The Screaming Sands: A Novel

Summary

By the three-time winner of the W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction: an unforgettable thriller set on post-WWII Iwo Jima

In 1947, two years after the surrender of Japan, an American contingent is sent to the devastated island of Iwo Jima. Led by newly-appointed Consul Chad Grey, the mission is to begin disinterring the nearly 7000 Marines who were killed during the island's legendary assault and prepare the remains for return and burial in America.

But Grey soon finds his tasking complicated by a hidden danger: holdover soldiers from the defeated Japanese military, the last few survivors of what had been more than 20,000 men. Unaware that the war has ended, these soldiers seek honor in death and will fight to the end. Then Japan sends its own mission to Iwo Jima, seeking to repatriate its dead—but with another agenda that might threaten the post-war order of American power.

Working with a charismatic but damaged female general, a Japanese doctor with ambiguous motivations, and a host of military personnel who harbor deep anger against Japan and all its people, Grey must survive typhoons, outwit holdovers and their death wish, and explore what really lies beneath the burning, sulfurous sands of Iwo Jima. The Screaming Sands is a dramatic, utterly authentic thriller by an award-winning master of military adventure fiction.