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(More customer reviews)Jed Babbin's first book is part novel, part political pamphlet, and part morality play. Readers will be treated to an exciting and straight-forward military action story - albeit with satirical touches - and a political wake-up call.
The military action in Babbin's book is accurately described and furiously paced. His warriors are tough, smart, and highly motivated. The low subplot centers on ambitious and unprincipled Washington politicians, to whom the military values of duty, honor, country mean nothing.
Babbin uses a team of Navy SEALs, ably led by Lieutenant Cully O'Bannon, to illustrate the valor of America's military. But this legacy -- with a long and glorious pedigree -- is put in jeopardy by a cynical political establishmnent in the grip of political correctness. In Babbin's fictional Washington -- difficult to distinguish from the actual one -- the military is putty in the hands of social engineers eager to translate every left phantasm into policy. Women in combat. Social work deployments. The whole disaster.
At the top of this sorry political food chain is a shallow, opportunistic president who has no military service, a bossy wife, and no understanding of how important a strong and motivated military is to America's freedom and prosperity.
Ring any bells yet?
Any resemblance between characters in Babbin's novel and some of the real politicians who infest Washington is, well, not that hard to parse. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. But readers won't need a magic decoder ring to figure out who a ficticious California senator named Barbara Berkely is, or an attorney general referred to by all the president's persons as Will Do Wanda. Sometimes Babbin can't restrain himself, so we have a U.N. Secretary General named Boolah-Boolah Gemali. Charles Dickens, call your office.
Formidable on the battlefield, the military services are no match for politicians who won't give them the financial support they need to do their jobs, or the respect they deserve for doing them. In his long set-up, which can be a bit talky at times, we see politicans and their staff members (sometimes more powerful than the elected politicians themselves), driven by ambition and left ideology, strip the military to the bare bones, including disbanding all the nation's special operations units.
Babbin may go a bit over the top in describing the political rape of the military. Not even the Clinton administration -- the most anti-military administration in the nation's history -- tried to deploy 20 percent of Army and Marine Corps troops to guard the South American rain forests. And today's feminist red-hots are more interested in having women serve in submarines than in doing away with subs.
But Babbin deserves the benefit of our doubts. The melody here is right, if not every word of the song. He knows whereof he writes. He's a former Air Force JAG officer. As deputy undersecretary of defense under George Bush (the first one) in 1990 and 1991, he served Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney during Operation Desert Storm. He knows whose phone rings and in what order when things start hitting the fan. He shows readers, in dramatic narrative, how the military and its civilian leadership work together when the pointy end of the spear has to poke someone.
Many of Babbin's descriptions of White House lefties ring true, and make it hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. Here's a young staffer who obviously believes late-night bull sessions in Yale dorm rooms prepare one better to take arms against a sea of troubles than does military training and combat experience. He's sifting candidates for the position of deputy national security advisor. After describing two academic candidates glowingly, he says:
"The third is a Marine brigadier general, and he's probably the least qualified of the lot.He has no formal education at all, just a degreefrom the Naval Academy."
After politicians have miniaturized and feminized the military -- including shelving the elite special units that do the tough, up-close and personal work -- America is presented with a crisis of crises, cooked up and executed by a bold, dedicated, and competent band of terrorists. Worthy opponents for O'Bannon and his warriors, who return from the civilian work to which they have been relegated, for a pro-bono job.
The last 40 pages or so of "Legacy of Valor" are as exciting as anything in Tom Clancy and feature a clash for all the marbles at one of America's most sacred sites. It's not revealing too much to say that at the end the reader will have some reason to hope that Babbin's ficticious America might, after all, learn to support and respect the men and women who, to borrow from Kipling, guard us while we sleep.
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What has the politics of the 90s done to America's armedforces? Has the culture of the fighting man - of duty, honor, andcountry - been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness? JedBabbin's new novel, LEGACY OF VALOR, takes on these questions with anexciting mixture of explosive action, low politics, and highvalor. LEGACY OF VALOR is the story of a Navy SEAL lieutenant, CullyO'Bannon, and his platoon or tough, smart adrenaline addicts. Aftercarrying out a key mission on the eve of the Gulf War, Cully and hismen return to a country now led by a man whose dislike for themilitary is only exceeded by his ineptness in foreign policy. TheSEALs, now a target of budget cuts and social experimentation, faceextinction when an accident in a rescue mission makes them the focusof the wrath of the President and his powerful allies in theSenate. The SEALs only hope is a beautiful staffer who works for asenator whose seniority is the best weapon in fighting !for theSEALs' continued existence. Meanwhile, war is brewing in the MiddleEast. While the Senate pillories the SEALs in televised hearings, anunthinkable alliance of Russian terrorists-for-hire and Arab dictatorsis held in check only by the fear of American intervention. When theplan to threaten New York with nuclear blackmail unfolds, America mustsearch for the weapon it has thrown away - Cully O'Bannon and hissmall band of men who have been scattered across the country in theNavy's efforts to obey the short-sighted demands of thepoliticians. LEGACY OF VALOR is a story of military life in the 90s,told from the standpoint of the professional soldier. It's a storylaced with real military tactics, political satire torn from today'sheadlines, and enough action to satisfy the more hard-core adventurereader. In Cully O'Bannon, a new American hero is brought to life inthis story of love, honor, and stubborn trust in the values that madeAmerica.
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