[Stingy Jack]

A good and appropriate conflict for this story --- if you don't mind me providing example -- would be to make your protagonist young and inexperienced. In fact, you've already established that he "just completed training for search and rescue". But I would go even farther and say that he had just completed his training entirely. In fact, his stint in the military is his first time away from home. Imagine that --- little experience outside of training, and being abandoned in an alien existence before you've even had a chance to develop any world experience in your own plane. This would be good -- but, I need to ask you a question before I continue. How long do you plan on making this story, and do you plan on having other characters for your protagonist to communicate with?

The reason why I ask is that, if you plan on making this actual novel length, then your protagonist had better start to become pretty interesting pretty quick. He has to be interesting enough to carry a whole novel by himself! So, I was surprised when you killed off his entire squad. The main difference between a novel and novella is characters -- not length. A novel's length is like it is because the many characters force it to be long. I would really like to see some survivors for this character to interact with.