The Rods and the Axe by Tom Kratman

 Tom Kratman continues the ongoing saga of Carrera's war on Terra Nova here. There is a great deal of detail given relating to how his tercias continue to prepare and dig in for the anticipated attack from the Tauran Union and the Zhang Empire, some good political shenanigans, and some fun stuff from his "ministry of dirty tricks".

I've learned from watching BSU football games over the years that, even if you're known for having a lot of trick plays up your sleeve (like Carrera), you still have to have a good solid skill set of offensive and defensive strategies and tactics in order to win, and I think that the author is quite aware of that, while still providing enough exciting confusion and misdirection to keep the readers entertained.

Kratman may be the only author I can think of off of the top of my head in the military science fiction field, besides David Weber, who can pull off the massively multi-POV story well. I'm not terribly good at visualizing all of the locations on his world, or keeping track of all of the different officers and soldiers and government officials on the multi-front conflict, but he gives me just enough referents to keep moving along with it.

A good, solid step forward in the story line, which was only irritating in that it ended after four hundred pages or so with "To be continued..." Drat! I was really hoping to see the Zhang and Taurans brought to their knees at last.

Come and Take Them by Tom Kratman

Tom Kratman once again delivers a great story of warfare between the nations of Terra Nova. Left to themselves, the Tauran Union leadership might be content to merely restrict the freedoms of the people of Balboa by imposing various economic sanctions and hoping that their barbaric moral philosophy leads to their downfall in the end. Unhappily, UEPF high Admiral Wallenstein isn't willing to wait that long, so she bribes and cajoles the Taurans into provoking a war with Carrera's Legion.

There are still a few honest men left on the Tauran side, and their supreme commander, works directly with Carrera to stand down from the first provocations, hoping to achieve an uneasy peace once more. That hope is shattered later when a group of women from the Tauran Union are captured, tortured and killed, and the video released showing that Balboan security forces were responsible. So, the war begins.

Carrera has spent years preparing for this conflict, setting up multiple lines of ambush and surprise to use when it all hits the fan. We get to see some of the preparations, though only a portion of those become relevant in Come and Take Them, so it is likely that they'll be revealed in all their sneaky glory in another installment of this saga.

There are a couple of "cameo" appearances from primary characters in The Amazon Legion here. The action in that novel is going on in parallel with this one, and some of it becomes crucial to the outcome. The book is pretty clear at the end that this is just the beginning of the war, and there are at least a couple of interesting plot threads left dangling; what's going to happen with Carrera's son, Hamilcar, and his harem who worship him as god? and how is the traitor within Wallenstein's staff going to affect the outcome of things?

One quote I found amusing:

"...do we do well on those (standardized) tests because we are bright, or despite the fact that we're bright? Because most of the people who do well on standardized intelligence tests are, as near as I can figure, incompetent, arrogant morons who are ruining our world. Whatever those tests measure, it is not intelligence, and whatever the schools are delivering that those tests get people into, it is not competence."



If I had a quibble with this book, it's that it jumps around so often that I really had to stop and think and concentrate to keep track of who, when and where things were happening. In a way, I suppose, it was a bit like the fog of war, and I really couldn't be certain at any given time who was winning, in the big picture. I also missed the quotations from History and Moral Philosophy that appeared in earlier books.

Pulling no punches, this is a tough war novel, forget the science fiction.

On the positive side, I finally got to find out what Alex Kilgour of the Sten novels "reeking lums" were. On the negative side, I had to wait too long for it, subjectively speaking.

A State of Disobedience by Tom Kratman

 I think this may be Tom Kratman's first novel; it seems a little less polished than some of his later works, but it's still quite a good read. Just stumbled on it at the bookstore the other day, realized I didn't have a copy, and the rest is history, or future history, perhaps.

