Book Review: The Reaper

By Nicholas Irving

Book on CD

This is a good book for a lot of reasons.  It is good example of the mindset of a warrior.  He was raised in a military family and everything he did throughout his life was preparation for the task he eventually mastered, an elite military sniper.  You don't have to become a soldier to take notes and put some of the ideas to use in the defense of yourself and your family. 

Some key points. 

He was dispassionate about the targets.  They were only real in the sense they were threats, but he stayed away from hatred and anger.  Instead he focused on neutralizing the enemy in a methodical fashion. 

He trained regularly and everything he did seemed to move toward improving his skills and knowledge as a fighter.

He didn't fall in love with equipment and instead focused on functional reliability and whatever improved mission outcomes.

Overall impression.

You'll learn about the challenges and risks that face our most precious citizens who take up arms for our country.  These men sacrifice safety, comfort, and income to do this job and knowing how poorly they are often treated by our government during deployment and after they get home it should make angry.  The efforts and what appears to be wasted efforts in many cases as we walk away from long fought wars in distant places and wasted lives of our own and the so called enemy it makes it clearer that these wars in the end come to no good.

What is impressive is the quality of the individuals that do the fighting.  It should hold you in awe as your realize that these same men could have taken easy paths in life but chose to do this.

This is a great book, and especially as an audio book.  I highly recommend it.