In Tom Young’s new novel Sand and Fire, a six-foot-eight black Marine gunnery sergeant named A.E. Blount teams up with Young’s series heroes Michael Parson and Sophia Gold to fight an extraordinary terrorist in northern Africa. But it was a decade earlier, during Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah, that Staff Sergeant Blount really learned what war was. In this remarkable novella, riveting in its action, shocking in its candor, we see through his eyes as Blount and his comrades discover that the limits of what men will do, both for good and evil, go beyond anything they ever imagined; that the line between friend and enemy is much more complicated than they thought -- and that courage and mercy come in the most surprising of forms.    At the time of his retirement as a senior master sergeant in 2013, Tom Young had logged nearly five thousand hours as a flight engineer for the Air National Guard in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia, and elsewhere. He is also the author of The Mullah’s Storm, Silent Enemy, The Renegade, and The Warriors.