How it would have beenI served as an artillery forward observer, Assistant Executive Officer (AXO) and Executive Officer (XO) in Germany in the late 1970s. This novel is largely spot-on, and takes place before the great Reagan Modernization of the 1980s. While it largely assumes that Russian equipment is not the junk that we now know it to be, and that the Russian army and tactics are better than they really are, it still captures the reality of the NATO forces in the late 1970s. There are no sappy love plots or other distractions here; just how it would have been. And the author at least had some notion, which few had at the time, that the Soviet (Russian) Army was corrupt, and poorly led, motivated, and trained. This is an excellent novel about a war which, thank God, was never fought, at least not until the Russo-Ukrainian War.3