Legacy of Valor [Hardcover]

Jed L. Babbin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2000

What has the politics of the 90s done to America's armed forces? Has the culture of the fighting man - of duty, honor, and country - been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness? Jed Babbin's new novel, LEGACY OF VALOR, takes on these questions with an exciting mixture of explosive action, low politics, and high valor. LEGACY OF VALOR is the story of a Navy SEAL lieutenant, Cully O'Bannon, and his platoon or tough, smart adrenaline addicts. After carrying out a key mission on the eve of the Gulf War, Cully and his men return to a country now led by a man whose dislike for the military is only exceeded by his ineptness in foreign policy. The SEALs, now a target of budget cuts and social experimentation, face extinction when an accident in a rescue mission makes them the focus of the wrath of the President and his powerful allies in the Senate. The SEALs only hope is a beautiful staffer who works for a senator whose seniority is the best weapon in fighting ! for the SEALs' continued existence. Meanwhile, war is brewing in the Middle East. While the Senate pillories the SEALs in televised hearings, an unthinkable alliance of Russian terrorists-for-hire and Arab dictators is held in check only by the fear of American intervention. When the plan to threaten New York with nuclear blackmail unfolds, America must search for the weapon it has thrown away - Cully O'Bannon and his small band of men who have been scattered across the country in the Navy's efforts to obey the short-sighted demands of the politicians. LEGACY OF VALOR is a story of military life in the 90s, told from the standpoint of the professional soldier. It's a story laced with real military tactics, political satire torn from today's headlines, and enough action to satisfy the more hard-core adventure reader. In Cully O'Bannon, a new American hero is brought to life in this story of love, honor, and stubborn trust in the values that made America.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jed Babbin is a former Air Force officer who began his active duty in the last year of the Vietnam War. He later served as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush Administration. He now practices law in Washington, DC. Mr. Babbin is donating twenty-five percent of the proceeds from LEGACY OF VALOR to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. S.O.W.F. is a private charitable organization whose mission is to provide college funds for the children of special operations soldiers and officers killed in the line of duty.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 245 pages
• Publisher: Pentland Press (NC) (August 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571972137
• ISBN-13: 978-1571972132
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,255,982 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valor Survives, May 1, 2001

By 

Larry Thornberry - See all my reviews

This review is from: Legacy of Valor (Hardcover)

Jed Babbin's first book is part novel, part political pamphlet, and part morality play. Readers will be treated to an exciting and straight-forward military action story - albeit with satirical touches - and a political wake-up call.

The military action in Babbin's book is accurately described and furiously paced. His warriors are tough, smart, and highly motivated. The low subplot centers on ambitious and unprincipled Washington politicians, to whom the military values of duty, honor, country mean nothing.

Babbin uses a team of Navy SEALs, ably led by Lieutenant Cully O'Bannon, to illustrate the valor of America's military. But this legacy -- with a long and glorious pedigree -- is put in jeopardy by a cynical political establishmnent in the grip of political correctness. In Babbin's fictional Washington -- difficult to distinguish from the actual one -- the military is putty in the hands of social engineers eager to translate every left phantasm into policy. Women in combat. Social work deployments. The whole disaster.

At the top of this sorry political food chain is a shallow, opportunistic president who has no military service, a bossy wife, and no understanding of how important a strong and motivated military is to America's freedom and prosperity.

Ring any bells yet?

Any resemblance between characters in Babbin's novel and some of the real politicians who infest Washington is, well, not that hard to parse. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. But readers won't need a magic decoder ring to figure out who a ficticious California senator named Barbara Berkely is, or an attorney general referred to by all the president's persons as Will Do Wanda. Sometimes Babbin can't restrain himself, so we have a U.N. Secretary General named Boolah-Boolah Gemali. Charles Dickens, call your office.

Formidable on the battlefield, the military services are no match for politicians who won't give them the financial support they need to do their jobs, or the respect they deserve for doing them. In his long set-up, which can be a bit talky at times, we see politicans and their staff members (sometimes more powerful than the elected politicians themselves), driven by ambition and left ideology, strip the military to the bare bones, including disbanding all the nation's special operations units.

Babbin may go a bit over the top in describing the political rape of the military. Not even the Clinton administration -- the most anti-military administration in the nation's history -- tried to deploy 20 percent of Army and Marine Corps troops to guard the South American rain forests. And today's feminist red-hots are more interested in having women serve in submarines than in doing away with subs.

