Customer Reviews

Fortune Favors the Brave: The Story of First Force Recon (Special Warfare Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is not a dramatized, blood and guts novel. The fact that other reviewers refer to it as a "novel" is somewhat revealing as to their low ratings.
Yes, the new cover art tries to market this book to the lowest common denominator.

Here's the deal:
Colonel Meyers was instrumental in the formation of United States Marine Corps Special Warfare, and this is the story of how he made it happen.

This book details every aspect of the early years of Marine Corps Reconnaissance, including not only the mission of the Recon units, but the doctrine and methods the units would use to carry out their mission. It primarily focuses, however; on how the Marine reconnaissance units came to develop their methods of special warfare.

This book IS: A very detailed, personal and insightful look into the innovations that made Special Warfare what it is today.

This book IS NOT: Stories of heavily armed dudes smashing doors down and firing machine guns at bad guys while defusing bombs, throwing grenades, dodging flamethrowers with commando rolls, and making breakfast while punching Commies in the face.

If you are a student of special warfare, or a United States Marine; I highly recommend this book for both education and entertainment.

If you are looking for stories of knife fights, machine-guns and snake-eaters, I recommend you go back to watching "The A-Team."

Semper Fidelis: Colonel Meyers.

-B

It is an interesting story. It definately isn't the book for you if you want to read about spec ops guys doing super secret missions, but if you want a quick and interesting read this is a fun book. It shows how a lot of things that are now considered to be standard training for most special operations units around the world came to be such as HALO, the fulton sky hook, swimming out of a torpedo tube and so on. My personal favorite is the stories about guys sitting in the bomb bay of fighter bombers and then getting dropped out at high speed.

This is not a horribly written novel, just not a very interesting one. Mr. Myers could have written a one chapter synopsis that covered the whole book and could have shared some operations that Recon were involved with at it's beginning. In fact, it is just the reverse. He spends the whole book describing the formation of test unit one and all the training that went into forming the Recon. (including equipment testing) Only the last chapter in the book gives some small snippetts about units in combat using the Fulton Skyhook and SPIE rigging extraction methods. All in all a very technical but boring book. Good for those who want to know what type of material that was selected for special forces parachutes or for spie rigging ropes....

Really not what I expected. A lot of auto-biographical info on the author's military career and little about real-world missions. I read the first 150 pages and had to put it down. I guess I was expecting something along the lines of Col. Beckwith's Delta Force or Pfarrer's Warrior Soul. I felt like I was having a conversation with a friend that was talking about all things I liked, but in a most sedate and unexciting fashion. Not very entertaining.