MEN'S FICTION AUTHOR FROM THE '80S GOING E-BOOK!

My introduction to men's adventure novels, and war fiction, was The Sergeant #4:The Liberation of Paris by Gordon Davis. Up until I cracked open that paperback, I had never read anything like it before. I turned pages in a stunned trance, eyeballs dilated, jaw slack, visions of bayonet duels dancing in my head.

With this new literary universe to explore, I began collecting similar books. (It took me years, but I now have the entire Sergeant series in paperback.) Another series I collected was The Ratbastards by John Mackie. It was also a WWII series, but set in the Pacific rather than Europe.

At the time, I took the different author names at face value, but couldn't help noticing similarities in style, phrases in the dialog, and certain recurring sequences in different battle scenes.
The main protagonist in both series is a big, tough, battle-scarred Master Sergeant in the infantry--Clarence J. Mahoney in The Sergeant and John Butsko in The Ratbastards. Both have loyal junior NCO sidekicks that were once innocent all-American boys, but are now the best soldiers in any man's army.

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