Fiction

JohnHopkinsprof.pdf

In the above letter, date November 23, 1968, W. C. Woods' professor of creative writing at Johns Hopkins University advises the budding writer to connect with a literary agent whose standing was commensurate to the quality of his writing. Indeed, he would personally recommend Woods to "the most powerful agent in the world," Candida Donadio, who represented Joseph Heller, Michael Herr, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy among many others over the course of her career. The recommendation would eventually lead to the sale, publication, and subsequent acclaim of his 1970 novel The Killing Zone.

Harper's Magazine Press, New York, 1970 

The Killing Zone

A novel


One day a young officer came to the company, came to command. 


The company is an infantry training unit. The officer is Lieutenant Track, a summer soldier and a computer expert who brings with him a grand design: he will program the company's next combat maneuver to determine the usefulness of computer technology in directing small-unit action.

To First Sergeant Melton, a thirty-year veteran of three wars, the idea is contemptible. How, for instance, can a computer prescribe the conduct of a fire-fight--if it cannot measure courage? (Melton had been nominated for, but did not receive, the Congressional Medal of Honor.)

To Sergeant Cox, Melton's prodigious and enigmatic young protege (a devil, some claim, a born killer; but the first sergeant cherishes him as a born soldier), the computer is just another weapon, not an instrument that might ultimately cheat him of his destiny.

And to Private Pendleton, a draftee fresh out of college, the computer seems to pose less of a threat than does the disquieting realization that he's beginning to trade his sophomore humanism for the arts and style of a soldier. 

In the climax that crowns this jolting narrative, the appearance of combat switches explosively to the reality, pitting the valor of warriors against the stresses of war's new technology and generating a tension unique in the literature of arms. 

In The Killing Zone, William Crawford Woods has created a major novel. Written with extraordinary maturity, discipline and range, it fuses dramatic power, psychological probing and a profound awareness of the quicksand distinctions between bravery and cruelty, honor and obedience, duty and form. 

Mayday | The Atlantic | March 1974