3Here is the epic story of a Walter Lang, a man born into a soldier's family, who lives a soldier's life. What makes this adventure particularly compelling is that this young man who made the traditional stations of the Cross along with his brothers from the epoch (hunting with the uncle, forging through formal education, securing life's love) somehow also contrived to be not merely witness to, but major player, in the grandest events along the timeline of his century, most significantly the war that traumatized America, the one we did not win, the one that contested our most cherished notions of ourselves and that provoked in an Army considered the foremost in the world internal turmoil, anguish, schism. -- Brigadier General (Ret.) Alan Farrell, Virginia Military Institute