Tomahawk (Dan Lenson Novels) Review

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(More customer reviews)I have read the other David Poyer novels featuring USN officer Dan Lenson. They are THE MED, THE GULF, THE CIRCLE and THE PASSAGE. I liked all of them because Poyer, a Naval Academy graduate writes well about men and the sea.
I had trouble with TOMAHAWK mainly because Poyer turns Lenson into (in my opinion) a very unbelieveable character. While I will grant the possibility of a career naval officer falling for a peace activist, I think the way Poyer writes about it is unrealistic and I think readers who buy the premise are simply naive romantics.
For those who have never served in the officer corps of any of the armed forces, let me say this. Dan Lenson's misgivings about the TOMAHAWK as a then new weapons system would have caused him a lot of trouble. Since the system gave him a moral dilemma, it follows that those doubts would reflect in his performance. The doubts did and his OER (Officer Efficiency Report) suffered.
To be sure, there is an incredible amount of waste in military procurement but, I really think that if LT Lenson had or developed moral qualms about the weapons systems the US Navy was seeking to develop and procure, he owed it to himself, his service and his nation to resign his commission and find another way to make a living. Most officers who leave the service do so for a variety of reasons. Some of them hate the OPSTEMPO, the deployments, separation from family, living conditions/low pay, etc. All of these are reasons retention of personnel in the military today is heading SOUTH!!!
I served on active duty and am now a member of the reserves and I found Dan Lenson unbelieveable in this book. If I served with a fellow officer like Dan Lenson, I would probably sit down with him and recommend that he find another career path because he was deliberately shooting himself in the foot. Well educated Annapolis grads like Dan Lenson don't do that. If they have a problem with the system, they make their recommendations for improvements; if they go unheeded, they either shut up and press on or they request a transfer. If the navy itself is what's getting to them, they generally put in their resignation papers and head off to greener pastures.
I just couldn't find any sympathy for Dan Lenson. If Poyer writes another Dan Lenson novel and I read that he has become an Admiral, I think I'll be sick. Dan Lenson is not Flag Officer material, not even with all the fictitious license in the world.The way it was written tells me that TOMAHAWK should probably be the last installment in the continuing saga of Dan Lenson, USN.

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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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The Circle (Dan Lenson Novels) Review

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(More customer reviews)I was stationed on two FRAM-II Destroyers. I am a "Blue Nose", a "Shellback", and earned a Combat Action Ribbon while a crewmember on the USS Ozbourn (DD-846) off the coast of Vietnam. I am tired of all these glorified ("gun-decked")stories and movies about submarines and aircraft carriers, usually written by retired admirals or authors who were never even in the military never mind the navy. This story tells it like it is. I've often times wondered how young Ensigns dealt with the crap and stayed sane never mind got advanced and survive to make successful Navy careers. I truly enjoyed this book. I'm reading "The Med" now and I have also got "Passage" standing by. Only a "Tin Can Sailor" could have written this book. The terminolgy and slang terms are right on. I can understand how a person who never served in the Navy would have a hard time with this book. Perhaps Poyer should have a glossary in the back of his books to help decipher Navy jargon. I highly recommend this book, especially to former Navy anchor clankers. To Mr Poyer, from one ol' Tin Can Sailor to another, I bid you fair winds and follwing seas.

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The Passage (Dan Lenson Novels) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book eventually rewards a patient reader, but it's quite an ordeal to get there.
Poyer is using the device here of an unpleasant character who learns and grows through his experiences in the story. Dan Lenson, the hero, is shallow and unable to engage meaningfully with others. One of the themes of the book is the process by which he learns to connect with his fellow human beings. But it takes a long time, and he's a jerk for much of the story.
In a year I make to be about 1981, the USS Barrett is an experimental warship with a computer program that can fight the ship essentially in autopilot. Lenson is an officer on the ship. Not only are there severe technical problems with the computer system, but there are various rumblings of discontent within the crew. This plot thread is interspersed with the story of Graciela, a pregnant Cuban woman who tries to escape the island in a refugee boat. The plot develops slowly, and though the climactic portions are exciting, they take a long time to show up. Because of the year, some of the plot seems dated, as when the computer whiz figures out what a computer virus is: realistic for the time, but not very exciting from the perspective of 2002 (the book having been published in 1995).
Poyer was exploring the issue of homophobia here, and so the reader has to sit through lengthy revelations of ugly bigotry on the part of various characters. While the dirty stories and nasty attitudes are no doubt realistic, they weren't fun to read. Likewise, though the main antagonist, Harper, is believable in his ugly sexism and crudity, I didn't enjoy reading about him. Eventually, Poyer comes across with a genuinely heroic homosexual character, but as with other aspects of the book, the reader has to suffer for a long time first. It's a meaningful issue and I think that to portray it realistically some ugliness is necessary, because that's an accurate representation of people's attitudes, but it got hard to keep turning the pages at some points.
The last quarter of the book is a good, page-turning adventure story. Getting there, though, may not be worth the time.

