Dying Hard appeals to a wide variety of reader.  Below is a recent review of the book on Amazon from a reader who is a weapon’s enthusiast.

I’m a gun guy, and I love to read how historical military weapons were used, so in many respects, Dying Hard seemed to be written for me! It’s real life stuff; not endless technical jargon. The author tells you why a weapon was effective, and even how to listen to that weapon and know exactly what it is. Like the MG42 machine gun and what American infantrymen thought about them. As Colonel MacLean wrote: “we call them Hitler’s buzz saws or Kraut bone saws, and when you hear them firing, you’ll know why.” Then he describes the sound – “a burrrp-burrrp-burrrp, somewhat like a bedsheet being torn in two.” In my mind I could hear that.

In many parts of the book the author describes the wounds our soldiers received, because he found their US Army Hospital Admission Records. And those tell you about weapons too. You’ll read where one soldier was crossing a field and was hit by a burst of machine gun rounds in the stomach, lower back, groin, pelvis, both legs, and a foot. Later you’ll read that he was evacuated to England, where he had five operations and once back home had to go into another hospital.

I never realized how truly interesting barbed wire is, and how nasty anti-personnel mines are. Where else would you read, “With enough mines, you have a minefield; if it’s big enough, it gets its own name, like the huge German Wilde Sau “Wild Pig” minefield near Wittscheidt, just north of Germeter”?

The piece on Marksmanship Training was fascinating and easy to understand. It’s in the School of the Soldier section at the end of Chapter 1. These sections tell you what really goes on in the Army and many are very humorous. In the Introduction, the author gives you a hint why these are in the book, when he writes, “School of the Soldier is an old Army term that has to do with teaching a soldier the really important stuff in the Army – like goldbricking, sleep, chow, and hooch – and how to survive.” There are more than fifty of these topics, all easy, fun, reads.

Dying Hard is more than a great book. It’s almost a one-on-one conversation with the author, who obviously has a great interest in the topic, and due to his own background, knew what to look for and how to find that. If I ever talked with him, my first question would be: How did you manage to travel back in time to Company B?