Excerpt: 'The Last Thing You Surrender'

In this abridged excerpt from "The Last Thing You Surrender" by columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., elements of the all-black 761st Tank Battalion make a grisly discovery and Pvt. Luther Hayes, whose parents were murdered before his eyes by a white mob when he was a boy of nine, learns a lesson about humanity's true capacity for cruelty.

It was a camp of some sort, barracks arranged in neat rows. And hobbling, shuffling, tottering toward them from every direction, came an assemblage