One thing I don't quite understand is how the author totally nailed the 2008 Democratic campaign rhetoric and majority of the resulting administration's agenda implemented after taking power, when Kratman wrote the book in 2003. I think he was anticipating a Clinton run, as the President in the story is a Progressive woman - the historical election of a black man was still too much fantasy at that point. Perhaps one should regard this as more of an alternate history novel.

Anyway, federal government law enforcement agencies have burgeoned out of control, with the EPA, Surgeon General's office, and others maintaining their own pseudo-military forces, in addition to the usual suspects from the FBI, NSA, CIA, BATF, and so on. The word has gone down from the President's office to fully enforce the new abortion rights guarantees, and to take the gloves off when it comes to the Pro Life demonstrators. The Surgeon General's police force goes on the offensive in Dallas, Texas against a group of demonstrators they suspect of setting fires at abortion clinics, and when one reaches for a cell phone during the attack, it triggers a massacre. Father Flores, the leader of the group, flees to what he hopes is sanctuary with another Catholic priest, Father Montoya and a Waco-like siege ensues, except that this time not only innocent children and their caregivers die, but a number of federal police are killed, as well.

As it turns out, Father Montoya's sister is the governor of Texas, and his best friend from Vietnam is the commander of the Texas National Guard, and to some extent you can predict how things are going to fall out from this point. It's a tense story, with a couple of interesting twists, and Kratman (a retired Army Colonel, if I remember correctly) infuses the tale with extremely accurate depictions of the flow of battle operations, weapons capabilities, and the perspective military men bring to a civil conflict. A good solid story which explores the issue of federal overreach and the point at which citizens revoke their consent to be governed.

The Amazon Legion by Tom Kratman

In The Amazon Legion, Carrera is desperate for more troops, and proposes a novel experiment, especially for the male-centric culture of Balboa, training up a legion of women warriors, and another one consisting solely of homosexual males.

Most of the book has as its protagonist Maria Fuentes, a young woman of impeccable family, who gets herself in the family way by trusting the blandishments of a young man of good family. When he denies being the father, she is disgraced and runs away to raise the baby on her own. This doesn't work out too well, as she is repeatedly victimized in the underbelly of Balboan society. A chance meeting with Carrera, however, puts her on track to apply for the new Amazon Legion where, if she succeeds, she and her daughter will be taken care of, and once again feel part of a family.

We follow Maria through her training, which is about as brutal as basic in the U.S. Marine Corps, aside from some minor modifications made to account for the relative strength and endurance of female troops as compared to males.  After she graduates from basic, she goes on to a form of OCS intended to turn her into the equivalent of a noncommissioned officer in the Legion.

When the Taurans finally lose patience with Balboa, and attack, we get to tag along with Maria and her Amazons on some fairly normal military missions, and also a long sojourn as a guerilla fighter against the invaders. As we've come to expect from these stories, there's plenty of blood and gore to go around.

I loved the Heinlein The Moon is a Harsh Mistress tribute, naming the mountain camp Camp Bernardo O'Higgins.

One great quote:
"All the courses and books in the world on building self-esteem are largely exercises in learning how to be a bad judge of character."

Kratman spends a great deal of time in this novel expounding on the idea that social experimentation, in the form of attempting to integrate gay soldiers and female soldiers into the general military population, has serious consequences and repercussions upon fighting effectiveness and morale. There are quite a few discussions, as well, on the subject of "why we fight".

More good reading in the ongoing saga of Terra Nova by Kratman, though I can't determine whether this amounts to a side plot, with the main action still to be published in a new installment.

