Dear Mr. Cornwell, I have had the great fortune, not to mention the unexpected abundance of free time, to finish the entire Sharpe’s series and would simply like to express my admiration for authoring what was quite a literary journey for me. I was first turned onto the series by a chance viewing of the movies. I began reading the series once I realized that my present duties in Iraq were not to be very demanding. Instead of getting irate or disappointed I chose to catch up on about three years of reading to fill in the ‘dead time’. I suppose I got more out of the saga because I have shared some of the same impressions in life and thoughts as the characters. To me, at least, it made the story more alive than when I read Julius Caesar’s account of the campaigns in Gaul. To give you an idea of the amount of dead time I’ve suffered here, I started and finished the Sharpe’s series, The Hornblower series and most of the Aubrey-Maturin novels. I won’t elaborate on the nature of my job but I am a mechanic without a toolbox. Again, I am merely sending my gratitude for creating so entertaining and exciting a world, more so as its basis is actual events, and making this year go by rather fast in the process. SSG Dennis M. Dutton