The following three paragraphs contain the slightly overheated (but actually quite accurate) prose from the dust jacket. Scroll down further for Steven Pressfield's private assessment.

Autumn, 1942. Hitler's legions have swept across Europe; France has fallen; Churchill and the English are isolated on their island. In North Africa, Rommel and his Panzers have routed the British Eighth Army and stand poised to overrun Egypt, Suez, and the oilfields of the Middle East. With the outcome of the war hanging in the balance, the British hatch a desperate plan -- send a small, highly mobile, and heavily armed force behind German lines to strike the blow that will stop the Afrika Korps in its tracks.

Narrated from the point of view of a young lieutenant, Killing Rommel brings to life the flair, agility, and daring of this extraordinary secret unit, the Long Range Desert Group. Stealthy and lethal as the scorpion that serves as their insignia, they live by their motto -- Non Vi Sed Arte (Not by Strength, by Guile) -- as they gather intelligence, set up ambushes, and execute raids. Killing Rommel chronicles the tactics, weaponry, and specialized skills needed for combat under extreme desert conditions. And it captures the camaraderie of this "band of brothers" as they perform the acts of courage and cunning crucial to the Allies' victory in North Africa.

As in all his previous novels, Pressfield powerfully renders the drama and intensity of warfare, the bonds of men in close combat, and the surprising human emotions and frailties that come into play on the battlefield. A vivid and authoritative depiction of the desert war, Killing Rommel brilliantly dramatizes an aspect of World War II that hasn't been in the limelight since Patton. Combining scrupulous historical detail and accuracy with remarkable narrative momentum, this galvanizing novel heralds Pressfield's gift for bringing more recent history to life.

A Quick Q & A with Steven Pressfield

How much of this story is true?
The forces are true; the surrounding historical events actually happened. There really was a Long Range Desert Group; there really is an SAS. The types of operations they performed are depicted truly. Almost all of the geography and protocol comes straight from actual combat reports of the time. Everything about Rommel's character and his history is factually accurate. And many of the characters are true historical personages, and they're depicted as they truly were.

How would you describe Killing Rommel in your own words?
Any time an author sets a story in a period of time other than the contemporary, the question immediately arises: Why? Why that time period? Why that specific era and not another? A lot of times, a writer doesn't even know, at least when he starts out. I know I didn't with Killing Rommel. All I knew was that something about the North Africa campaign grabbed me. It wasn't till I was months and months into the story that I realized the answer.

Rommel himself wrote an account of his experiences in North Africa. He titled it Krieg Ohne Hass, "War Without Hate." Believe it or not, that assessment is accurate. Amid an otherwise monumental, brutal and pitiless war, the campaign in North Africa was characterized in large part by chivalry and by acts of astonishing self-restraint among the individual combatants. That's one of the two major and interrelated themes of this book.

You're right; chivalry in warfare is hard to believe.
It certainly is these days. When we see beheadings on video on the nightly news, ethnic cleansing, genocide in Africa (which to not to diminish or understate the numberless ghastly inhumanities perpetrated by all sides in other aspects of World War II.) But the enactment of deliberate self-restraint was a fact on the ground in the North Africa campaign of '40 to '43. Machine gunners of both sides routinely held their fire when crewmen bailed out of shot-up tanks; stretcher bearers were permitted to dash into the open to collect the wounded. In dressing stations and field hospitals, it was not uncommon for soldiers of the Axis and Allies to be treated side by side, often by German and British doctors working shoulder to shoulder. Rommel himself was one of the foremost examplars of this ethic. Here's just one story out of many: when Rommel's panzers overran a British field hospital where the staff had elected not to flee but to stay with their patients (who were German and Italian as well as British and Commonwealth), Rommel visited the site at once, shook the hand of every doctor and nurse and thanked them personally. He asked them to stay on until he could bring up his own Afrika Korps medical personnel (the British readily agreed), then made it a point of honor not to make them prisoners of war but to have them repatriated through neutral Switzerland. Can you imagine something like that happening today?

Is that why you wrote about North Africa? And that era?
I wanted to address the issue of morality in warfare. Not just in theoretical terms but from the point of view of the individual soldier on the ground. It's an issue that's been on my mind for a long time. Today, in the era of suicide bombers and global terrorism (and the response to terrorism, which is a moral question equally as important), I wanted to shine a light on another time and a different way of fighting a war. And not some puffball, cotton-candy war but the most devastating, all-out conflict in history.

Is it possible for men to retain their humanity while fighting for the very survival of civilization? What does it mean to the individual soldier? Because, believe me, our guys in Iraq and Afghanistan today have to answer that question on the streets and in the mountains every day -- and their responses will stay with them for the rest of their lives. And we are just as involved as they are. We put them there. We stuck them in that place and placed the moral onus on them, to act in areas that aren't black and white and are barely even gray!

What is the second theme of Killing Rommel?
The story is told from the British point of view, through the words of one young lieutenant who, far from being a prepared professional soldier, was a normal civilian -- an undergraduate -- when history caught him up in the war. That was deliberate on my part. I wanted to examine the actions of ordinary men under extraordinary circumstances and to ask the question if, in the end, their very ordinariness wasn't what saved them and brought them ultimately to victory.

Do you believe that?
I do. The British in North Africa were "decent chaps." So were the Germans. They kicked each other's asses back and forth between Cairo and Tripoli, sparing no effort of force or will to overcome each other. But in the end both sides in that theater could hold their heads up. Many of them, in fact, have remained friends. They used to have regular postwar soccer matches -- Desert Rats versus Desert Foxes.

The story is "book-ended" by an opening and closing chapter (and others in the middle) describing the protagonist, Lt. Chapman's civilian life. Why did you do that? Why not just stick to the "war story?"
Because the moral dimension didn't end with the cessation of hostilities. The war lived with the men who fought it long afterwards, as all wars do. That's part of the question: can we retain our humanity? That's why it was important to include where these young men came from, what they went through in the war, and how those events changed them and played out throughout their lives.

It's hard to put that on a dust jacket, but that's the deeper story of this book, beyond the hardware and the action. Is it possible for men in war to maintain their humanity? What part do ethics, chivalry and self-restraint play in modern armed conflict? Are they some quaint holdover from a vanished past? Or can the honorable actions of officers and men actually help produce victory? Is the moral dimension a luxury that we discard when we find ourselves forced to go up against extreme and brutal opponents? Or is it something that can fuel us emotionally and actually produce success?

These are big questions. And the example of Rommel himself -- the historical Rommel as well as the fictional personage in this book -- might have some valuable lessons to teach us.