Jerry Coker
The author is a war historian and researcher. He served in the US Marine Corps as a rifleman and earned degrees in literature from the University of California, Davis and Brown University when he returned from Vietnam. His combat experiences and six months in hospitals recovering from wounds were the basis of his Master's Degree thesis from the Brown University Writing Program and his first two unpublished novels.
His first novel, First Among Men, is a fictionalized account of the battle no one ever heard of, remembered and developed because the author listened to his father slowly unravel and dispel his demons releasing bits and pieces of the story over his lifetime. A regular Army infantryman with the US Army's 7th Infantry Division in May of 1943, his father could not forget the horrors of those bloody weeks in the snow and freezing rain. The author decided the story needed to be told. After ten months of meticulous research and another six writing, the story captures a battle that would be characterized later in official Army records as a battle of honor over an island nobody wanted. Published by Pocol Press in May of 2013, the book is available at the publisher or Amazon.
His second novel, Into the Wet, moves to the far end of the Southwest Pacific where the Japanese Army is preparing to capture Port Moresby on the southern end of Papau New Guinea in mid-summer 1942. A desperate battle fought with a small group of Australian soldiers in a mix of equatorial coastal jungle right up into some of the triple-canopy rain forests at 8,000 feet. A battle of heroic desperation on both sides, fought entirely in the dark with a nation at stake. Released on August 27, 2015 by Black Rose Writing, Into the Wet was re-released by Pocol Press in September, 2017, and is available at the publisher and Amazon.
His latest novel, Hunt of the Kite, is a historical novel set in WW II France. The story of the journey home of a young medical student as the world collapses around her. Her journey takes four years, as she survives a cat and mouse existence deteriorating into destitution, prostitution and eventually murder for revenge. She survives by her wits, courage and indomitable will to unite with her remaining family. Released on April 2, 2019 by Pocol Press, the book is available at the publisher and Amazon.
