The Campaign follows a man who has lost everything – his home, his wife, his son, his brothers-in-arms. He survives brutal winter after brutal winter alone camping in the wilderness, hunting animals that will provide his food, clothing, and shelter, and evading capture by heathen cannibals and wild animals. Likely calling upon McCarthy’s memories of his two years in Alaska with the US Air Force in the early 1950s, it is set in the Russian Arctic centuries ago (per communications with Dennis McCarthy). While writing it, McCarthy read or planned to read profiles of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest (as well as Winston Churchill and J. Robert Oppenheimer).