I read A Desert Called Peace for the first time in 2014, gave it a 4 out of 5, and moved on without thinking about it again for over a decade. This was going to be a straightforward reread. It isn’t, because the book hasn’t changed and I have, and that gap is basically the whole review now. This is an A Desert Called Peace review with two timestamps on it, and they don’t agree with each other.
What Carrera actually does in this book
Patrick Hennessey loses his wife and three kids to a terrorist bombing carried out by the Salafi Ikhwan, Tom Kratman’s none-too-subtle stand-in for al-Qaeda, and that loss is the last thing holding him back. He takes a new name, Patricio Carrera, and a new country, a corrupt little client state called Balboa that maps onto Panama closely enough that the intent isn’t hiding. Most of the book is Carrera rebuilding Balboa’s rotted-out military into something genuinely dangerous, then using it to pacify a country called Sumer. Sumer is Iraq. Not Iraq-flavored, not Iraq-adjacent. Iraq, with the serial numbers filed just far enough off that Kratman can write the counterinsurgency he wants without technically writing about a real war. He fights it without the restraints a real Western democracy would put on itself, and the book is upfront that this is the actual argument being made: an essay about what winning an insurgency costs, wearing spaceships as a costume. This piece on the Sumer pacification section gets at that counterinsurgency argument better than most reviews I’ve seen of it.
It’s a long book and I’m not going to walk through four hundred pages of plot. What matters for where this review is going is that Carrera isn’t written as clean. The book keeps circling whether a man can get his revenge without becoming the thing he’s hunting, and it never lets him off that hook easily. Which is more interesting than a lot of “man builds army, kills bad guys” books manage, and it’s part of why this one stuck with me enough to still have an opinion on it twelve years later.
What I actually remember, more than any single battle, is the slow math of what Carrera trades away to become useful for this. He doesn’t lose himself in one scene. Kratman tracks it in stages, a decision here, a compromise there, until the man who used to have a wife and kids and a normal career is mostly gone and something harder has taken his spot. That’s the part of the book I’d defend against anyone who wants to write it off as jingoistic wish fulfillment. It knows exactly what it’s showing you, and it isn’t pretending the cost is free.
Reading it in 2014, when the sides felt obvious
Back in 2014 I read this and the moral math worked without much friction. America was the good guy in my head. Not perfect, plenty to criticize, but far and away the best option on offer, and a world where it held the most power felt like a net positive rather than something to be nervous about. Carrera isn’t literally American, but his training, his instincts, the civilization he’s avenging, all of it comes from that world’s version of it. The Ikhwan attack plays as 9/11 with the names changed, and going after them plays as going after al-Qaeda. I don’t think of myself as a violent person. But I could get into Carrera’s head that year and it tracked. Here’s a group with no regard for anyone’s life but its own cause, and here’s a man willing to become something ugly to end it. That felt justified. It felt, honestly, satisfying.
That’s the part I want to sit with for a second, because it says more about where my head was in 2014 than it does about the book. I wasn’t reading A Desert Called Peace as an argument I needed to evaluate. I was reading it as a story where I already agreed with the premise going in, so all Kratman had to do was not lose me, and he didn’t. A lot of the early chapters landed as satisfying rather than as provocative, which I don’t think was the intent. The provocation only shows up if you’re not already nodding along.
This wasn’t my first taste of the Baen house style, the flavor of military science fiction that treats “the military is good and the enemies of the West are bad” as a starting assumption rather than something the book has to earn. I’d read some Weber before this one and figured Kratman would sit in roughly the same spot on that shelf. He doesn’t. Weber lets you root for Honor Harrington without much guilt attached. Kratman wants the guilt in there too, sitting right next to the satisfaction, closer to what Starship Troopers was doing decades earlier than to anything on my Weber shelf, and in 2014 I mostly skipped past that part of the assignment.
Reading it again in a very different 2026
That confidence hasn’t survived the last few years intact. It’s not really about the book at all, it’s about which country I trust to be the one holding the gun. America doesn’t default to “the good guy” in my head anymore, and it’s been a stack of things, not one. Trump’s economic attacks against most of the world. The strikes on Iran, which might even be justifiable and still leave me uneasy about who’s making that call. The sheer amount of dishonesty coming out of Washington lately. Add it up and I question a lot of things I used to take for granted.
Gaza makes the whole region harder to read in black and white too. I didn’t think the initial attack on Israel was defensible, and I also think the scale of the response since has caused loss of life that’s hard to call anything but unforgivable. Holding both of those at once isn’t comfortable, but that’s where I’ve landed. Russia and Ukraine did the same thing to my assumptions from a different angle. I expected Ukraine to fold fast, and the fact that it hasn’t has made me distrust my own read on who’s supposed to win these things. And that’s before Covid gets factored in, which did its own quiet work on how much faith I put in any institution telling me it has this handled.
None of that changes a single word on the page in A Desert Called Peace. What it changes is how easily I can sit in Carrera’s corner while he does it. “Fight fire with fire” still makes sense to me as a principle, and I haven’t given up on it. I’m just a lot less sure these days who actually gets to hold the match, and a book built entirely on being sure about that plays differently once you aren’t.
Where that leaves Carrera, and where it leaves me
I don’t think the book wants Carrera as an uncomplicated hero, and I don’t read him as one either. He’s closer to a warning that the author lets you enjoy a little too much before it turns on you. To be fair, that might be exactly the point Kratman is making, and if so, the book is doing its job better than I gave it credit for on the first read. Compared to David Weber, who I’d put in a similar Baen lane, this one asks a lot more of my stomach, and it never lets Carrera off the hook the way a cleaner hero gets let off.
I’d also put it up against On Basilisk Station, the other Baen series-opener that lives on this site. Weber gives Honor Harrington plenty of hard choices, but he never asks you to enjoy watching her make them the way Kratman does with Carrera. That’s the real difference between the two authors for me now, not the quality of either book.
I still rate this a 4, mostly on the strength of how well it’s built and how much it’s stayed with me, but it’s an honest 4 with an asterisk now, not the uncomplicated 4 I gave it in 2014. Given the choice today I reach for something a bit more sanitized: Dune, Wheel of Time, even a fair amount of Weber, before I reach for another round of Carrera’s war. That’s not a knock on what Kratman pulled off here. It’s just where I’ve landed after a decade of the real world making his premise a lot less comfortable to agree with.