The Green Beret

In a future where the United Nations wields real military power, Corporal Harry Read carries a badge and a burden: enforcing peace on a burning continent. The dictator Umluana has escalated tensions across Africa, and Read's mission is to bring him in, alive. But justice has never been simple, and the road to the dictator's compound runs through gunfire, gas attacks, and a transmitter station where survival means becoming the very thing he enlisted to oppose. Purdom, writing in the early 1960s when the UN still inspired genuine hope, asks a question that still haunts us: what happens when the soldiers of peace must make war? Read is no Action Hero. He's a man who enlisted for ideals and now finds those ideals colliding with the brutal mathematics of arrest warrants and armed resistance. This is military science fiction as character study, less interested in the spectacle of combat than in what combat does to the people who wage it.