Six Weeks of Autumn: Revised Edition

Revised Edition

by Richard Smith

After forty-six combat missions over Europe, Captain Elias Mercer is given six weeks of leave. Not a reward—borrowed time. In the rain-soaked pine woods of East Texas he marries Evelyn, the only person who still feels real, while knowing Washington has already marked him for something worse.

In July 1945 he is ordered on a classified Pacific mission. Somewhere west of Iwo Jima the engines begin to sound wrong. Smoke appears where there is none. Voices cut through the static and tell him to turn the formation around. When he does, the war does not end. A tribunal follows. A firing squad is considered. And for the next forty years Eli keeps silent about what happened over the Pacific.

Framed by the last hours of a dying man in 1980 and the discovery of a cassette tape by his grandson years later, Six Weeks of Autumn is a quiet, unsparing story of combat trauma, the cost of coming home, and the long silence that families inherit when the war refuses to stay overseas.