Halo-First Strike (Lesson Learnt)

Halo:First Strike

Well, you know me. I'm a big fan of the game based novel--Halo and I even wrote the book review of its first series in January. So, for this month's book review, I just decided to write about the continuing series of this story which is--Halo: First Strike.

Let me first explain a little about the story before I move on to the lessons I've learnt. The story begins with Dr. Halsey sent a group of Spartans to the underground hidden headquarters of Office of Naval Intelligence to retrieve a strange crystalline shard in a cavern built by ancient Forerunner. They managed to escape the pursue of Covenant but are trapped deep down underground where later on Master Chief came with a small group of Spartans to rescue them after he had escaped from Halo and escaped from what's left of planet Reach. Later on they discovered the Covenant's intention of going directly to Earth and Master Chief leaded his Spartan team to disrupt this plan and they succeeded.

As I  read through the story, I found a few lessons that really catches my attention. Among them are never abandon your comrade. During the Spartans' invasion to disrupt Covenant's plan of going directly to Earth, Spartan-058, Linda was hiding in a spot where no one knew and playing her role as the best sniper in the team, covering her comrades' back even when they were going to escape. Master Chief then decided to go back into the battlefield to try and get her out alive, or die trying as she was Master Chief's good old comrade. Master Chief decided to save her as well because at one point she almost died when defending planet Reach. Later on Master Chief managed to save his comrade and escaped with his team, blowing up the Covenant's base by overloading the mothership's reactors.

Not only that, I also learnt that one should always sacrifice themselves for the greater good. For an instance, Master Chief was willing to take his team of Spartans to disrupt the Covenant's plan even though he knew that this mission was a lot more dangerous than any other. Also, when Corporal Locklear was entrusted to take care of the crystal and don't let the Covenant to get to it no matter what happens as it will endager humanity, he sacrificed himself by wrapping cans of explosive around the crystal and detonated it with him in the room because he was surrounded by the Covenant.

All in all, Halo: First Strike was definitely a very interesting book, well, at least for me and it also contains a lot of lessons in it. What I've read through in this book will definitely carved into my memories forever and I will make good use of the lessons I've learnt from this book.

Loh Khang Wen

10-4-2014