I really like this series even though it’s got stuff in it that I never read, like Dragons and cat ninjas, dwarfs, wizards and other fantasty stuff. I just don’t like fantasy science fiction, but these books are well written and are more about US Army Rangers than anything else. This whole series is a tribute to Army Rangers who, if they’re half as bad as portrayed in these book, are some seriously bad, bad dudes!
The story is told through the writings of a former PFC now just Private Talker (a.k.a., Private Walker) who is a linguist assigned to this Ranger Company for this specific mission. Now that mission had been to go forward in Earths timeline to about 10 years and determine if the plague was still around. Only something went wrong and the Ranger Company got thrown 10,000 years into the future and Earth is almost unrecognizable. There are things existing now that come straight from the “Lord of the Rings” movie and most of those things you just don’t want to meet.
Private Talker (he was demoted for not obeying orders in their last mission), is now serving extensive and extend guard duty at FOB Hawthorn. That’s the place the Ranges took back from the now non-human SEAL who has joined the Dark Side! The Forge is located here and that’s the miracle machine that can make just about anything. It is now busy making lots of weapons and ammo for the Rangers so they can defend this fortress for as long as it takes. Then the dragon attacks!
Now, this isn’t you’re normal run-of-the-mill dragon, if there is such a thing, because this one is huge! And, it has a toxic breath that forces the Rangers into MOPP gear, which in their case are Protective Masks. It’s hard enough fighting anyone with just the battle rattle you normally have on, but putting that damn masked on makes it really, really miserable! Still, getting one whiff of that dragon’s toxic breath and you’re dissolved into powder. I’ll keep the mask on. Oh, the Rangers are shooting back something fearfully, but when you can see 50 cal. rounds bouncing off the Dragon, then you kind of get the feeling you’re over matched here. The Dragon does his damage which includes outright killing of eight Rangers by spitting some kind of poisonous acid gel on them during the attack. But finally, with all the Rangers firing everything they had and even getting the anti-tank stuff involved, they drove off that Dragon, but certainly didn’t kill him.
So, you know Captain Knife Hand, as the CO of the Ranger Company has been named by Private Talker, is not going to let the killing of eight of his Ranges be a done and forgotten thing. No, he sits down with his Sergeant Major and the rest of his staff and Senior NCOs and starts a planning session that will result in the violent death of the Dragon in about six weeks. The book is about how the Rangers don’t go running into battle with crazed intent, but actually plan, strategize and apply killing tactics to end their opponent. It’s a pretty interesting account although it is a short book. I’m not sure if they’ll ever be a time when a Ranger Company needs to kill a dragon, but if that time ever really comes, here’s a pretty good way to get it dead.
At the end of this short book, you’ll get to read some information as to how the world or Earth came to be as it is now. It wasn’t some fantastic World War III, although there have been wars all during the past 10,000 years, but humanity almost killed it self off with a virus. Sound familiar?
This isn’t the end of this series yet. There appears to be a book four, “Lay the Hate”, coming on/about 1 September 2021. I recommend you get it on your reading list. I’ve already done that.