But Babbin deserves the benefit of our doubts. The melody here is right, if not every word of the song. He knows whereof he writes. He's a former Air Force JAG officer. As deputy undersecretary of defense under George Bush (the first one) in 1990 and 1991, he served Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney during Operation Desert Storm. He knows whose phone rings and in what order when things start hitting the fan. He shows readers, in dramatic narrative, how the military and its civilian leadership work together when the pointy end of the spear has to poke someone.

Many of Babbin's descriptions of White House lefties ring true, and make it hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. Here's a young staffer who obviously believes late-night bull sessions in Yale dorm rooms prepare one better to take arms against a sea of troubles than does military training and combat experience. He's sifting candidates for the position of deputy national security advisor. After describing two academic candidates glowingly, he says:

"The third is a Marine brigadier general, and he's probably the least qualified of the lot. He has no formal education at all, just a degree from the Naval Academy."

After politicians have miniaturized and feminized the military -- including shelving the elite special units that do the tough, up-close and personal work -- America is presented with a crisis of crises, cooked up and executed by a bold, dedicated, and competent band of terrorists. Worthy opponents for O'Bannon and his warriors, who return from the civilian work to which they have been relegated, for a pro-bono job.

The last 40 pages or so of "Legacy of Valor" are as exciting as anything in Tom Clancy and feature a clash for all the marbles at one of America's most sacred sites. It's not revealing too much to say that at the end the reader will have some reason to hope that Babbin's ficticious America might, after all, learn to support and respect the men and women who, to borrow from Kipling, guard us while we sleep.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally - A Real Hero, September 4, 2000

By 

Jo-Anne Prokopowicz (Arlington, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Legacy of Valor (Hardcover)

There aren't many heroes that can turn a woman's fancy these days - certainly not in our Nation's Capital. The only thing chicks in Generation-X like me have going to for us is a small British boy-wizard in training named Harry or the occasional cheesy USDA Grade-A beefcake in a romance novel.

That was until I met Navy SEAL Cully O'Bannon on the pages of Jed Babbin's new military thriller Legacy of Valor (Pentland Press 2000). It is a griping story of love, loss, glory and the Navy SEALs. Not so gently - it hammers away at a liberal establishment in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. that frowns upon national defense and smothers you with psychobabble. (Sound familiar?)

What makes the novel so charming is Mr. Babbin's accuracy with the military lingo without submitting the reader to an over indulgence of geek-speak minutiae. (Gals - that means both you and your guy can enjoy the book together!)

This is Mr. Babbin's first novel and it starts strong off of the blocks. His use of fictional and real-life characters helps the reader clearly focuses on the guys who are donning the "black hats" in this modern day Western that pits good and evil against each other. Mr. Babbin also has an amazing gift for showing us the dark underbelly of folks in political power who - for their own amusement and pleasure - make choices at the expense of our safety and national security.

If you are looking for a book with strong characters and a cutting-edge story line - order this book and hope for a rainy where you can rip the phone out of the wall, sip on some single-malt scotch and read a fine novel.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gripping story filled with Action and Romance, January 11, 2001

By 

Graham M Curtis (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Legacy of Valor (Hardcover)

In response to the kidnapping of American Ion Perdicaris in Morocco by Mulay Hamid El Raisuli in May of 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt gave the Moroccan government the following ultimatum; "Give me Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead." Roosevelt delivered that famous ultimatum with the knowledge that his military was not only the most powerful in the world, but also the most respected and feared military of that time. May of 1904 was a moment in history when the President of the United States showed his respect for, support for and pride in the American military. Many things have changed since then. Among those changes has been the loss of respect, appreciation and support of the American military by many in civilian power.

In his novel, Legacy of Valor, Mr. Jed Babbin vividly portrays how one administration can have such loath and disrespect for the military that it becomes the cause of deadly destruction. Legacy of Valor is the kind of novel that makes the reader both agitated with excitement and consumed with condemnation for a President who would treat his military with such contempt. So well written is Legacy of Valor that it's characters like Cully O'Bannon and Senator Berkley virtually jump out of the pages and pull you right into the middle of a hot fire fight or a room full of conspiring Senators. Mr. Babbin's insight into the military and his experience inside the Beltway has allowed him to create an amazingly entertaining and insightful novel well worth reading over and over.

This is a book that should be taken very seriously. Mr. Babbin's novel is a great tribute to American soldiers and especially those who make up our Special Forces. I highly recommend Legacy of Valor. My heart and prayers go out to those whom our fallen soldiers have left behind.