Into the Light

In the early 21st century, mankind made unexpected first contact with an alien species, the vulpine Shongairi. They did not come in peace. In mere hours, kinetic strikes wipe out over half of the human population, but the Shongairi are shocked that when they come to Earth's surface, the humans have not surrendered, and they will fight to the death. Deciding that humans are more trouble than they're worth, the alien invaders decide to exterminate the human population with a biological weapon.

However, they did not realize that the Earth was home to two sentient species, and so in their error they find themselves overrun, their technology seized, and their own homeworld open to attack. Having found solace in allies stepping Out of the Dark, humanity itself must now step Into the Light. 

The sequel to the short story turned novel from David Weber, with the help of Chris Kennedy, Into the Light picks up in the horrifically post-apocalyptic world and the devastation left behind by the alien invaders. Political disorder, famine, rampant disease, and destroyed infrastructure takes its toll. Humanity has been reduced to only a few billion souls, and a county level government operating at something like half efficiency is considered a prime achievement worthy of praise. Can humanity build itself back up, all before the alien masters of the ancient Hegemony which dispatched the Shongairi in the first place realize what has happened?

From goodreads

Split into three parts, the novel tells the story of the rebuilding of the human population from scattered enclaves, first in North America where governments with shaky legitimacy are attempting to rebuild, and with some other hope spots from around the world. Then it tells of the startling discoveries humanity has made, and finally, a foray into the stars. 

It's not strictly necessary to have read Out of the Dark to enjoy this story, and you can read either the 2010 novel, or the original short story and not lose too much in translation. That does make it an easily accessible to casual readers, which should always be appreciated.

Part One does a great job exploring the dislocation caused by the Shongairi invasion, and from refugee camps to shattered government offices, we get a good story on how leaders from Canada to Brazil are trying to piece the world back together. I probably enjoyed this section the most as it had a more, human element, and was a really fun romp regarding the fallout from the invasion, and just how badly humanity has been pushed back.

Part Two is interesting, only insomuch as it does some fun exploration with the technology established in this little universe Weber has created. From experimenting with space platforms, warships, the fun use of railgun technology in small arms and tanks, and the intriguing Heinlein Armor, it is really setting us up for the book's climax.

The final section in Part Three is fun as it manages to tell a fairly intricate first contact story in just over one hundred pages. It sets up the good guys, the bad guys, and a great cast of secondary characters you can root for. There's been a lot of work put into the alien species for how much screen time they're given, and it was a nice touch that they were very well developed. It did invest me in the climax more than I anticipated, and the way it was handled made me laugh out loud with how clever it was.

If you enjoy a good military space science fiction story with some clever elements, look no further than Into the Light.  

Babylon's Ashes

After the events of Nemesis Games have, almost literally, broken the world, the Solar System finds itself engaged in the most destructive war in history. Governments have fallen, countless are dead, and the crew of the Rocinante find themselves struggling to keep up in a world choking on Babylon's Ashes.

Going forward, there are major spoilers for the series, so below the cut will include a much richer review.

In broad strokes, Babylon's Ashes more than Nemesis Games is a war story first and foremost. More so than even Caliban's War was. Picking up in the immediate aftermath of the status quo shattering events of the last book, we're thrown right into things as our cast, the crew of the Rocinante and a legion of new and familiar faces, are attempting to adjust to how much the world has changed once again.

We're given a sweeping narrative that runs from Earth to the edge of settled space and in the slow zone we first saw in Abaddon's Gate. Taking many familiar faces, Avasarala, Prax, Bobbie Draper and Anna, there's a wide amount of latitude to explore the tragedies of a solar system at war. Economic dislocation, creeping tyranny, and tragic loss from piracy, starvation and battle. It does an amazing job at humanizing war, especially one on a scale not before seen in human history.

It also does a wonderful job of humanizing people. So many stories about war too easily devolve into "us and them" stories, but this one doesn't. It acknowledges that people, whether from Earth, Mars or the Belt are people - no matter the physiological differences. One of James Holden's best traits shines through as, in response to Free Navy propaganda, he makes videos about the lives of average Belters trying to eke out an existence in the most hostile living arrangements known to man. He tries to show that, regardless of ideology, birthplace, or distance, everyone is human. It's a truly touching moment that tries to dismantle the usual dichotomy of war.