The Lotus Eaters by Tom Kratman

The Lotus Eaters picks up the story of Patrick Carrera on Terra Nova not long after the events of Carnifex. Carrera has lapsed into a drunken, depressed state after the war in Pashtia, where one of his final acts was to detonate a nuclear weapon in a city of a million people, killing many innocents along with the terrorists he was targeting. No one seems to be able to break him out of his funk, until Jimenez and McNamara convince him that he must return to command to rid their country of its foreign occupiers. Of course, Carrera has a plan, and he begins to gather his forces to achieve his objectives.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, acting Admiral Wallenstein is expecting to be either prosecuted and cashiered for her role in the UN forces' debacle on Terra Nova, or be promoted to full Admiral and made a Class 1 citizen. It turns out to be the latter, and Wallenstein also has a plan, which will restore the space navy forces around Terra Nova to full functionality and allow her to keep the Terra Novans from ever posing a threat to Earth. Despite her determination to do the right thing for the UN, she displays a kinder, gentler side at times, and we are left to hope that maybe she and Carrera need not butt heads, but can cooperate again at some point in time, for the betterment of the human race's future.

Kratman does some neat things with transitions in this book, where he linguistically links the end of one chapter with the beginning of the next.
For example:
"The two guards, joined immediately by two others who had stood alert at the boy's door, followed.

Caridad Crus followed her husband..."

and:
"Martin was, perhaps, overly ambitious.

The program is ambitious..."

These types of transitions occur fairly frequently and soften the effects of the large number of "jumps" between points of view in the novel. I'm sure there's a technical term for them, but Literature 101 was 35 years ago for me, and I've long forgotten it.

Another great thing is the interludes between major sections of the book, which are ostensibly written by Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza, in the Historia y Filosofia Moral. Is this a tribute of sorts to the course labled History and Moral Philosophy that citizens in Heinlein's Starship Troopers are required to take in high school? We never really get to see the contents of that course, except in dialogs between teacher and students, so I think Kratman does a pretty good job of putting together a consistent moral philosophy that fulfills our long-awaited dreams here.

An excerpt,

"...there are things that are real, things that are true. A mother's love for her child, or a husband's for his child and his wife; these are almost always real. That honor, integrity, and courage are the only things one truly owns is true. The penalty a people ultimately pays for submitting to fraud is real. That political power grows from the barrel of a gun is true. The concrete of a bunker and the steel of a cannon; those are real."

And,
"Reason cannot tell the typical voter that he should not grant himself X largesse from the fisc when the penalty will not be paid until Y generation, a century down the road. That necessary restraint comes from an emotional commitment to future generations, and to the culture, values, and traditions of the society of which the voter is a part. Indeed, once the practice of robbing the fisc is well established, reason must lead the voter to 'get mine, before it's all gone.'"

Crap, this is just too timely, in the midst of the debt ceiling debate in the U.S. Congress.

Kratman has included an enormous amount of detail in this one about the recruiting, equipping and mobilizing of an effective fighting force. There's not as much actual combat as in previous installments, but just enough to whet our appetites for the next book in the series.

There are tons more of these.

Carnifex by Tom Kratman

Carnifex takes up the action right where A Desert Called Peace leaves off, on the planet of Terra Nova. The initial campaigns of the Legions put together by Patricio Carrera (nee Patrick Hennessey) and his colleagues have wound down, and the FSC has tried to mothball them. So, when the time comes that they need to be called back to service, Carrera/Hennessey makes the politicians who fired him in the first place pay through the nose to hire his men.

In the meantime, Carrera and the boys have been building an even more formidable force than before, including the beginnings of a fleet of ships, including a small aircraft carrier, and their first job is to tackle the piracy which is crippling shipping for the FSC and its allies. Then their army is hired to take care of the Salafists who have retreated to a mountainous and tribe-infested area of the planet (sounds like Afghanistan).

After Mr. Kratman was kind enough to comment on my post about the first book in this series, A Desert Called Peace, I feel moved to discuss some of the deeper issues raised in reading his books.

