Book Review: 'Sword Point'

In the mid-1980s, after the late Tom Clancy became a “name brand’ author with two back-to-back best-selling novels (The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising), it seemed as though a platoon of new writers who specialized in military-themed fiction emerged seemingly from thin air. Soon, book stores were seemingly full of late Cold War-era novels which featured stories featuring characters similar to Clancy’s CIA analyst Jack Ryan or focused on military themes and scenarios in which Soviet and American forces faced off against each other in various parts of the world.

Because these stories described modern weapons, their effects, and their use in great detail, the publishing world – much to Clancy’s dismay – even came up with a new sobriquet for the military fiction genre: technothriller and anointed the former Maryland insurance salesman as its master scribe.

 Among this new crop of writers who specialized in technothrillers was Harold Coyle, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and, in 1985, was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. Inspired by Clancy – who became a friend and mentor – and Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War duology, Coyle joined the fraternity of military fiction authors when the Presidio Press published Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III in 1987.

The book – which describes the experiences of a U.S. Army company-sized armored unit in West Germany caught in the maelstrom of a Soviet-led invasion of West Germany in the mid-1980s – was a best-seller. Coyle – who was still an Army officer at the time – was soon being compared to authors such as Larry Bond, Stephen Coonts, and even the “master of the technothriller” himself – Tom Clancy.

Encouraged by the popular and critical success of Team Yankee, Coyle soon began work on Sword Point, the first of five novels in the Scott Dixon series.

Published in 1988, Sword Point is, like Team Yankee, a novel about a U.S.-Soviet clash of arms set sometime in what was then the “near-future.” However, although Sword Point shares thematic similarities, it’s not a sequel to Team Yankee. It’s a new story that exists in a separate reality from Coyle’s literary debut and creates a series with a cast of continuing characters and explores various possibilities for post-Cold War conflicts in which America’s armed forces play a central role.

In Sword Point, Coyle takes the readers to Iran and the Persian Gulf, a region of the world that at the time was a more likely location for a U.S.-Soviet clash of arms than Western and Central Europe. In this “alternate timeline” of the late 1980s, the third world war Coyle describes in Team Yankee never happened, and by the time this book was being written tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact were easing in Europe.

As the novel begins, the world is at peace. The U.S. Army is not embroiled in any conflict in foreign lands. The United States and the Soviet Union have signed a treaty that eliminates intermediate-range nuclear forces. The Soviet leadership is attempting to save Communism by reforming it through the General Secretary’s policies of Perestroika and glasnost. The long-running Cold War seems to be coming to a peaceful end.

But on the Soviet Union’s southern flank, the Red Army is about to carry out an ambitious – if perhaps reckless – military operation: the invasion of Iran. (Why? The unnamed stand-in for Mikhail Gorbachev is described in Sword Point as a hardliner who thinks the world would not “respect a toothless bear.” That’s as much explanation for the Soviets’ motive in this book.)

Although the Soviet leadership has masterfully deceived the West with a combination of peace overtures, the Russian army is poised to invade the Islamic Revolutionary Republic from the USSR itself as well as from bases in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. They prepare several army groups in Armenia and other Soviet republics on the Iranian border, and D-Day is set as 25 May.

But in the age of electronic surveillance and satellite reconnaissance, the Soviet buildup does not escape the attention of the Pentagon, and on 24 May Lt. Gen. Francis Weir, commander of the U.S. Army’s Tenth Corps, receives a warning order telling him that the forces under his command are being deployed to Iran.

To say that Weir is surprised by his orders is an understatement. Tenth Corps is a tank-heavy mechanized organization “tagged” by the Army for NATO duty in Germany and not Southwest Asia. And Iran, the target of the Soviet incursion, is not an ally of the United States; Tehran is still governed by the anti-Western clerics that toppled the Shah’s regime in 1979, and the Ruling Council has not requested military assistance – much less American boots on its ground – from the nation it calls the Great Satan.

But orders are orders, and soon the men and women that Weir commands are on their way to the Persian Gulf.

Major Scott Dixon, an Armor branch officer, is one of those soldiers who is on his way to an uncertain future in the arid and mountainous lands of Iran. Dixon is a battalion S-3 (Operations Officer) in one of the 25^th Armored Division’s three brigades. He’s a professional who joined the Army as a VMI graduate after the Vietnam War but has never seen combat. Like most professional soldiers of the mid-1980s, he doesn’t like war but at the same time he likes the intellectual and physical challenges of the military profession; it’s a tough job, soldiering, but someone has to do it.

