Having lost numerous friends and his lover to the seemingly defeated Slugs, Jason is understandably ready for some downtime. But when—after an eventful two-year flight in Earth's one remaining interplanetary rescue ship—he ends up on a war-devastated Earth, he finds that peacetime life holds as many dangers as war.
His temporary rank of general provisionally intact, Jason is paraded around as a war hero, used by the Washington administration as a puppet for their plans to decommission the armed forces and start repairing Earth's ecology and economy. Jason's soldierly instincts are at odds with his new mission, and even the sophisticated advice of his handler, a woman named Ruth Tway, as well as the gruff advice of his old DI, Sgt. Ord, can't save him from some gaffes. Trying to solace himself with the material and carnal pleasures afforded a hero doesn't work either.
So it's almost a relief when, thanks to a technological blunder by distracted genius Howard Hibble, the Slugs come calling again, war erupts once more, and Jason can return to doing what he does best: Circumventing the rules, exhibiting ingenuity and bravery and staging a last-ditch mission to save humanity's chestnuts from the fires of armageddon. A mission consisting of Jason, a fellow PTSD-suffering vet named Brumby, Hibble, a hotshot pilot named Mimi Ozawa, a little robot named Jeeb—and as much high explosive as they can carry.
The future of the footsoldier
It is possible, of course, to read allegorical intent into Buettner's series (and this book remains open-ended), mapping his hypothetical future conflict onto present-day ones. But as he explains in an afterword (in which he cleverly explicates the subtext of both Heinlein's Starship Troopers [1959] and Haldeman's The Forever War [1974]), the author has done everything possible to render his tale bias-free, producing a tribute to the common infantryman that does not point fingers or choose ideological sides. Toward this goal he has made great strides. Pacifists, fence-sitters and war-hawks alike can find common ground in Jason Wander's story, based on essential human emotional qualities that supersede any intellectual arguments.
Much of Buettner's success is attributable to his choice of first-person narrative voice. Jason's personality is on the page continuously and is maintained without deviation or failure of consistency. This authentic voice is captivating, as is Buettner's facility with crisp, clear action, whiz-bang plotting and clever twists.
The first half of the book requires some mental readjustment on the part of the reader who emerges from the initial book all keyed up for more military action. Instead, it's 100 percent politics and seemingly less-than-mortal maneuvering. But these Machiavellian moments are never uninteresting on their own merits—the conflicted character of Ruth Tway sustains a lot of the narrative here—and they set the stage for the second half of the book, when all hell breaks loose.
Jason's johnny-on-the-spot heroics this time around possess a little less sense of inevitability than those in the first book, since he has to maneuver himself into position to save the day, rather than just allowing circumstances to channel his efforts. But given his "addiction" to rule-breaking and putting his life on the line, they seem utterly plausible. What Buettner has succeeded marvelously in doing once again is to show us how within all of us lurks a spark of glory and heroism, fanned more brightly by some of us than by others.
In the light of the New Orleans tragedy, Buettner seems positively prophetic in his comments in Chapter 15 about how the federal government can screw up disaster relief. This kind of clear-eyed but not despairing cynicism is the essence of his refreshing attitude.—Paul
