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Seventy-Eight Miles: A Novel of the Chosin Reservoir
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 12 2026
Pages: 250
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.53 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
November 1950. The Chosin Reservoir. The temperature is thirty below zero. The Chinese have sent 120,000 soldiers to kill them. The road south is seventy-eight miles long.
Corporal Oren Lockhart counts everything. Rounds. Steps. Seconds between mortar impacts. Men still breathing after a firefight. He has been counting since Okinawa, since a hillside covered in bodies taught him that numbers are easier than feelings. For seven years, the counting has kept him alive. It has also kept him empty.
Then a nineteen-year-old kid from Omaha named Fisk starts talking about a girl. He talks about her the way some men talk about God - with total conviction and no evidence that the faith is returned. He carries eleven unsent letters in his breast pocket. He has a chipped front tooth and a grin that won't quit. He is everything Lockhart is not: open, afraid, and fully alive.
When the trap closes and the 1st Marine Division is surrounded, Lockhart makes a decision he cannot put into words. This kid walks out. Not for the Corps. Not for the country. For a girl in Omaha and a stack of letters that haven't been mailed.
What follows is a fourteen-day, seventy-eight-mile march through the worst terrain and the worst cold and the worst odds in American military history. A sergeant with an infected arm who refuses to stop walking. A Navy corpsman who talks about his mother's recipes while he stitches men together. A Chinese colonel on the ridgeline who studies the Marines the way a teacher studies students. A bridge that mathematics says should fail. A column of men who keep walking because walking is the only thing left.
And a man who has spent seven years counting the dead - who must now learn to count the living.
From the frozen mountains of North Korea to a church basement in Omaha, Seventy-Eight Miles is a novel about war, endurance, and the slow, hard return to being human.
For readers of The Things They Carried, Matterhorn, and On Desperate Ground.
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