The main protagonist, Patrick Hennessy, enters into this endeavor motivated mostly by vengeance, needing to make the terrorists pay in blood for the death of his family. In the journey, however, we do see some other aspects of Hennessy, such as his intense loyalty towards his men. He'll spare nothing, not even his own health, wealth or sanity, in order to make sure that they get the best training and equipment possible to wage this war. In the beginning, they have little, but after a time, they are the most effective fighting force on the planet. He also endures the dilemma that all commanders face, of sending troops off into situations where they are all likely to be killed, in order to achieve a strategic objective, and this responsibility ages and saddens him, but not past his ability to do what he must.

There's a point in the books when Hennessy, seeing that the opposing forces are not treating prisoners humanely, makes a public statement to the media and to his foes that if they will abide by the rules of war, his troops will continue to treat prisoners well, allow battlefield surrenders, and so forth. But if the Salafists will not abide by the rules, then his forces will be released to be as brutal as necessary to win. This policy appeared to work in the book. It raises some moral questions, though, and one wonders if in lowering our standards to those our enemies follow, we might not become too much like them to bear.

The Legion also maintains a very secretive on-the-water "intelligence gathering' operation. Captured terrorists are both physically and psychologically tortured until they give up the information needed to thwart their organization's ongoing plans. We've just been through a huge public debate on torture in this country, so I've considered it a bit. My gut level reaction is that, if the lives of my family or friends were at stake, and time was short to find out how to stop an impending attack, my first instinct would be to use whatever means necessary to stop it. The needs of the many, or the innocent, outweigh the cost of brutalizing someone who means them harm. Does it make it moral, however?

In the United States, we have long had a mandate that the military forces of the country are ultimately under civilian control, with the President as our commander in chief. The Legion, in these books, is only nominally under civilian control, mostly from a payroll standpoint, though as time goes by Hennessy and his financial wizards come close to achieving financial independence as well. So, is the existence of a superior fighting force, abiding mostly by their own sense of honor and duty, a good thing to have lying around? In this story it may very well be. What responsibility should an army have to their civilian masters when those master become corrupt, incompetent and at times betray their own nation?

Other thoughts...

What happens when the standard of living in a country is so low that joining a mercenary force like the legion provides young men with the highest wages they could ever earn, better training than the could ever have hoped for, a guaranteed retirement and death benefit, and for the truly talented, paid scholarships? When you have such a flood of volunteers that you can pick just the best and the brightest for your troops?

At what point do you regard media workers who are ostensibly neutral or overtly hostile to your cause to be actual enemies? What level of cooperation with your armed enemies makes them fair targets? What about members of NGOs who are providing material aid? What level of retaliation is appropriate? Humiliating or discrediting them, taking them prisoner until the war is over, assassinating them?

If you like hard core war fiction, complete with rape, torture, assassination, violent combat, graphic sex, corruption, and twisty plots, traps and pitfalls, it's a great book. Kratman makes no bones about how he feels about those who view the world as they wish it could be, rather than accepting reality and dealing with treacherous terrorist forces accordingly.

A Desert Called Peace by Tom Kratman

This novel by Kratman barely qualifies as science fiction. I've mentioned before that in the realm of what's published these days as science fiction or fantasy, there are actually many books which are more realistically termed as Westerns or Romance or Detective novels, which only get called SF & F because they don't take place on modern day Earth. Kratman's book is really just Military fiction which happens to take place a century or so from now, though even the weaponry hasn't changed that much from what we have today - there's no disruptors, ray guns, stunners or particle beams, just plain old projectile weapons and some good old-fashioned nukes.

Most of the action takes place on Terra Nova (New Earth, right?) and seems to be a slightly altered version of recent events on our planet. A retired military man, Patrick Hennessey, loses his entire family when two airships deliberately crash into the skyscraper where his family's business offices are located, while his wife and children are visiting his uncle. Rather than burn to death in the resulting conflagration, they leap to their deaths as do many others. Hennessey attends their memorial service, then descends into an alcoholic grief-fueled stupor for several months, until some of his friends, former allies and enemies, come to him with a plan which will allow him to take his revenge on the terrorists who ruined his life.

