Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)"The Med" is a great read. I say this not just because I'm a former destroyer sailor who enjoys an authentic rendering of naval action, though the book would have repaid my time on this basis alone. "The Med" is also a compelling story with believable characters (some sympathetic, some contemptible) dealing with real issues under real stress.
The central character, Lietunant Junior Grade Dan Lenson, is an appealing man whose integrity you can feel as you watch him struggle with the question of just how far one has to go in the name of duty. Just how much one has to put up with from a swine with four stripes. You see him realize, intellectually and viscerally, that the orders he gives (or doesn't give) may decide whether men live or die. The Queeg-like Sundstrom (not as crazy as Queeg, but as conniving and perhaps even more inadequate) shows how everyone's life can be put in danger by a dithering, totally self-centered, incompetent commander.
I don't know how people who've not been in the Navy will react to the build-up of tension between the junior officer Lenson and the incompetent and evil commadore. For those who understand what total control a commander at sea has over a subordinate, and what serious business it is to even appear to question authority, there will be some electric moments. (By comparison, telling a civilian boss to shove off is nothing; I've done it more than once with hardly a measurable change in my blood pressure.)
The story is a believable and complex one (that could go from novel to headline anyday) involving an amphibious task force in the Mediterranean compelled by terrorits to go into action fraught with physical, political, and military peril. In sub-plots we follow a squad of marines fighting each other until they face a real enemy; a first-rate chief machinists mate who must battle old, balky equipment as well as officers who demand too much (some things never change); and an officer's wife who must decide whether she loves her husband as much as she hates the Navy. These are played out against the background of vicious Middle East politics and resentments and the struggle between a good officer pushed almost beyond humnan endurance and a horrible officer in busines for himself.
And boy does Poyer - a former Navy officer - reproduce Navy life accurately. Not just in the speech and jargon, though that's right on. I could almost smell the salt water and feel the ship roll under me as I read. I almost expected to hear a bosun's whistle (fortunately, I didn't taste the creamed chipped beef). He has everything down right: the Marines' cocky attitudes, the chiefs' raunchy stories, and the weariness of the sleepless drudgery that makes up so much of Navy life at sea. Poyer's Navy is so real I feel that after I've read all his novels (and I plan to) I'll rate another hash mark.
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