This story rated a high "Meh" on the mediocre scale for me. There wasn't anything intrinsically wrong with the story, per se, but there wasn't really anything right with it either. The characters were flat--I agree with eytanz's summaries--and thereby boring to me. All Nohaile did for the duration of the story was whine about how he didn't want to be there. He knew what he was getting into. Man up. Bamboo was fun, but not interesting.
The story was very straight forward, no real try/fail cycles--which is usually fine in a short story as there isn't enough time to spend on more than one--but this story was: "Let's go. Crap they blew everything up. Ha! We blew them up back. The end." I found the ending fairly anticlimactic. I was waiting for the twist or additional action or something to happen when they found the opposing bunker full of dead bodies, but instead it was just that: a bunker full of dead bodies. Game over. They talked so much about how the opponent's wife was on the other end of the field that the fact that she was dead was kind of a "duh" moment.
I think it might have been more interesting/shocking/powerful if the reveal that it wasn't the Niklaus Sintov, but instead his wife, didn't come until the very end, when they find her dead body. Then Nohaile could have wallowed in his own guilt over having caused the death of an innocent women to settle a financial dispute.
In all, I was intrigued by the idea of settling disputes the new old fashioned way, a fist fight to the death, but agree that it's unrealistic at best.
Perhaps I'm just missing the deeper meaning here, but this one didn't get me, nor I it.