Having signed up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in they find these days to be vivid. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt, and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America's past.