Authors have a fundamental problem writing non-fiction about spies, commandos, and secret operations: all the interesting stuff is secret. If they can talk about it, it's either antique or it's mind-numbing. Either way it makes for a bad story.
When he wrote his first book about the BUD/S training school for Navy Seals, "The Warrior Elite", Dick Crouch carried it off well. He did lots of 'showing' and not much 'telling.' Maybe this shouldn't be a suprise, after all, doing 1000 pushups in an hour and not sleeping for a week may be demented but it's not a national security secret.
The sequel follows the class post-BUD/s and onto their advanced training, preparing them for active duty on 'the teams.' 'The Finishing School: Earning the Navy Seal Trident' starts out with a cool title, but goes no further. The fundamental problem is that there is almost no 'showing,' just 'telling.'
Theoretically the book should have been interesting, with students attending all sorts of radical schools (sniper, intelligence, emergency medicine, etc). However he never digs into any of them except perhaps the Winter Weather course in Kodiak Alaska, which is little more than a week-long, freezing-cold BUD/S redo. The whole book has a grim pallor of "operational security" over it, as if he isn't free to say anything very interesting. Even the characters he interviews are dull, anonymized individuals that say nothing memorable.
Consequently, to fill pages, he falls into the same trap of other special forces books -- tons of tedious administrative and organizational detail that no one enjoys except maybe Seal groupies. To the average guy looking for some riveting stories and impressive characters, you really don't give a shit about the variations of officer assignments and platoon compositions from Vietnam through the present. "Most of the time, the AOIC will move into the OIC position, but not always. Occasionally, the LPO will make chief petty officer and move into the key role as his platoon's chief petty officer."*yawn*
I've read far worse books, but I'd only recommend buying this volume if you crave completeness.
Today marks the second time I've been burnt by the Central Intelligence Agency. I just finished reading retired CIA 'Pathfinder' Antonio J. Mendez's second book, Spy Dust, a skimpy sequel to his first skimpy nonfiction, The Master of Disguise, with a secondary, revolting 'love story' bolted on.
The ostenisible premise of these books is that Mendez, a decorated CIA agent, recounts his work in the technical side of the CIA. Starting out as a document forger, he moves into unspecified disguise 'technologies', and ultimately works closely with active field agents incorporating all these Q tools in various hair-raising operations.
In reality, the books strike me as a cheap PR exercise for the benefit of the CIA, lulling us into momentary amnesia about their recent massive failure with hoary victories of the Cold War.
Assuming that the guy is modest, and the tales aren't aggrandized, the books still fail in three principle ways:
They reveal nearly nothing
It's true, they don't. In fact, they seem to go beyond respecting security rules, they seem downright tight-assed about giving you any color.
In Spy Dust, a significant part of the plot revolves around the Soviet's KAPELLE device. It's described so obliquely that you can only assume it is some sort of 1980's ENIGMA machine. But that's got to be wrong, because when you get to the end of the book, the device is somehow used for one last intelligence coup that is entirely orthogonal to encrpytion/decryption.
Why do they have to be so secretive about the details? This was in the 1980s, the Soviets know we have the technology (we stole one from an embassy in (if I read between the lines correctly) Nepal), and it must be antiquated now, anyway.
Similarly, the better part of Master of Disguise involves (of course)disguise. But the information is so sparse that it's not even clear what the disguise is or how it works. Is it a rubber mask? makeup? a laser-cloaking device?
They might as well be talking about a transistor or a code formula or rocket fuel when the only description of the disguises are sentences like, "Swazie had been the first officer to deploy the highly secret disguise technique I had created after Mary Peters had been ambushed in Moscow. We had named that technique DAGGER."
That's all you're ever told. What is 'the technique' ? When disguise is a principal subject of the book, how is such scant detail going to work???
The answer is, 'it doesn't work.' It's not just the paucity of information that makes these books losers..
...all the lousy boilerplate in the world wouldn't fill in the massive vacuum of these books.
These stories should be compressed into a single shorter book, or even better, a long Atlantic-style article. But alas, they're not. Consequently you regularly find yourself running laps of grey, boring, rote prose. Their ghost-writer is so, so unimaginative. About the only color provided is regular, breezy mentions of discussions held while 'finishing his second scotch' or 'over pitchers of beer.' I'm not sleeping, Antonio, just resting my eyes... Wake me up when you get there.
The Love Story
I don't want to make this review a slanderous attack, but the combination of the picture of the husband/wife author team and the passages inside the novel is totally nauseating.
I leaned over, put my hand on his shoulder, and kissed him lightly on the lips.
There was a moment of recognition by us both.
"Thats not a kiss," he said, putting his glass down on the side of the tub. He pulled me towards him, through the steam and bubbles. "This is a kiss."
I am not going to quote the passages where the two consumate their love in the empty upper-deck of a 747 Megatop...
Conclusion
There are a few nuggets here and there, but far, far too few to pay any amount of money for these books. Either wait till they hit the 'remainders' stacks, or better, when you visit us, give them the twenty-five minutes they deserve and speed read for the highlights.
During my trip to China I became engrossed with the paperback novel True History of the Kelly Gang. Without question it's the most gripping and intense book I've read since Yukio Mishima' Sea of Fertility
series and the most imaginative books since I read Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (until I found out that the book is at least partially grounded in a real 'Ned Kelly'. Regardless, the form of the book is still enormously creative)
In short, it's a fictional journal of Ned Kelly, an Irish-immigrant outlaw in southeastern Australia in the late 1800's. The whole 'journal' structure is executed very well. And hanging throughout is a terrible sense of foreboding, given the book's prologue, that becomes more and more intense the more you read about, and like Kelly.
I recommend it enthusiastically. But I don't want to discuss it too much because reading all the lame reviews in Salon and pretentious discussion on Amazon, I'd be afraid I'd just drive you away further. The book is really good, really gripping, and really unique. I'll leave it at that. (plus you can buy it in paperback, so it's cheap)
A month ago I went on a book-buying orgy at Kinokuniya (a massive and excellent Japanese bookstore) during their annual sale. Among other things, I bought By-Line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades.
The book is a 500 page anthology of dispatches he wrote as a journalist. It's terribly entertaining because many of the articles aren't more than two pages long, yet the prose he paints is far beyond the corrugated cardboard five-w's fare you read in an AP/UPI dispatch. They're more like single espresso distillations of what could be novels. I've only read perhaps twenty dispatches (30 pages of text) so far, but I'm addicted, and look forward to each little break that gives me opportunity to pull another.
Here's a short excerpt from "Old Constan" (The Toronto Daily Star, October 28, 1922)
"If it doesn't rain in Constan the dust is so thick that a dog trotting along the road that parallels the Pera hillside kicks up a puff like a bullet striking every time his paws hit the ground."