Surprise! The terrorists are Salafi extremists, who have merely been a nuisance to the other cultural enclaves on Terra Nova up to this point. But someone behind the scenes is funding them and giving them strategies and intelligence information to carry out increasingly effective acts of terrorism. Hennessy and his friends begin to build a military force that can reach out to kill the Salafis in their homelands, and eventually are recruited as a mercenary force by the FSC, the most powerful nation on the planet, to do just that.

The main story line is interrupted fairly regularly with what might be termed flashbacks, showing how Terra Nova was discovered, then colonized by Earth. Most of the people who emigrated were either the best and brightest, or what the United Nations, which gained supreme power over Earth as time went by, considered troublemakers - often both. The United Nations, and Earth itself, are now stagnating, and are only able to make repairs to their aging space fleet by selling off Earth's art treasures to the Terra Novans, who have a robust economy, for the most part. The Admiral of the UN fleet in orbit about the planet, and his staff, are hopelessly decadent and corrupt, and are searching for a way to prevent the FSC and its allies from ever achieving space travel, so that they never are able to return to Earth, to dominate the world either militarily or economically.

Brutal violence, graphic sex, just the usual Baen blend these days. Aside from some interesting political musings well blended into the action, that might cast some light on what the author feels would be a more effective set of tactics to use against Islamic terrorism on our planet, it's just pure war porn.

Caliphate by Tom Kratman

Kratman often writes with John Ringo, whom I really like, so I thought I'd give one of his solos a try. He's created a future about 75 years from now, which isn't all that unimagineable. In the 21st century, Islamic extremists succeed in smuggling nuclear weapons into several major U.S. cities, destroying three of them completely. The U.S. reaction is at first somewhat muted, as they recover and regroup, but eventually the enraged populace elects a man to the presidency who makes some radical changes to foreign and domestic policy.

When this new president feels confident he can carry out his plans, he goes after the core Islamic countries at first, wiping out, basically, all of the Middle East. By this time muslim immigration to Europe has basically replaced the old population, and sharia law is in effect there, leaving old Europeans in a condition of dhimmitude under The Caliphate. The U.S. continues to eradicate all vestiges of Islam around the world, and when this story begins, they are in the process of wiping out or deporting all of the Moros from the Philippines.

Two of the (I hesitate to call them heroes) protagonists in the book are Hans and Petra, "christians" of old European stock. As children, they are seized from their family when they are unable to pay the jizya (tax), and Hans is sent to be trained as a Janissary, while Petra at first is a household slave, companion to a young Muslim girl, Besma. Later, Besma's stepmother, to gain power in the household, encourages her son and his friends to rape Petra, and she is judged guilty of "enticing" the boys (as a woman's testimony is only worth half that of a man's in Islamic law) and is sold into prostitution ...oh that's right...temporary marriages performed by mullahs.

The other protagonist is an American soldier, John Hamilton, who has just finished the campaign against the Moros. He gets recruited into a Central Intelligence operation in Germany, where three scientists are suspected to be working on a deadly virus which the Caliphate will use to attack the United States. The paths of the three protagonists intersect when Hans is assigned to the unit guarding the facility, Petra is sent to the "comfort facilities" nearby, and Hamilton poses as a South African slave dealer to get to the scientists and destroy their work.

Interwoven into the middle of the stories of Petra, Hans and John, there is the tale that gradually unfolds from the pages of Petra's grandmother, Gabi's, diary. Gabi is a European progressive who believes above all in the virtues of tolerance and acceptance, except when it comes to Americans and their war-mongering, evidently. She doesn't really come to her senses until the Caliphate is nearly established, when her own daughter is raped and mutilated for failing to wear the hijab required by sharia law. This part of the tale allows the readers to understand how Europe could succumb to Islam, gradually.

This is definitely not a book for the squeamish. Graphic sex, graphic violence, graphic everything. Kratman's premise is scary, and controversial. Read at your own risk.