Billy Gogan Goes Fer Soldier

Far from having found a refuge, Billy must now battle a new enemy, the fearsome and sadistic first sergeant of Company C, Fourth Infantry Regiment, who mercilessly persecutes him. Hoggs's reign of terror is cut short when a young second lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant takes command of the company. But Grant cannot entirely end the enmity, and Billy must battle Hoggs with the aid of his new friend, Hermann Wurster.

The Fourth Regiment is part of the biggest army assembled by the United States in the thirty years since the English nearly reconquered the United States in the War of 1812. The so-called Army of Observation has been ordered to the banks of the Nueces River to defend Texas as it becomes the 28th state in the United States. But the army is both tiny, hardly 3,000 combatants, and woefully unprepared for war. Most of the senior officers have never commanded any military unit larger than a company or platoon at some lonely frontier fort, and not a single officer, not even the army's beloved commander, newly-minted Brigadier General Zachary Taylor, has ever fought in a war against a modern army. Worse, the U.S. army has little cavalry, even less artillery, and only a very attenuated supply chain that must rely on rickety civilian ships and boats.

Old Zach, as he is known to his bluebellies, with the help of his chief-of-staff (and beloved son-in-law), W. S. "Perfect" Bliss, slowly whips the army into shape over the winter of 1845-46, as disease ravages shoulder strap (as the officers were known) and bluebelly alike. But the winter that the Army of Observation spent in Corpus Christi was not entirely grim. A playhouse was built and a production of Shakespeare's Othello, unlike anything that would be staged today, was put on, with none other than the young Lieutenant Grant cast in the role of Desdemona. A tent village also pops up almost overnight, filled with all manner of dens of iniquity to entertain the troops.

Billy and Hermann meet Colonel Henry Kinney, the founder of Corpus Christi, and his life-long friend and Tejano hacendado, Don Guillermo Uribe Rodriguez. Billy and Hermann also meet Don Guillermo's wife Alandra and two daughters Calandria and Serafina, and become immersed in the swirling cultural and political maelstrom of who is ultimately to control south Texas--is it to be the aboriginal Indians, los Tejanos, or the late-arriving Norteamericanos? For los Tejanos, there was also the existential question of whether to throw their allegiance to los Norteamericanos or to remain loyal to la Patria.

Billy becomes even more keenly aware of these conflicts as he learns Spanish in order to help Lieutenant Grant work with Mexican arrieros, led by their caporal, Juan Pablo Delgado, train the hundreds of mules necessary for the army to march south to the Rio Bravo--the name by which all Tejanos and Mexicanos referred to what los Norteamericanos still today call the Rio Grande.

Billy and Hermann also meet Sarah Langwell, better known as the "Great Western," a thrice-married--and newly single--camp follower who has come to Corpus Christi along with the Fifth Infantry Regiment. The Great Western helps Billy and Hermann fend off Hoggs's increasingly cruel attacks. She also rescues Jenny the washerwoman from the tent-city brothel in which Hoggs mysteriously has an interest.

Alas, the budding romance between Billy and Calandria (and also the romance between Serafina and Hermann) is cut short when the Army of Observation is ordered to march south to confront the Mexican army gathering at Matamoros. The march is brutal, and Hoggs takes full advantage of its brutality to inflict misery on Billy and his friends.

Once the army is ensconced on the northern bank of the Rio Bravo, pre-war jitters peak. An American colonel goes missing while visiting a young woman. Hermann is nearly killed on a patrol looking for him. The savage discipline of the ante-bellum U.S. Army causes several dozen desperate bluebellies to desert and swim across the Rio Bravo to an imagined paradise. Not only do persecuted Irish Catholics desert, so too do Protestant native Americans and Negro slaves. Meanwhile, every bluebelly in the army is drafted to build a fort--called Fort Texas--as the main fortification to both protect the army from surprise attack and lay siege to the Mexican city of Matamoros.

War begins badly for the Americans when an entire squadron of cavalry is killed or captured in an ambush--a loss the tiny American army can ill afford. At risk of being cut off from their supply line and from reinforcements at Point Isabel, Old Zach marches from Fort Texas to Point Isabel, leaving only a few hundred soldiers of the Fifth Infantry to defend Fort Texas.

The Great Western and Jenny heroically help defend Fort Texas, while Old Zach wins a pair of victories that sends the Mexican army scuttling ignominiously south to Monterrey. Now occupying Matamoros, Old Zach's newly-named Army of Invasion prepares for the hard march south to once more meet the enemy, while Billy is sent on a mission with the Texas Rangers, which ends in a tragic war crime.

Billy Gogan Gone fer Soldier ends on a lonely rooftop as the bloody fighting on the savage first day of the Battle of Monterrey concludes in American defeat.