Alongside those moments, it manages to give us a gripping story of ending a solar system wide war. It begins as the forces of Earth and Mars are trying to consolidate and defending themselves from flying rocks thrown by the Free Navy. Holden and his crew go on a daring mission to blind their opponents to finally give the beleaguered Earth some breathing room. From there, it's a series of feints, attacks, and chases to try and gain advantage.

One of the small things I will criticize with this novel is that, while it nails the human element of war very well, the specifics of the war are left very vague. Outside of some moments near the end of the story where I have a definite idea of the numbers, the stakes involved in various battles and chases are extremely vague. I never know who held the balance of power, how many ships were involved, and whether one side really had the upper hand. The book could have been made so much more tense by the breakdown of what was lost, and what assets were where so I could sense out the course of the war. 

However, since the human element is more important, I can forgive it. As one character puts it, "war isn't just torpedoes and battle lines."

Through the character of Michio Pa, a tertiary character from Abaddon's Gate, we get the divided loyalties of someone who believes they're doing the right thing in war. To some, she's a pirate, from her own perspective she's a freedom fighter trying to bring justice to the people of the Belt. The vision put forward by the Free Navy, a Belt no longer under the heel of Mars and Earth, economic justice for Belters, and true void cities, is intoxicating. However, the increasingly brutal means put forward to make that a reality, are at odds with her own morality. 

It also examines the rolls of leaders. Even the flaws with the Great Man Theory of history. It shows us the leaders we have, while great, are not necessarily infallible geniuses. One of the best moments is when Fred Johnson simply says, he's doing what he knows in the best way he can. 

The narrative climaxes in a satisfying way, trying to seek solutions to the problems which led to the war in the first place. I quite enjoyed the effort to look at humanity through a full glass, and with the major players earnestly trying to find methods to solve the problems which caused the war, but with just enough ambiguity for the future to keep you invested in what comes next.

Moreover, it has some amazing moments which will probably not be forgotten in this series, but many spoilers follow.

Game of Thrones: Retrospective

Ten years ago, Game of Thrones burst into the television scene and rammed itself into the collective psyche of millions the world over. It was common for people to talk more about the politics of Westeros than the politics of their respective countries for a while! Almost overnight, the show leapt to meteoric heights, praised as "The Sopranos in Middle Earth" and having a talented cast of dedicated actors who worked their way through some of the most intensive scenes we've seen on television.

For all that though, not many people talk about Game of Thrones today.

Unlike say, The Sopranos or The Wire, or even other big name science fiction and fantasy shows like Merlin or Stargate and Battlestar Galactica; you don't see many people sharing memes about the show, it isn't often referenced in contemporary discourse, and often times people seem to act as though it didn't even exist. Where once you couldn't scroll through reddit, Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter without seeing something related to that series, now you only find it on dedicated fan sites and amongst people who still care about the (as of 2021) unfinished series.

Why that is, is hard to explain. For one thing, the show has possibly the most divisive ending in television history. From some who praised it, to millions of fans who were so pissed off they petitioned to have the ending re-filmed. In fact, the show seems to have ended on such a bad note that people who were fans seem to be almost unwilling to talk about having ever liked it in the first place. Hyperbole sure, but I certainly don't run across many people who I know loved the show who say they're going to re-watch it any time soon.

2034

Just beyond the scope of my recent WWIII reads, we come to the not too distant future with a thriller set in the year 2034. The novel was written by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, both had military experience and an insight into the world of the military from the top to the bottom. It made me quite curious to see their views on what a future conflict with a peer competitor might look like.

The novel is, unsurprisingly, set in early 2034, taking place in the South China Sea and Iran at first. It looks at one of the areas of heightened tensions in the world and from there tries to trace a series of events where the two global powers end up in a series of increasing miscalculations and escalations which lead to, if not all out war, then a fairly close approximation of it.

From amazon.ca

Told through the eyes of USN Captain Sarah Hunt, Marine pilot Major Chris "Wedge" Mitchell, deputy security advisor Sandeep Chowdhury, Revolutionary Guards Brigadier General Qassim Farshad, and finally Peoples Liberation Navy Commander Lin Bao. Through this cast of characters, from diverse and at odds nations, we see truly horrific events unfold in ways we can only hope will never happen.

