Hit The Beach

War doesn't care about your past — and neither does Sergeant Butsko. In Hit The Beach, the opening volume of The Rat Bastards series, a misfit squad of soldiers gets thrown together with nothing in common except bad reputations and a talent for violence. Bank robbers, racketeers, berserkers, a gun-happy Texan, a silent Apache — men the Army couldn't quite tame find themselves unleashed in the Pacific theater, where their worst qualities might just be exactly what's needed to survive.

What makes this book work is how efficiently Levinson and Mackie build a world you can feel in your teeth. At under 200 pages, there's no fat — just lean, propulsive prose that drops you into the mud and keeps you moving. The characters are sketched with economy but genuine texture; each man carries enough backstory to feel real without slowing the momentum. It reads like the pulp war novels of an earlier era but with sharper edges, and it establishes the squad's brutal, darkly comic dynamic with enough confidence to make the next installment feel like a foregone conclusion.