Special Forces

February 1, 2001
His now legendary reputation in military circles gives Clancy as complete access to events and sources as any civilian can expect. This is the seventh in Clancy's series investigating key institutions of the contemporary U.S. armed forces (Armored Cav; Fighter Wing; etc.), and the most comprehensive overview of the U.S. Army Special Forces available to general readers. Clancy, writing with regular series collaborator John Gresham, begins with a softball-tossing interview of Gen. Hugh Shelton--books like Clancy's are not written by antagonizing four-star generals--and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman establishes Special Forces evolution from the "snake eaters" of the Vietnam era to the "quiet professionals" described in the rest of Clancy's mostly first-person narrative. The first person is a big selling point here; discussions of equipment, "extreme" training and what Special Forces detachments actually do in peace, war and the gray areas in between are based on Clancy's own reportage often enough to maintain the "guided tour" conceit. Special Forces are shown training Venezuelan internal security forces, acting as coordinators for fire-support missions in Kuwait, cooperating with conventional U.S. units and, in a near-future scenario, defeating a nuclear-tipped terrorist revolution in Indonesia. Clancy's language slips into jargon often enough to confuse the target audience of interested generalists, and others may be disturbed by the implications of a military instrument able to do the things described here. But despite the drawbacks, Clancy remains a consummate storyteller, and this book is no exception to his oeuvre. (Feb.) Forecast: Pluses: It's a book by Tom Clancy in a series that regularly debuts on paperback bestseller lists. Minuses: It's not really a start-to-finish narrative, but a collection of field notes, albeit highly detailed and often compelling ones. Nitpick: the repeated phrase from title to subtitle reads badly.

February 1, 2001
The seventh and ostensibly last of Clancy's portraits of U.S. combat specialities covers the special forces, who do not care to be called Green Berets. The book covers recruitment and training of personnel, who are more often broadly educated professionals than Rambo types; equipment, which includes an exotic mixture of high, low, and no tech components; and the variety of missions special forces execute. The latter encompass glamorous covert operations abroad (e.g., in Kuwait) and complex training exercises at home to help train other U.S. forces in counterinsurgency warfare. The book ends in the series' customary style, with a tightly written near-future scenario, this one laid in Indonesia. Over the years this series seems to have been determining how the revolution in compact electronics has affected everything military, which means that in it Clancy has produced one of the more significant as well as readable bodies of popular military studies. A fit shelf mate for its six predecessors.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)