At the center of Harold Coyle's brilliant new novel is the dramatic court-martial of a courageous young woman combat officer, forced to choose - on the battlefield - between an action that will save her troops and the senseless order of an arrogant and frightened general.In Code of Honor, Harold Coyle - himself a former career Army officer - whose fast-paced novels of military action have made him a New York Times bestselling author, confronts the most sacred traditions of the Army's command structure to show what happens when one person - in this case a woman, in what was until recently a man's world - bucks the system.Captain Nancy Kozak's story is set against the decision to send U. S. troops to Colombia as "peacekeeping" force to prevent anarchy, a decision that leads to a vicious full-scale war in which the American forces, at first out-fought, battle desperately for survival - a scenario with disturbing echoes of the current controversies about putting U. S. forces into foreign countries....Coyle's cast of characters - familiar to readers of his previous books - includes not only Captain Kozak, but Brigadier General Scott Dixon and Lt. Colonel Harold Cerro - all of them plunged into a burgeoning guerrilla war in which the mistakes of Vietnam are about to be starkly repeated, over the objections of the officers on the spot.Pitted against each other are a number of antagonists as badly matched as any in the history of warfare - the pompous martinet commander of U. S. forces in Colombia, Major General C. B. Lane, whose MacArthur pose hides fear and incompetence, and Hector Valendez, the brilliantly gifted leader of the FARC, the Colombian left-wing guerrillas who are in the process of transforming themselves, under Valendez's leadership, into a real army that will frighten the pants off Lane and fight him to a standstill, as well as officers, soldiers, civilians and politicians on both sides, caught up in the tragic reality of war.As always, Harold Coyle's descriptions of battle are alarmingly authentic, but in Code of Honor he has reached a new level of excitement. In hard-edged muscular prose and action, he takes the reader into the very heart of battle, and at the same time brings into the foreground nancy Kozak, who personifies the problems of a young woman, in love and sometimes confused about her own emotions, commanding troops in combat - and in the best sense of its kind since The Caine Mutiny - finds herself facing a court-martial despite her heroism and leadership. Read Less