Tom Sexton is an agent with a private intelligence company.
The title of the first recorded adventure tells us that he is a "temporary agent" and that is very much what he intends - he really had no desire to be even that but a debt he could never hope to repay demands that he agrees to the job.
When we first meet Sexton he is working an unexciting job operating a "prewar-era press brake machine". He is living with and very much in love with Stella, a woman who despite the difference in their age, she being a dozen years older than he with the 45 to his 33, still dominated his attention. Stella was a very vibrant and exciting woman and just the thing that Sexton needed to keep him out of the doldrums.
Sexton has been out of the navy for five years. In that half decade he "had been drifting from place to place for five years but was looking, maybe, for somewhere to stop." Then he met Stella as she waitressed a railcar diner in northern Connecticut and he knew he was right where he wanted to be.
While in the navy for just shy of a decade, Sexton had been a member of the vaunted Construction Battalion, or SeaBees. It is very important to the understanding of Sexton and how he is able to do some of the tasks we will watch him do that we remember this vital section of the Navy has the nickname of 'Fighting Sea-Bees'. It is often the job of these men and women to head into enemy territory to build or repair as quickly as they can the needed structures that the planned incoming troops will need. Since the enemy will most certainly try to stop them, these people have to be trained to defend themselves as they do their duties.
Sexton was especially well trained, considered the best his outfit had, which is why when after he had walked away from all the carnage he had had to deal with, he was pulled back in. Unfortunately, it was not construction that he was needed for - it was the fighting.
Sexton had really hoped that his "temporary" job would be just that. Unfortunately, to save the life of a man who had once saved his, the debt mentioned above, Sexton and Stella will make an enemy who does not forgive so even after the temp assignment is finished, the work is not.