Black Storm (Tales of the Modern Navy.) | David Poyer | A big Book about small unit action

Black Storm (Tales of the Modern Navy.) | David Poyer | Boots On The Ground

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Black Storm (Tales...

	Black Storm (Tales of the Modern Navy.) David Poyer, 2002 - 292 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It is the eve of America's invasion of Iraq, and Saddam Hussein has threatened to attack Tel Aviv if a single tank enters his country. Though the United States has no intelligence on the type of location of the weapon, Naval Lieutenant-Commander Dan Lenson and a recon team of Marines and military professionals are ordered to eliminate the threat. After a crippling trek into the Iraqi desert, the team successfully locates the weapon in the underground tunnels of Baghdad, only to find that destroying it would unleash a horror more terrifying than anyone could have imagined.

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A big Book about small unit action

In the days prior to commencement of the ground war in Iraq during the first Gulf War, allied intelligence comes across a possible WMD weapon system called Flying Rocks. A hastily assembled team is inserted by helicopter and then moves over land to Baghdad.

I read the Publisher's Weekly blurb, and I'm not quite sure what they are complaining about. BLACK STORM and CHINA SEA are amongst Poyer's better books. BLACK STORM is the gritty action of a recon team that penetrates 500 miles into hostile territory to discover a horrifying weapon.

There are the complex interactions between the Force Recon marines, an SAS trooper who has been in the desert way too long, and two attachments. One of the charms of this book are the details as they walk across the cold desert, dodge Iraqi patrols and finally penetrate the Iraqi bunker beneath a hospital complex.

Another home run.

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Boots On The Ground

ABOUT THIS BOOK: If you're new to David Poyer please see the section titled ABOUT THE AUTHOR. Dan Lenson's exciting, yet imperfect Naval career is about to take a new twist, this time with the Marine Corps. Because of his expertise in missiles he is pared with a USMC Recon unit and dropped into the desert during the first Gulf War to search for WMD. I love small unit military action when it's written well and Poyer nailed it in this book! The Marines in this book are well portrayed, realistic and in some cases deeply flawed human beings.

YOU'LL LIKE THIS BOOK IF:
* You like small unit military action novels like "God's Childrend" and moveis like "Blackhawk Down"
* You want to know what it's like to have Boots On The Ground, as infantry troops say.
* You like Poyer's earlier stuff.
* You don't mind a little harsh language. This book has more of that than you typically see from Poyer or this genre in general.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Poyer is the only writer in this genre I'm aware of who isn't writing about future, "what if" scenarios. He has been writing Dan Lenson into recent historical situations, which might make you think that you already know how the story ends, but he makes it very, very exciting. His writing is excellent (not so with every writer in this genre)and his stories are compelling. What else could you ask for?

BOTTOM LINE: It's on my Favorite list.

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Outstanding

With lots of up to date military action and tech speak I found the book quite interesting. I have read three others and been impressed with Mr. Poyers writing. I feel his background has enabled him to write quite factual and compose a novel interesting to all that care for military action. I highly recommend this book.

Fair wind and following seas

This was a very good book in the continuing series about Commander Dan Lenson. It was a refreshing lapse from the at sea tales. As a former sailor in the U.S. Navy I can totally believe and understand what was going on. I am also a veteran of Desert Storm. David Poyer has again captured the essence and feeling of life in the naval service as well as the Corps. I am looking forward to the last book in the series, The Command, which I have just started.

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Highly evocative writing about a march into bleakness

Calling David Poyer's Dan Lenson novels military procedurals obscures the very good writing, of or near literary quality, within them.

"Black Storm" has gotten panned by some reviewers for plot deficiencies. Lenson gets detailed to a hurried, ill-conceived land recon mission into Iraq just before the Allied invasion in 1991. It's different from other series entries as less action is seen through Lenson's eyes.

But that's also one of its strengths. Poyer seems refreshed by the opportunity to put his fiction ashore to write about land warfare.

His descriptive passages of the team's mission into Iraq - from its harrowing flight in on a helicopter, to its trek towards Baghdad - are highly evocative. Lenson and a recon team must march at night across a barren, hostile landscape. Poyer spares no literary effort in it, as well as the soldiers' equally bleak interior landscapes on this highly dangerous mission.

They don't even know its endpoint: part of their job is figuring it out. Rumors of Saddam Hussein preparing to use a weapon of mass destruction, probably against Israel, are peaking, but commanders don't know what it is, or where, other than somewhere in Baghdad. Even the source is problematic, a Syrian-linked agent of dubious credibility. Whether a mission would actually be sent under these find-the-needle-in-the-haystack circumstances is one weakness in the plot. Poyer sets it against the ticking clock of the invasion deadline to bolster believability, but I still can't imagine a recon team would be dispatched with so vague an idea of its target.

The team's makeup contains the usual cliches of military fiction - the dedicated but haunted platoon leader, the short-timer, the psycho, the bigot, the minority, the Southerner and so on. (Refreshingly, the bigot isn't from the South, he's from the West.) This being set in the `90s, we get not only a minority (a silent Guatemalan) but a woman - a biological warfare expert - Who Must Prove Herself Among Skeptical Men. To Poyer's credit, he handles the platoon dynamics with reasonable subtlety, not pounding them too hard and weaving them into the fabric of the mission.

Poyer convincingly gets inside team members' heads, and the book is better for it. He easily could have fallen back on using Lenson's outsider and new-to-ground-warfare status to view most action through his eyes, but instead we get to see how elite modern Marines - not SEALs or Delta Force commandos, but rather people who typify what every Marine learns - operate, see themselves, and continue to function despite fear, exhaustion and hopeless odds.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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