Tea with a Dragon. The World of Tortuga-on-the-Rocks, #5

Tom O'Driscoll came to fight. He trained as a surface-to-air missile operator - serious business, the kind of skill that mattered. Instead, he was handed a scrub brush and sent to the mess hall. Tea with a Dragon is a quiet war story: no battles, no glory, just the grinding routine of a mercenary base on a nameless tropical coast - pig slop, burnt cauldrons, a typhoon that floods the camp, and Master Sergeant Lin, who inspects every washed bowl with a napkin and says exactly two words: Passed.
Or: Rewash. Told in short, unsparing scenes, this novella follows Tom through a year of heat, boredom, and small cruelties - until the mess hall gives him something he didn't expect to find there. A prequel set thirty years before the events of the Tortuga-on-the-Rocks series, Tea with a Dragon stands entirely on its own - a story about what soldiering actually looks like when nobody's shooting.