Captain Absolom Bracer has already given his life once in mankind's seemingly endless interstellar war with the alien race known as the "Jillies." Resurrected by medical technology and with a body that's more machine than human, he and the three ships under his command are on their way back to Earth. The ships are two patched-up battle cruisers and a hospital ship, all of them crewed by walking wounded; men and women whose broken bodies have been roughly repaired and given a semblance of life. Like Bracer, all of the officers and crew are living in the hope that the hospitals of Earth will be able to make them whole again, will give them living skin and muscle and organs where they now have crude mechanical prosthetics. But the Jillies are a race determined to drive humanity to extinction, and the demands of the relentless war interrupt Bracer's journey home. With the very future of the human race at stake, Bracer and the crews of his three ships find they may have no choice but to make the ultimate sacrifice... once again. This 1968 book is one of the finest and most powerful examples of military science fiction, and certainly one of the darkest. - from Amzon