The 5 Commandments

Full Assault Mode: A Delta Force NovelBy Dalton FurySt. Martin’s Press, 2014 Some people were surprised to find out that David Foster Wallace enjoyed Tom Clancy’s military thrillers, but as Morgan Meishas pointed out, it made sense: Tom Clancy liked to “pack in facts,” and so did Wallace.Literary novelists have always been explorers: the Romantics explored the natural world, the Victorians charted social mores, the Modernists delved into the quiddities of the mind, and their successors . . . were flabbergasted. War, science and French philosophy made the world – even America! – seem like a dark, uncertain place, and so fiction’s mirror shattered into glinting, teasing little pieces. This created a problem for novelists, and coronary episodes for their editors.How could the literary novelist know what to cut in this uncertain, heretical, unpatriotic age? Old methods didn't work: the pachydermous memory of Marcel Proust, and the fastidious elegance of John Updike’s microscope, were too focused for the task. Everything seemed connected and nothing was certain, so anything could be important. Wallace’s solution was the footnote. He admitted a fondness for them, but also knew they could be incongruent. That is why he envied Clancy, who could pack a dozen facts into a paragraph without the reader feeling like they were out of place.But Clancy trod a hallowed, sacred path. In a thriller, excess is processed in a very special way: by describing every single thing in exactly the same tone. Usually it’s the workings of a 105mm howitzer or an AR-15 assault rifle, but it could be anything: the proper method of brewing strong coffee, or the striated patterns made by a lycra tank top hugging the invariably large breasts of a female character.Wallace had inadvertently stumbled upon the first commandment of the schlock military thriller. Things are different now than in Clancy’s day – China and terrorism are the enemies de jure – but much remains familiar. There are five commandments governing the literary art of the modern military thriller – some say ten.   In his new continent-spanning anti-terrorist Special Forces novel, Full Assault Mode, Dalton Fury hews to every one.1. Tell, Don’t Show, And Then Keep Telling. In Fact Tell Everything. In this genre, the hero doesn’t simply get ready for battle. First, he surveys his kit:

Sitting upright in the middle of the cubicle were his assault vest and body-armor plates, which, like a Roman soldier’s breastplate, were heavy and sturdy. They didn’t shine, but they were impressive all the same.His rifles and hoolie tool were leaning against the back of the cubicle, rifles muzzle up with the Magpul rifle magazines loaded and stacked neatly against the sidewall. His tactical tan Gen4 Glock 23 pistol lay unloaded on its side with tan hard-ball-loaded magazines next to it. Handheld OD green smoke canisters, thermite grenades, frag grenades, and nine-bangers were stacked on top of each other in cardboard boxes…Spare batteries for everything from the weapon optics to NVGs to GPS to Peltor (ear pro) were neatly taped or otherwise secured to the appropriate piece of gear or stuffed in a pocket on the vest. Door charges, both rubber-strip charges and an eight-four-inch ECT charge, were rolled neatly and secured with a rubber band. Fuse igniters were on the opposite side of the charges until ready to be connected.

There’s more, including “Fastek buckles,” “Red Man” chewing tobacco, several copies of “Maxim magazine,”and something called “Crige Precision G-3 combat pants,” which I found for $202 plus shipping on the web (less on E-bay). The point is the hero needs a lot of gear, which he must survey for several pages,after which time he will take several pages to check it, and then several pages more to put it on. He needs every piece of it to fight America’s enemies. If his “HK416 rifle” doesn’t have a “5.56 Hornady TAP 75 grain bullet” in the chamber, then it’s not really loaded, is it? And if the author doesn’t describe all this gear, then our hero isn’t really wearing it, is he?Similarly important are locations, their characteristics, and the specific actions our protagonists take to navigate them. You may think such detail is onlyimportant for combat scenes, but they are equally crucial on the home front. This paragraph, which describes a scene involving our hero’s love interest, provides an instructive example:

Thumbing her iPhone 5 as she passed though the food court before exiting the main entrance, she marveled at how glorious a day it had become. If the sun held, she thought she might take in an hour or so poolside to even out her farmer’s tan after hours of flat-range pistol work at the secret Delta compound located in the upper left quadrant of the sprawling nineteen square miles of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Nothing bugged her more than the distinct tan line separating her biceps from her wide, muscular shoulders. But that would have to wait for much warmer days because, even though the sun was strong enough to make her slide the white Costa Hammerhead sunglasses off her head to protect her eyes, February in Fayetteville usually floated between a frosty 33 to a cool 47 degrees.

