"To the everlasting glory of the infantry"
Robert Buettner says in his afterword that this book, and the previous one in the series, were written to be updates of the "young man-become-soldier amid interplanetary war" novels epitomized by "Starship Troopers" and "The Forever War". Where each one of those books has a political stance or message of some sort, Buettner wants to emphasize the irrelevancy of politics for the men and women in combat. Those men and women stand and fight for each other, not for an abstract idea. While it's a fine subject for a book it could have been expressed in a more exciting way. The first half of the book puts the hero into political manipulations and scenarios of one sort or another. As a reader, the indifference of the protagonist to these machinations is simply boring, not illuminating. Never once did I make the leap the author intended me to and think about the connection between politics and the will to fight.

However, once the action starts the book is as entertaining as any military sci-fi I've read since Starship Troopers. The aliens are slugs rather than bugs, but they are still mindlessly malevalent and incompetent enough for one human infantryman to mow them down in waves. Even in the earlier slow chapters Buettner's writing style kept me interested. He ends each chapter with a cliffhanger sentence, as if he had written the book as a serial.

Overall, I rate this book very highly - as long as you don't care about missing the message of the author and are only looking for a rollicing good space fight!

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