The War After Armageddon
by Ralph Peters
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Book Reviews of The War After Armageddon
Book Review: Terrific military thriller.
Summary: 5 Stars
Ralph Peters is a military veteran, an often provocative columnist, author of perceptive books on various aspects of the United States intelligence and military activities and a writer of fiction.
In "The War After Armageddon", a United States few of us would recognize is seeking a final resolution of a decades old problem: the Islamist war against the West.
The Caliphate has been restored after nuclear weapons were detonated in several European cities and in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Europe reverted to type and slaughtered its Muslim residents, forcibly expelling the survivors. The United States has embraced a militant Christianity and raised an army known as The Military Order of the Brothers in Christ (MOBIC), built atop the structure of the old National Guard. It exists in parallel and often in contention with the regular branches of the military.
Iran has essentially destroyed Israel with a rain of nuclear tipped missiles and the boundaries of the old Caliphate have been largely restored in the Middle East.
A Messianic Christian dictator rules in China which is fighting westward to recover territory from the Muslim armies while Russia has restored the Tsarist monarchy, declared itself an empire again and is pushing south into Turkey.
The world is a mess, but the United States is determined to defeat the Muslim aggressor.
To this end it has assembled a military force of the remnants of the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard. Thanks to the aggressive downsizing of the American military decades earlier by a pacifist President, the military is fighting with equipment that is decades old. Nearly all the technology that the military had invested in is useless since the Muslims have knocked out satellites and become experts in the use of Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) weaponry which destroys electronics. MOBIC has what modern weaponry is available.
A ragtag fleet discharges the American invaders off the coast of what was Israel. MOBIC invades the south and the old regular military invades the north under the command of Lieutenant General Gary "Flintlock" Harris. He is called Flintlock because he never trusted in the reliance of the Army on technology and trained his units in fighting wars without its use. Since the technology is no longer widely available, he is the logical choice to lead the regular forces.
In contention with him is a former Army colleague, Simon Montfort who now heads the MOBIC forces. Montfort is a zealous Christian determined to rid the world of the enemy and make the United States into a purified Christian nation.
Peters borrows heavily from the history of the Crusades and does it with great effect.
At this point, if I get into detail, it will be a spoiler, so I won't do it.
Suffice it to say, Peters invests his fictional war with real presence. We are with the general and his staff as they plan the operation, with the troops as the fight in a truly hostile environment with limited means against an enemy who welcomes death.
Peters brings us into the thick of the military action while carrying a parallel plot of the machinations of Montfort to gain the upper hand across the board.
There are sidelights into the personal life of Harris which add to the story.
Overall, this is a military thriller first and foremost. Peters makes it explicit that he is not prophesying in this book, that it is a work of fiction. The plot will seem plausible or not depending on your own orientation. Personally, I found it plausible if you consider the great waves of revivalism that swept the United States in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Given the impetus of two major cities destroyed by nuclear weapons and a global, if limited, nuclear reprisal, it is believable that the United States could very well be driven toward revenging itself and undoubtedly ideologues would spring up seeking their own advantage.
Overall, "The War After Armageddon" is top-notch military fiction, though those seeking a neatly wrapped up happy ending may find the book unsettling.
Jerry
Book Review: Fever-born Fear Mongering
Summary: 2 Stars
Peters first caught me with his incredible visionary novel 'The War In 2020' - his Army creds speaking volumes and lending a sincere reality above and beyond the typical military based novel. Vets can smell b.s. Hollywood/New York-schooled-never-served-a-day-in-BDUs many klicks away.
However, just as I left Clancy when he started his uneven tilt toward unfettered jingoism, I'm utterly left empty reading 'The Day After Armageddon'.
While I applaud his, and any writer's choice, to not 'save the sacred cow' - i.e. Letting the bad guys win; I sadly found myself discovering that instead of being taken for an adventure, I was in fact being preached to by the cardboard-carrying man at the street corner.
Yes, we can see the cautionary tale of a theocracy born out of fear, revenge and hate. Yes, we can see where freedom earned can be so easily warped into freedom entitled. And yes, we can see the path toward Armageddon being cheered on by zealots from both sides. But - man - give a guy some breathing room Col. Peters!
This novel reminds me of the time I had to take my sister to her OB/GYN after a particularly terrifying episode of the tv show 'ER' with Anthony Edwards. In the show Dr. Green (Edwards) deals with what appears to be a standard pregnancy that quickly spirals into a horrific series of complications that ultimately leaves the mother dead and her newborn child with only one parent.
She was so shaken that she immediately (along with, apparently, several hundred other pregnant women) made an emergency appointment.
My brother-in-law was deployed at the time so it was left to me to stand in his stead. The doc was frazzled beyond measure with all his patients calling for "emergency" check-ups. He repeated the same thing over so many times that by the time we got in - he looked and sounded shell-shocked. His now-stock answer was that the scenario played out on the tv show was the equivalent of giving the patient every single mishap that could EVER happen - simultaneously occurring at the SAME time to the SAME patient. It was so fundamentally impossible that his final utterance before leaving to see the mob of waiting pregnant patients went something like: "You stand a better chance of being hit by lightning 3 times in a row on the same day you won the Powerball Lottery." I fondly recall that he smiled gently and walked out.