I also highlight this passage to emphasize the importance of brand names. Literary novelists shy away from these important facts, but this is a mistake because if a character is just holding a “cellphone” then we would have no idea where to buy it. I would have appreciated some details about the culinary options our heroine enjoyed as she left the compound, but we can let that pass. Even military thrillers have to make concessions to old-fashioned editors, who put money above art, and heed not the wisdom of Heraclitus, who said, “Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.”  2. The Main Character’s Name Must Be IncredibleThere’s an optional sub-commandment to commandment number two which pertains to the author’s name, so let’s get that out of the way first. This is where Tom Clancy begins to look outdated. Tom Clancy: it has a certain ring, yet there’s nothing particularly arresting about it. But today we are blessed with the likes of Mack Maloney and Brad Thor. (Clive Cussler was ahead of his time.) The author of Full Assault Mode is Dalton Fury, but Dalton Fury isn’t Dalton Fury’s real name. Dalton Fury was in Delta Force before he took up writing. Dalton Fury’s first book was the memoir Killing Bin Laden, in which Dalton Fury described being given the thankless job of coordinating the search for al-Qaeda leader at Tora Bora in 2001, but not the men necessary to do it. Dalton Fury does not wish to reveal his real name, so out of respect for that, and the fact that Dalton Fury is better at killing people than I’ll ever be at anything, I’ll just call him Dalton Fury, which I love doing anyway.Dalton Fury’s hero is Kolt Raynor, and “Racer” is his call sign. Put them together and you get Kolt “Racer” Raynor, which is very impressive indeed. Dalton Fury takes full advantage of this, using every opportunity available to refer to him by name, and when no one else is around Kolt sometimes speaks and thinks in the third person. Wisely, Dalton Fury skirts the first commandment by varying usage. (The sign of a true master is knowing when to break the rules.) Often it’s just “Kolt,” or “Racer,” or “Raynor.” “Kolt Raynor” dials it up a notch, as does “Major Raynor.” Further up the scale are “Major Kolt Raynor” and “Kolt ‘Racer’ Raynor,” which are interchangeably impressive, though one relies on the authority of rank while the other obtains its power from the kinetic implications of our hero’s call sign. But even Dalton Fury won't risk combining them all into the Category 5 of military thriller protagonist names: Major Kolt “Racer” Raynor. Initially, I thought this was a mistake, but Dalton Fury was wise to leave it to his readers’ imaginations because it would have set a precedent: halfway through the novel, Raynor is promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, but I don’t want to be responsible for what happens if I type those ten syllables.3. Use the power of the name. Repeatedly.“Goddammit, Maverick!”It was 1986, Morning in America, and those words heralded the supersonic coming in Top Gun of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, with his fiery insouciance, quivering, expressive mandibles,and preternatural ability to maneuver the F-14 Tomcat and its dual General Electric F110-GE-400 afterburning turbofans at terrifying speed. Popular novels often take their cues from popular movies, but it would be difficult for any author, even Dalton Fury, to replicate Tom Cruise’s roguish charisma or Jerry Bruckheimer’s delicate eye in prose (much less the aural stylings of Harold Faltermeyer and Kenny Loggins).

An author may compensate for this in several ways. One is to have the hero’s commanding officers mutter and shout his name or call sign in anger several dozen times. “Damn it, Raynor!” says one, “I am the commanding general, not Webber, and not you.” Or “Admiral Mason had had about enough of Kolt Raynor for one career.” One very telling conversation contains: “Sit down, Major,” “Save it, Racer,” “Look, Racer,” “Relax, Racer,” “Either way, Racer,” “Major Raynor,” “Raynor,” “Kolt,” “Major Raynor,” “Major,” then finally, “And Racer,” as our hero is walking out the door, “Make your own luck!” Have no doubt that he will.This repetition denotes a grudging respect the reader is meant to share, but concurrently, a master knows that each frustrated or admiring utterance of the hero’s name is also an opportunity to explore the hero’s resume. Kolt, for instance, first appeared in the Delta Force series two books ago, in disgrace for disobeying orders and getting his teammates killed in Pakistan—a mission gone wrong, in other words. He redeemed himself by undertaking an unsanctioned solo penetration of the Pakistani border and rescuing his teammates, some of whom had survived and were being used as human shields by Al-Qaeda against American drone attacks. He discovered in the process an al-Qaeda plot to destabilize the region by capturing a “black site,” where US and Pakistani special forces were no doubt questioning prisoners in an enhanced manner. He foils the plot, but unfortunately I can’t report on what equipment he uses.In the second novel, as one of his commanders, Admiral Mason, reminisces in the third novel, a “Boeing 767-400” was hijacked. (Not the 767-200, 767-200ER, 767-300, 767-300ER, or 767-300F. Dalton Fury must have meant the 767-400ER, as there is no 767-400, but perhaps an editor accosted this page before the manuscript got through.) The commander recalls “hearing the details of how Kolt Raynor and three other Delta operators landed on the wide-body fuselage while it was moving, beached through the roof hatch, killed a half-dozen Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists, and rescued over 140 hostages.” Also, after a Seal Team Six mission to find and kill an American al-Qaeda member and his hand-picked team of terrorists goes wrong, Kolt is forced into action, and ultimately stops them from downing Marine One (the President’s helicopter, which is either a VH-3D Sea King or a VH-60N “Whitehawk”). Kolt Raynor saves the President of the United States and earns the thanks of a grateful nation. The author must persevere through such recitation. Dalton Fury sometimes shows his exhaustion with this device, and in those moments his lists of heroic achievements take on the air of a disinterested eulogy, but overall he acquits himself rather well: by the end I admired Kolt Raynor very much.As the Admiral closes his remembrance, we get one of Dalton Fury’s brilliant psychological insights, and we see how discomfiting Kolt’s prowess and patriotism are to the lesser men around him:

