I remember as a P-3 pilot flying to the datum of a Soviet submarine seeing our acoustic operators reading the Hunt for Red October, then hours closely tracking the boomer or SSN, completing a constructive kill, and picking back up their reading as we RTB’d. When art and the art of ASW merge!
I was working in NAVSEA when the book came out. I went down to a Crystal City book store during lunch to buy a copy, wearing the uniform of the day, SDB. I asked for the “Tom Clancy book.” The clerk said “Oh, you mean the Search for Red October.” I did a double take and said “You don’t search for submarines. You hunt them, and then you kill them.” The clerk was taken back a little, but he found the book.
I first read Red Storm Rising while my Air Guard unit was deployed to an airbase in Norway for a two week summer camp. Usually under the wing of an F-16 filling idle moments waiting for a pilot or a fuel truck. That paperback spent 15 days in the left cargo pocket of my BDU pants.
Wish I'd just read his books. As a Navy student at the Air War College senior course in 1995, AWC invited Mr. Clancy to speak to us. My entire seminar was underwhelmed. His whole talk was a self-congratulatory pat on his own back...who he knew, that he was part owner of a pro-football team, and he'd become a famous author, and how much money he had made. Very much like the former insurance agent he was, not one mention of those who had helped him get where he was, anything about national security, nor even that he cared anything about the audience he was speaking to. Very disappointing and a waste of the time we spent listening to him. Sad really that he was such a braggart and so unaware of his suroundings.
His books were a fun read and helped wash away the post Vietnam stigma carried by the public about the US military. All of his protagonists were honorable which helped change perception of the military. His outsized ego and self-aggrandizing don't detract from his accomplishments any more than Chuck Yeager who was also notorious for the same character flaw.
Yeager was a true Amercian hero and had personal and dangerous accomplishments to brag about. Perhaps if I'd heard him bragging in person I'd feel different.
We can agree to disagree on Mr. Clancy. He's the one I saw in person, and he seemed to think that having made lots of money from his books entitled him to bloviate. If you get invited to speak to an audience of the nation's military leaders, perhaps it would be good to have something worthwhile to say other than bragging about houses you owned, sports teams you bought, and such.
We had Clancy speak at the Midatlantic Chapter of the Naval Submarine League, just after _Patriot_Games_ was published. We had 200 people; he spoke about an hour, and stayed to signed books afterward. He told the story about he came up with The Hunt. It was based on a Kivak, attempting to leave Riga for Sweden. They failed. That was before he was really rich and really famous.
That is disappointing. My dad bumped into him at a DC Metro station shortly after the Hunt for Red October became a smash hit, and he was humble and friendly. They talked about movie adaptations, since Clancy had just sold the film rights to Mace Neufeld. Fame and money can be corrosive over time...
a few years back a family member gave me one of the newer Jack Ryan novels, written for the estate. My OCD kicked in and I had to go back and read them all from Red October to then present. Took about six months with other activities and reading thrown in, but it was an enjoyable experience again.
I think Red October was the first fiction published by Naval Institute Press. One of the next was Flight of the Intruder, which nearly cost me an A on an exam at the trade school when I was either plebe or youngster because I stayed up all night reading it.
Have read all of Clancy's books. Loved them all. Might be time for a second reading. In 1981 in an EW Advanced Applications class we were introduced to the A-6 platform by a guest speaker from the NFO EWO school next door, an ex-Enlisted LCDR A-6 NFO B/N and later in 1982 I was working for a Captain who was an EA-6B NFO EWO. So the book that did it for me was Flight of the Intruder. It was the icing on the cake after the talks by those 2 NFO's. I swear that Coontz put me there in the cockpit. Read it twice. Need to read it again.
A coworker flew A6 in ‘Nam (I forget if he was a pilot or B/N). He loaned me his personally autographed copy with a promise I owed him my 1st born if it didn’t come back pristine. An excellent story.
FBF select highly approved. I was a brand new flag aide (frocked LT) at NavSea when Hunt came out, and my wife generously bought it for my birthday. When RADM W ( sub bubba and a great EDO saw me reading it during my very small lunch break he came over and told me "I've got you something better than that- a ride on a boomer out of Cape Canaveral". Yeah, like that did not sound like a good idea to this young aviator and I voiced my hesitation. Then NavSea 00 came out after hearing my hesitancy and VADM F said "now that is the kind of dumb parochial thinking we've got to eliminate in this Navy". Ugh, yes Admiral, and two weeks later off we went and I took the book with me. If you have to go to sea on a sub the Ohio class wasn't a bad gig - always coffee and ice cream but the flight deck sunset stroll was just not the same.
