The Gold Crew

Rating:
Summary: The new battle of the Atlantic
Review: Most technothrillers seem like throwback to the cold war in their portrayal of stalwart American servicemen (without a hint of any dissent) and their problem-free hardware up against the fractured - almost medeival - horde of the Warsaw pact military. "The Gold Crew" in which the crew of an American ballistic missile submarine comes apart and brings the world to the brink of nuclear war, is a different anachronism - when we thought we were losing the cold war and our pretensions of freedom were being undermined by a dissent that argued against the costs of our hostility to the Russians.

The title "The Gold Crew" refers to the navy's system of having rotating crews on-board missile subs - the subs can endure prolonged duty better than the men who run it; to ensure that a submarine remains ready for sea (and for launching its missiles) for the longest period, missile subs return for patrol only to switch crews - blue crew for gold and vica versa. The gold crew gets the lucky (or unlucky) assignment of participating in an extended wargame involving a few missiles with unarmed warheads. The need for constant readiness requires that some of the missiles remained tipped with armed warheads, but the gold crew is the best and nobody imagines that the crew is particularly vulnerable to stress. In this case, it comes down to bad paint - fumes that put the men off their axes and sufficiently diminish their ability to tell reality from wargame inspired fantasy.

I read "The Gold crew" about the same time that "Red Storm Rising" appeared - and "Gold" seemed prefigured to destroy the myth of seamless, push-button techno-warfare that Tom Clancy's books created, almost as soon as they were really created. Unfortunately, it takes more than bad technology to make good charachters, and none in "Gold" really stand out. Author Scortia realized that the whole charachters of other books were too unbeleivable, but failed to realize that even dissassembled chartachters don't a compelling novel make. Once bad paint fumes cause the crew to become undone, and the captain has begun to convince them that war has actually begun , the crew doesn't try to put itslef together. There's something frightening in the way that Scortia's crew moves with the listless way of men who have actually seen WWIII, but he doesn't capitalize on it enough.

Still a worthy effort - and better than the by-the-numbers TV movie based on it (With Robert Conrad, David Soul and Sam Waterston)

Rating:
Summary: The new battle of the Atlantic
Review: Most technothrillers seem like throwback to the cold war in their portrayal of stalwart American servicemen (without a hint of any dissent) and their problem-free hardware up against the fractured - almost medeival - horde of the Warsaw pact military. "The Gold Crew" in which the crew of an American ballistic missile submarine comes apart and brings the world to the brink of nuclear war, is a different anachronism - when we thought we were losing the cold war and our pretensions of freedom were being undermined by a dissent that argued against the costs of our hostility to the Russians.

The title "The Gold Crew" refers to the navy's system of having rotating crews on-board missile subs - the subs can endure prolonged duty better than the men who run it; to ensure that a submarine remains ready for sea (and for launching its missiles) for the longest period, missile subs return for patrol only to switch crews - blue crew for gold and vica versa. The gold crew gets the lucky (or unlucky) assignment of participating in an extended wargame involving a few missiles with unarmed warheads. The need for constant readiness requires that some of the missiles remained tipped with armed warheads, but the gold crew is the best and nobody imagines that the crew is particularly vulnerable to stress. In this case, it comes down to bad paint - fumes that put the men off their axes and sufficiently diminish their ability to tell reality from wargame inspired fantasy.

I read "The Gold crew" about the same time that "Red Storm Rising" appeared - and "Gold" seemed prefigured to destroy the myth of seamless, push-button techno-warfare that Tom Clancy's books created, almost as soon as they were really created. Unfortunately, it takes more than bad technology to make good charachters, and none in "Gold" really stand out. Author Scortia realized that the whole charachters of other books were too unbeleivable, but failed to realize that even dissassembled chartachters don't a compelling novel make. Once bad paint fumes cause the crew to become undone, and the captain has begun to convince them that war has actually begun , the crew doesn't try to put itslef together. There's something frightening in the way that Scortia's crew moves with the listless way of men who have actually seen WWIII, but he doesn't capitalize on it enough.

Still a worthy effort - and better than the by-the-numbers TV movie based on it (With Robert Conrad, David Soul and Sam Waterston)