Annoying. The story itself is...well, I think it's kind of silly, the frame at least. The philosophizing is pretty much par for the course for a Bahzell book, but bringing in someone from Desert Storm (or a war very like it)...was more distracting than powerful, for me. The first contact bits were way too easy, too. And on top of that, there's the positioning of the story - it exists (as far as I can tell) _only_ as an addition to the first Bahzell book. So everyone who (like me) has read and owned Bahzell for years, has the choice of missing this story or paying for another copy of the first book just to get the novella bundled with it. I did, eventually, get the ebook with the novella, but I'm annoyed about it. And the fact that this story is canon, and heavily referenced in Sword of the South, makes it even more annoying. It's hard to focus on content when I'm sufficiently annoyed about context. ( )