Book Review: Harold Coyle's Trial By Fire

Like the other authors who became really Big Names in the techno-thriller field, Harold Coyle made his name with Cold War stories, starting with 1987's Team Yankee, which depicts a NATO-Soviet clash in Central Europe as seen by an American tank crew. However, the end of the Cold War compelled him to shift to other themes, with his first post-Cold War book Trial by Fire, presenting a scenario based on U.S. relations with Mexico. Here, in the wake of a takeover of Mexico by a military junta--the "Council of Thirteen" intent on saving the country from corruption, crime and poverty--a Mexican crime boss driven into flight and exile by the Council's crackdown (Hector Alaman) manufactures a series of violent incidents on the U.S.-Mexico border that he intends for the U.S. to blame on the new Mexican regime, compelling the United States government to drive it from power, and giving him the opportunity to resume his old position within the country.

As might be guessed from that scenario--and for that matter, experience of post-Cold War techno-thriller writing generally--Coyle had to make a good deal more effort than before to develop the scenario that leads to the fighting (in comparison with his simply borrowing John Hackett's scenario for the armored warfare in 1987's Team Yankee, for example, or his only slightly written background to the Soviet invasion of Iran in 1988's Sword Point). What was less predictable was the level of adroitness Coyle would display in both choosing his scenario, and developing it. In envisioning a crisis of this kind with Mexico Coyle set up a situation in which the United States government may be overwhelmingly more powerful with regard to conventional military capability, such that it can destroy Mexico's armed forces with ease, but at the same time not manage to get what that government actually wants--security along its two thousand mile border with the vast and populous neighbor to its south, tasks requiring levels of military manpower far, far beyond what the U.S. has at its disposal. (In one of the more memorable scenes Coyle's military officer protagonists explain the numbers to a stupid, sarcastic politician with little apparent ability or willingness to process the obvious.) Moreover, Coyle displays some nuance in depicting how the situation unfolds--not least in an alertness to the vulnerability of governments to being manipulated by parties, foreign and domestic, for their own ends; how prejudice, media sensationalism, political hucksterism can easily combine with the demand of some to "do something" and the plain and simple happenstance that throws sparks into a tinderbox to push policymakers who are supposed to "know better" into disastrous courses (with one aspect of note how the politics of border states like Texas color national policy in this area); how as crises escalate, and missions "creep," political objects become ambitious beyond anyone's actual ability to realize them, with this particularly happening when soldiers win a conventional battle with ease only to find themselves stuck trying to hold territory and impose their political will on its inhabitants in an era of what Rupert Smith called "war amongst the people," and find that task nowhere near as easy. (Indeed, much more than is the case with most techno-thrillers, the policymakers and "pundits" in Washington would have had a chance to learn something if they picked it up--to the extent that they have the faculty to learn at all.)

Coyle's strengths here also extend to the depiction of the fighting itself, which here has the kind of grit one is unlikely to see in the more high-tech stories of aviators in super-planes--or of those writers of fighting on the ground inclined to present perfectly competent super-people rather than real human beings (for instance, one techno-thriller writer whose prose on this level was rightly compared with that of a "Victorian boy's book"). When America and Mexico do go to war here American officers do not always prove wise, strong or noble in making their decisions, or dealing with their consequences, which can and do include subordinates losing their lives. At the same time Coyle treats the Mexican characters on the opposite side of the battle from those Americans with a level of respect far from standard in the genre, the military officers of the Council sincerely acting as patriots, and intelligent ones, who have good reason to bristle at how their neighbor to the north sees them. (Where this rather nationalistic genre tends to treat foreigners' criticisms of the U.S. and its treatment of them as sanctimoniousness and worse, when Colonel Alfredo Guajardo complains that American representatives to his country lecture, threaten and dictate rather than talk to them we are getting his honest and not necessarily invalid appraisal of the relationship--while in making Guajardo the Council's "face" in America there is no sense that their view that his being of visibly European rather than indigenous descent would be advantageous for public relations with the United States government and the American public is at all an unfair assessment of racial attitudes in America on their part.)

