The Green Jackets: The 95th Rifles

By: Vogeler, Brett

The Green Jackets: The 95th Rifles

In 1805, Marcus Bradbury is a twenty-year-old gamekeeper, his future as confined as the English estate he serves. He sees no escape until the arrival of Thomas Plunket, a charismatic, silver-tongued recruiter for the 95th Rifles. Plunket offers more than a king's shilling; he offers a place in a revolutionary new corps of "thinking soldiers", a world where a man is judged by his skill with a rifle, not his birth. Seduced by this promise, Marcus trades his fowling piece for a Baker rifle and is plunged into the brutal forge of the Napoleonic Wars.

But the man who recruited him becomes his tormentor, his saviour, and his dark mirror. Thomas Plunket is a legend in the making: a peerless marksman with an almost supernatural gift for killing. Marcus's baptism by fire is not just against the French in the disastrous street fighting of Buenos Aires, but in witnessing Plunket's brilliance and his brutality-culminating in an amoral war crime that leaves Marcus isolated with a terrible truth.

This complex bond is forged in the hell of the 1808 winter retreat to Corunna. As the 95th acts as the army's rearguard, hunted by Napoleon's legions through frozen mountains, Marcus and Plunket's opposing philosophies are laid bare. In the village of Bembibre, they discover hundreds of their comrades dead-drunk in wine cellars. Plunket demands they abandon the men to the French-a cold, pragmatic necessity. Marcus is horrified, but his compassion is no match for the enemy at their heels.

Their fates are sealed at the River Esla, where Plunket saves Marcus's life in an act of savage, close-quarters butchery. The debt is absolute. Days later, Plunket repays it on a national scale. At Cacabelos, with the rearguard about to be shattered, he performs an impossible, legendary feat: using an unorthodox supine position, he shoots and kills the advancing French General Colbert at an extraordinary range, saving the army.

This single shot makes Plunket a demigod, but Marcus witnesses the cost. The act of "perfect" killing haunts Plunket, and his heroism is the catalyst for his descent into alcoholism and shame. While Plunket is celebrated, court-martialed, and broken by the very system that created him, Marcus walks a different path.

Promoted to Sergeant, Marcus's war becomes a different struggle: to lead his men, to survive the carnage of Talavera and Salamanca, and to hold onto his own soul. He finds his anchor not in glory, but in a pragmatic sutler's daughter named Tracy Morrison and in a single, defining act of mercy: at the height of the Battle of Waterloo, he orders his men to spare the life of a terrified French drummer boy trapped in the slaughterhouse of Hougoumont.

Spanning from the disastrous raid on Buenos Aires to the apocalyptic field of Waterloo, The Green Jackets is a gripping, meticulously researched novel of war, survival, and the search for humanity in a world of brutal, state-sanctioned violence. It is the story of two men-one who became a legend but lost himself, and another who sought only to be a soldier, and in the process, found a way to remain a man.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FZHBFL6J
• ISBN13: 9798272857798
• Release Date: November 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"