In 2034 we see the authors being just ambitious enough with the history leading up to these events to engage the reader but not bog them down with geopolitics. We have references to India fighting a brief proxy war with Pakistan, Israel losing control of the Golan Heights, Russia annexing Belarus and much of Ukraine, and Iran engaging in various client state building wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The US political system has apparent faced so much gridlock that the president is an independent and an octogenarian Putin still rules Russia, with NATO slowly falling apart in the background. It's enough background to keep an audience engaged, but not so much that you can't hope to understand the world around you.

Looking at these events also helps explain why the United States becomes extremely concerned with face saving measures in the Pacific, rather than potentially concentrating on the broader outcome like further Russian aggression in Europe, Iranian proxy wars and other factors a US which is humiliated by a foreign power might suffer. 

The novel's main premise, and overall cautionary moral, is to chide many American commentators and planners who blithely assume the United States will remain at the top of the technological dog pile. In begins with the Wèn Rui Incident in the South China Sea where unspecified advances in Chinese cyberwarfare capabilities blackout the communications of a small USN flotilla, and swiftly lead to shots fired. Almost concurrently an F-35 is hacked by (supposedly) Iranian forces who force it to land inside Iran and take the pilot hostage. Either incident alone would be enough to trigger a harsh response, both trigger an escalation.

A United States shorn of its usual expectation of technological advantage discovers itself lacking many options it might otherwise employ beyond brute force. Miscalculations in Washington and Beijing each lead to more shots fired in anger, and horrendous consequences ensue. 

Unlike my previous reads, where combat and technological know-how was highlighted, this book was much more interested in things like exploring nightmares from someone who commanded a losing battle, an old warrior seeing too much and desiring peace, and a political man thrust into a situation he was totally unprepared for and his much more powerful boss has to save face against. That doesn't mean we don't get a look at war, but the action scenes are few and far between, with battles largely being described after the fact. It made for an interesting change of pace and an overall shorter book (300 pages vs the 400-900 of previous reads) that flowed very easily.

That's not to say this was necessarily an improvement. The story, after all, is trying to present a cautionary tale that the US may find itself too dependent on overall technological superiority and lacks any strategic deterrent outside its nuclear arsenal. This did, overall, lead to a very limited look at strategy (the US's potential allies in the Pacific are all absent, and only the potential enemies get mentioned, suggesting something has gone horrifically wrong with international alliance systems) and it did leave me with more than a few questions on that front.

While I understood that the premise of the story would be impossible without the Chinese developing an advantage on some front, it did feel a bit odd that so many of the US's other contemporaries, like India, had completely blindsided it on similar fronts. Not necessarily impossible - the year the war is set is nearly fourteen years away, plenty is possible - but just very convenient for the plot. 

It was an interesting story, but the characters did feel a little thin. Sarah Hunt in particular had some of the most moving moments, but I felt I never really got inside her head the way I did for Wedge, Chowdhury or Farshad. Chowdhury was the most globe trotting character, going between the White House and New Delhi, engaging in delicate political maneuvers and probably having the most "American" outlook by being a proud immigrant and dealing with the backlash many immigrants in similar situations would face. The other characters were fine, but Lin Bao fell almost too far in the territory of a mediocre villain at times. In complete fairness to the novel though, no nation really comes off as a "good guy" in this scenario, with everyone being guided by realpolitik rather than rational policy decisions.

2034 is a chilling piece of future history. Whether you find the scenario realistic or not, it does its best to show how a future war might not be one we're overly familiar with, but no less deadly for all that. An intriguing and cautionary tale which may be well worth your time.

Red Metal

In a world not too different from our own, Russia has lost control of a valuable piece of real estate in Kenya. Embarrassed, angry, and it's political apparatus threatening to fall into irrelevance, the Russians aim to reassert themselves in a world where they have been beaten down since the Cold War ended. Their only option is to unleash a tide of Red Metal.

The authors Mark Greaney and Rip Rawlings IV collaborated on this project and brought quite a bit of experience to it. Greaney is perhaps best known as being the last and most connected collaborator with the late Tom Clancy, and having a quite successful career of his own with his Gray Man series. Rawlings is a former Marine Corps infantry and reconnaissance officer who has begun writing his own fiction as well. From their diverse backgrounds, they've come together to do quite a lot of research and put it into one very exciting package!

Another piece of alternate history with the Russians thundering across the European plains! This one just edges in as it was written in 2019 and set in 2020, so something like the War in 2020 but very different! I'll admit I was attracted to this one because it was set in a contemporary setting, and trying to keep up with recent technologies. It made for some intriguing military analysis, and many, many tense action sequences.

