Overview

Vietnam, 1968. Daniel Cofield is nineteen years old, a helicopter crew chief with the 1st Cavalry Division. He will spend twelve months in the air above a war that will never leave him. Daniel arrives at Bien Hoa with sixty-two pounds of gear and no understanding of what waits for him. He is assigned to a Huey helicopter crew - Chalk One - under a pilot who communicates in three taps on the cyclic and says almost nothing else. His crew chief, Lou, teaches him the only rule that matters: The gun wants to fire. You just let it. Over twelve months, Daniel flies into landing zones where the treeline erupts, carries wounded men who bleed through the helicopter floor, and watches the crew he trusts with his life come apart one by one. He learns that war is not the single catastrophic moment but the accumulation - mission after mission, body after body, letter after letter from a home that no longer feels like his. When he returns to his family's welding shop in Hadley, Missouri, he discovers that the war followed him. It lives in his hands, which shake over the welding torch. In the sound of a semi on the highway that could be a helicopter. In the silence between himself and the people who love him but cannot reach him. The Weight of the Sky is a novel about what war does to the men who survive it - and what it costs the families waiting for them to come home. Written with the restraint and precision of Tim O'Brien and the emotional depth of Karl Marlantes, this is literary war fiction at its most unflinching and human.

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