The New Breed

The Brotherhood of War series is excellent. W.E.B. has an excellent knowledge and very easy to read style. I've read the Presidential Agent series and The Corp series and they are all good.

I have being reading all of Griffin's books since he came out with the Lts. He has several series. Brotherhood of War is about the Army from World War II to near the end of Vietnam war. The Marines is about World War ll up to Korea. The Police series is about the Philadelphia Police in the 60's, the OSS series is World War II mostly in China, and the newest series is about the secret service. Even though he turns out series by the pound, each book stands on its own. The best part of all his books is the charicter studies. The background story is there only to improve the characters. These are the kind of books that you pick up and don't put down until they are done. You feel you know the people in the books and they are no longer fiction. These books get dog eared fast, because you will reread them often. Each time you read them you will find out something you missed the time before. Pick up all of his writings.

"The Brotherhood of War" series is really six books, beginning in 1944 with "The Lieutenants" and ending in 1970 with "The Generals." This book, though nominally #7 in the series, is (like "The Aviators," nominally #8) not so much a part of the series as a stand-alone adjunct to it. Major characters from the first six books (Craig Lowell, Sandy Felter) are supporting characters here, and the focus is on characters that didn't exist (or received limited attention) in the main series. One happy result of this is that, although "The New Breed" *can* be read as part of the original series (Note: Descriptions of it as a "prequel" to "The Generals" notwithstanding, it's really read better *after* that book) it also works perfectly well as a stand-alone novel. Fans of the series will see dimensions in the Craig Lowell/Geoff Craig relationships that first-timers won't, but those nuances aren't critical to enjoying the story. The story proper is about U. S. Army intervention in the former Belgian Congo during its post-independence civil war . . . an aspect of the Cold War that most Americans know about only from an old Tom Lehrer lyric about making peace "the way we did in Stanleyville and Saigon." Griffin makes good use of the post-colonial setting, and Col. Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare, a famous leader of mercenaries in the real world, makes a credible supporting character. The three leading fictional characters, Karl-Heinz Wagner, Geoffrey Craig, and Jacques "Jack" Portet are all drawn well enough to be interesting, and Griffin uses Wagner (an East German defector) and Portet (a Belgian-American airline pilot who gets drafted) to say some thoughtful things about loyalty and cultural differences. What really makes a novel like this stand or fall, however, is the quality of the plot, and here (perhaps sensing that he's writing a stand-alone story) Griffin does better than usual at creating a story arc that lasts through the whole book, ties the characters together, and comes to a satisfying conclusion. This is (like Griffin's other books) more a "military procedural" than a slam-bang, shoot-em-up "war story." That may disappoint some readers (try Wilbur Smith's "Dark of the Sun" or "Cry Wolf") but it's true to the characters and material in a way that extravagant violence wouldn't be. Recommended

This is yet another great book in the Brotherhood of Arms series. The characters are great and I got a real feel for military life.