The most important reason to hate Tom Clancy

[jmowreader]

It's fashionable to hate Tom Clancy because his books are all this rah-rah America--Fuck Yeah! shit, and he's as close to being a freeper as you can get without needing a drool bib. Plus he got rich by writing about submariners but, for some strange reason, all his jacket photos show him promoting surface combatants.

No, the most important reason to hate Tom Clancy is that his books are long advertisements for cigarette smoking.

Every major character in his books, with the exception of Jack Ryan's eye-surgeon wife who keeps catching him smoking and his buddy Clark whose father was killed by cigarettes, smokes like a chimney. They smoke in the White House. They smoke in submarines. They smoke in every government building there is. They smoke so much I sometimes wonder if he's not sponsored by Philip Morris.

[Taverner]

1. How about routinely revealing state secrets in his novels?

Putting our men and women in uniform at risk?

[jmowreader]

4. I got bad news about those "state secrets," Taverner

A lot of that shit, you can get from open source media in far more detail than our intelligence community gets from its classified sources.

A good juicy one: You're a spy and I'm a spy. You're working for me and we've still got commies running around. I task you to get me the maximum range of the rocket-assisted projectile for the Soviet 2S7 self-propelled field gun. You could spend thousands of dollars to try to get the sergeant major of the 34th Artillery Division to steal you the technical manual for that system...or you could pull out your copy of Jane's Armour and Artillery and turn to "Self-Propelled Artillery--Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" which would tell you that a 2S7 firing RAP rounds has a maximum range of 50km.

This is actually a famous war story: The Soviets introduced the MT-LB "multipurpose armored vehicle" in, probably, 1969. This is a great little vehicle because it is very reliable, plus it is very convertible. They mount quite a few other systems on this chassis, use it as an ambulance, make a mobile repair shop out of it...oh, and they can also fight out of it, but the fighting units don't want it; they'd rather have BMPs, BMDs or BTRs. Anyway, the CIA saw this thing on an aerial photo in 1971 and wanted to find out all they could about it. They spent something like five million dollars hiring spies, using every form of reconnaissance known to man, and still couldn't learn all they wanted to know about it. So they called the British MI-5 and asked them what they knew. "It's in Jane's Weapon Systems."

[EFerrari]

2. He's repetitive. I sometimes wonder if his work isn't generated

by a computer at Philip Morris.

[Aristus]

3. I don't hate Tom Clancy. I just don't like his books. They're boring.

Being a boring writer is worse than being a bad writer. Even bad writing can be entertaining. Clancy's droning, tech-heavy, character-sparse writing is a great cure for insomnia.

If you like Clancy's milieu, try Harold Coyle. He also loads his books with lots of military hardware; but he's much more entertaining than Clancy. Coyle is not a brillant writer, or even especially good. But he entertains.

[underpants]

5. When Clancy tried to buy the Baltimore NFL team...

he was told, "Sorry you just don't have enough money" this was reported as being quite a surprise to him at the time. Truth be told it must have been something the owners came up with because all you would need to do to own one and pay for it with absolutely no problem is to borrow the money to do with your stake as the collateral.