Short of a video recording, it is impossible to relive your past. Even if you succeeded in convincing H.G. Wells’ Time Traveller to let you hitch a ride on his machine, your experiences since childhood have changed you to the degree that you would experience those years differently the second time around. This is what Thomas Wolfe was getting at when he said you can’t go home again.
An exercise in nostalgia can be disappointing if you dig past the superficial memories. It is no coincidence that the word’s origins in Greek are nostos (return home) and algos (pain). Specifically, I wanted to determine if the novels I treasured in my youth and young adulthood still had the same effect on me. Would I love them again? And considering that memories are so often a faulty catalogue of actual events, would my memories of the books even be accurate?
In 1988, I was a 13-year-old Cold Warrior. I spent many hours studying the state of the American and Soviet militaries using the pre-internet means we had available at the time. I managed to borrow several of the massive and very expensive Jane’sseries of hardcover books that catalogued various navies and other military hardware of armed forces around the world. I would create massive handwritten lists from these tomes because I couldn’t afford to buy the books. Photocopying them was also beyond my budget.
Each Christmas and birthday, I would ask my parents for more reasonably priced books on the same subject. I spent hours reading James Dunnigan’s A Quick and Dirty Guide to War and How to Make War, gaining an inordinate amount of expertise in modern warfare for an eighth-grader. Looking back, this obsession with all things military did not help in my attempts to be one of the cool kids. Few eighth-grade girls were swayed by my “charms” during a discussion of sabot versus HEAT rounds for the M1A1 Abrams tank.
My love affair with the Cold War was shepherded by the rise of the techno-thriller. The success of Tom Clancy’s A Hunt for the Red Octoberswept a wave of these novels onto the bestseller lists throughout the 1980s. That debut novel was Clancy’s best work. The Jack Ryan universe of novels, video games, TV series and films would continue until present day. But at the time, my personal favorite of Clancy’s oeuvre didn’t feature that famous character at all.
Red Storm Rising depicts a large-scale conventional war between NATO and the Soviet Union. As a 45-year-old, many of the details of the plot had grown fuzzy. My memories involved an all-encompassing conventional war on land, air and sea. My mind’s eye had a picture of multiple subplots focused on tanks fighting in Germany, air battles over the Atlantic and submarines battling underneath.
My 13-year-old self was mesmerized. Growing up in southeast Wichita, every day I would see F-4 Phantoms flying over our home on their way to McConnell Air Force base. I was thrilled to see the Wild Weasel version of the fighter jet appear in a raid on Iceland in the pages of the novel. That was the starkest detail I remembered. Mostly, when I thought of the novel, a vague, warm feeling of nostalgia flooded my brain. It was the perfect book for a military-obsessed young teenager.
I soon sought out as many similar techno-thrillers as possible. One in particular earned a long-term spot on my bookshelf: Team Yankee. Other than a faint nostalgia, my memories of this novel were even more vague. I remembered that the basic plot was similar to Red Storm Rising, except Team Yankee focused more on tank battles in Germany.
When I sat down to read these two books for a second time, 32 years had passed. Part of me feared that the reality of these novels would ruin my nostalgia. But that was the point. I wanted to find out how much of that 13-year-old was still left inside of me.
As I read through Red Storm Rising, I soon realized my memories were faulty. Though much of the fictional war happened in Germany and Norway, the novel focused on the naval and air campaigns taking place over, on and under the surface of the North Atlantic. My memory included chapter after chapter of glorious tank battles. They did not exist in the pages of this novel. Also, I had completely forgotten a major sub-plot of the book involving an amphibious invasion of Iceland.
In the second half of the book, more attention was paid to the land campaign, but primarily from the view of a Soviet general: Pavel Alekseyev. I correctly remembered that the conflict was precipitated by a terrorist attack on the largest oil refinery in the Soviet Union; an attack that threatened to cripple their economy. But I had blocked from my memory the fact that the American forces had conducted a preemptive strike on Soviet airfields in East Germany while the Soviets massed for an attack.
I might have selectively forgotten that last point because it made the black hat/white hat element of the story a little less tidy. Not that a preemptive strike under those circumstances would have been unfair. The Soviet advantage in conventional forces would have threatened to overwhelm NATO very quickly. But for a boy raised on The Lone Ranger, a preemptive strike might have seemed less than heroic.
Clancy’s predilection for hardware over people didn’t bother the 13-year-old me. I doubt I noticed. But I most definitely noticed the second time around. It’s not as if Clancy couldn’t create vibrant characters: Hunt for the Red October is a testament to that. But there was a paucity of humanity in Red Storm Rising. Yes, there was a human-centric subplot in Iceland centered around a U.S. Air Force officer who escapes to the countryside when his base is overrun. He ends up rescuing a damsel-in-distress after a violent rape. But the entire rape scene and its aftermath struck me having been written by someone who was desperately trying to write about something he didn’t know how to write about.
Ironically, Soviet General Alekseyev exhibited more roundness than any of the American characters. The novel successfully juxtaposed his frustration at the war and the limitations imposed by the communist system of government with his patriotism and sincere desire to beat the Americans. By the end of the novel, Alekseyev ends up as one of the story’s greatest heroes.
Clancy shines when he focuses on the technology and the realistic portrayals of sailors, soldiers and airmen interacting with their fellows. But outside of those conversations, the prose in Red Storm Rising might be described as “good enough.” Just when you think Clancy is on a roll with a brilliant exchange between crewmates on a submarine, you’ll get hit with page 261: “…gave off enough heat to attract the attention of a blind man in a fur coat.”
I am not the first to point out the occasional deficiency in Clancy’s writing. Christopher Buckley, novelist, journalist and son of William F., had a long and storied history of antagonizing Clancy about the quality of his novels. He even called Clancy “the most successful bad writer of his generation.” Regardless of their literary merit, Clancy’s novels fascinated millions of readers for good reason. He told stories worth telling and did so in a way that accurately portrayed the military and intelligence communities. He also channeled Nostradamus: his fictional scenarios leapt from the novel to the newspaper page.
And Clancy should be praised for recognizing one of the the Cold War military’s blind spots. He introduces a female Air Force pilot who is reduced to ferrying F-15s across the Atlantic Ocean because her gender disallows her from being in combat. Amy Nakamura runs into several Soviet Badger bombers on her way over and manages to shoot down three. She then is tasked with an anti-satellite mission and proceeds to gain ace status after shooting them down.
Team Yankee turns out to be a better book for the 45-year-old me. The characters are more fully human and more thoughtful. The protagonist, Captain Sean Bannon, bitterly dreams up an accurate, but unsent letter describing the reality of war to a dead subordinate’s mother: “Dear Mrs. Lorriet, your son was killed in nameless, insignificant sideshow. Better luck next time.”
The experience of rereading this book confirmed my fear that the magic I felt as an eight-grader could not be replicated so many years later. But it’s no surprise. I can’t read these books again for the first time. Those feelings can’t be felt in the same way. Surprisingly, it doesn’t bother me. Red Storm Rising and Team Yankee each comprise a duality: the idea of the book I have from my youth and the reality of the book as I read it at age 45. And thank goodness that’s the case. Who wants to be a flat character that never changes?
