First book of a new series and I have a problem right off the bat. I don’t like the main characters first name. He is Corporal Jimmy Stiegel. He and I have a lot in common, first of which is our first names. I haven’t gone by Jimmy since I was a kid and certainly didn’t answer to it when I went into the military. Why he doesn’t prefer to be addressed as James or Jim is beyond me. The fact that he’s in the Army does lessen his first name usage quite a bit since they would normally address him as Corporal Stiegel or just Stiegel. But the book keeps calling him Jimmy and that doesn’t sound right.
Something else we have in common is that he’s in a field artillery battery which is where I spent the majority of my time in the Army. But Stiegel, labeled a Corporal and I don’t recall ever having any Corporals in my firing batter or my battalion. Most E-4s were Specialist and then moved to Sergeant once promoted to E-5. But Corporal Stiegel is something different. He likes PT and is a hard charger wanting to go to Special Forces or Ranger Training if possible. He’s put in a request and with the help of his First Sergeant and a Captain Hawthorne he got his chance.
Now headed to Special Forces Selection course, Corporal Siegel was determined not to fail. He had been given some great advice by his Fist Sergeant who had been through the course but not selected. And yes, that was a thing. If you didn’t score high enough, even though you finish the course, you could be non-selected and told to come back and try it again! Corporal Stiegel was not going to let that happen to him, but, of course, he didn’t know what was he was heading into.
He finally got to New Bolivia and reported in to Camp Jeffries. Here’s where the real story begins. Corporal Stiegel is going to be tested to his physical and physiological limits. It’s going to be a non-stop training of a kind he’s never experienced before. He’s going to join sixty other soldiers and will find out that more than three quarters of them will quit the course while a number of them will complete it, but not get selected for further Special Forces training. Quitting is strictly voluntary. None of the senior NCOs conducting the training are going to tell you to quit, but they will ask if you want to. Fail to meet a training standard will get you automatically dropped.
Fortunately, Corporal Stiegel has someone pulling for him that he doesn’t really know about. Captain Hawthorne commands the 29th Unconventional Warfare Detachment (UWD) and he just lost his Forward Observer during their first combat mission. He needs a replacement, so he was going to follow Corporal Stiegel’s progress through the course with interest. The 29th UWD was stood up with a specific mission and that was to find out who was conducting a slave trading operation and to stop it dead! It was believed that a group of rebel terrorist on a planet called Sanctuary were capturing human civilians and turning them over to the Chartean Empire. This was an alien species similar to Earth arachnids that used humans as slaves keeping them in horrible conditions.
So, Corporal Stiegel begins his training. It is going to be brutal as is most any special selection course tends to be. He just has to convince himself that he can do what has to be done even if his mind doesn’t always want to cooperate. What he faces in training could be much less difficult than what he’ll face once he goes to war. And going to war is just what Captain Hawthorne is planning to do. His unit hasn’t finished their mission and they need a replacement Forward Observer so he’s counting on Corporal Stiegel to complete the course with high enough grades to get selected. Captain Hawthorne has not control over what Corporal Stiegel will go through or how he’ll be graded. That’s strictly up to the Senior NCOs that are running the course. If Corporal Stiegel wants to quit, then he’ll quit. They won’t encourage him to do otherwise, just lay out the challenges he has to meet.
Some of this book sounds like it’s probably close to the real thing. Other parts sound pretty lame if you ask me. I don’t think Special Forces operators need some Sergeant telling them when to do something the Captain asks, they just do it. Also, at the beginning, Corporal Stiegel has two privates that work for him during maintenance and he drops them, tells them to do pushups for talking back to him and in my experience, that’s not done. Of course I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. And some of the conversations between team members of the 29th UWD just seem a little off. Can’t explain it, but I don’t know why, but it just sounds kind of silly.
Still, I liked the book and will continue to read the series. The next book, “Fire Team Nomad”, is now available on Amazon. I’m adding it to my reading list.
[Note 1 (12/23/2025): I’m no longer associated with Amazon and will no longer provide any links to books from that website. You can usually find books that you like at your usual source.]
[Note 2: As of 12/03/2023, this will not be posted on Amazon since I have been banned from posting reviews for some unknown reason. ]