They go to the next place. This is, it seems to me, the true experience of the ordinary fighting man or woman in a military organization throughout history, who has very limited choice. Various individuals manifest good or bad behavior, sanity or craziness, cleverness or stupidity. And luck matters. No one has the big picture, which may be known when the fighting is over and may not. The ones who do the job best tend to survive and perhaps rise in the ranks. Some of them are bad and or crazy, but not stupid, which leads to death. There is very little moral choice possible, but the characters we tend to admire are those who are sane, careful, and make moral choices as they can.And try to live with them afterward. There is no access to those who make policy in Drake's military fiction. All in all it is a fairly dark vision of human life.

By using SF as a distancing device, and by further using classical mercenaries as soldier characters, Drake constructs a fictional space in which he can investigate and portray certain kinds of human behavior, heroism, loyalty, cowardice, the strategic working out of detailed military actions and the impact on them of individuals behaving well or not, of high and low technology for killing functioning properly or not.And he can do this with something analogous to clinical detachment as the killing commences, without advocating policy.

No one who reads Drake properly can imagine him advocating war.War exists and Drake chooses or is compelled to portray it as it is, and has been, and might be close up. This military SF is not military pornography but rather a form of horror fiction (see "The Interrogation Team," for instance). It is not intended to deaden the sensibilities to the horrors of war, but to awaken them. Like Ambrose Bierce's "Chickamauga." Like Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage." Or sometimes like Tolstoy's descriptions of the advance of Napoleon's armies on Moscow in War and Peace. Historical parallels abound in Drake's stories, but distanced into space and the future. This is the same David Drake as the horror writer, not a different person.