Grunts!

Halfling hand job. Turgid orc dicks.

Also, machine guns and castle raids and shit.

If that doesn’t sell you on this book, nothing will.

As I try to plow through the oldest books on my "to-read" shelf, I realize that whatever intuition it was that kept me away from these books for so long, it was a sound one. This story seems to be driven entirely by the author's premise (as described in her introduction) of orcs in a fantasy setting wielding Vietnam-era firepower and talking like characters from "Full Metal Jacket," and she fleshes the story out beyond that using a series of buffoonish fantasy characters and familiar-sounding conflicts seen from the orcs' perspective. Don't ask me how the orcs learned to talk like that or came to identify themselves as "Orc Marines," that happens outside the narrative and no explanation is given. Maybe that's for a future book, but I could only manage a quarter of the way through this one, even skimming.