The Gulf (Dan Lenson Novels) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is the first novel by David Poyer I have read, and I must say I enjoyed it. A great work of military fiction, the stars of this novel are those who serve on the "small ships," the destroyers, frigates, and minesweepers that often do not get into the headlines, ships that perform vital duties in war and in peace for the US Navy. While aircraft carriers (as in the Stephen Coonts novels) or submarines (as in the Tom Clancy novels) are more often the star in works of fiction, the "little guys" finally get their due in this work.
As the title suggests, the novel is set in the Persian Gulf. Published in 1990 - prior to the Gulf War - in the novel the Cold War is still the paradigm in US defense thinking, the Iran-Iraq War still rages, and the "tanker war" continues as well, the US (and British) escort of American, Kuwaiti, and other countries tankers and other merchant vessels through a deadly gamut of island bases, deadly small boats called "boghammers," aircraft, and mines. A narrow, shallow desert sea that winds its way through hostile, often warring countries, not allowing Americans basing rights for ships or aircraft, the seas too shallow for the great aircraft carriers or our mighty submarines, the task to protect one of the busiest and most important shipping lanes in the world falls clearly on the shoulder of destroyers, frigates, and minesweepers. As in real history, with the "accidental" firing of a missle on the USS Stark, the tragic downing of a commercial airline by the USS Vincennes, and most recenlty by the terrorist attack on the USS Cole, these ships are vulnerable, in the front line of what Poyer calls in the dedication "...a strange war, a half-war, shadowy and constrained...in what we call peace - though it isn't."
More accurately, the focus of the book is primarily upon Lieutenant-Commander Dan Lenson, a star of previous Poyer novels, who serves as XO on the USS Turner Van Zandt. Hoping to have command of the ship when the captain is relieved due to illness, he instead finds himself serving a new captain, Benjamin Shaker, a man who lost his last command, the USS Louis Strong, to a missile fired from an unseen enemy. Sunk with the loss of many hands, many of the crew having died from fire damage from the missile strike, Shaker is determined that history will not repeat itself. Ordering changes in how the ship is run and even ordering torn out everything flammable, down to the crew's polyester uniforms, even against Navy regulations, Lenson obeys, but is unsure what is captain's ultimate intentions are, how far he should follow him, and how his past will affect how he operates. As the USS Turner Van Zandt continues to escort new convoys to and from Kuwait, protecting them from accidental and intential attack by Iraqi and much more often Iranian ships and aircraft, will this captain stay within established procedure for dealing with these threats, in a "war" that is waged under tight political constraints, or will he go beyond? What does Lenson really know about this captain, can he trust him? What unknown dangers lie in wait for the vulnerable convoy threadings its way down the deadly Gulf?
Poyer does a great job of illustrating several other charcters in the work, from aging reservist minesweeper divers to the hard-living helicopter aircrew of the ship to the drug-addicted but (mostly, sorta) trying to do well semi-stowaway corpsman, they add depth to the novel, their fates all intertwined in the end. His vivid descriptions of life abord the ship and sailing through the tropical desert sea are excellent.
Good book, I recommend it.

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