Paperback fighter.

• Author: Shuger, Scott
• Position: Author Tom Clancy

Paperback Fighter

Tom Clancy is lousy at writing sex scenes between a man and a woman. But he's great at writing sex scenes between a man and a weapons system. In Clancy's Red Storm Rising, it's boy meets plane, boy gets plane:

Colonel Douglas Ellington's fingertips caressed the control stick of his F-19A Ghostrider attack fighter....

Lockheed called her the Ghostrider. The pilots called her the Frisbee, the F-19A, the secretly developed Stealth attack fighter. She had no corners, no box shapes to allow radar signals to bounce cleanly off her. Her high-bypass turbofans were designed to emit a blurry infrared signature at most. From above, her wings appeared to mimic the shape of a cathedral bell. From in front, they curved oddly toward the ground, earning her the affectionate nickname of Frisbee. Though she was a masterpiece of electronic technology inside, she usually didn't use her active systems....

Or consider this episode from The Cardinal of the Kremlin:

Slowly, the Archer raised the launcher and trained its two-element sight on the approaching helicopter. His thumb went sideways and down on the activation switch, and he nestled his cheekbone on the conductance bar. He was instantly rewarded with the warbling screech of the launcher's seeker unit.

... The helicopter was sideslipping right at him now, expanding around the inner ring of the sight. It was now in range. The Archer punched the forward button with his left thumb, "uncaging" the missile and giving the infrared seeker-head on the Stinger its first look at the heat radiating from the Mi-24's turboshaft engines. The sound carried through his cheekbone into his ear changed. The missile was now tracking the target....

The missile screamed its readiness at the Archer now, but still he was patient. He put his mind into that of his target, and judged that the pilot would come closer still before his helicopter had the shot he wanted at the hated Afghans. And so he did. When the Hind was only a thousand meters off, the Archer took a deep breath, super-elevated his sight, and whispered a brief prayer of vengeance. The trigger was pulled almost of its own accord.

... As always, it was almost a sexual release when the launcher tube bucked in his hands...

All this caressing! All this nestling! This warbling, whispering, and bucking! In Clancy's world, war takes on the romantic allure most of us find in something else. What was it that Clancy said after the Army let him drive a tank and fire its cannon? "Sixty tons, 1,500 horsepower, and a four-inch gun--that's sex!" And what was his comment after the Army staged mock battles for his viewing pleasure? "It was Disneyland with guns! It was better than sex!"

Well, so what? Clancy is, after all, great airport reading. What's the harm in having such a hoot on paper with wars that never happened? The harm is that a lot of people read at the airport--to date, 20 million of them have read Clancy's five books. And there could be at least that many customers for the first Clancy movie--The Hunt for Red October--when it comes out next spring. That's millions and millions of people who have gotten most of what they know about warfare and the U.S. military from an ex-insurance agent who never served a day on active duty.

Government by bestseller

And the further misfortune is that some of those fans control the U.S. military. Ronald Reagan called Clancy his favorite author and had him in for a private chat at the White House. With patronage like that, Clancy has had no trouble getting the ear of the National Security Council, the CIA, and the FBI. The Navy lets him go to sea and the Army lets him drive tanks. Dan Quayle is also an admirer; once, in a speech on the Senate floor, Quayle advocated funding the ASAT antisatellite weapon on the grounds that it was what won the war in Red Storm Rising. "They're not just novels," Quayle explained. "They're read as the real thing."

Late last summer, George Bush made sure he got a copy of Clancy's newest novel, Clear and Present Danger, within hours of its publication, and he recently said that Clancy has made "a marvelous contribution... to our literary world and, I also would like to think, to the national security interests of the United States." It's more than a little eerie that just a few weeks after reading Clancy's latest effort, in which the U.S. government turns away from confronting the Evil Empire in order to tackle Colombian narcoterrorism, Bush decided to do the same thing. Have we finally arrived at a new form of polity? Government by Bestseller.

With all this official acceptance, it's hard to remember that Clancy writes fiction. Now admittedly, fiction can point to real truths--just think of Oliver Twist and The Grapes of Wrath--that government and society should take account of. But has Tom Clancy done anything like that? Does he know what he's talking about? He certainly seems to know a lot about how planes, subs, and missiles are supposed to work, and how we and the Soviets intend to use them. And this makes his books that much more seductive. But is there any reason to think that he knows what will happen when those weapons and those intentions are put into the pressure-cooker of combat? The more complex war has become, the more ways there are for missions to go bad, and the graver the consequences. The history of modern warfare is replete with counterexamples to Tom Clancy's vision. The problem is that history hasn't sold 20 million copies.

How unlike fiction is real war! Clancy has it in his head--and his readers are getting it drummed into theirs--that the U.S. military is a precise instrument, capable of almost effortless accuracy. In Clear and Present Danger, a Navy bomber pilot en route to the target of his laser-guided bomb thinks of his mission as "too easy." A few pages later, Clancy almost lovingly describes the bombing itself as sure-fire mechanized ballet:

It landed within inches of its target point, striking the top of the truck. Unlike the first test shot, this bomb was impact-fused. Two detonators, one in the nose and one in the tail, were triggered by a computer chip within a microsecond of the instant when the seeker head struck the fiberglass top of the truck. There were mechanical backups to the electronic triggers. Neither...