Literature / Primitive War

2 Following

Primitive War is a military sci-fi series written by Ethan Pettus which takes place during the Cold War.

The premise of the first book is the following:

Men are sent to Vietnam to kill the Vietcong to contain Communism. In doing so, these Americans lose their souls, their minds, and their lives. But this is all they know. They thought they knew the enemies they fought.

They were wrong. It's not just the Vietnamese, not just the Soviets, not just the US commanders who sent their men into harm's way. Then things change dramatically. A rift has opened, and the stuff of nightmares has poured through.

Now, the hunter becomes the hunted...

Being set during some of the most violent conflicts of the Cold War (The Vietnam War in the first novel and The Hunting of Stalker Force, and the Angolan Civil War in the sequel), it features a lot of graphic violence, adult language, drug use, and references to war-related tragedies. The series is also notable for having dinosaurs and other prehistoric species being depicted in a mostly scientifically accurate fashion, which is more than can be said for most other stories of this variety.

In addition to the main series of novels, there are an illustrated bestiary and an anthology series called Primitive War: Dispatches.

A film adaptation released on August 21, 2025. The trailer can be seen here.

Main series:

1. Primitive War: Opiate Undertow (2017)

2. Primitive War II : Animus Infernal (2020)

3. Primitive War III: Aeon Ouroboros (TBA)

Spin-offs/Companion Books:

1. The Primitive War Bestiary (2018)

2. Primitive War Dispatches Volume I - The Hunting of Stalker Force (2019)

3. Primitive War Dispatches Volume II - The Saraph of Simurgh (2022)

This series provides examples of:

• Apocalypse Cult: Ordo Ouroboros serves as one for Primitive War II and onward. They're a secret cabal that wish to return the world to a "Garden of Eden" and are secretly responsible for the events of the first two Primitive War books
• Apocalypse How: Leans towards Planetary-scale Societal Collapse near the end of Primitive War II as multiple Colliders had been built around the globe and have all been sabotaged by Ordo Ouroboros to detonate, either destroying the infrastructure or releasing dinosaurs into the wild.
• Artistic License – Biology: In Animus Infernal, the three-toed footprints of the Carnotaurus is described as being identical to an ostrich's only bigger. Ostriches have only two toes per foot. An emu would have been a better comparison.
• Artistic License – History:
  • The human characters somehow know the taxonomic names of every animal they come across, even when those names were not coined until well after the Vietnam War concluded in Real Life, such as Yutyrannus, Utahraptor, Sinornithosaurus, and Kaprosuchus.
  • Zig-Zagged in the film adaptation, as despite appearing, the Utahraptors are never explicitly called such.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: For all the accuracy given, the book does still have its fair share of inaccuracies:
  • Both Utahraptor and Kaprosuchus are heavily oversized, the former being 2 feet taller than it’s real life counterpart and the latter being nearly three times the size of the real animal.
  • Kaprosuchus is depicted with long legs, when its placement within Notisuchia implies it would have legs slightly longer than modern crocodilians.
  • Sinornithosaurus is depicted as venomous, which is based on a misconception that had already been debunked when the books were written.
  • It's unlikely Quetzalcoatlus had an extendable tongue, since such organs are rare in archosaurs, and only found in highly derived birds such as woodpeckers and hummingbirds, and in Alvarezsaurs such as Shuvuuia which have specialized bony structures to support them. No pterosaurs had these structures.
  • The Ankylosaurus in the film have a Studded Shell not unlike in Jurassic World.
• Badass Crew: The Vulture Squad and Stalker Force.
• Barbarian Long Hair: Xavier has some.
• Battle Couple: The male and female Tyrannosaurus Rex during their slaughter of the Soviet base. They even give each other a nuzzle when everything is said and done. Awww.
• Big Bad: Soviet general Borodin is this in the first novel. The Axis Mundis mercenary Pardus serves as one for the sequel.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The first novel ends with Vulture Squad destroying the secondary collider built within the valley to make sure either more dinosaurs don't pop out or a blackhole doesn't engulf the planet but they still need to ensure that the dinosaurs don't escape the valley and the end of Dispatches Volume 1 makes it obvious that that is exactly what's starting to happen.
  • Primitive War II leans heavily into the Bitter side as Stalker Force is killed off and Ordo Ouroboros succeeds in sabotaging other colliders around the world, either destroying or unleashing dinosaurs all across the planet. It only avoids a Downer Ending due to Andrei knowing the coordinates of their hidden base and Eli, one of the original members of Vulture Squad, will probably lead the charge against Ordo Ouroboros.
• Corpse Land: An indication that Deinonychus are nearby is finding a pile of their dead prey that are spread all over the ground.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Tolstoy. He may be a jingoistic Jerkass but being torn apart by a Quetzacoatlus with its tongue is... eugh
  • Poor Logan, devoured by a horde of Kaprosuchus.
  • Borodin is dragged back to the Utahraptor nest and disemboweled so that the Utahraptor chicks can crawl inside of him and eat his organs while he's still alive.
  • Ben Williams is fatally poisoned by a Sinornithosaurus and is in constant pain before Nyugen finishes him off.
  • Josef is horribly mangled by a Carnotaurus. He is barely alive and can only communicate through writing before the boat Axis Mundi commandeers is attacked by a pair of Suchomimus.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The Yutyrannus pair easily slaughter a group of four Utahraptor when they first appear. However, this is mainly because they had the advantage of surprise.
  • The Tyrannosaurus Rex couple versus Soviet military base. Suffice to say, homo sapiens simply do not stand a chance — the dinos almost casually stroll through the encampment slaughtering everyone in their path while totally shrugging off gunfire.
  • The preview of Animus Infernal shows a Carcharodontosaurus easily killing a pair of Carnotaurus. Not surprising, given the size difference between the two animals.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Given the setting, several of the main characters didn't exactly act like saints in previous operations and the life of some before the war wasn't the most pleasant.
• Death from Above: The Deinonychus drops on their prey from tree branches. The Quetzalcoatlus roams the skies of the Vietnamese valley where the story takes place and attacks people on several occasions.
• Dies Differently in the Adaptation: Several characters in the film met their ends differently than how they occurred in the novel.
  • Rather than being killed by Kaprosuchus, Logan shoots himself after drawing the Deinonychus away from Vulture Squad.
  • Nikita is ripped apart by the Utahraptor in the film, whereas in the novel, he is killed by Borodin.
• Disposable Women:
  • Women are only ever notable in the story if they die and cause character growth for one of the male soldiers, even in the second book where Zosimus returns to his old tribe, his mother had been killed long ago to cause his disillusionment with the tribe leaving his father as the one to bring him back into life with the tribe.
  • Averted in the film adaptation.
• The Dreaded:
  • The Yutyrannus in The Hunting of Stalker Force are this to the Utahaptors as they systematically exterminate any pack of raptors they find.
  • The Utahraptor themselves are this to the humans who have to deal with them. Strong, fast, numerous, and highly intelligent, they are the greatest single threat to the valley and the wider world.
• Elephant Graveyard: In the film, Baker and Leon enter an area filled with the bones of animals, including elephants. They learn to their horror that this is the nest of the Tyrannosaurs.
• Eye Scream: One Utahraptor is nicknamed "Cyclops" due to having a knife jammed in its eye.
• General Ripper: Both Borodin and Jericho falls under this trope.
• Genre-Busting: The series mixes Vietnam War fictions and dinosaur horror.
• Genre Throwback: Vietnam War films.
• Gentle Giant Sauropod:
  • Amargasaurus appears in The Hunting of Stalker Force and are depicted as relatively peaceful animals.
  • The Giraffatitan from Animus Infernal also count, with a Carcharodontosaurus taking a full grown adult down with very little effort inspite of the size difference.
  • Other than Amargasaurus, Dreadnoughtus appears in the film and they have no problems marching alongside Vulture Squad.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: The eyes of the Deinonychus illuminate within the darkness of their cave as Vulture Squad unknowingly enters their territory.