Sword Point doesn’t focus its narrative solely on Dixon or the men and women under his command; Coyle creates a web of characters and situations that are episodic in nature yet come together to tell a story about a war and the people caught up in it. We see the Iran War from many diverse viewpoints, including those of:

Ed Lewis, a Major in the Tennessee National Guard caught by surprise when his unit is federalized and sent to Iran as part of Tenth Corps’ deployment

Amanda Matthews, a young first lieutenant assigned to the Corps as an assistant intelligence officer

Harold (Hal) Cerro, a second lieutenant and platoon commander in the 17^th Airborne Division

Percy Jones,  a British Army officer assigned as an exchange officer and liaison to the 25^th Armored Division

Anatol Vorishnov, a Soviet Army major assigned to the 33^rd Tank Division in Iran

Nikolai Ilvanich, a junior lieutenant in the 95^th Guards Airborne Division

Though it’s a novel written primarily as a work of fiction, Sword Point is a comparison-contrast examination of American and Soviet military doctrines. As Coyle explains in his foreword, the Russian Army has a long-standing tradition of strict top-down command and control in which military operations are planned down to every detail, with much of the initiative held tightly in the hands of senior commanders. In the Russian style model – which was adopted by many of the Soviet Union’s client states, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – the junior officer has little or no freedom to interpret orders and use personal initiative on the battlefield. Tactics are thus highly “scripted” and carried out with as much imagination as a paint-by-numbers art set.

In contrast, U.S. Army doctrine stresses a looser style of command, especially at the operational level. Higher command identifies the objectives and sets the strategic goals – such as “We’ll defend Point X on the map to deny Y to the enemy,” or “We’ll move the division from Normandy to Paris and liberate the city before the enemy razes it.” But other than making general plans that allocate assets and identify missions and roles, American generals do not try to run battles by exercising tight control down to the platoon level. They issue directives but trust lower-level commands to operate with freedom of action.

Since Coyle was a serving officer at the time he began his writing career – he would serve in the Persian Gulf War of 1991 before retiring after 14 years in the Army – it’s clear which doctrine the author tends to favor. He throws Scott Dixon and the supporting characters into situations in which the Soviets throw everything but the kitchen sink at the Americans, but even though not everyone remains unscathed, the outcome of the Iran War is not in doubt.

If you’ve read books by Larry Bond, Stephen Coonts, Ralph Peters, or Tom Clancy and his literary heirs, you’ll probably recognize many tropes of the technothriller genre. The emphasis isn’t so much on character but on the action sequences and military technology. The people in Sword Point aren’t exactly thinly-drawn stock characters, but since the novel is tightly focused on its fictional conflict, they’re not fully fleshed-out creations, either.

As a reader, I think Coyle gives readers an insider’s look at how American soldiers – both men and women – behave and talk both on and off the field of battle. I have not met many professional soldiers – especially field grade ones like Scott Dixon – in person, so I don’t know if they are as laconic or dry-humored as many of the GIs in Sword Point. But since Coyle was a soldier and “talks the talk and walks the walk,” I think he knows the jargon the Army uses and the way that soldiers behave when they are not on base and are out on the field.   

As a study of two different military doctrines, Sword Point is all right, I suppose. As I said earlier, Coyle is hardly impartial when he compares the “by-rote” Soviet model to the Americans’ “let the man on the scene make the tactical decisions.” Yes, it’s true that Coyle’s obvious if unstated thesis that the U.S. model is superior to Russia’s has been supported by the performance of our military in two conventional wars against the Iraqi Army. Yet the deck is stacked against the fictional Russians in most cases when the two superpowers’ forces clash in Iran.

Some readers who just want to get their fix of fictional battles may think that I’m overthinking things a bit, but Sword Point also never explains the Soviets’ motives for an invasion of Iran. In Red Storm Rising, perhaps the best-selling fictional account of a U.S.-Soviet conflict, readers are given a logical rationale for Russia’s decision to go to war against NATO. But Sword Point doesn’t give us a concrete or believable motive for the Kremlin’s actions.

There is, happily, some suspense centered on Iran’s reaction to finding itself the ultimate chessboard in a deadly game of Hot War Chess. Will Tehran’s theocracy turn its back a decade’s worth of resentment and diplomatic estrangement and ask the “Great Satan”  to intervene? Or will the regime take aggressive measures against the troops of both America and the Soviet Union.  

Fans of the genre may like Sword Point, even though the novel is 30 years old and rooted in a power structure that no longer exists. Like Tom Clancy’s early novels, Coyle’s story is a throwback to an era that no one born in 1988 can remember with clarity. Like the MiG-25 Foxbat or the Pershing II missile, Sword Point is a museum piece – albeit an entertaining one – from one of history’s most fearful eras: the Cold War.