[In the following review, Liddy offers tempered criticism of Without Remorse, though concedes that "of the millions bound to read it, few will not enjoy it thoroughly."]

It may seem a bit early, but why not revisit the cold war? After all, successful authors have been dining out on World War II for half a century and, if memory serves, they didn't wait long to start. The trick is to use the hottest part, Vietnam, and throw in a parallel story of revenge in the dirty world of drugs and prostitution that metastasized in our cities' streets as our involvement in Indochina progressed. In terms of the internal architecture of Without Remorse, the weaving of the two plots around the central actor in both, one John Kelly, the Navy Cross-winning former Seal introduced in earlier Tom Clancy novels, the author performs the trick well. His plotting is symmetrical and the satisfying resolution a setup for yet another sequel. If Mr. Clancy can cure Kelly's addiction to introspection (completely out of character for a Seal) Kelly will be a lot more popular than Jack Ryan, the hero of Patriot Games and other books.

The year is 1970, and the United States Government sends Kelly (nom de guerre John Clark) on a special mission to Vietnam just when he is fighting a self-declared war at home employing the same skills. The bad guys on the domestic front have anticipated the plot of a "Miami Vice" episode by more than a decade with the method they have devised of smuggling heroin into the United States, and have earned Kelly's lethal enmity by killing a close friend. Both plots are advanced by the plan-disrupting effects of leaks. No one in this book can keep his mouth shut, and that includes Kelly, who should know better.

Mr. Clancy's latest action thriller is certain to join his unbroken string of best sellers. Of the millions bound to read it, few will not enjoy it thoroughly.

Those few who won't will belong to either or both of two small, ever diminishing groups: those familiar with the operation and correct use of small arms (as we spend less and less on recruitment and training of the armed forces) and those familiar with the correct use of the English language (as we spend more and more on our public school systems). Both, unable to put down such a good story, will become increasingly exasperated at errors that could have been avoided easily.

To give Mr. Clancy the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the reason his description of how to make a suppressor to muffle the report of a firearm would leave a graduate of the mechanical shop class at Benedict Arnold Junior High laughing is that it's an attempt at social responsibility (we can't have all those grammar school kids carrying handguns with suppressors). But I doubt it. Mr. Clancy is one of the good guys. He correctly fingers the American left for supplying intelligence to the enemy during the Vietnam War, and his idea of proper behavior during that era would not serve as an outline for a biography of President Clinton.

Now there's nothing wrong with not knowing how to accomplish something so unusual as the manufacture of a suppressor, but if you don't know, why attempt it? It is gratuitous in any event, like naming the brand of the hero's suntan lotion (Coppertone). Just say he did it and move on. If not, find out how from someone who knows and who will, presumably, understand that it is necessary to provide a means to attach the device to the barrel of the pistol.

Even more irritating is Mr. Clancy's interchangeable use of the terms "magazine" and "clip." They are not the same. The M-1 Garand rifle, for example, uses a clip. The handgun of choice of John Kelly, the formidable 45-caliber ACP Colt model 1911 A-l semiautomatic military service pistol, uses a spring-loaded magazine, not a clip. It gets worse. Kelly, like all Seals a small-arms expert, is described as disassembling his chosen handgun in a manner that is mechanically impossible. (No, I'm not going to tell you how to do it properly. This is, after all, supposed to be a book review, not a field manual. The problem is that as I read the book, from time to time I got the impression that it was a field manual, albeit one issued during the Carter Administration.)

Then there is the battle scene in Vietnam, earlier in the war, wherein Kelly, supposedly a superbly trained and disciplined member of the psychologically and physiologically toughest special warfare-special operations organization in the world, is inserted alone in country on a mission to capture and bring back alive a specific enemy officer. Because Kelly witnesses that man doing some particularly nasty things before the rest of the team arrives, he mounts a one-man attack on 11 enemy soldiers and deliberately kills the officer he was sent to retrieve. Moreover, another of the enemy is "hosed down" with a fully automatic carbine by Kelly "emptying his magazine" (all remaining 22 rounds!) "into the running figure." That's no way to expend ammunition when you start out with only 180 rounds, surrounded by the enemy and deep in country.

We come now to that most lost of causes, the English language. Again, to be fair to Mr. Clancy, what follows is undoubtedly attributable to the appallingly under-reported nationwide editors' strike.

It is one thing to have a character ignorantly or carelessly confound the forms of the intransitive verb "lie" with those of the transitive verb "lay"; indeed, it may be required for verisimilitude (although not, one would hope, in the speech of Miss Sandy O'Toole, a nurse practitioner and the possessor of a master's degree, who nevertheless orders her patient to "lay down"). The striking editors could have been counted upon to point out, among other things, that "free" does not take "for"—one may get something "for nothing" but, if so, it is free; that there's a difference between "nauseous" and "nauseated," et cetera, ad nauseam.

Then there is my favorite passage in the book: "Food, nourishment, strength. He reached into a pocket, moving his hand slowly and withdrawing a pair of food bars. Nothing he'd eat by choice in any other place, but it was vital now. He tore off the plastic wrappers with his teeth and chewed them up slowly. The strength they imparted to his body was probably as much psychological as real, but both factors had their uses, as his body had to deal with both fatigue and stress." To say nothing of indigestion. Those plastic wrappers are hard on the stomach, even when chewed up slowly the way your mother always told you.

Enough. Eons ago, tribesmen sat around the campfires as the tellers of tales engaged their imaginations. A few years from now, Mr. Clancy will have a hearty last laugh on the few of us who care about these things as his visage fills the television screen, enabling him to deploy his narrative gifts to the delight of millions of graduates of "outcome based education," their illiterate little minds brimming with self-esteem, held in thrall by a master storyteller