The Day After Armageddon presupposes so many unlikely and highly improbable events that it goes beyond foreshadowed fiction and enters surreal visions born out of fever. Do you honestly believe that many of Europe's intel/action services could be simultaneously hoodwinked? Especially Germany's BND?!
I cringed at Freedom Fries and did I shutter when "The Dept. Of Homeland Security" was born? Of course! Anyone who grew up steadfastly avoiding Orwell's Newspeak would understand and appreciate the bizarre branding. I found myself even more fearful that it was then put in overall charge of so many disparate federal agencies - yes, I get it.
But to believe that a nuclear attack on our soil, however horrendous a strike to us, would born the sick ugliness of the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ - with black crosses for ranks no less!
Sorry, wholesale VOLUNTARY conversion of the Army into the modern Waffen SchutzStaffel? Seriously? You see our brothers as being that pathetically mindless? The only time I hear that is when it comes from the ass cracks from the Left.
The United God-Fearing States of America. Again - seriously? Col. Peters a more paranoid wracked vision I could not begin to imagine. The day Pat Robertson or one of his many pedantic step-cousins is elected President - that's the day the Second Revolution begins brother. But let's get real and deal with real problems with real solutions.
Book Review: A good read, but it didn't feel "complete" to me
Summary: 3 Stars
Let me say first that I am a fan of Ralph Peters. I think The War in 2020 is one of my favorite novels. So when I heard he had a new book coming out called "The War After Armageddon" I was sold.
Having just finished the book, I have to say that I was a little disappointed. The whole experience did not feel "complete". In screen writing they say to "come into the scene late" and I feel that is what the author has done here. The attack on L.A. and Vegas are referred to by characters in the book, but we don't "see" much of the attack or the aftermath other than to hear about lots of people dying of radiation sickness. Same for the attackers in Europe and the Mid East; these are all past events that are a common experience for the characters in the book, but we are the outsiders since these events are not experienced by us. I'm willing to forgive this, since these are all events designed to "set up" the rest of the book.
But where he goes from there kind of loses me. America becomes Uber-Christian in response to the attacks and turns the National Guard into a Christian Military order and we launch a sort of "Second Crusade" to re-take the Holy Land. The book begins with the Marines and Army (alongside the new Christian National Guard Units) storming ashore. From there we jump back and forth between several different POV but never really get to know any of them in depth. The action is gritty and violent, but disjointed. Only our hero sees the real danger, and when the worst happens he's better prepared than any to "save the day", only he doesn't. (Trying not to spoil the book for those that have not read it.) In fact, everything our hero and his allies have been trying to do or avoid ends up coming to pass anyway. While I think it is quite refreshing to avoid the typical "Happy Ending", this feels a bit forced as if instead the author tried to create the Anti-happy ending.
I am also pretty sick of the "Christians are just as bad as Isalmic Terrorists" if we take either to extremes, which seems to be the warning of this book. The Uber-Chrisitians are perfectly willing to kill everyone and let the Man upstairs sort out who is who. I found those parts a bit over-the-top; none of the Uber-Christians have any redeeming qualities at all in the book. They seem to be more the bad guys than the guys were fighting. (Which, I suspect, was the authors intent.)
The other point the author tried to stress was our current reliance on technology. In this book, nothing works. The electronic jamming, EMP land mines and other nastiness is so bad that we must resort to old-style runners and smoke signals. I think the author went a bit too far with this point, in fact our most modern tanks become almost useless due to the reliance on "electronic armor" (whatever that is) and our planes will not fly at all. But for some reason unmanned drones are flying all the time wreaking havoc. Sure, we rely on our technological advantage as a force multiplier, but to think that it will simply go away because we lose some communication satellites and get jammed is a far stretch.
All griping aside, I enjoyed the ride. The characters were great, and I wish I'd gotten to know them a bit better. (It's always good when your left wanting more!) I'll buy his next book when it comes out. I wish he'd spent a bit more time and beefed this the book up more instead of coming into the scene late. I think this could have been a great book with another hundred pages to round it out. As it was, I enjoyed it but it felt a bit unfinished to me. Would I recommend it? Yes. Was it as good as The War in 2020? Not by a long shot. Three stars.
Book Review: Terrifying and Plausible
Summary: 5 Stars
Would you like a gripping read, with a frightening premise, a breakneck pace, and a terrifying conclusion, one that leaves you with dark thoughts for days after the closing page?
And a story that shows the ultimate weakness of the US Army and the US Marines -- a sense of honor. But more about honor in a moment.
This story is not just unlikely horrors such as Hannibal Lecter's cannibaliam or Stephen King's hyperactive imaginings, but a full-scale, all-out, apocalyptic, messianic vision of a final war of extermination between Moslems and Christians. This may seem unlikely to Americans, who live largely sheltered by two oceans and our willful blindness to history.
