Some 23 years ago, when I returned from my LDS mission, I learned that a movie based on Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October was soon to be released. So I bought the book and read it.
After Red October I read Red Storm Rising and really enjoyed it, then Patriot Games which I struggled a bit with -- at least the first half after Ryan breaks up the attack in London, then the attack on the highway in Maryland propelled me through the rest of the book. I waited awhile before reading Cardinal of the Kremlin and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.
I didn't like Clear and Present Danger as much and The Sum of All Fears took a long time to get to the action. But I really enjoyed Debt of Honor and Executive Orders.
Clancy was one of the best, he will be missed.
Two things really impressed me about Clancy. First, there were times when I would stop reading just to marvel at how good his writing was. Second, his LDS characters, though usually minor, were real people rather than charactures.
In Clear and Present Danger as Ryan is struggling to decide what to do about the illegal secret mission in Columbia, he is driving along the beltway and sees the Washington Temple, which leads him to recall members of the church in government who have acted with integrity. In Without Remorse the F-105 pilot shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese was LDS, and I could find no fault with how Clancy developed the character or how he presented LDS beliefs. The pilot even taps out "all is well; all is well" in Morse code to another prisoner.
I have posted before about integrity, with that in mind, here is an excerpt from Clear and Present Danger (Jack Ryan is being driven along the Washington beltway):
Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd looking buidling, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hard-working , and fiercly loyal to their country, becuase they believed in what America stood for. And that was all it came down to, wasn't it? Either you stand for something, or you don't, Ryan told himself. Any jack[wagon] could be against things, like a petulant child claiming to hate an untasted vegetable You could tell what these people stood for. The Mormons tithed their income, which allowed their church to construct this monument to faith. Just as medieval peasants had taken from their need to build the cathedrals of their age, for precisely the same purpose. The peasants were forgotten by all but the God in Whom they believed.
The cathedrals -- testimony to those beliefs -- remained in their glory, still used for their intended purpose. Who remembered the political issues of that age? The nobles and their castles had crumbled away, the royal bloodlines had mostly ended, and all that age had left behind were memorials to faith, belief in something more important than man's corporeal existance, expressed in stonework crafted by the hands of men. What better proof could there be of what really mattered?
Jack knew he wasn't the first to wonder at the fact, not by a very long shot indeed, but it wasn't often that anyone perceived Truth so clearly as Ryan did on this Monday morning. It made expediency seem a shallow, emphemeral, and ultimately useless commodity. He still had to figure out what he would do, and knew that his action would possibly be decided by others, but he knew what sort of guide, what sort of measure he would use to determine his action. That was enough for now, he told himself.
Source: Clancy, T. (1989). Clear and Present Danger. New York: G.P Putnam's Sons. Pg. 498.
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