Back in the early '90s when I was flying AH-64s at Ft. Cavazos (then Ft. Hood), TX, Tom Clancy visited our unit (6th Cav) doing research for an upcoming work (don't know which one). One of our unit IPs (that's Instructor Pilot for the uninitiated) walked him around the aircraft & explained much of its workings & capabilities, and then gave him a short front seat 'courtesy ride' to let him know what it looked & felt like in action.
We used to buzz his house on Chesapeake Bay - Calvert Heights. I was sitting in the door of our Seahawk and we flew about 500 Ft off his home and I waved and he waved back. I think he had an armored vehicle on his lawn. Can’t remember exactly what it was.
Sal, like many who now while away our time on your porch, I spent many afternoons and evenings of my “pre-navy life” enthralled by the words of Tom Clancy…as a teen, he catapulted me from the Ozark mountains of Northwest Arkansas to the waters of the North Atlantic, the craggy fjords of Iceland, and the Fulda Gap. Later in life when sailing those waters or visiting those battlefields of our youth, I was struck by the accuracy and vision of an insurance salesman from Maryland. I recently revisited RED STORM RISING and was again reminded of his vision and mastery of narrative writing. FB indeed!
Great books, almost without exception. He did the Navy and the military a lot of good when we really needed the boost. As to the comments about his personality: So what? WSC was not an easy man to be around either.
Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle all wrote books that military types could read and relate realistically to...mostly. Clancy did NOT understand rotary wing ops, I'll defer to carrier flight ops and armor vets for their opinions and thoughts. For me all of them wrote compelling stories with characters that were developed in a manner that I identified with. I tried to read one of the "new inspired by Clancy" novels, and found it to be filled with two dimensional characters that I couldn't identify with and didn't care about. As Jetcal1 said, his protagonists were honorable, changed the perception of the military in a positive way, and frankly gave me a sense that I was doing something worthwhile. I'm glad he (and the others) wrote their books so I could read and enjoy them.
as the late President Regan said..."It's a good yarn!" a story, an imagining, a "what if..?" The immense value in reading such things, even be they purely for entertainment, is that they bring one to realize......there is danger out there. and then to ask: "where's the next threat, or, the greater one?"
"what would I do in such a such circumstances?" "how can we address this possibility?" "how can we best use what we have?" "what can I use in a different way?"
recent comments re: carriers...... brought "Red Storm Rising" to mind, BIG TIME.....
I have every book ever penned by Tom Clancy in first edition hardback. It is the pride of my library! In fact, the acknowledgment in "Red Storm Rising" was to the crew of the ship I deployed on twice in the late '80's (USS Gallery FFG-26). Said something like, "Thanks to the crew of the USS Gallery for showing this landlubber how to be a sailor" or something like that. I'd have to open up my bookcase and check to be sure!
I was a LT, an NFO from VP50, and teaching air navigation at NATU, Mather AFB, CA. Because I was a member of the Naval Institute, they sent me a flyer about it, and it sounded interesting. It was one of those "stay up all night reading it" books, and I couldn't IMAGINE how it had gotten published. It was, I thought, full of "top secret" information, and as P-3C Nav and Tacco, it rang VERY true. (Of course, a lot of the "secrets" had been published years before in "Weyer's Warships" and Jane's.)
I recommended it to all of my navigator students then, and later at Cubi Point ASWOC. And everything else he wrote rang with authenticity and plausibility. I read everything he wrote, and still have them all in hard cover.
They were a great bunch, mostly, until two P-3Cs midaired in the SoCal exercise area, a few years later. Two airplanes and two flightcrews lost, and a few months later, the squadron was dis-established.
My wife claims to have discovered Tom Clancy, only because she bought the 1st edition Hunt for Red October when Tom Clancy was an unknown. She wanted to see what all this ‘ASW stuff’ was all about.
I remember as a P-3 pilot flying to the datum of a Soviet submarine seeing our acoustic operators reading the Hunt for Red October, then hours closely tracking the boomer or SSN, completing a constructive kill, and picking back up their reading as we RTB’d. When art and the art of ASW merge!
I was one of those acoustic operators that read "Hunt for Red October" on my way to "on-station." Fun book.