Perhaps a few reminders might help. In the years after 1492, through disease and guns, Christians killed 90 percent of all the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. Hitler killed 6 million Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals -- and 50 million Russians. Stalin killed tens of millions of Ukrainians. The Christian Taiping Rebellion killed 30 million Chinese. Mao Zedong starved to death 40 million Chinese. In 1258, Hulagu killed every man, woman, and child in Baghdad, nearly a million civilians. In 1099, the Christian Crusaders slaughtered most of the inhabitants of Jerusalem -- Moslems. Jews, and native Christians. In the Fourth Crusade, Roman Christians massacred the Eastern Christians of Constantinpole. In the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Catholic Christians murdered nearly 30,000 Protestant Christians. And today's Wahabi and Salafist Moslems rejoice in slitting throats, cutting off heads, and blowing up girls' schools -- and posting shameless videos of their sadism. The list could on. The point is man's boundless capacity for enormous evil.
But even American Christianity has its extremists. Tens of millions believe that men and dinosaurs co-existed; fossils are merely the Devil's snare. There is an informal network linking survivalists, skinheads, neo-Nazis, "birthers," and clinic bombers, egged on by radio conspiracy-mongers who make millions stoking the fires of paranoia. Someone is out to get you. Islam makes an easy target, with its terrorist violence and rage again the West. Christian and Moslem radicals, each beliving that the other deserves eradication.
Add in a few technical details.The Chinese have perfected shooting down satellites; without them, we have no GPS and a paralyzed military. The "smart" aircraft and vehicles, peddled so ferociously by America's military suppliers to a compliant and ignorant Congress, are woefully vulnerable to electroc jamming. The US Air Force, in love with the image of zoomy silver birds and steely-eyed Top Gun pilots, buys planes too fast for ground support, while dragging their heels into an all drone future.
But we must return to honor. The US military tradition follows a code of honor, honesty, and duty. Peters raises the question -- are these useless virtues in a world increasingly run by religious zealots, callous, unscrupulous, and hypocritical, with murder in their hearts?.
Take all these premises, each factual, add an author who a is real military man (a former lieutenant colonel), add the touch of a master story-teller, whose moral compass is the Sermon on the Mount, and you have a timely, moral, engrossing, and deeply unsettling book. I commend it highly.
Book Review: Peters' Intuitive Thriller Is Not for the Lazy Reader
Summary: 5 Stars
Set in the future, after "Armageddon," Ralph Peters' The War After Armageddon is gripping, intelligent and swift. The conflict is between two modern adversaries--Christianity and Radical Islam--and embedded in the Holy Land hotspots of the Middle East. Judaism is caught in the crossfire but of course an ally of the Christian soldiers from post-Armageddon America. The Nation of Israel has been decimated by a nuclear attack, as well as the American cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Americans have responded by electing a strong Christian government and establishing the MOBIC (Military Order of the Brothers In Christ) branch of the military to replace the National Guard. The result is a tenuous relationship among the various branches, and inevitably, strained communications among the Commanding Generals.
On the surface, the obvious conflict between the Christians and Muslims is heightened by the lack of technology, or the overly-advanced use of it. In this futuristic thriller, the over-dependence upon technological advances is the Achilles heel for the soldiers on both sides of the conflict, as opponents must rekindle their skills in the more basic uses of old school navigation to get around signal jamming devices.
Digging deeper, "politics as usual" runs amuck with under-the-table deals and double-talk among the various players. The reader is kept guessing, concluding and reasoning his way through who is helping who, who is setting who up for the fall. The undertone of dirty politics quickly blurs the line between good and bad.
Flintlock stands out, along with a certain Sergeant Major, as the most authentic character. He is so good, in the sense that he is real and wants to do the right thing, that it is his downfall. Readers may identify Lt. General Flintlock with some modern figure(s) in American politics, which is likely not a coincidence since Ralph Peters wrote this as a very informed modern political contributor.
Peters' military intelligence background makes the details of The War After Armageddon riveting and smart. As a thoughtful author, Peters provides a glossary of terms and characters in the back of the book. A person with military experience or exposure can likely figure out most, if not all, of the acronyms Peters uses; however, the glossary is a welcomed tool in making the book comprehensive and detailed.
A better prepared reader will know the geography of the Middle East and the significance of various Holy Land archeological sites. Peters explains some of them, but prior historical knowledge will make this a more enjoyable and logical read.
The War After Armageddon makes you think, feel, pontificate and ponder the very essence of the conflicts of faith. Is it differences in faith that fuel the deadliest of wars or the basic human desire for power and control? Is it the human desire to play God that keeps us from knowing Him and His desire for us as humans?
The War After Armageddon is not a simple, lazy read. One has to be on his feet and ready to be transported into a new dimension with Peters' latest thriller, as well as accustomed to high level intuition and shifting gears from one location to another at a moment's notice. It is a ride that is both fascinating and spine-chillingly real.