Unlike my last two reads, which contained lots of older history with the Cold War in full swing, we find ourselves in the 21st century, the Soviet Union dismantled, NATO hovering over Europe, and the Russians quite upset with how their fortunes have turned out. We're in the internet age, Facebook and satellite communications are more prominent than even in the fantastic works done by Clancy or Peters. Though one might ask themselves, how does war come about in such an age? To their credit, the two authors go to lengths to convince you why the war happens and how these plans are concocted. It's all rather believable and makes for an interesting set up, similar to Red Storm Rising. It was immensely enjoyable, and I found it quite interesting to see a deep effort by the Russians to carry out a maskirovka in line with modern expectations. The pages spent establishing it were vital to seeing how the conflict breaks out.

The Russian plan, codenamed Red Metal, is one of calculation and sweeping depth. It involves a raid into Europe to blind NATO, using armored columns, suped up war trains with artillery and anti-air assets, and the insertion of Spetznaz forces to distract and blind the NATO alliance. Like the Russian generals, I too was shocked by it's depth and audacity. The way it ends up being carried out is quite bombastic, clever, and really worthy of a Bond Villain in its cunning and menace.

The authors have done a very good job in describing modern war. There's hackers knocking out the web, drones scouting artillery positions, and satellites being blinded or destroyed by ASAT missiles. From the internet to special forces teams, they don't overlook anything that might need to go boom to get the ball rolling in the early 21st century. One of the coolest things though are the Red Lighting trains, primed for deception and military support. Being rolling command posts, armored support columns and anti-air batteries all in one, it made for a very exciting aspect no one might have considered before!

Red Metal also includes a large and diverse cast of characters. From the ground, to the skies, to below the seas, it's a diverse group for a large war. I never found myself bored by the characters or their stories, and besides one painfully shoehorned in romance sub plot, the characters were all deeply interesting in their interactions. 

On the American/NATO side we have Lt. Colonel Dan Connelly, a former field commander who is now behind a desk and working with his army counterpart Major Griggs who is intelligent, but a chronic underachiever. Lt. Colonel Tom Grant, a tank logistics and maintenance officer and interim commander of his regiment while his commander goes home on Christmas leave. We also have Captain Raymond "Shank" Vance who pilots at A-10, Lt. Sandra "Glitter" Glisson an Apache pilot, and a Polish militia soldier Paulina Tobiazs. Finally, prominent among others still, is Pascal Arc-Blanchette, an old French spy who willingly stays in Africa and his son Captain Apollo Arc-Blanchette, French special forces operator.

Then on the Russian side we have Yuri Borbikov, the mastermind of Red Metal. Humilated after being forced to withdraw from a rare earth mind in Kenya in 2017, he has masterminded the plot to humiliate NATO in return. The two generals who will carry out the plan are Eduard Sabaneyev and Boris Lazar. Sabaneyev is an up and coming officer in the military while Lazar, the Lion of Dagestan, is one of the finest soldiers in Russia. This trio are our main viewpoint at the Russian side of the war, other than occasional one off characters who flesh out the action. Unfortunately, the Russians generally turn into Bond villains, complete with war crimes and supervillain trains, quite quickly. With one notable exception there's not a lot of humanizing the enemy, and we get into some nationalistic chest beating early on.

The action though, is just spectacular. These authors have clearly spent time in warzones, and the detail they put into the weapons, their uses, and it's effects on humans is intense. Whether being shredded by an A-10's cannons, blown apart by tank main guns, or incinerated by a fuel air bomb, the authors don't spare you the horrors of modern war. It was engrossing reading about everything from an undermanned militia unit fighting a Russian advance column, to a full regiment of US Marines fighting off Russian armor and artillery from a well fortified position. With all that, characters die, and the happy endings are few and far between.

I will confess that the presence of one of my favorite modern war machines, the ugly but beautiful A-10 Warthog did inspire much of my praise for this book. It is used to well and the character who drives his 'hog to the bitter end, was fun to watch. From the awesome of blowing through massed Russian armor to the almost absurd of a trio of Warthogs fighting off a pair of Su-57 fighter jets I was hooked.

