TEAM YANKEE [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Coyle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 1988

In the winning tradition of Flight of the Intruder and Hunt for Red October comes an explosive new military adventure. "Stunning. A powerful story . . . so real, you can smell the smoke".--Tom Clancy

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Audioworks; abridged edition edition (April 13, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067166252X
• ISBN-13: 978-0671662523
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,498,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Team Yankee - Step into the cupola!, December 11, 2002

By 

K. Wyatt "ssintrepid" (Cape Girardeau, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Team Yankee (Paperback)

To say that Team Yankee is a high speed, low drag, and intense military thriller would be a vast understatement! This is an in your face, action packed, combat thriller that is hard to put down once you've started it. Being a former soldier, Harold Coyle knows what being a soldier is about. Armed with a VMI education and seventeen years of Active Duty in the US Army, the author set out to write a military thriller about a possible European, NATO/Warsaw Pact conventional conflict. He quite successfully accomplished that mission with Team Yankee, in flying colors! He has a particularly good writing style that is very fluid and doesn't get bogged down heavily in the details.

Team Yankee begins with a succinct set up as to why the conflict starts. He then flows perfectly into the nuts and bolts of a very likely scenario of how a conventional WWIII would've begun in the mid to late 80's. The story concentrates heavily on Captain Sean Bannon, commander of Team Yankee which is a detached armor team with mechanized infantry attached to them.

Along with the highly intense initial combat scenarios, there are the harrowing evacuation scenes of his wife Pat, their kids and the other dependents of Team Yankee! These scenes are exceptionally well written and will leave you exhausted.

The author puts on display a great many things that can happen during war, to include the "fog of war," where there are times when communications are cut and Company Commanders have to totally wing it and pray for the best. He flawlessly displays the entire gamut of emotions that Captain Bannon and the other soldiers are going through, throughout the entire novel. In essence, this novel puts you in the Tank Commanders cupola completely and thoroughly. The dialogue is tremendously well written, along with well detailed explanations for the "plans" of attack or defense. As an added bonus, there are detailed graphics with the proper symbols for units' friendly and enemy alike. Thank God this is a work of fiction and humanity did not have to face the brutal realism in this book!

Not since I read Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" or Larry Bonds "Red Phoenix" have I read a military action thriller written this well. If you're into military/action thrillers, this true treasure is one you need to add to your library. It took me a while to locate a decent copy of this book and it was well worth the search!

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You can almost smell the cordite...., September 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Team Yankee (Paperback)

I first read this book in 1990 while serving in West Germany as a Cavalry Scout with 4/7 Cav 3rd Armored Div. I really enjoyed it at the time. I later served in Operation Desert Sheild/Storm and was involved a heavy armor engagement at the Battle of 73 Easting. This book is as close as you can get without having to dodge sabot rounds. Coyle does a great job of not only mastering military jargon and weapons systems but he also captures the fear and terror felt by the common tanker and foot soldier... probably the most powerful war story I have ever read.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Coyle makes impressive authorial debut with Team Yankee, August 23, 2004

By 

Alex Diaz-Granados "fardreaming writer" (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Team Yankee (Paperback)

Harold Coyle's Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III (Presidio Press, 1987) was published a year after Red Storm Rising's triumphant debut in hardcover, and although it is thematically similar (Soviet forces invade West Germany after a series of crises escalate into an all out conventional war), Coyle's approach is very different from Clancy's. Instead of creating his own possible scenario for a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact confrontation, he asked for, and received, permission from British author (and retired General) Sir John Hackett to set Team Yankee within the scenario created in Hackett's two

"speculative fiction" books The Third World War: August 1985 and The Third World War: The Untold Story.

Team Yankee takes place within a two-week period in an August in the late 1980s. Since late July, a series of crises precipitated by the Iran-Iraq war has morphed into a clash between U.S. and Soviet naval forces in the Persian Gulf region. By August 1, word comes that NATO is mobilizing and ordering their armed forces, including Bannon and Team Yankee, to their wartime positions. Soon, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact "allies" cross the Inner German Border in force. Team Yankee and the rest of NATO's forces in West Germany must then fight the invaders and stop them before the Red Army reaches the Rhine River. After that, assuming the Soviet attack bogs down, the mission will change from merely defending territory to taking offensive operations and pushing the invaders back. The question Coyle poses is, can American soldiers, using their weapons and tactics against superior numbers of Soviet and Warsaw Pact soldiers, defeat Russian weapons and tactics?

Readers familiar with Hackett's macrocosmic World War III will know the big picture, but first-time readers will be turning the pages to see who wins, who loses, who dies...and who survives in this outstanding first novel by a true master of the military fiction genre.

The only flaw, and this is not Coyle's fault, is that reality -- in the shape of the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War -- has made the novel's setting extremely outdated. Some of the then-modern weapons, such as the M1 main battle tank, have been since updated to M1-A2 standard, older weapons have been retired, and obviously there's no more Warsaw Pact.

All in all, it's an entertaining read.