A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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 V...

(C) 1987 Presidio Press Harold Coyle's Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III (Presidio Press, 1987) was published a year after Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising's triumphant debut in hardcover.  Although it is thematically similar (Soviet forces invade West Germany after a series of crises escalate into an all-out conventional war), Coyle's approach is very different from Clancy's. Instead of creating his own possible scenario for a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact confrontation, he asked for, and received, permission from British author (and retired General) Sir John Hackett to set Team Yankee within the scenario created in Hackett's two "speculative fiction" books The Third World War: August 1985 and The Third World War: The Untold Story. Team Yankee takes place within a two-week period in an August in the late 1980s. Since late July, a series of crises precipitated by the Iran-Iraq war has morphed into a clash between U.S. and Soviet naval forces in the ...