Military & War Short Stories Collection
4 total works
Meet Lieutenant Flint: hard-edged and muscle-bound, radiating machismo-a bull of a soldier. In the opposite corner stands Captain Turner: with his pencil mustache and tailored shirts, he's a Trick Soldier-smart, crisply-dressed, and always at attention. They're fire and ice, oil and water... Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox in Casualties of War. Ten years ago and a thousand miles away, they attended boot camp together. They didn't get along then . . . and they don't get along now. Reunited in the Haitian jungles, in the midst of a fierce rebel uprising, they confront the most dangerous enemy of all-each other. It's time for heroes to rise and cowards to fall, and in the case of Lieutenant Flint and Captain Turner, bravery runs deep. When brute strength confronts military honor, the true measure of a man is not in his fists, but in his heart. A First Sergeant with the 20th United States Marine Corps Reserve, Hubbard knew exactly what it meant to be a Marine. As he wrote in 1935: "Most of the fiction written about [Marines] is of an intensely dramatic type, all do-or-die and Semper Fidelis." But the reality, he said, was far different. "I've known the Corps from Quantico to Peiping, from the South Pacific to the West Indies, and I've never seen any flag-waving. The most refreshing part of the U.S.M.C. is that they get their orders ... and do the job and that's that." It's that kind of unique and pointed insight that he brings to stories like Trick Soldier. Also includes the military adventures He Walked to War, in which Marine Sergeant E.Z. Go appears to take it easy, but always gets the job done ... even if it's hard as nails or dangerous as hell-in the end E.Z. does it; and Machine Gun 21,000, the story of a soldier who loses a gun and faces a court martial, but finds a way to save the day.
American pilot Mike Malloy has been unjustly sentenced to five years in a Moroccan penal battalion - which is French for death sentence. But Malloy, who could easily pass for Douglas Fairbanks, is about to get a reprieve ...if he's willing to fly into the heart of the Sahara and into the teeth of a Berber rebellion. The expedition could have unexpected benefits. One of his passengers is a young woman whose eyes are as beautiful and blue as the wild blue yonder...Hubbard once said that writers too often "forget a great deal of the languorous quality which made the Arabian Nights so pleasing. Jewels, beautiful women, towering cities filled with mysterious shadows, sultans equally handy with robes of honor and the beheading sword ...these things still exist, undimmed, losing no luster to the permeating Occidental flavor which reaches even the far corners of the earth today." Hubbard brings this unique insight to his stories of North Africa and the Legionnaires, investing them with an authenticity of time, place and character that kept his readers asking for more.
Launch into the action with this gritty tale. An American lieutenant in the French Foreign is caught in the middle of an ancient feud between the Jeppas of the Atlas Mountains and the bloodthirsty tribe of Perviz al Bahman.Tension mounts as a gorgeous female Jeppa warrior with golden red hair is drawn into the midst of the conflict and captured by Perviz's tribe. When the American lieutenant later finds her being sold on the slave market, he unthinkingly does what any man must: he rescues her. But while his actions may have saved a beauty, they have also just ignited all - out war. "...one of the best pulp writers of the 1940s." - Library Journal
It is one of the greatest conflicts-and a pivotal turning point-in history...the Chinese civil war. On one side stands Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists. On the other, Mao Zedong and the Communists. And their forces are about to meet in a decisive battle...the outcome of which is in the hands of one American pilot, John Hampton, a man who, like Bogart in Casablanca, couldn't care less... He's a mercenary, flying for the highest bidder, his only loyalty to himself and to cold hard cash. He has nothing to believe in, and nothing to lose. But just as this is a critical moment in history, so, too, is it about to become a defining moment in Hampton's life. What is the extraordinary experience that has the power to penetrate Hampton's armor of cynicism and touch his heart? What is it that makes him see that there are things, other than money, that are worth fighting-and maybe even dying-for? The surprising answers spur him to undertake the ultimate mission in Red Death Over China. Hubbard experienced China in the 1930s in a way few Westerners did. Traveling from the ports of the China Sea to Beijing to the Great Wall and onto the hills of Southern Manchuria, he came to know the land and its people-soldiers, spies, outlaws, and monks-as well as any American could. It is that background that shines through in stories like Red Death Over China. Also includes the flying adventures The Crate Killer, in which a test pilot uses up his nine lives parachuting nine times from crumbling planes, only to discover that his tenth flight presents the biggest challenge of all; and Wings Over Ethiopia, the story of a pilot captured and accused of being a spy by both sides in a war-and his only means of escape is through the lens of a camera. "Highly recommended for aviation action/adventure pulp fiction." -Midwest Book Review