The novel Whittled Away is the tale of Corporal Bain Gill and Private Jes s McDonald. In 1862, Bain and Jes s enlist in the Confederate army in San Antonio, Texas, joining fifty-six other Texans as soldiers in the Alamo Rifles-Company K of the Sixth Texas Infantry regiment. The two young friends, not yet twenty when they put on their first uniforms, grew up on ranches on the western edge of civilization, herding stubborn longhorns and always wary...