Danny Kowalski knows every tree in his family's forty-acre walnut orchard — the Hartleys his grandfather planted, the Eurekas he pruned with his father before dawn, the old Franquette on the southwest corner that hasn't produced in forty-five years but no one has the heart to pull. The orchard is his future. Karen, the rice farmer's daughter who knows his hands better than he does, is the rest of it.

Then the draft numbers come over the radio. Forty-nine thousand men in August alone.

Danny and his best friend Jack Medina — the grain elevator kid with the quick mouth and the restless legs — make a decision on the bleachers behind the high school: they'll enlist together. Go through basic together. Stay together. It's the most important decision either of them will ever make, and they make it between one breath and the next.

What follows is a novel told in four voices across two worlds. In Vietnam, Danny and Jack face monsoon, ambush, and a war that strips everything down to the man beside you. In Woodland, Karen and Jack's wife Ellie — a second-grade teacher who holds a crying boy's hand every morning at the classroom door — build a friendship forged in waiting, silence, and the ordinary courage of women who keep the world running while the men they love are ten thousand miles away.

Karen learns to prune. She learns to drive the shaker. She fixes the irrigation line Danny told her about, with the fitting he said was under the house, in the toolbox by the water heater. She holds the orchard the way she promised she would. And when the war takes what it takes, she holds it still.

The Orchard is a story about the people who go to war, and the people who stay behind and do the harder thing.

From the author of the 13-book Vietnam series The Way Home Is Closed and The USS Arizona Series. Available on Kindle Unlimited.