Yes, Mason knew all about Kolt fucking Raynor. And nothing about the maverick Delta officer was to his liking. In fact, he wasn’t too comfortable in Kolt’s presence even now. Sure, Mason knew Kolt had a reputation for getting shit done, but it was Kolt’s colorful past that made it all the more difficult for him to approve the mission the Delta major was presently seeking his approval on.

Another commander puts it more succinctly: “Who the hell am I to judge this fucking warrior?”4. Educate Your ReaderA mission goes wrong in the third book, too. In fact, two missions go wrong. This underscores the danger of Kolt Raynor’s chosen line of work, but it also helps to reinforce the larger point Dalton Fury is making, of which more shortly. The fourth commandment states that all military thrillers have to make a point, often a political one. A few, like Eric Van Lustbader, lean liberal, but most advocate what could be called a conservative, or hawkish, point of view. I’ll just call it strength.Brad Thor is perhaps the greatest living exemplar of this commandment. His masterpiece, The Last Patriot, revolves around a hidden revelation from the prophet Mohammed secreted away in a rare first edition of Don Quixote (a fact gleaned from Thomas Jefferson’s secret Presidential diary), which commands all Muslims to lay down their AK-47s and live a peaceful life, and makes some stirring arguments about how America has grown soft, become afraid to let its foreign operatives work on US soil (one could argue that the obligation to violate posse comitatus is a sub-commandment of the fourth commandment), and left itself vulnerable to the depredations of Sharia law and the anti-American campus liberals who cover for them.Full Assault Mode is too action-packed to power-stroke into such deep waters, but Dalton Fury, like Brad Thor, also uses his opportunity to show that we are too soft on terror, too afraid to incur casualties (this is why Kolt’s missions keep going wrong). “I realize,” Kolt explains to his shrink,

that we are weak sisters compared to our adversaries. We spend years in training, millions in funding, and still lack the key ingredients to be successful against these maniacs…Very simply, Doc, we are not willing to sacrifice ourselves even if it means victory for our nation, if victory is even definable… If you break it all down, we are inarguably an inferior and less-committed species than our terrorist enemies.

In the end, Kolt Raynor proves that there is still one American left willing to get the job done when he charges out to save a convoy under attack in Afghanistan, charges out again to save an operative and capture an important terrorist, charges out to the Middle East to gain intelligence undercover, charges through the homeland to penetrate a terrorist cell abetted by a disgruntled nuclear plant employee whose coworkers aren’t nice to him, charges to the rescue of his would-be paramour (Cindy “Hawk” Bird), charges to the driver’s seat of a van with a bomb inside in order to save a crowd of nuclear plant employees, and charges (dives, really) into the cooling tank of the plant itself to kill the terrorists and complete the mission.The point is, Barack Obama should stop apologizing for America.5. Admire, then Destroy Americans may have grown soft, but Kolt Raynor’s resolve is hard as carbonized steel, which has a tensile strength of up to 0.84 GPa (122,000 psi), a yield strength of 0.64 GPa (67,000 psi), and a melting point of approximately 2800 degrees Fahrenheit (1538 degrees Celsius).To fight America’s enemies the hero must have hard muscles, too, and Kolt Raynor doesn’t disappoint, as Cindy “Hawk” Bird discovers when she visits his house:

She had never seen Kolt topless, but had to admit he looked pretty hot standing there in only a pair of black Mountain Hardware climbing pants, even for a forty-year-old. Cindy tried not to stare at the scars on his rib cage or even at his wide smile…She followed his muscular right arm from his well-developed shoulder, past the bicep with the thick vein running the length, and to his rugged hand that grasped a bright orange Fat Albert Wiffle-ball bat.

