The Command

I have only read a few pages of it so far, but it warms the coccles of an old Naval Officer's heart and brings back many memories. Tom

You want to cheer for protagist Dan Lenson, but the author has made his flaws so overwhelming you keep thinking, "this guy is a schmuck!" On the other hand, Commander Dan, toiling in a Navy so flawed you wonder how they can float a conoe, always comes through in the crisis. The writing is compelling, however dark, and I continue to read every novel in the series.

In "Command" DC Poyer has finally elevated Dan Lenson - the luckless but never feckless USN Career officer-hero of his books - to a genuine command. Previoulsy, Lenson had near commands of other ships and, in "China Sea", center-seated an obsolete destroyer on a covert sea war against modern-day pirates of the Pacific. In "Command", it's 1992, and Lenson masters a Tomahawk-armed missile destroyer, the USS Horn. With a mixed-gender crew, the Horn is something of a social-experiment at sea. Sent to mideastern waters to enforce the post-Desert Storm blockade against Saddam Hussein, Lenson will contend with smugglers and terrorists as well as more internal threats - vague ROE, friction caused by the presence of women aboard and outright hostility from colleagues. Unfortunately for Dan, his immediate supervisor is Admiral Niles - his boss from "Tomahawk". Though African-American, Niles has some intolerant views on women in combat - and considering the bad terms with which he and Dan parted ways, Niles's position bodes poorly for Lenson & The Horn. Following form from his other books, Poyer adds depth to his depiction of sea-life by creating a coterie of lower-echelon crewmembers whose lives will run parallel the intrigue of the larger story - from women sailors aboard the Horn to an American Muslim who runs investigations for NCIS in Bahrain. Departing from the other books, Poyer also gives us the terrorists themselves - especially a Sunni doctor who constructs especially deadly bombs for a certain, never-named organization (though we can guess) that cut its teeth driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan, and now may have Dan's new command in his sites. Lenson must balance these threats/issues while running Horn on a mission that includes blockade enforcement and possible attacks on Iraq. This is great stuff - it's not quite as unpredictable as "China Sea", but we see more of the crew's private lives than we had in other books. Poyer drops details from his other books, though they seem extraneous - neither advancing the plot nor hindering it for those who haven't read them. Though sometimes seeming abbreviated, Poyer still writes a meatier naval technothriller than anybody else. Poyer isn't afraid of using flawed, sometimes unlikable characters plagued by self-doubt and lacking cutting-edge technology - though "Command" actually gives us some techno-wizardry without getting in the way of our characters' personality. If "Command" has a flaw, it's that it creates too many threads without resolving them. More any other Poyer book, it looks needlessly unfinished.

Dan Lenson finally gets command, but it is a mixed blessing. He takes over from a captain, who did his best to do nothing, and he is handed an experiment - the first integrated crew (male/female) on a warship. Does Poyer have an opinion? I think so, and he tends to hammer it home through out the book. Does the ship and crew sail into danger? Do they take casualties? Is there a bad guy out to get them? Yes, yes and yes - why else would we read a David Poyer book. Is it realistic - for the most part. I could have done without the four-letter diatribes and the knuckle-headed excesses engendered in a mixed crew, but that is also part of the story. I swallowed this one in 2 sittings.

I have been a fan of David Poyer for years, reading nearly all his books. He brings realism to his characters and many of his books will survive the test of time to become classics. Read Poyer today and you'll be captured for life. Read David E. Meadows forthcoming book DARK PACIFIC due for release September 2006.