Clash of Steel

Maj. Denton's team experienced the occasional screwup, but on the whole, things worked the way they were supposed to. This novel is especially fascinating because it was written by a man who has been there, done that. Burruss, who retired as deputy commander of the Delta Force, knows whereof he speaks as to how the weapons and other technology work, how a Special Forces team operates and how the men -- and woman -- talk to each other. This gives "Clash of Steel" an authenticity you don't find in a novel by someone whose research is learned rather than lived. Norman Mailer, in "Of a Fire on the Moon," lamented that it was too bad someone with an artist's sensibility didn't get to ride in space to be able to tell us more lyrically what it's like out there. Instead we have engineers, scientists and pilots, whose imaginations tend more to the practical than the heart. In the war experience, veterans who come back to write novels may have the hearts of poets, but they tend to have soldiered at the grunt level -- enlisted or as junior officers. Burruss is the rare exception. An English teacher before he decided to take up the profession of his father and grandfather, he brings a lyrical imagination and the advantage of a greater range of military experience to the craft of writing. And his writing reveals a depth of understanding of the dynamics of battle and of the people in them that can't be faked. As a bonus, Burruss give us a plausible plot, set at that end of the Cold War in Iran, with strategic consequences that, while now part of history, could re-emerge under various scenarios in a more modern geo-political setting. The only license he took, undoubtedly as a sacrifice of realism for the sake of one seriously thrilling story, was the absence of Mr. Murphy, and his law that if something can go wrong it sure as hell will. One nit: there was so much terminology and acronymology for everything from weapons systems to organizational components, that at times it read a little like a Pentagon paper. The fact that the guy writing it has probably written plenty of real Pentagon papers, made this not only tolerable but the more interesting for it. But it's an esoteric interest, for readers with a military background. Not sure how an editor could make it friendlier to a general readership without turning it into Rambo times 16. If I had to choose, I'd say without hesitation, screw the general readership.

Excellent book that pits a special forces B team against a soviet rifle regiment and a tanks regiment in Iran... This small 16 man team manages to force the Soviets to call for a truce because of superior American firepower.