{"id":17611,"date":"2017-11-22T13:26:03","date_gmt":"2017-11-22T19:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=17611"},"modified":"2017-11-22T19:21:15","modified_gmt":"2017-11-23T01:21:15","slug":"book-report-rogue-warrior-seal-force-alpha-by-richard-marcinko-and-john-weisman-1998","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/22\/book-report-rogue-warrior-seal-force-alpha-by-richard-marcinko-and-john-weisman-1998\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Rogue Warrior: Seal Force Alpha<\/i> by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman (1998)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/sealteamalpha.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">Let&#8217;s get it right out of the way: In my book report for <em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/04\/book-report-slave-of-the-warmonger-by-alex-kilgore-1981\/\" target=\"_new\">They Call Me Mercenary #7: Slave of the Warmonger<\/em><\/a>, I dinged that volume for misspelling the name of the Browning Hi-Power.<\/p>\n<p>Welp, this book:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>On his thigh, I could see the butt of an old SAS-type Browning High Power pistol peeking through the ballistic nylon restraining strap.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So consider this volume officially dinged.<\/p>\n<p>As with any of the Rogue Warrior novels, you know what you&#8217;re getting: A crassly composed, often vulgar voice describing a pretty tight military\/suspense story.  This book deals with the specialist SEAL team destroying a clandestine Chinese weapons ship only to discover that the tangos had their hands on a particularly Top Secret electronics weapon called Big Brother&#8211;which means someone in Washington has been working with the ChiComs.  So Marcinko and crew have to stop a plot (dealing with the disputed Senkaku islands&#8211;here in the future, in 2017, we know all about those still-disputed islands, don&#8217;t we?).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s fast-paced and fun reading (if you can tolerate the voice, which is strangely part of the charm for me).  Apparently, these books are still getting written and put out, and I have to wonder how they will evolve&#8211;in 1998, the main character has open disdain for the Clinton administration, for example&#8211;as history has unfolded.  Sadly, they could just about recycle a number of the post-Cold War plots since the same hotspots from 1998 remain places of suspense in 2017.<\/p>\n<p>Check out the foresight as to the hot things to come:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>No, Dick&#8211;what you sometimes gotta do is take the Oriental approach.  Use the discipline of Mindfulness.  Let everything be everything, and in equal degrees of being.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In 2017, all the cool listicle and life-hack sites talk about mindfulness (as does this blog, as I end up reading a bunch of that stuff to relax).<\/p>\n<p>As I have said or alluded, these books are scarily timely even after 20 years.<\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=qf_sp_asin_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=stlbrianj-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=B0078XGEV6&#038;asins=B0078XGEV6&#038;linkId=ce39d1bd5287b52fb1e900595e480c9d&#038;show_border=false&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true&#038;price_color=333333&#038;title_color=0066c0&#038;bg_color=ffffff\"><br \/>\n    <\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s get it right out of the way: In my book report for They Call Me Mercenary #7: Slave of the Warmonger, I dinged that volume for misspelling the name of the Browning Hi-Power. Welp, this book: On his thigh, I could see the butt of an old SAS-type Browning High Power pistol peeking through [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17611"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17621,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17611\/revisions\/17621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}