Call to Arms: The Corps Series Book 2

Call to Arms: The Corps Series Book 2 by W.E.B. Griffin

Book 2 of 10 in W.E.B. Griffin’s “The Corps” series.  Although Griffin always does a very good job catching his readers up to what has already happened in previous installments, I still maintain that if one is going to read any of the books in this (or any of the author’s) series, you really should go all out and read them all from start to finish.  So if you happened to grab this book at a garage sale, make the small sacrifice of finding and buying book 1 and reading that one first.

There are criticisms of this author’s style from both sides of the fence.  One side claims that he’s too technical when it comes to the intricacies of war and goes into far too much detail when describing battle weapons, and military jargon.  The other side claims that these books are really nothing more than soap operas with soldiers.  Both of these criticisms are fair, yet I never found the book to lean too heavily on either side and found the book enjoyable overall. 

This book of the series focuses on a select group of soldiers that are part of the marine corps and tells us a tale of their comings and goings as young men in the early 1940s as World War II begins to grip the nation.  This small group is young, cocky, and smarter than most. Because of their smarts, their actually low-grade officers rather than enlisted men.  How much they age in the next eight volumes, I have no idea, but in this book their quite green, quite adventuresome, a tad immature, and have an awful lot of sex on the brain.  This volume takes place during 1942; beginning right after Pearl Harbor was attacked and the U.S. is finding themselves a willing, yet slightly scared participant.  Ironically, a book about soldiers in 1942 such as this one features very little actual conflict.  Yes, there is somewhat of a plot. The main character Lieutenant Kenneth “Killer” McCoy is being recruited to be a part of a group of commandos that is led by an individual who is allegedly showing signs of instability as well as possible communistic leanings.  McCoy’s objective is to sniff around and find out if this leader is, in fact, a threat to the U.S. armed services and the American way of life.

Truthfully, though, there’s really not much of that story here.  Instead, we read an awful lot of romantic escapades among the soldiers.  Some are in serious relationships, some are in puppy love, and others are just looking for a loose woman to frolic with whenever the time seems right.  So, yes, there are almost as many women within these pages as the men, and you know without a doubt that we’ll see these relationships take many ups and downs in the subsequent novels.

I should also point out that the fact that you know you’re only reading a “chapter” of a much larger story by completing this book takes away the feeling of incompleteness.  Had this book been a standalone story, most readers would have been rightly let down at the fact that there really isn’t a complete story being told here.  I confess that I’m glad that as I’m reading this series, all of the books have been written.  I don’t think I would enjoy this if it were a “new release” and I had to wait a whole year or so before I could continue the story.  The story here is good, but not THAT good.  I would classify this book, and all of the other books by this author, as “light reading”.  They’re fun excursions, but nothing that will stay in your brain for any length of time, nor win any sort of literary awards.