I liked a lot about this book, but there were other things that I didn't like so much about it. I loved the overall military actions and the stuff that went along with most of military life. Our family is in the military and so a lot of it felt really true to my experiences. However, the main character was very obsessed with women and they seemed to be the only reason he was okay with fighting in a war. Some long-lost genetic thing inside him that made him only want to fight for that reason. We also spent a really long time remembering lectures he had heard in a class he said he hated. The author spent a lot of time saying that the problem with our world right now is that we don't spank/whip/punish children enough when they're young, so they become criminals when they reach adulthood. He likened it to punishing a puppy for having an accident in the house "he doesn't know better, so you have to rub his nose in it and spank him harder and harder until he figures it out". All of that kind of talk really took me out of the story and made me cringe. The overall characters development was really well done and I even liked how the story seemed to come full circle for him, but I just couldn't rate it any higher for the things I felt like it was wrong about.