The Bear and the Dragon
Tom Clancy. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2000. 1,028 pp. $28.95 ($26.05).
Hong Kong
Stephen Coonts. New York: St. Martin's, 2000. 348 pp. $25.95 ($23.35).
Reviewed by Commander Ward Carroll, U.S. Navy
If you are one who believes in the prescience of technothriller authors you might want to check whether your mutual funds have any Far Eastern holdings. The premise of both Stephen Coonts's Hong Kong and Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon is that China is in serious financial trouble and willing to go to extreme lengths to preserve its Communist power base. Among the differences between the two novels (besides nearly 700 pages) is that Coonts sees the after-math as domestic in nature while Clancy takes his story to the brink of World War III.
The Bear and the Dragon opens with a rocket attack on the streets of Moscow. A Russian pimp is killed, but there is some doubt whether he was the intended target. Then for the next 600 pages, with the exception of a very well-written scene in a Chinese hospital where police gun down two clerics, the story goes nowhere. Instead, the reader is dragged slowly into Clancy's world, a place where no twodimensional hero goes unworshipped, where those in government service all have three appellations-a real name, an acronym, and a cool Secret Service call sign (e.g., Jack Ryan, POTUS [President of the United States], Swordsman)-and Captain Kirk is God. Finally, China attacks Russia to get at Siberian oil reserves and a shooting war ensues.
After more hackneyed ideological boilerplate posing as prose and a few more Klingon references, the Chinese are forced into a Hail Mary situation, and an intercontinental ballistic missile is lobbed at Washington. Run for the bunkers! But not President Jack Ryan. He is an intel guy (which is Clancy's original sin in understanding military reality), and when the going gets tough, intel guys report to the ship's combat decision center. Fortunately, the Aegis cruiser Gettysburg is docked near the nation's capital.
We know the Aegis system can tackle the job of saving Washington because Clancy gave us one of his agonizingly detailed treatises on the subject several hundred pages earlier in the book. Ultimately, for all of its complicated plot lines and potentially valid predictions of how Armageddon might come about, this is a book written by a guy, prolific as he might be, who came to his understanding of the military and government by letting other people brag about themselves and reading a lot of stuff. In addition, The Bear and the Dragon is just too damn long.
Hong Kong, on the other hand, suffers from no such delusions of grandeur. Coonts is not so taken by the concept of bureaucracies and those in them, and the result is more engaging and less bloatedand more fun-than Clancy's idiom.
Hong Kong puts Admiral Jake Grafton in the eponymous locale for a little rest and relaxation with his wife, Callie. During the visit they are invited to dine with the U.S. consul general, who happens to be Jake's old bombardier/navigator from his Vietnam War days, Tiger Cole. But Jake's trip is not just for pleasure. The CIA wants him to find out how involved Cole is in a political fundraising scandal. The fact-finding mission goes astray when the Communists close a major foreign bank and the seeds of revolution quickly start to grow. The crisis also takes a very personal turn for Jake when Callie is kidnapped. The stage is set for a romp, and that is what the reader gets. Hong Kong is a page-turner in the tradition of the great gumshoe novels; a book that dares you to put it down.
Coonts is a master at balancing realistic detail with effective pacing and spicing the mix with a light dusting of the human condition. But unlike Clancy, Coonts understands the context of his chosen genre. He does not imagine himself as Tolstoy with Tomahawks. Carrier battle groups have proved their utility from the littorals in the post-Cold War world, and, likewise, Hong Kong proves that the technothriller is not dead.
Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II
Stephen Budiansky. New York: Free Press, 2000. 337 pp. Appendices. Photos. Maps. Notes. Bib. Index. $27.50 ($24.75).
Reviewed by A. D. Baker III
The claim to completeness in the subtitle to Stephen Budiansky's exceptionally well-written and easily accessible treatise on the development of the art of cryptography and its operational uses during World War II might be subject to challenge by specialists, but the author nonetheless has produced an outstanding introduction to an extraordinarily complex and broad topic. In the course of 330-some pages, Budiansky manages to touch on nearly all the major themes handied in greater detail by the myriad other books that preceded his, while at the same time achieving an admirable balance in his presentation.
The heroes of Battle of Wits are the British cryptographers at the renowned Bletchley Park, who worked in unpleasant and cramped surroundings and always with inadequate personnel and equipment resources. They nonetheless were able to expand on the initial Polish breakthroughs in deciphering German Enigma transmissions and through perseverance and iron resolve were, at least most of the time, able to keep ahead of changes in the German cipher systems throughout the war. In that vital effort, they were greatly aided by the Germans' refusal to believe that the British could read their ciphers.
