Red Phoenix

A few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin's first collaborative effort, Red Phoenix, became a New York Times bestselling novel.In this novel, Bond (Tom Clancy's uncredited co-author of Red Storm Rising) uses his superb writing skills, experience as a former Navy intelligence expert and talents as a war game designer (he is the creator of Harpoon) to write a terrifying scenario for a second and even more destructive Korean War.Red Phoenix is set in the early 1990s. North Korea's elderly Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung, is still alive but clearly frail. Day to day control of this isolated and paranoid Stalinist nation is now in the hands of Kim's ambitious son, Kim Jong-Il, the Dear Leader. Ruthless and mercurial, the younger Kim seeks to surpass his father and accomplish what the old man had failed to do in the 1950s: the reunification of the Communist North and the capitalist South.At first, Kim's plans almost become undone when a team of South Korean and American soldiers discovers a tunnel dug under the DMZ by North Korean combat engineers. In it is a vast stockpile of weapons, ammunition, and even Soviet-made tanks, enough for a battalion of invaders. But events elsewhere, including the office of a Michigan Congressman and the Interior Ministry in Seoul, soon create a perfect convergence of events that enables North Korea's nefarious Dear Leader to mobilize his forces and launch a lightning invasion of South Korea.Bond and Larkin's novel depicts units, weapons systems, and tactics which were state-of-the-art 14 years ago, and the political makeup of the world has changed since its publication. (Modern day readers might see as archaic Bond's references to the Soviet Union, East Germany, and other Warsaw Pact nations. In early 1989, these may have sided with North Korea, at least nominally. Today, of course, the USSR is no more, East Germany reunited with West Germany and is part of NATO, as is Poland.) However, considering the current and alarming situation as the real Kim Jong-Il races to build and openly deploy nuclear weapons, Red Phoenix is no longer a relic of Cold War-era popular fiction; it is a chilling vision of what a conventional conflict in the Korean Peninsula could have been like before North Korea upped the ante and developed weapons of mass destruction.

"Red Phoenix" is the authority in the world of "What if's" as far as the Korean theater of operations is concerned. The "puzzle palace" was probably wondering how he figured all this out. I'd originally read this amazing story when it first came out and was just floored by the realism, the character interactions and the author's knowledge of military operations. A few years later I was scheduled to go to South Korea on tdy and picked it up to read again. It was amazing to be reading this book and seeing a lot of the areas he'd talked about in the book, in person. To see the river's and the rivetments on the banks, to see the tank barricades all around Seoul and all the bases north of Seoul and be reading this book again at the same time. Absolutely amazing! Thank you very much to Larry Bond for an excellent book.

This is just an incredible tale about a second Korean War.Contrary to other people i find refreshing the fact that Larry Bond does not comes up with all Clancy's "political know how" and page after page of boring reading. This book just goes to the point, you fill you are in the foxhole with the infantry or riding along with the F-16 fighter pilots. Great Read.