The third book in the Billy Bob Holland series

ONCE AGAIN I'd like to thank my wife Pearl and our children Jim, Jr., Andree, Pamala, and Alafair for always being with me.

I'd also like to thank Father Edmond E. Bliven for his insight into the historical and theological nature of Christian baptism.

Doc Voss'S FOLKS were farmers of German descent, Mennonite pacifists who ran a few head of Brahman outside of Deaf Smith, Texas, and raised beans and melons and tomatoes and paid their taxes and generally went their own way. When Doc got his draft notice his senior year in high school, a lot of us thought he might apply for exemption as a conscientious objector. Instead, Doc enlisted in the Navy and became a hospital corpsman attached to the Marines.

Then he got hooked up with Force Reconnaissance and ended up a SEAL and both a helicopter and fixed-wing pilot who did extractions on the Cambodian border. In fact, Doc became one of the most decorated participants in the Vietnam War.

The night Doc returned home he burned his uniform in the backyard of his house, methodically hanging each piece from a stick over a fire that swirled out of a rusted oil drum, dissolving his Marine-issue tropicals into glowing threadworms. He joined a fundamentalist church, one even more radical in its views than his family's traditional faith. When asked to give witness, he rose in the midst of the congregation and calmly recited a story of a village incursion that made his fellow parishioners in the slat-board church house weep and tremble.

At the end of harvest season he disappeared into Mexico. We heard rumors that Doc was an addict, living in a hut on the Bay of Campeche, his mind gone, his hair and beard like a lion's mane, his body pocked with sores.