If I can make one major criticism, the story by the rough half way point did begin seeing the lucky breaks start falling almost one sided towards the US/NATO. The tone shifts from one of well plotted and established action to one of enormous convenience for NATO forces. Russia still gets its licks in, but by the last two hundred pages I could accurately predict the general outcome, somewhat disappointingly. Too many things swing just the right way for the NATO forces which robbed the final moments of much of their dramatic tension. Even had there been some slight tweaks to this formula it might have raised the bar that much higher for me.

However, as a contemporary war thriller, with espionage and action, I was pleasantly surprised at how detailed and exciting Red Metal turned out to be. I'm sincerely hoping these authors produce another war thriller together because they collaborated extremely well on this one. The ending hints at another potential conflict on the horizon, and - in the world of fiction at least - one can hope! A definite recommend.

Nemesis Games

I've been keeping up pretty regularly with the works of James A. Corey and The Expanse, both in show format and in dead tree form. Now though I've finally come to one of the most game changing books in the series. The verse as you know it is about to be upended. Here, we get a look inside the head's of each member of the crew of the plucky ship Rocinante. In this installment, James Holden and his crew will face their greatest challenges yet as they sit down for Nemesis Games.

From wikimedia commons

Taking place roughly a year after the events of Cibola Burn, Holden and the crew are back on Tycho Station, their ostensible home base. However, one by one they are drawn off by personal needs. With their ship in dock for extensive repairs after the events of the last novel, they have some unexpected down time. They find themselves with personal matters cropping up.

For Amos, there is a funeral on Earth. For Alex, his wanderlust for his Martian heritage and old life creeps up on him. For Naomi, a message from her past she never expected comes over the horizon at her, giving her no choice but to go it alone to try and confront her demons.

Nemesis Games is notable for being the first book in the series where we get a look at the personalities of the whole crew of the Rocinante and not just it's erstwhile captain James Holden. Though Naomi, Amos and Alex have been along for the ride all along, we haven't gotten much beyond smaller looks at their pasts, their secrets, and the issues which brought them out to the ice hauler Canterbury so long ago. In this story, told entirely from the POV of the crew as they diverge across the solar system, we share their own secrets, their fears, and anxiety at losing touch - even briefly - with their surrogate family as they endure the greatest terrorist attack in human history.

Events in the Sol system and the myriad of worlds beyond have been largely focused around the thousand new worlds opened up to humanity by the Gate. That presents a singular problem for Mars whose centuries old terraforming project now stands in peril as there are easily accessible worlds to stand on only a year or two's travel away. Why waste your time in domes when you can hop on a spaceship and see the open sky? For the people of the Belt too, who have spent their lives downtrodden by the power of Earth and Mars, they fear they will be overlooked in this land rush. There are many competing ideas about this, and how this gets resolved, and some are much more violent than others.

In the wake of a stunning declaration of war on, effectively, humanity, the crew of the Rocinante are left struggling to find their way home to their ship. Whether trying to maintain calm on Tycho Station, racing around Mars on a potentially deadly investigation or trapped on Earth, things get grim for not only them, but humanity as a whole.

Since we're getting such a more intimate look at the crew and their own personal dynamics, I felt this was one of the most surprising yet desirable turns the story of The Expanse could take. It made for enlightening reading. Characters who had thus far only played supporting roles were given the center stage at last while their own interactions and feelings towards one another were more deeply explored. Set against a suitably dramatic backdrop, it felt like the collapse of the status quo was much more intimate, something a broader lens might have achieved, but not with the same effect of interconnected fear and familial love.

Explorations on what it means to be human, the interconnectivity of society and the very real concerns people have over their own potential irrelevance are well explored. The social issues, while not heavily hammered on, take a forefront in this story. You get a real feeling that, even in the 24th century society can't quite pull itself together properly. There is though, still hope.

Nemesis Games is the first book in the series to end on a very definitive cliffhanger. You're left with the situation overall still in turmoil, threats unresolved, and terrible problems yet to be revealed. This is my second time reading the book, but it did make me want to immediately leap onto the sequel, Babylon's Ashes. A great novel and an excellent hook for continuing the series!

Red Army

In 1989, Ralph Peters, in perhaps a piqued reaction to the breezy assumptions of many technothriller writers and armchair pundits of the era, wrote a short novel simply entitled Red Army after the foe that NATO would end up facing in any major conventional war in the 20th century. It was, explicitly noted by the author, written as an attempt to humanize the men behind the guns of the Soviet war machine which might come streaming across the West German border.

