A landing beach in France, exploding under fire and littered with wounded men. Grim surgeries performed in a captured pillbox, in an orchard, inside a Calvados distillery barn. A crumpled glider falling out of a hedgerow.

And Géraldine Dupré, a young French woman who was not pretty, not exactly, but pleasant enough to look at.

This is the war of Will Hastings, a green Army doctor, five thousand miles away from Virginia Sullivan, his former girlfriend who had not written in months, and from Tierra, the little town that seemed to have forgotten him. This was his war in Normandy in 1944.