Winter in Korea and Able Company of the Marines fighting battles against desperate odds and winning out is the basic plot of this war novel imbued with the esprit de corps of its redoubtable subject. All the stock characters that entered American war novels with The Naked and the Dead and its countless followers are here; the young officer afraid of his first command; the underprivileged boy from the New York slums; the hard-fightin', hard-hittin' hillbilly; the Negro; the Jew; the family man; the great lover, etc. The author has added a few new twists to his standard characters, the setting is reasonably fresh and the book provides fast and exciting reading for the war novel devotee who likes his language rough, his characters tough and his philosophy homespun.