We need role models like this because America is literally soft as well. Its average body mass index is 26.5 for men and 29 for women. A BMI of between 25 and 29.99 is considered overweight, and a BMI over 30 is considered obese. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 34.9 percent of American adults are obese. BMI is calculated this way:

Dalton Fury takes full advantage of this national rotundity. He knows we enjoy the vicarious pleasure of identifying with demi-god saviors, and that they set an example to which we must aspire but inevitably fail to reach. Common sense declares that this is what everyone should look like, otherwise little girls wouldn’t want Barbie Dolls, little boys wouldn’t read Superman, and movies wouldn’t have so many fat villains. Disney, obeying one of the commandments for children’s cartoons, has done an especially good job of encouraging this standard. Fantasy novels allow for more variation in phenotype, but they are also godless.Though it may be hard to accept, heroes need to suffer, too, otherwise the story doesn’t bite. Happily, physical injuries give the author another opportunity to linger over the gloriously proportioned bodies of his protagonists. Late in the novel, Kolt Raynor must rescue his damsel, Cindy “Hawk” Bird. Though a member of the military, she couldn’t survive its most elite program and is subsequently captured. She has been shot and is chained to the floorboard of the terrorists’ van. “Racer,” she pleads,

“Please, go. You can’t stop it. It’s going to blow.”“I’m not leaving you, Hawk.”

Kolt has to stop the bleeding and then stop a bomb in the parking lot and then stop the terrorists who have infiltrated the plant’s core. But with the prescience of an omniscient narrator, knows he has time for a gander:

Kolt ripped Hawk’s button-down shirt wide open. The buttons flew. Her left pink bra cup was covered in blood. Blood had run down her stomach, seeping over the angles and into the depressions made by her seven-percent body fat and well-developed ab muscles…Kolt noticed the bullet hole just above her right breast. It was a classic sunken chest wound. Air oozed in and out with the rhythm of her heart. Kolt knew she was lucky—still only alive because the bullet found her right breast and not her heart. Kolt slapped the palm of his right hand against the wound in a feeble attempt to seal the hole. Her skin was cold, but her blood warm. Kolt could feel the air from Hawk’s body continued [sic] to seep out in synch with the faint beat of her heart.Kolt continued to look Cindy over. His eyes locked down on her right upper thigh. More blood. A lot of blood. Kolt made a fist with his left hand and pressed it, knuckle-down, against the entry wound…Arterial blood squired upward, past Kolt’s fist, spraying him in the mouth and neck.Kolt spit over the driver’s seat.He looked back toward the bomb’s timer.2:28, 2:27, 2:26…

Now, you may think that this suggests an unfortunate, pubescent fascination with violence and sex, or an even more disturbing conflation of the two. Feminists have been complaining about this stuff for years: they call it the “Women in Refrigerators Syndrome,” but that’s silly because Cindy Bird is in a van, not a refrigerator. Dalton Fury is merely satisfying the perfectly reasonable and eminently profitable human need to see beautiful things destroyed.As I said, this is closely connected to the imperatives governing Dalton Fury’s careful descriptions of guns and eateries. What some don’t understand is that the military thriller is a product for enthusiasts, and enthusiasts are geeks—in this case macho, patriotic geeks, but geeks all the same. Geeks don’t just enjoy something; they fixate on it with the flinty-eyed concentration of the American bald eagle, wanting to know it in all its detail and all its permutations—all its possible permutations. Basically, geekdom is a kind of fetishism. And fetishes are okay, as long as they aren’t too perverted.

______________Well, there we have it. The wonderful thing about the schlock military thriller commandments is that they’re adaptable: you keep the old ones but as the world changes you can add more without going to hell, just like the Constitution.In literary fiction today no one knows what the rules are, and that’s because the world is a scary place and some people, like David Foster Wallace, ask too many questions. But military thrillers, like the crime thriller, the spy thriller, and the courtroom thriller, evince structure and certitude, twin pillars of a finely tuned machine designed to brew a concentrated product that goes down easy and leaves no aftertaste.This is what the people want, and that is as it should be: in America we have the marketplace, whose wisdom we have learned to trust, and the five commandments of the military thriller, a target at which Dalton Fury’s 5.56 Hornady TAP 75 grain bullets have flown straight and true.____Greg Waldmann is the Editor-in-Chief of Open Letters Monthly, and a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.