The first day of 1951 dawned bitter cold, gray, and snowy on the ridge overlooking Korea’s Han River. On that fateful morning, thousands of white-clad Chinese soldiers launched a surprise attack that overran allied positions and drove them into a brutal retreat down the peninsula.

Fleeing the onslaught, four strangers tumble into a foxhole to shelter from the torrent of withering fire. When they can resume their retreat, they come upon a cowardly American officer whom one of them guns down.

Refusing his efforts to turn himself in, the others joined him in a devil’s compact that would bind them together for the rest of their days. Two remain in the Army, join the military intelligence branch, and navigate the dangerous, dark intrigues of Cold War Europe and later the treachery and conspiracies of the Vietnam tragedy.

They often cross the amorphous line between good and evil and, in the end, take some of the purloined contraband for themselves. The other two survive life-threatening war injuries and pursue civilian careers.

One will become a surgeon to the Hollywood elite. One will marry into a banking family and conceive a financial empire that will reunite them all and enrich them beyond anything they could have imagined, having grown up in the desperation of the Great Depression.

However, their success will have a high personal cost. At ninety-six and aware his time is running out, the last of them decides to publish their story to atone for his many sins despite the irrational risk it poses to his reputation and his family’s wealth.

“Let the chips fall where they will,” he tells his worried daughter. It will be up to her to somehow appease the father she adores and shelter him, their family, and those of his deceased comrades from his folly.

This is a tale about loyalty at any cost, the raw pain of love tragically lost, the renewal of hope when a new one is found, and the onus of survival when so many are gone. It is a parable on the burden we are destined to carry from the sins we commit while making our journey aboard this bright blue orb.

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