Readers of Mike Ledingham’s first book, Once a Grunt, will be familiar with the characters in many of these stories. As with the first book, the characters in Always a Grunt are loosely categorized into military-related and non-military yarns. There are also a couple of uncategorized stories, both of them emotionally intense. They are Nessy’s Story, which deals with raw grief, and The Boy, which describes a child’s struggle with sexual abuse by a Catholic priest.