• Gorn: This series has a lot of gore.
• Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: Averted entirely. A majority of the scariest dinosaurs are feathered, including all of the Dromaeosaurs and Tyrannosaurs.
• Introduced Species Calamity: The series paints a good picture that introducing ancient dinosaurs to the modern world would be disastrous, as the former proceeds to devastate most of the wildlife and native humans in the valley and would most likely leave the area to find more food.
• It Can Think: The Utahraptor consistently show intelligence well above that of other dinosaurs. Near the end of Animus Infernal, they show the capacity to "negotiate" with other packs and even bury their dead, suggesting a near-human intellect.
• Kill the Cutie: The nurse who tends to Leon gets shot.
• Lost World: Subverted. The valley seems to be this at first but it’s later revealed that the prehistoric creatures encountered arrived in modern time thanks to a Soviet particle accelerator malfunction.
• Mama Bear:
  • The female of the T. rex couple. The female goes on the warpath against the Soviets after they killed one of her babies.
  • Mother Gaia the Carcharodontosaurus from Animus Infernal is deeply protective of her infant Prometheus. Most impressively, when the male Carcharodontosaurus Goliath attacks Prometheus, the Mother Gaia attacks the Goliath in a rage and ultimately kills him.
• Misplaced Wildlife: Done deliberately. Most of the dinosaurs are from different places and times and would never have met each other under normal conditions. On top of that, none of them were actually from Vietnam. This is because they arrived in the present through a man-made wormhole that led to multiple points in the past.
• Mockbuster: The film adaptation is one to Jurassic World Rebirth, with the majority of the dinosaurs looking an awful lot like they came from the Jurassic movies. Even more so, the scene of the Kaprosuchus attacking the boat was changed to Spinosaurus in order to capitalize on Rebirth.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Seen in Cryolophosaurus, which lives in matriarchal prides consisting of a female and several males. The females are a few feet longer and about half a ton heavier than the males. Curiously, no other dinosaurs show this kind of sexual dimorphism.
• New Meat: Leon is a recent addition to the Vulture Squad.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: The Kaprosuchus, ancient crocodile relatives that swarm the squad's boat and devour Logan
• No Man Should Have This Power: Baker decides to have Vulture Squad stop Borodin, not wanting the collider to be abused by the Russians nor wanting the Americans to claim the technology and repeat the same thing. Even Jericho's inner circle wants the entire Soviet base be bombed, deeming the technology too dangerous to be on human hands.
• Papa Wolf: The male of the T. rex couple.
• Plot Parallel: Vulture Squad's attempts to converge and reunite with one another is mirrored with the Tyrannosaurus family who got separated after their pursuit of the soldiers. Both groups would unleash Hell upon Borodin and his men.
• Raptor Attack:
  • Subverted. The Utahraptor and Deinonychus packs are fast, intelligent, and quite brutal predators; but they are also superb climbers, can hunt solo as well as they can in packs, and are entirely covered in accurate feathers.
  • The Sinornithosaurus from the second book are portrayed as vampiric parasites similar to oxpeckers, with anti-coagulants in their saliva and hemotoxic venom. This is based on a real, but now disproven, hypothesis that Sinornithosaurus was venomous.
• Red Right Hand: The alpha Utahraptor "Sobek" gets his name from the Kaprosuchus teeth embedded in his head and face. Similarly, "Cyclops" has a knife stuck in one eye. Probably most prominent is Xipetotec, a Utahraptor with burn scars from a napalm strike covering most of his body.
• Savage Spinosaurs:
  • A Suchomimus is seen carrying off a crocodile it killed in it's jaws.
  • A pair of Spinosaurus briefly attacked Vulture Squad's boat before turning their attention to the Triceratops herd that are drinking at the river. Like the Suchomimus, they kill and eat a crocodile.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: A given due to the setting. A number of the characters, such as Logan, show PTSD.
• Shout-Out:
  • The series isn't shy of making lots of references to Jurassic Park:
    • Dispatches Vol. 1 doubles down on this with characters like "Alan Malcolm" and "Grant Robelle".
    • The Yutyrannus treatment in The Hunting of Stalker Force is similar to that of the Carnotaurus from The Lost World (1995) as they are nocturnal predators with camouflage abilities feared by the raptors.
    • In the film, a Spinosaurus clamps onto the neck of a Triceratops and snaps it, much like in Jurassic Park III where the Big Bad Spinosaurus performs the infamous Neck Snap on a Tyrannosaurus rex.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Surprisingly for this type of story, the dinosaurs are, with few exceptions, remarkably accurate with all of the tyrannosaurs and dromaeosaurs sporting feathers.
  • An example exclusive to the film adaptation acknowledges that Utahraptor had not yet been discovered by the time of the setting by never referring to the Utahraptor as such.
• Social Ornithopod:
  • Parasaurolophus are depicted as being gregarious.
  • The film features Edmontosaurus and Tsintaosaurus which both congregate in herds.
• Super-Persistent Predator:
  • Downplayed. In the film, Sofia explains that the Tyrannosaurus parents won't venture outside their territory and leave their babies alone. After chasing Baker and Leon for hours, the male stops pursuing them when he falls into a lake and chooses to return to his family.
  • The Utahraptor are hell-bent on ripping apart Vulture Squad and becomes the final enemies the protagonists have to face. Cyclops takes the cake though, as he is so blinded by his pursuit of Baker that he seemingly doesn't care when the entire Russian base is about to go up in flames whereas the rest of his pack notably flees once they realized something is happening.
• Temper-Ceratops: The Triceratops and Pachyrhinosaurus are portrayed as very defensive creatures. A bull Pachyrhinosaurus manages to best the Carcharodontosaurus Goliath in battle.
• Terrifying Tyrannosaur: The T. rexes in the franchise are basically the theropod equivalent of The Juggernaut. They're capable of taking out a fortified Soviet military base on their own and can shrug off gunfire and even explosives like they're minor inconveniences. The best thing anyone can do when facing them is to try to run.
• Time Traveler's Dinosaur: The dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are revealed to have been sent to the 20th Century due to a particle accelerator malfunction.
• The Vietnam War: The setting of the first book.
• Weird Historical War: The series revolves around an accidental (then quite deliberate in the following books) worsening of the Cold War via dinosaur rampages,
• Xenofiction: The Hunting of Stalker Force has some chapters dedicated to the POV of the Utahraptor.
• Zerg Rush: Deinonychus, Kaprosuchus, and Utahraptor often attack this way.