The New Breed

The New Breed – by W.E.B. Griffin

This book was a pleasant surprise on many levels.  The seventh installment of the author’s “Brotherhood of War” series is a book that, I’m somewhat convinced, might not have ever had the intention of being written.  Volume Six, “The Generals” was probably supposed to have been the last.  That one was somewhat haphazard, took place during two different time periods (both stories seemed unrelated) and even had a “Where Are They Now” postscript at the end of the book.  It was a definitely a letdown.

I’m guessing that the author realized that he still had more story to tell around his characters and their escapades, and decided to resurrect the series. For this book, we go back several years to 1964.  The focus for this installment is the Communist uprising in the Congo. Most people nowadays are not really familiar with that event. We tend to remember this time, when speaking of military events, as the time when America was starting their escalation into Vietnam, so that event tends to be our focus when we think back.

I immensely enjoyed this book for two reasons. First, unlike the other books in this series, this book tends to focus more on the actual fighting and the incidents going on in the thick of the conflict. In the other installments, Griffin only talks about the major conflicts in a half-hearted way, choosing instead to focus on the main characters that are mostly far away from the battle. The earlier books take place during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, yet very little action takes place on the battlefield. Instead, Griffin focuses a lot on his principal characters, their love lives, their sex lives, their tendencies to imbibe a lot at cocktail parties, and so on.  He still managed to tell a good story, it just got a bit old after a while.  It’s somewhat refreshing to finally read a book about the military where the actual events that made history have a much more predominant role in the storytelling.

The second reason I enjoyed this book so much is somewhat related to the first reason. When we read about love lives, sex lives, and cocktail parties, Craig Lowell was always the lead character in the previous books and, after a while, the shtick got old. Lowell is one of those characters that fits in perfectly for an old 1940s style war movie.  Incredibly good looking, incredibly rich, insatiable with every woman he meets, and incredibly rebellious against the military and its rules. Lowell always weasels out the consequences of his actions because, well, just like one of those handsome actors in those old movies, is an outstanding soldier. In this book, he’s featured rarely. Instead, his friend Sandy Felter gets the spotlight through most of the book. It’s Felter who convinces new President Johnson that the Congo is just as equally as hot as Vietnam, and action must be taken there as well.

So we meet a few new characters, revisit a lot of older characters that were introduced to us somewhere along the older books, and are treated to a very good story.  I can’t say it’s the best of the lot. After reading so many of these, the timeline blurs for me when trying to remember what happened in every one of the books (especially when the author spends probably too much time revisiting events that happened in the earlier books. I guess he wants to make sure his reader remembers and/or doesn’t get lost). 

It's par for the course. Perhaps I enjoyed it so much is because the author smartly realized that there were too many loose ends after the last book, and that particular one wasn’t as satisfying. A wonderful addition to a very good series.