Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World

LTC Peters' best work thus far---and I've followed his writings (fiction, non-fiction, columns---and the Army War College Quarterly, Parameters) for years. Peters lays bare the world as it is (or was during the late 80's/early 90's) warts and all. This isn't a collection of columns but a record of travel to places most people will never, nor would ever want to see. I spent a great deal of time in the Former Soviet Union in the early 90's and can vouch for the conditions Peters' describes and the crack-pot/thug/mafia wannabes that rushed into the vacuum the communists left behind (in most cases---the communists changed hats/affiliations). One story which mirrors Peters experience in the FSU was during a humanitarian aid mission in the early 90's in Kazakhstan. There was one instance of delivering food-stuffs and medical supplies, but our folks had no idea "what" was in the delivering railcars before the railcars appeared. One car was full of canned pork---and concerned about the Muslim populations dietary restrictions, we informed our counterparts---and he quickly assured that the product would be described as "American "white beef"". All laughed at the time, but truth is, no one had any idea what happened to any of the "relief" supplies after our Kazak counterpart signed for custody----but everyone guessed the materials ended up on the black-market and there was subsequent evidence to bear this out. Back to Peters---great story of reflections/impressions and clear judgements. If policy-makers still did their own reading---this book would be high on the list. Perhaps someday, Peters will return to government as a SECDEF or CIA Director---now, that would be interesting. Many thanks to LTC Peters for a great read. Highly recommended!!

Ralph Peter's book should be required reading for every Marxism-besotted and multiculturalism-drunk humanities department in the United States. He stumbled upon an elemental truth in a youthful visit to Tito's Yugoslavia with its communism-lite: "There was nothing like firsthand exposure to the dialectical materialism to teach that the dialectic rarely delivered the material. Leftist rhetoric is wonderfully seductive. The tragedy is that those stirring promises are worthless." Most of the book adventures over the center of that contagion, or as Peters likes to describe it, "across the rotting corpse of the former Soviet Union." This book gives that fingertip feel of anecdotal truth to this marvelous combination of memoir, travelogue, and social and strategic commentary. Not since the Comte de Custine traveled across Russia in the late 18th century (pegging the Russians as blond Orientals, by the way) has there been such a deft and insightful portrait of that immense and wasted land. Tongue in cheek he opines that he is convinced there is no word in Russian for maintenance; certainly the epitaph of the Soviet Union is "seventy-four years of deferred maintenance." But it is the lives blighted on the altar of ideology that draw out his empathy in the penetrating human portraits he sketches with his prose and everywhere is the waste of human potential, the lives emptied of a future. Yet, he does not overlook the beauty. Peters has a magic inkwell, I am convinced after reading almost everything he has written from his thrillers to his strategic essays to his incomparable Owen Parry series of Civil War murder mysteries. He dips his pen into a poet's ink of beauty and writes a description of the Baltic coast. "The route traced the Amber Coast, a stretch of cold, white sand as beautiful as Heaven on a holiday. Dark blue waves lapped a coastline of low dunes adorned with stunted trees, worn rocks, and golden reeds. Birds rose broad-winged from marshes, black against the blue-enamel sky. No end of books praise the palette of the south, the lemon light of Italy, or the hues of an Arab souk. But there are no colors so true and piercing as those of an early summer day I the north, when the white clouds temper the brightness, lulling your eyes before the sun reappears. The world grows deep and detailed: the gnarl of driftwood, talcum sand, the vast, competing blues of sea and sky. A walk on the shore becomes a stroll with God." Peters reserves a special contempt for that group of arrogant, Ivy-League amateurs in the Clinton years who bungled our relationship with the bewildered fragments of the old Soviet Union. Prisoners of their own delusions, they insisted that the old Russia of czar and commissar had vanished in a dawn of good intentions, a breathless, evolutionary leap worthy of the crackpot Marxist genetics of that fraud Lysenko. Peters more realistically noted, "We had passed through the Soviet sickroom just before the hour of dea

"Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World by Ralph Peters (367 pages, Stackpole Books, 2008) Reviewed by Frederick J. Chiaventone One of my favorite tales from childhood, and one which I've happily shared with my own sons, is Rudyard Kipling's marvelous tale "Rikki Tikki Tavi." A story of a plucky young mongoose who embodies the insatiable curiosity of his breed and their collective motto "Run and find out!" Rikki is the favored guardian of an English family in India and his natural instinct is to seek out and destroy the threatening serpents in his family's house and garden. Krait or cobra each is dealt with summarily in Rikki's enclave. Ralph Peters is about as close as we come to a latter day Rikki Tikki Tavi in human form. A retired Army intelligence officer with an insatiable curiosity and a scintillating intellect to match, trouble has almost a magnetic attraction for Ralph. I must admit to having had Ralph as a close friend for decades now and can recall while we were both still on active duty a number of his friends would gather in a quiet office at the Foreign Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth to read Ralph's letters out loud. Be they from Tajikistan, Moscow, or Azerbaijan they were priceless. His private letters invariably contained the intimate and telling details of a life on the road that would never make it into his official reports and yet were as revealing as anything one could hope for. Ralph is blessed with an insatiable curiosity, a crusading belief in justice and fair play, and a stubborn determination that is legendary. His ability to assess a situation and anticipate violent changes in society is exceptional. Take for example his assessment of the former Soviet Union just before it began to come apart at the seams; "The USSR was a hopeless case, in need of a mercy killinig. We sensed that its hour was coming, perhaps in months, certainly in a year. Later that summer, as I sat in a staff-college classroom in Kansas, tanks would fire into the Russian parliament and the face of the tall white building would burn black. The Soviet Union would die overnight and Boris Yeltsin would begin his reign in a fit of exhiliration that ended, as things Russian so often do, in drunken exhaustion." Repeatedly and with incisive and well-documented proof of his enights Peters would submit written reports of what he had seen and experienced up the chain-of-command. All too frequently his input was ignored, pigeon-holed, or relegated to the circular file and the bureaucrats responsible for our international relations would plod blindly ahead into catastrophe. Time and again, upon returning from a trip of exploration and inquiry Peters would find.. "...no one in the U.S. Intelligence was interested. If the data didn't come from a satellite it didn't count. The human factor was messy and unpredictable. Better to count tanks and ships and wait for a reviva of the Cold War. Intelligence failure is as old as

Marine Corps officers would call this a collection of sea stories -- tales of seedy fortune, hard-knock education, and derring-do that leaves readers in stitches, tears, or both. After three decades of globetrotting on behalf of America, this is a book that Ralph Peters has earned the right to write. All his hallmarks are on display in "Looking for Trouble": Kissinger-esque insight, Jeremiah-like candor, and a wit (and karaoke partner) that Mark Twain would envy. Reading this is the most fun I've had with travel writing this side of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Steinbeck. A cynical bookbuyer might discount the five stars and voluminous accolades as just a literary comrade's pep talk. However, this is Peters's first work of nonfiction that I thought rated five stars. His strategic tomes were interesting, colorful, and well-written. But Peters wrote those books with urgency, attempting to square away the post-9/11 U.S. military and educate the Pentagon's minions to prevent them from doing anything stupid (well, at least he tried). They didn't quite have that extra spark. "Looking for Trouble" does. And then some. I had thought about ending this review with quotes from the outstanding statements I found in the narrative. If I was going to grant Peters a perfect score, I figured I should at least show him off a bit to justify my judgment. As I was reading, I folded back each page that I found a remarkable sentence, unexpected insight, or laugh-out-loud outrageous illustration. I bookmarked 53 pages.

This book is not, as some might expect, a collection of past Op-Eds, but rather an extraordinary retrospective at the 1989-1996 time frame when officers like Ralph (and General Al Gray, myself, and a number of others in the Army and the Marines) were seeing the writing on the wall: the end of big war and the emergence of global instability in every clime and place). Ralph actually walked the ground and had "eyes on." I was immediately charmed anew by the poetic writing and the visually elegant turns of phrase. I have in my notes: chuckled, amused, reminded. This review is going to combine my fly leaf notes with as many short quotes as I can fit in within my 1,000 word allotment. Notes first: Deep reading of Tolstoy and others set the stage for *understanding* today's culture and mindset in Russia. Earlier in his life, a subscription gift from an aunt to National Geographic opened his eyes to the rest of the world. Early on, disdain for how we spend billions on satellites and nothing on officers walking the ground. He notes that overt human intelligence can absorb and articulate what no satellite can provide: "the temper of the people, the taste of the land." USSR in 1991 was potholes and rust. In his "walk-about" he gained direct invited access to an MVD commander's office, to all of the local "secret" messages, and had invited "eyes on" the MVD special intelligence communications room. In the Bosnia-Kosovo run-up, which he and others anticipated, he learned that Europe cannot be trusted to act in unison or decisively in the absence of strong US leadership--France, Germany, and the United Kingdom all revert to their historical animosities, and despite their large standing armies, lack the political will or the deep strategic analytics necessary to use those armies in a coherent manner. His respect for Armenia is deeply rooted in his on the ground experience among them. Col Stu Herrington, whose book Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World I have praised, is strongly praised in this book. He and the author were part of a team that worked with the Russians to address the long-standing concern over Americans being held in the Gulag, and the pages in this book, covering each of the wars from World War II onwards, are a complete surprise and essential reading for anyone interested in POW/MIA accounting. He blasts the US policy of crop eradication, and his devastating criticism of arm-chair politicians and ivory tower diplomats warms my heart. Late in the book he focused on Pakistan and I find this chapter especially vital for the public understanding of how the US is destroying its once-close ties to the Pakistani officer corps. The older officers are fully trained by the British or the US. The company and field grade officers are not, and are so delusional about Islam and so ignorant about the rest of the world as to be very dangerous to us. Throughout the book he laments the lot of women across most Islamic countries (