Some men get honored. Some men get managed around.
Sergeant Caleb Wright runs the radios for a Marine Raider team in the southern Philippines. A twenty-one-year-old Filipino Marine has just bled out within arm’s reach.
Eight thousand miles away, his fiancée is arranging chairs so his mother won’t have to sit near his father. The seating chart puts Dale Wright in the second row. Not because anyone dislikes Dale, but because he’s the kind of man who won’t make a thing of it, and everyone knows it.
Caleb has a deployment left to run, a woman behind a 7-Eleven counter in Parang asking him questions no one back home thought to ask, and a decision waiting about what kind of man he intends to be.
Second Row is a novel of Christian masculine formation, written for men who found the church’s version too soft to carry a rifle and the internet’s version too hollow to carry a marriage. It is book 1 of The Long Forge, which follows the Wrights, a name that means maker, from the Crusades to the present across seven books.
Content: No profanity. Combat is restrained. Intimacy stays off the page.
