Fiction

Title: Sniper Shot
Author: Barry Ozeroff
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1596871504

Sniper Shot is the dramatic, suspense-filled debut novel about the ongoing and potentially deadly conflict between Ben Geller, primary sniper on the Stratton, Oregon Special Response Team and Bob Slater, the team's secondary sniper. Despite Slater's superior marksmanship, Geller is the primary sniper because Slater, a world-class long distance, high-powered rifle competitive shooter, lacks the patience and discipline needed to assume the position of primary sniper. Sniper Shot takes readers deep into the world of this special elite team, moving toward the kind of showdown nobody expects between Geller and Slater—one of them is a robber and murderer, and the game of cat and mouse between the two, sets up a taut, dramatic finale.

Title: Code of Conduct
Author: Karen Black
Genre: Fiction, Military
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0972444904

Matt Tillet, an F-8 Crusader pilot, is shot down over North Vietnam in 1966, just one week before his ship would be heading home after his second back-to-back six-month tour. Escaping from his spiraling out-of-control jet with only seconds to spare, and evading for all of three minutes, he becomes a Prisoner of War. Surviving torture, months of solitary confinement and the infamous Hanoi March, the dream of returning home to his wife and two children keeps him going. Repatriated in 1973, he returns to find his dream shattered.

Code of Conduct takes place in the middle of a war; however, it is not so much a blood and guts war novel as it is the emotional tale of a family torn apart by war, more than seven years of separation, and the long journey to reconstruct their lives.

While many POWs came home to broken marriages, the personal relationship portion of the book is purely fictional. The prison scenes are based on actual events that happened to the POWs in Vietnam. The story was inspired by many years of listening to the recollections of the author's husband and several of his Vietnam ex-POW buddies. Time does not seem to have faded their memories of what they went through (although they can now joke about it) and each reunion or get together provided a new tidbit.

The author's goal is to present the horrendous prisoner-of-war experience and the resulting shattered personal lives in the format of a novel.

Title: Don’t Mean Nothing
Author: Susan O'Neil
Genre: Fiction, Collection
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0982546270

In this debut fiction collection--the first by a nurse who served in Viet Nam--Susan O'Neill offers a glimpse into the war from a female perspective. These stories are about women, and men, who served in three combat hospitals in 1969 and 1970. They are interconnected, peopled by one-time "stars" and recurring characters, and they deal both with both the minutia of everyday life in wartime, and grander, more over-reaching themes--love and loss, faith and despair, morality, futility, military idiosyncrasy, magic, and the cost to the soul of a year in war's very particular hell. The stories are purely fictional, yet based loosely on the author's experiences, and they are laced as liberally with black humor as with pathos.

Title: First Traitor
Author: Jeff Wade
Genre: Fiction, Military
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 097479550X

America is on the verge of WWIII and the Vice President of the United States is a traitor bent upon world domination. His plot to conspire with America's enemies and bring the world to its knees seems foolproof. The conspirators have planned for everything - everything but Lieutenant Commander Jake Gregory of SEAL Team 5.

Title: Nobody Comes Back: A Novel of the Battle of the Bulge
Author: Donn Pearce
Genre: Fiction, Historical
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): B000KHXCD0

Donn Pearce, the author of Cool Hand Luke, again revisits the subject of men under tremendous pressure, living and dying according to oppressive circumstances. Now, he brings you another tragic hero, thrust out of the only world he knew and forced to create one on his own terms . . . or die trying.

Toby Parker was America's unwanted son. Only sixteen years old, he was too young to be enlisted in the army, but old enough to know that he didn't want to return to the life he knew: moving from new home to new home, neglected by his mother, ignored by his father, overlooked by everyone else.

The war overseas promised exotic locations and adventure, but what it delivered was something else entirely. The Nazis were beginning to fall back, and the war was all but over. But the fighting still raged on in pockets of Europe. Out of the critical focus on France, only one last position needed to hold: the city of Bastogne. Thrown into battle almost immediately upon arrival, he soon found himself wounded and alone, struggling to survive and looked upon to lead. It was here that Toby was to learn what war really was, and what kind of man he was destined to become.

Many American boys went into World War II, and each one lived their own nightmare, critically shaped by what they experienced. Out of the dead, even the survivors, Nobody Comes Back.

Told with gritty authenticity, Donn Pearce captures the very essence of what it means to be caught under the worst circumstances imaginable, while having the strength and humanity to rise above them.