I was working in NAVSEA when the book came out. I went down to a Crystal City book store during lunch to buy a copy, wearing the uniform of the day, SDB. I asked for the “Tom Clancy book.” The clerk said “Oh, you mean the Search for Red October.” I did a double take and said “You don’t search for submarines. You hunt them, and then you kill them.” The clerk was taken back a little, but he found the book.
I first read Red Storm Rising while my Air Guard unit was deployed to an airbase in Norway for a two week summer camp. Usually under the wing of an F-16 filling idle moments waiting for a pilot or a fuel truck. That paperback spent 15 days in the left cargo pocket of my BDU pants.
Wish I'd just read his books. As a Navy student at the Air War College senior course in 1995, AWC invited Mr. Clancy to speak to us. My entire seminar was underwhelmed. His whole talk was a self-congratulatory pat on his own back...who he knew, that he was part owner of a pro-football team, and he'd become a famous author, and how much money he had made. Very much like the former insurance agent he was, not one mention of those who had helped him get where he was, anything about national security, nor even that he cared anything about the audience he was speaking to. Very disappointing and a waste of the time we spent listening to him. Sad really that he was such a braggart and so unaware of his suroundings.
His books were a fun read and helped wash away the post Vietnam stigma carried by the public about the US military. All of his protagonists were honorable which helped change perception of the military. His outsized ego and self-aggrandizing don't detract from his accomplishments any more than Chuck Yeager who was also notorious for the same character flaw.
Yeager was a true Amercian hero and had personal and dangerous accomplishments to brag about. Perhaps if I'd heard him bragging in person I'd feel different.
We can agree to disagree on Mr. Clancy. He's the one I saw in person, and he seemed to think that having made lots of money from his books entitled him to bloviate. If you get invited to speak to an audience of the nation's military leaders, perhaps it would be good to have something worthwhile to say other than bragging about houses you owned, sports teams you bought, and such.
Anyhow, have a good weekend.
We had Clancy speak at the Midatlantic Chapter of the Naval Submarine League, just after _Patriot_Games_ was published. We had 200 people; he spoke about an hour, and stayed to signed books afterward. He told the story about he came up with The Hunt. It was based on a Kivak, attempting to leave Riga for Sweden. They failed. That was before he was really rich and really famous.
That is disappointing. My dad bumped into him at a DC Metro station shortly after the Hunt for Red October became a smash hit, and he was humble and friendly. They talked about movie adaptations, since Clancy had just sold the film rights to Mace Neufeld. Fame and money can be corrosive over time...
a few years back a family member gave me one of the newer Jack Ryan novels, written for the estate. My OCD kicked in and I had to go back and read them all from Red October to then present. Took about six months with other activities and reading thrown in, but it was an enjoyable experience again.
I think Red October was the first fiction published by Naval Institute Press. One of the next was Flight of the Intruder, which nearly cost me an A on an exam at the trade school when I was either plebe or youngster because I stayed up all night reading it.
Have read all of Clancy's books. Loved them all. Might be time for a second reading. In 1981 in an EW Advanced Applications class we were introduced to the A-6 platform by a guest speaker from the NFO EWO school next door, an ex-Enlisted LCDR A-6 NFO B/N and later in 1982 I was working for a Captain who was an EA-6B NFO EWO. So the book that did it for me was Flight of the Intruder. It was the icing on the cake after the talks by those 2 NFO's. I swear that Coontz put me there in the cockpit. Read it twice. Need to read it again.
A coworker flew A6 in ‘Nam (I forget if he was a pilot or B/N). He loaned me his personally autographed copy with a promise I owed him my 1st born if it didn’t come back pristine. An excellent story.
FBF select highly approved. I was a brand new flag aide (frocked LT) at NavSea when Hunt came out, and my wife generously bought it for my birthday. When RADM W ( sub bubba and a great EDO saw me reading it during my very small lunch break he came over and told me "I've got you something better than that- a ride on a boomer out of Cape Canaveral". Yeah, like that did not sound like a good idea to this young aviator and I voiced my hesitation. Then NavSea 00 came out after hearing my hesitancy and VADM F said "now that is the kind of dumb parochial thinking we've got to eliminate in this Navy". Ugh, yes Admiral, and two weeks later off we went and I took the book with me. If you have to go to sea on a sub the Ohio class wasn't a bad gig - always coffee and ice cream but the flight deck sunset stroll was just not the same.
