Black Dragon

Black Dragon follows a single Marine rifle company, 2-F-23, known as Fox Company, through its campaign across the central Pacific in World War II. Steven D. McCloud tells the grueling, day-by-day story of that advance through the eyes of the Marines who lived it.

The men of Fox Company were American teenagers, many of them away from home for the first time. They trained together and became a team that held firm through the war. After it ended, the survivors dispersed, went home, and tried to leave the experience behind while building their lives.

Decades later the company re-formed through correspondence and reunions, and its members welcomed McCloud by telling him their stories. He took notes and tracked down company reports and other documents to fill the gaps, then reconstructed the unit's journey. His research also drew on painstaking study of battlefield reports and extensive interviews with surviving members.

The title comes from a veteran who returned to Iwo Jima half a century later. He said the pilgrimage helped him conquer his black dragons, the bloody, foul nightmares that had visited him nightly for fifty-six years, and that his remaining dreams were in black and white and gray and were ones he could live with. The book is pitched at readers of Stephen Ambrose's oral history of E Company in the European theater.