McBride’s story recounts the experiences of the four surviving soldiers of a squad in action in the Serchio Valley in December 1944. Privates Sam Train, Bishop Cummings, and Hector Negron, and Second Lieutenant Aubrey Stamps barely escape with their lives when the racist white captain directing artillery fire from division HQ against the Germans angrily refuses to support their company as they face murderous enemy fire. Instead, he targets the Germans facing a white detachment. The company is, in the language of the times, cut to pieces. Caught alone on the wrong side of the Serchio Valley, the four men hole up in the tiny village of St. Anna.