Cunningham, Chet.

Cavalry Sergeant Will Larson, part of a routine patrol on a four day ride, is ordered by the green patrol leader to ride down to the Rio Verde river. The river is a Chiricahua Indian stronghold, and Larson and his men are attacked and pinned down. When the patrol leader loses his head, the sergeant must take over - and heads out to hike seventy miles across the waterless desert to bring a relief column to save his comrades.

Seeking gold, the new white settlers block all Indian access to the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud is not afraid and moves toward the Bozeman Trail, determined to take back the gold fields for his people. The settlers' primary concern is no longer gold, but escaping death. The Pony Soldiers are called in to crush an ensuing Sioux attack.

"For Kenneth Cunningham and the 387 other U.S. marines in the defense battalion stationed on Wake Island in the Pacific, World War II began on December 8, 1941, just five hours after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It ended on December 23. That day the marines on the tiny atoll - their twelve Wildcat fighter planes lost, their forces diminished, their communications down - faced an overwhelming enemy invasion, with the Japanese arriving in so many ships that, as one eyewitness put it, they could have walked from one to the other on the open sea. Private Cunningham and his fellow servicemen fought intrepidly. against impossible odds, until their commanding officers ordered them to surrender. Their term in hell, though, had just begun.". "No sooner had the marines laid down their arms than they were stripped of all their clothes. With their hands bound behind the back, they sat naked for two days in the hot sun; at night they shivered in the cold. After that they slogged and slept in the ruins of their bombed-out camp, until January 12, when they were jammed into the hold of the ship that would take them to prison camps in China and Japan. Forty-four months later, liberated at last from the cruel indignities and grim torture of their captors, they would return home unheralded and largely forgotten."--BOOK JACKET.