Trick Soldier (Stories from the Golden Age)
Ten years after they forged a life-long hatred in boot camp, soldiers Flint and Turner are reunited in the jungles of Haiti. Now Turner’s in charge, captain to Flint’s lieutenant, but Flint has no interest in toeing the line and taking orders from the man he used to call the “trick soldier” because he was a drill sergeant’s dream soldier, not to mention yellow when it came to a fistfight. Flint plots to kill Turner even as the enemy is doing its level best to kill both of them. Tough-guy dialogue and broad-stroke characterizations make the story, originally published in 1936, a quick and enjoyable read. The collection features two other stories from 1935, “He Walked to War,” based on a bad joke—Egbert Zacharia Golingame, otherwise known as E. Z. Go, is the laziest soldier anybody ever saw—and “Machine Gun 21,000,” in which Captain Blake must recover a stolen machine gun or pay for it himself. Neither is especially noteworthy—definitely lesser Hubbard, feeling like they were dashed off for a quick paycheck—but the lead story, “Trick Soldier,” is worth the price of admission. --David Pitt