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Korea Strait: A Novel (Dan Lenson Novels) Review

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KOREA STRAIT is the tenth in a series that follows the naval career of Dan Lenson. He began his missions in THE MED (first published twenty years ago) as a young lieutenant. These days thirty-nine-year-old Commander Lenson wears a Congressional Medal of Honor decoration but his high-profile history is a hot potato for his commanding officer. When Dan refuses to retire early, he's assigned to what should be a routine and inglorious shipboard tour in the Orient. He's to command a TAG (Tactical Analysis Group) gathering information during joint war game exercises with South Korea, Japan and Australia in the Korea Strait. Of course, Dan's timing is impeccable and while he's afloat on the South Korean flagship, Chung Nam, the games tracking friendly targets are interrupted by a genuine attack by a squad of subs. The TAG commander is a "rider" with no command authority on the Chung Nam. But he and his team, determined to stand by an ally, disobey orders to evacuate (crossdeck) along with the rest of the American presence. Faced with typhoon seas and an unidentified enemy; Lenson aids Commodore Jung and the ship's company in such diverse ways as, among other things, calculating threat probabilities on his laptop and working with a belowdeck repair and rescue detail. The battle rages... and then the true destructive power of the enemy's weapons is discovered. Now, Dan must convince his superiors to approve a daring proposal in hopes of preventing mutual destruction in the strait!
This thriller is highly engrossing in many respects besides the tautly-told main plot of battle against foe and sea. For instance, it convincingly portrays the tensions and strains that an American naval officer could experience aboard a foreign nation's ship. A few of the South Korean officers speak passable English, and they teach Dan a few phrases of Korean, but the language barrier isolates Dan and seriously impairs the allies' abilities to work together. Chung Nam's captain despises Lenson's sometimes ugly-Americanness, and the commodore's aloof leadership challenges Dan. Basically, Dan can't help feeling like a fish out of water in a navy so alien. Even his digestive system is thrown wildly out of whack by the food and the stress, leaving Dan in less than fighting trim during combat.
But here is one nit to be picked: the narrative's formulaic inserts occasionally break the surface. We learn one of Lenson's team has a penchant for underage Korean girls, and sure enough, he gets himself arrested. That plot is ripped from past headlines about American military men and Asian host countries' women. And what do you think happens to another man, whose command decision on his own ship cost some sailors their lives? Does he get a chance to redeem himself? KOREA STRAIT can and does lean into the predictable.
On the whole, though, Poyer delivers a suspenseful and, unfortunately, plausible scenario. The real world Koreas, China, Japan, and America all have great stakes in that ongoing political and military brinksmanship. One of these days KOREA STRAIT might not be fiction anymore. KOREA STRAIT is an expert tale of the modern Navy, authored by a real pro. (nearly 4.5 stars)

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Black Storm (Tales of the Modern Navy.) Review

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(More customer reviews)In "Black Storm," Poyer subverts the conventional elements of military "thrillers." By underplaying, almost underwriting, the firefights, the political "big picture" background, he leaves room for what becomes a harrowing, deeply convincing, account of men, and women, in battle.
I have no military background at all, let alone combat experience. But Poyer's account of this fictional small-unit mission, by a squad of Force Recon U.S. marines with a Navy missle expert and a biological warfare doctor, during the Persian Gulf War rings true on every page. The achievement is all the more remarkable because his previous novels about the U.S. Navy today have usually been focused on naval and naval air themes.
Poyer captures the strange intimacy of a Force Recon unit, whose members may not even be friends, yet they must be willing to die for each other. As the mission progresses, the squad finally enters Bagdad, and the sense of physical and emotional claustrophobia is almost palpable.
The reader can share in the extreme isolation of these combatants, the constant pressure to avoid detection, to avoid battle, the obsessional nature of the mission objective -- to discover if the Iraquis have created launchable missles armed with a deadly smallpox variant, and if so, to destroy them.
By under-writing the traditional action elements, Poyer lets the characters, with all their flaws and doubts and problems, emerge ever more clearly, and surely, as the focus of our attention. Against all odds, the squad moves toward its objective by all means possible. Over and over again, we're aware of how things both great and small hinge on the decision, the choice of single member of the squad.
Often that is the squad leader, Marine Gunnery Sargeant Marcus Gault. In Gault, Poyer has created a remarkable portrait of the nature of small-unit combat leadership: "Black Storm" could almost (again speaking as a civilian) be a primer on the subject. As the team leader, Gault is continually facing and making life and death decisions, each one measured against the merciless standard of the mission's success.
But Poyer doesn't cast Gault, or any of the characters, in traditionally "heroic" terms. In fact, the character of a sociopathic, if not psychotic, British SAS sergeant, with whom the Marines make contact inside Iraq, acts as a mirror of how the same military virtues Gault displays have the potential to become monstrous.
It is the very "ordinariness" of Gault and the others that is so compelling: young men, most of them, with terrifying responsibilities. And yet..."they soldier on."
In the end we, at least we civilians, are left facing the awe-full mystery of men and women willing to sacrifice their lives.

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