The Reckoning

by John Grisham

Finally, as the first trace of dawn peeked through a window, he accepted the solemn reality that it was time for the killing.

Today would be the last day of his life as he knew it, and he had accepted this. He had no choice.

“Not guilty.”

At that moment, it was impossible to stare at Pete Banning and think of him as the man who murdered Dexter Bell.

For the rest of his life, he would regret the day he caved and voted to kill another soldier.

“It just don’t seem fair.” “Who said life is fair?”

The Philippines is a collection of seven thousand islands spread over a far-flung archipelago in the South China Sea.

The cemetery was nicknamed the Boneyard, and how fitting that became.

An estimated five thousand American POWs crammed into the holds of Japanese freighters were killed by American torpedoes.

“What a lie.”

“What a family,” he said softly.

Shadows in the Jungle, by Larry Alexander; Bataan Death March, by Lt. Col. William E. Dyess; American Guerrilla: The Forgotten Heroics of Russell W. Volckmann, by Mike Guardia; Lapham’s Raiders, by Robert Lapham and Bernard Norling; Some Survived, by Manny Lawton; Escape from Davao, by John D. Lukacs; Lieutenant Ramsey’s War, by Edwin Price Ramsey and Stephen J. Rivele; My Hitch in Hell, by Lester I. Tenney; Escape from Corregidor, by Edgar D. Whitcomb.

Tears in the Darkness, by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman,

The Doomed Horse Soldiers of Bataan, by Raymond G. Woolfe, Jr.,