Of course, for all that the tale has its implausibilities—and its limitations. Even as Mexico's domestic troubles--not least, its poverty--loom large as a theme within the book, Coyle does not go into any great depth in discussing these, and his vision of the Council's attempt to redress the problems can seem a bit muddled. (The Council does not breathe a word about nationalizations and the renunciation of foreign debt the way a left-wing government might, while instead planning painful austerity measures the way a right-wing government would; but also uses price controls and backs them up with drumhead justice in a manner not easily reconciled with the demands of the "Washington Consensus" to which it seems the Council means to accommodate the country.) There is, too, the way that Latin America and the Caribbean (including close, longtime U.S. allies such as Panama) line up behind Mexico against the U.S. in the crisis (a turn critical to even the very limited extent to which Mexico is able to throw up a conventional defense against the U.S. intervention).

Meanwhile, getting away from the construction of the scenario that is on the whole one of the book's strengths there is much that is less than ideal. Like many an author a few books into their career an initial tendency toward spare prose gives way to prolixity--and not always to good effect. In contrast with a Clancy Coyle, if hardly likely to offer a warts-and-all view of life in uniform, is still at least prepared to acknowledge its more human side, with its moments of silliness and pettiness--an officer's awkward fumbling after a dropped uniform clip, arguments among units about the order of precedence at a ceremonial parade, an officer's foul mood after he is bested by a colleague in a training exercise, the disrespect that personnel of different ranks and specialties often feel for each other--all of which lends the story even more verisimilitude than the greatest exactness in describing the fire control systems of armored vehicles, and matters the more in a tale where attention to character is more than an authorial piety. Still, Coyle is only so successful in mining the quotidian for interest (a feat few writers ever really pull off), the more in as there is so much of it this time around--extended considerably by the prominent subplot about the then-fashionable topic of whether women should be allowed to serve in the armed forces' combat units by making a major character the first assigned to command an infantry platoon as part of an experimental program which proves plodding and predictable. (Did anyone picking this up in the '90s ever doubt that Lieutenant Nancy Kozak would prove herself as a combat officer and show up the naysayers?) Indeed, the only real spark of human interest this side of the book had to offer was in a very minor character--a harassed trucker called back to National Guard duty whose time in the story is concluded within a mere forty pages of his first appearance. Meanwhile what we see outside of uniform--the depictions of the media's coverage of the crisis by way of the adventures of Dixon's lover, reporter Jan Fields, and the inevitable inside-the-Beltway stuff--fall as flat as these things usually do in books like this one. (Fields seems to operate in a very different media business than the one we know, where reporters are free to follow stories without regard for pressures or interference from commercially- and politically-minded higher-ups, with the sensationalization of the crisis that helps escalate it somehow having nothing to do with her, never confronting her with a single dilemma; while the D.C. goings-on have the same sanitized quality.)

All of this contributed to the book's feeling cluttered and overlong in that way that gives one the impression that the author in this case was not "cutting to the chase" because there really was just not much "chase," the political scenario, after all, still used as the basis not of a political thriller but a military techno-thriller which ends up with few military techno-thrills. The 446 page book, in which not the Mexican Council but the criminal Alaman is the real villain, gives the heroes what is in military terms a very small-time opponent indeed by the genre's standards, while the action is also "small-time," consisting mainly of a few episodes of small unit-level violence on the border functioning mainly as dramatizations of Alaman's plot, and a few glimpses of the principal "set piece" of the novel, the "Battle of Monterey" following from U.S. forces' attempt to establish a security zone along the southern side of the Mexican border (the mortaring of a truck convoy, an anti-armor ambush against a tank battalion)--a Lilliputian affair next to the battles in Coyle's earlier Sword Point, in between two very limited-scale air assaults. Meanwhile, just as Jack Ryan quickly became too senior to get into the action very much, his "Coyleverse" counterpart Army officer Scott Dixon, now a Lieutenant Colonel on a divisional staff, is a non-participant (rather realistically denied permission when personal motives impel him to try and play action hero near the end), denying the fighting some of what personal edge it may have had. The result is that, even if the book is a much more than usually intelligent treatment of its principal theme, its particular dramas lent themselves less well to the constraints and demands of the techno-thriller form than those of a few years earlier--and in fact I can imagine that a more satisfying novel might have come had there not been an attempt to accommodate it to the genre and its requirements.