West Germany. Summer, 1971.
Four American military kids slip through a base fence before dawn and walk eight kilometers into the German countryside - past dragon's teeth, past a farmer's dog, past the edge of everything they're supposed to know. What they find is a sealed WWII bunker on the old Siegfried Line. What's inside has been waiting twenty-six years: four gold coins, a soldier's Bible, a photograph of a woman whose name no one knows, and scratched deep into the west wall - I was here. I loved her. Written by a man who died in that room the same day he wrote it. On the east wall of the bunker "KILROY WAS HERE" is inscribed with an arrow points down. Galen Rodriguez has been trying to write this story for fifty years. He's tried and stopped, tried and stopped, because every time he starts, Bobby's face comes back - the way it looked that summer, twelve years old and carrying something no twelve-year-old should have to carry. The way it looked when he smiled, just once, in a limestone shelter during a thunderstorm, talking about his dead brother. Some secrets aren't meant to be kept. Only carried for a while. The Summer of '71 is a story about four boys, a promise made in the dark, a one-armed German farmer who asked only one question in return for everything he gave, and the fifty years it took one man to finally write it all down.