Does it hold up as a war novel today? Personally, I really think it does.

From wikimedia commons.

It can be described as a very 'grey' novel. There's no sense that one side is winning any enormous moral victory over the other, very few hypercompetent officers, and the people behind the guns, whether they be infantrymen, tankers, artillerymen, pilots or commanding generals are just that, people. They have their flaws, worrying about whether their wives are having an affair, thinking about what to do after the war, and even wondering what the enemy may be thinking. For every man who rises to the occasion to become a hero, there's someone who flees in cowardice, for every noble act towards an enemy there's an atrocity either by mistake or by design.

Peters really puts you in the heat of the action, from the build up to the terrifying and pulse pounding moments when the guns open up all along the front. It has a number of scenes that, even having put down the book, stick with me. There is, to be frank, a lot of pointless death. Peters does not shy away from the horrors of war, and the book is all the better for it. One of the first deaths we see on the page is a young conscript crushed by a crate falling from a supply truck before the fighting has even started. From there Peters directly puts us in the firing line with bullets, artillery rounds, and bombs tearing men to literal pieces. 

That also equals a very high body count in named characters. For every character you see on screen there's a fairly decent chance that they'll be blown away by an act of war, whether from the enemy or friendly fire. I won't spoil who lives or dies, but I was stunned - and truly humbled even - by the rate of attrition. It was a very real reminder of just how deadly truly mechanized modern war could be. Also how personal the losses of the war can be.

We have numerous Russian viewpoints. This novel is rather unique in the genre as it only gives you one sides view of the war, the Soviet one. Our main viewpoints who we can sympathize with and know the most are actually behind the lines. Soviet general Mikhail Malinksy, a career officer descended from the old pre-revolution Russian nobility, will be leading the delicate operation across northern German to push Soviet forces to the Rhine. The second most important character is his chief of staff Pavel Pavlovich Chibisov. Jewish and an indispensable staff officer to his general, he does many tasks and takes much of the personal anger of Malinsky's subordinates who all believe that he, as a Jew in still extremely anti-Semitic Russia, is poisoning their leader against them. Through their eyes we see the grand plan of the battle unfold, with what goes right and what goes wrong.

It can all be somewhat dizzying at times, with characters introduced, fleshed out, and maybe blown away in the next chapter - or even in the next paragraph! I did find latching on to numerous Russian names took a bit of getting used to, but once I grasped the names and a few of the Russian patronymics, it became much easier.

Unlike say, Red Storm Rising, this book was much easier to read because with only a few exceptions, it doesn't throw mountains of technical data at you. A tank is a tank whether British, Dutch or Soviet. There is little real effort to tell you who is driving what, whether it's a T-80 or a T-74, which makes taking the information in so very easy. Even when American forces eventually show up Peters doesn't take time to wax poetic about this or that particular fighting vehicle. That gives us a lot more time to get to know characters, their foibles, flaws, and situation. It humanizes the men rather than dazzle you with the machines.

Speaking of Americans, they aren't really present until the late stages of the novel. This might be perhaps because the author couldn't really bring himself to write the Soviets beating American forces - or very realistic worries for the post-Reagan era of the Cold War that this might be interpreted as being unpatriotic. This doesn't hurt the novel, but it does rob a lot of the climax of some of the necessary oomph you would hope for, even perhaps delving into a dues ex machina territory as the war finds a more political solution, in a manner of speaking. It really could have even used fifty more pages to describe that last desperate fight to drive the story home. Though as stated, that might not be fully possible in time it was written.

Peters also doesn't shy away from the inefficiencies of the Soviet system, whether they be military or political. He stays very far away from the political situation, which allows him to write about the titular forces. It's refreshing to see a real sea of humanity in the Soviet characters with few outright caricatures, and he genuinely tries to write them as real people. It works very, very well to make me, if not necessarily root for them winning, to at least hope they make it out alive as I see them as human beings rather than simply the "other side" of the war.

This is perhaps one of the best stories of World War III I've yet read. A very well done, and extremely nuanced work, it shows you war is hell, and men suffer and die in the most agonizing ways through it. Largely absent of patriotic chest beating and full of compassion for people who were then his enemies, Peters delivers an amazing story of modern war and all its horrors. Definitely a must read for anyone thinking of this genre.