In contrast, Budiansky depicts the U.S. decryption effort as massive but often bumbling, with results generated primarily by throwing huge arrays of people and machines at the problem. Perhaps inevitably, the book begins with a gloss on the often-told tale of Commander Joseph Rochefort's leadership in the breaking of Japanese codes that led to the great victory at Midway and his disgraceful subsequent treatment by the Navy's Washington decryption "establishment" for the crime of having been right. But the author then goes on in fairly chronological sequence to lay the groundwork for the history of codebreaking in both the United States and Europe from its inception in World War I through the end of the second worldwide conflict in 1945. Budiansky is particularly skillful in explaining how the codes were constructed and how human minds were harnessed to everless-primitive, computerlike machines to defeat more and more of the Axis (and Soviet) codes. These codebreakers not only exploited vulnerabilities in the actual equipment employed by the enemy, they also played on the sloppiness and sloth that inevitably weakened the security of the encryption systems. Men such as Alan Turing and John Tiltman were true geniuses whose tremendous intellectual achievements never could be adequately rewarded during their careers.
The book is distinguished by several very useful appendices, including a helpful chronology relating world events to cryptological developments; a brief but clear explanation of the complexities of the British success in defeating Enigma in the early stages of the war; a similarly erudite detailing of how the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service overcame the Japanese "Purple Machine"; a list of U.S. and British communications intercept stations; and a listing and brief description of the exotic machines that were developed to assist the cryptographers and that led to the postwar evolution of the modern computer. The bibliography shows extensive research in primary sources as well as a comprehensive array of books and articles; in many respects it is by itself worth the modest price of the book.
Budiansky is a polymathic journalist whose other present publication is a study of the intelligence of dogs. An Atlantic Monthly correspondent, Budiansky provides an exceptionally literate guide to the rapid and convoluted development of cryptography through the end of World War II, and his cogent conclusions on the subsequent growth of the immense cryptological bureaucracies are perceptive. Battle of Wits is not the only book of its kind, but it stands with the finest.
Ripcord: Screaming Eagles Under Siege, Vietnam 1970
Keith Nolan. Novato, CA: Presidio, 2000.
Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $29.95 ($26.95).
Reviewed by Lieutenant General John H. Cushman, U.S. Army (Retired)
From March to July 1970 the 3d Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division fought a series of actions in the jungle-- covered mountains west of Hue to seize and hold Firebase Ripcord. From there an offensive was to be supported into the A Shan Valley near the Laos border that would destroy North Vietnamese supply installations and the North Vietnam Army regiments that protected them.
This book, meticulously researched by Keith Nolan-who interviewed scores of participants over three years-is the gripping story of that fight. Deliberately kept out of the news at the time, and overshadowed by operations in Cambodia, the battle for Ripcord finally is told here. It is well worth reading as a searing narrative of soldiers and small units in battle, of decision making at division level and below, and as a microcosm of America's painful last years in Vietnam.
The withdrawal of U.S. troops, along with the Vietnamization of the fight, had begun in 1969. A year before Ripcord, the 3d Brigade of the 101st had lost 56 dead and 400 wounded in a battle for Dong Ap Bia-dubbed Hamburger Hill by the troops. After that fight, General Creighton Abrams, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, flew to see the division commander, Major General Melvin Zais, and told him, "Goddammit, Mel, find a better way to do it." The Vietnam command was made to understand that if President Richard M. Nixon was to maintain public support long enough to implement Vietnamization, high casualty tolls would not be tolerated.
The North Vietnamese could not be allowed to build their forces and logistics undisturbed along the border with Laos; the 101st and the highly regarded South Vietnamese Ist Division were given the task of breaking up these concentrations in Operation Chicago Peak. The first phase called for the 2d Battalion, 506th Infantry, to secure dominant terrain for a firebase by heliborne assault. In a tight narrative, Nolan takes us through this opening move, in which the peak selected was found to be too well defended and Ripcord's peak became the alternate firebase site. Nolan brings out the personalities of the commanders at all levels; it is one of the best parts of the book.
After four months of vicious fighting, the acting division commander decided to leave Ripcord to the enemy. On the firebase's final day, as the battalion commander of the 2/506 was supervising the liftoff of his last unit, he was killed by a mortar round that landed at his feet-the last casualty of Ripcord. An unheralded fight that had cost many more lives than Hamburger Hill, Ripcord left behind only its simple record of valor, sacrifice, and performance under adverse conditions.