Sherman was right, of course. War is hell. I graduated from West Point, served as a Green Beret, and taught at the JFK Special Warfare Center. As part of that service, I’ve written extensively about military operations, tactics, and the people who carry them out. I say this not to establish credentials but to explain why this particular story wouldn’t leave me alone.
Sherman’s March to the Sea is one of the most talked-about campaigns in American military history. The strategic brilliance, the moral complexity, the sheer operational scale—all of it has been examined from every conceivable angle. It is also one of the most controversial.
Walking the ground in Georgia as I’ve done, you notice something the histories tend to skip. The spaces between the columns. The sixty-mile corridor of farms and plantations and forest and swamp where the army’s passage and the maelstrom of war created a lawlessness, and where the people who lived in those spaces—particularly the enslaved population—had to navigate a world that was collapsing and reforming simultaneously.
HOWL lives in those spaces. It is born in the most gut-wrenching Civil War site I’ve visited; not a battlefield, per se, but a prison. Andersonville. Where men became animals. My main characters Mobb and Slakin (Skull) and Cato are fictional. Sherman is not. The march follows the historical timeline and geography as closely as I could make it. The maps included in this book are drawn from the maps I studied at West Point and period documents from the Library of Congress, drawn by officers who walked the same ground. Where I’ve invented, I’ve tried to invent within the boundaries of what was possible and documented. The network of communication among the enslaved population was real and far more sophisticated than most accounts acknowledge. The stragglers and deserters who preyed on civilians in the army’s wake were real. The moral weight carried by the men who executed Sherman’s strategy was real.
The book starts at the Battle of Shiloh, where the carnage shocked the nation into realizing this war would be something the country did not expect. It then moves to the horror of Andersonville, and then the rest takes place during the infamous March to the Sea. Much of this was outlined as the next novel in my Duty, Honor, Country series, which ends on the first night of the battle. But the characters are different.
I wrote this book because the best war stories are never really about war. They’re about what happens to people who are asked to do necessary things that damage them, and what they choose to do with the damage afterward.
Ultimately it is a story about the evil that men do and the chance for redemption.