Back in the early '90s when I was flying AH-64s at Ft. Cavazos (then Ft. Hood), TX, Tom Clancy visited our unit (6th Cav) doing research for an upcoming work (don't know which one). One of our unit IPs (that's Instructor Pilot for the uninitiated) walked him around the aircraft & explained much of its workings & capabilities, and then gave him a short front seat 'courtesy ride' to let him know what it looked & felt like in action.
best fit:
Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment (1994)
That is a very good book!
Clancy was first and last a salesman. But he produced and sold a high quality IP, that I've enjoyed for decades. His IP, not the books he franchised.
He died too soon.
The books written after Clancy's death have become increasingly formulaic and boring. I have not read a new one in over 5 years.
We used to buzz his house on Chesapeake Bay - Calvert Heights. I was sitting in the door of our Seahawk and we flew about 500 Ft off his home and I waved and he waved back. I think he had an armored vehicle on his lawn. Can’t remember exactly what it was.
Sal, like many who now while away our time on your porch, I spent many afternoons and evenings of my “pre-navy life” enthralled by the words of Tom Clancy…as a teen, he catapulted me from the Ozark mountains of Northwest Arkansas to the waters of the North Atlantic, the craggy fjords of Iceland, and the Fulda Gap. Later in life when sailing those waters or visiting those battlefields of our youth, I was struck by the accuracy and vision of an insurance salesman from Maryland. I recently revisited RED STORM RISING and was again reminded of his vision and mastery of narrative writing. FB indeed!
Great books, almost without exception. He did the Navy and the military a lot of good when we really needed the boost. As to the comments about his personality: So what? WSC was not an easy man to be around either.
Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle all wrote books that military types could read and relate realistically to...mostly. Clancy did NOT understand rotary wing ops, I'll defer to carrier flight ops and armor vets for their opinions and thoughts. For me all of them wrote compelling stories with characters that were developed in a manner that I identified with. I tried to read one of the "new inspired by Clancy" novels, and found it to be filled with two dimensional characters that I couldn't identify with and didn't care about. As Jetcal1 said, his protagonists were honorable, changed the perception of the military in a positive way, and frankly gave me a sense that I was doing something worthwhile. I'm glad he (and the others) wrote their books so I could read and enjoy them.
as the late President Regan said..."It's a good yarn!" a story, an imagining, a "what if..?" The immense value in reading such things, even be they purely for entertainment, is that they bring one to realize......there is danger out there. and then to ask: "where's the next threat, or, the greater one?"
"what would I do in such a such circumstances?" "how can we address this possibility?" "how can we best use what we have?" "what can I use in a different way?"
recent comments re: carriers...... brought "Red Storm Rising" to mind, BIG TIME.....
I have read all of Tom Clancy's works multiple times.
I have every book ever penned by Tom Clancy in first edition hardback. It is the pride of my library! In fact, the acknowledgment in "Red Storm Rising" was to the crew of the ship I deployed on twice in the late '80's (USS Gallery FFG-26). Said something like, "Thanks to the crew of the USS Gallery for showing this landlubber how to be a sailor" or something like that. I'd have to open up my bookcase and check to be sure!
I'm jealous, I only have a couple first editions!!!
I was a LT, an NFO from VP50, and teaching air navigation at NATU, Mather AFB, CA. Because I was a member of the Naval Institute, they sent me a flyer about it, and it sounded interesting. It was one of those "stay up all night reading it" books, and I couldn't IMAGINE how it had gotten published. It was, I thought, full of "top secret" information, and as P-3C Nav and Tacco, it rang VERY true. (Of course, a lot of the "secrets" had been published years before in "Weyer's Warships" and Jane's.)
I recommended it to all of my navigator students then, and later at Cubi Point ASWOC. And everything else he wrote rang with authenticity and plausibility. I read everything he wrote, and still have them all in hard cover.
The "Blue Dragons " were a great squadron.
They were a great bunch, mostly, until two P-3Cs midaired in the SoCal exercise area, a few years later. Two airplanes and two flightcrews lost, and a few months later, the squadron was dis-established.
I lost two friends each on a different airplane that day.
My wife claims to have discovered Tom Clancy, only because she bought the 1st edition Hunt for Red October when Tom Clancy was an unknown. She wanted to see what all this ‘ASW stuff’ was all about.
dang good girl you got there!
Red October and Red Storm Rising are two of Clancy's best novels, and most realistic on the military.