The story in the book talks about an infantry warrior named Private Matthew Dodd and his journey to re unite with his fellow soldiers. The British army was retreating to the lines of Torres Vedras and Dodd was left behind since he separated from his comrades during the retreat in Portugal behind enemy lines. He knew that he had to do one thing, and that was to kill all the Frenchmen. Private Dodd ran through a lot of problems during his journey trying to find his way back to his men. With some help here and there from the natives, but mostly his own, he raids the French with his rifle to try and prevent them from building a bridge across the Tagus River. Rifleman Dodd is a story of a soldier who is on his own and slowly learns to make plans without any given orders, and it shows leadership qualities and knowledge of warfare. The main challenges that he had to go through was starvation, fatigue, and the little Portuguese boy he had encountered while he was trying to find his way to his fellow soldiers.
At the beginning of the story, Dodd was lost and couldn’t find his men or be on time so he got cut off and left behind and his fellow soldiers couldn’t wait any longer. He knew he would be left behind so he tried finding his own way to get to his people. While patrolling on foot alone, he was spotted out by a Frenchmen. They knew he was different because of the color of his uniform, it wasn’t like theirs. Half a dozen of the Frenchmen fired at him but every single shot they fired, they missed. While they still shot at Dodd, he still managed to make it up the hill to find cover, as he was up there; Dodd aimed at the group of Frenchmen from the top of the hill and was able to take some out with his rifle. The French saw where the shots were coming from and fired back at Dodd, but were unsuccessful to hit Dodd. His first challenge was battling starvation. This was a very serious problem because he didn’t have any food