Looking For Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World (Hardcover)

by Ralph Peters (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Anyone faintly involved in the study of international affairs these days knows of Ralph Peters, the retired Army intelligence officer, author of 22 books of strategy and fiction, a columnist and commentator who leaves in his wake a succession of red-faced academics, generals, and defense contractors. Marching through conferences and laid-back strategy seminars like an Old Testament prophet, Peters summary judgments crackle and burn like fire from above. ...How Peters moved from the coal-mining country of Pennsylvania to international fame is the story of the Army at its best. A kid just out of high school packs up and leaves home for the bright lights, except that in the authors case, his bright lights aren't in Scranton or Harrisburg, but in London and Belgrade... What follows in Peters' narrative the majority of the book are memories of his and his brother Foreign Area Officer s (FAO's) odyssey through a decaying Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, traveling through the central and southern reaches of that vast empire as the grip of the bureaucracy falters and social controls are loosened. While the United States government looks on with indifference, Peters and other FAOs wander through the wreckage of the Soviet Union... Peters' travels in Russia set the tone for his later career; going to the place, talking to the natives, coming back, and reporting honestly, and damn the consequences...In a world already full of distinguished strategists, what makes Ralph Peters so unique? What characterizes his work and makes it stand out, both as literature and analysis? First, probably resulting from his love of literature and experience with fiction, Peters is simply fun to read... Second, Peters will take a stand. Acting with the best instincts of an intelligence professional, his career as a FAO was driven by a desire to actually see and report on events as they unfolded (sometimes at the risk of his skin) rather than reading secondhand accounts or assumptions by desk-bound staff... Thirdly, the author sees himself as a realist he believes that it is through the exercise of power that things are ultimately decided in the world, and applying sufficient force from the beginning of conflict ultimately saves lives... Looking for Trouble helps the reader better understand the turbulent drive bottled up inside Peters during his service in an Army he loved, but which in the end simply became too restrictive. A career is like a love affair, he writes, and you need to know when it's over. Dragging it on just spoils the happy memories. For friends and detractors alike, Peters has done us all a service with Looking for Trouble. It is his best book to date. Every generation and age has its restless men and women who, as Kipling put it once, can't sit still. Peters story gives us a glimpse into the fringes of civilization that many will never see, much less experience. This is an Army life well spent, pushing beyond frontiers to see and report some of the great events of our time. Contrary to what Peters said about the end of his affair with the Army, both Wars of Blood and Faith and Looking for Trouble indeed, all his books are, in his own way, love letters. --Colonel Robert B. Killebrew: Parameters; US Army War College Quarterly

Product Description
Ralph Peters--career soldier, controversial strategist, prize-winning, best-selling novelist, erstwhile rock musician, popular columnist, and old-fashioned adventurer--has always been good for a surprise. Now, for the first time, Peters recounts the personal experiences that shaped his views of the world, from the collapsing Soviet Union to the drug wars of the Andean Ridge, from quiet forays into Burma and Laos to military missions to Pakistan and the Caucasus--and on to the Southwest border of the United States and the meanest streets of Los Angeles. As the U.S. Army's chosen troubleshooter before he took off his uniform to write, Peters saw the greatest international dramas of our times and the personal tragedies they created from a truly unique perspective--and took advantage of every moment "outside of the wire."

The result is startling: the liveliest adventure memoir by an American in decades, a perfect balance of high drama and laugh-out-loud hilarity. Readers--among them his many devoted fans--will meet a faded beauty and former favorite singer of Josef Stalin's, now in her nineties and still a hopeless coquette; KGB officers who refuse to let go of the past in Moscow's back streets; a winsome princess adrift in a dying world; the corrupt Thai police general whose hobby was imitating Elvis to karaoke machines in rural bordellos; sentimental Caucasian gangsters; oblivious diplomats; wary Burmese colonels; doomed Mexican drug cops; Mennonite marijuana farmers; lonesome Nazi widows in Bolivia--and their Jewish friends; Muslim fundamentalists who write love poetry to imagined sweethearts . . . and, above all, the author's two loyal brothers-in-arms who sometimes shared the dangers and the wonder at the "back of beyond" and whose remarkable personal backgrounds, dashingly eccentric personalities, and appetite for adventure explode every cliche about military officers.

Beautifully written and hauntingly told, Looking for Trouble is simply the book Ralph Peters was born to write. We can all be glad that he came back alive to write it.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 339 pages
• Publisher: Stackpole Books (June 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811734102
• ISBN-13: 978-0811734103
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #238,441 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kipling meets Twain, Elvis, Orwell, and von Bismarck, July 3, 2008

By	David J. Danelo - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Marine Corps officers would call this a collection of sea stories -- tales of seedy fortune, hard-knock education, and derring-do that leaves readers in stitches, tears, or both. After three decades of globetrotting on behalf of America, this is a book that Ralph Peters has earned the right to write. All his hallmarks are on display in "Looking for Trouble": Kissinger-esque insight, Jeremiah-like candor, and a wit (and karaoke partner) that Mark Twain would envy. Reading this is the most fun I've had with travel writing this side of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Steinbeck.

A cynical bookbuyer might discount the five stars and voluminous accolades as just a literary comrade's pep talk. However, this is Peters's first work of nonfiction that I thought rated five stars. His strategic tomes were interesting, colorful, and well-written. But Peters wrote those books with urgency, attempting to square away the post-9/11 U.S. military and educate the Pentagon's minions to prevent them from doing anything stupid (well, at least he tried). They didn't quite have that extra spark.

"Looking for Trouble" does. And then some.

I had thought about ending this review with quotes from the outstanding statements I found in the narrative. If I was going to grant Peters a perfect score, I figured I should at least show him off a bit to justify my judgment. As I was reading, I folded back each page that I found a remarkable sentence, unexpected insight, or laugh-out-loud outrageous illustration.

I bookmarked 53 pages.

35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Humans Knew in 1990's That Secret Mandarins Refused to Hear, June 28, 2008

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This book is not, as some might expect, a collection of past Op-Eds, but rather an extraordinary retrospective at the 1989-1996 time frame when officers like Ralph (and General Al Gray, myself, and a number of others in the Army and the Marines) were seeing the writing on the wall: the end of big war and the emergence of global instability in every clime and place). Ralph actually walked the ground and had "eyes on."

I was immediately charmed anew by the poetic writing and the visually elegant turns of phrase. I have in my notes: chuckled, amused, reminded.

This review is going to combine my fly leaf notes with as many short quotes as I can fit in within my 1,000 word allotment.

Notes first:

Deep reading of Tolstoy and others set the stage for *understanding* today's culture and mindset in Russia. Earlier in his life, a subscription gift from an aunt to National Geographic opened his eyes to the rest of the world.

Early on, disdain for how we spend billions on satellites and nothing on officers walking the ground. He notes that overt human intelligence can absorb and articulate what no satellite can provide: "the temper of the people, the taste of the land."

USSR in 1991 was potholes and rust. In his "walk-about" he gained direct invited access to an MVD commander's office, to all of the local "secret" messages, and had invited "eyes on" the MVD special intelligence communications room.

In the Bosnia-Kosovo run-up, which he and others anticipated, he learned that Europe cannot be trusted to act in unison or decisively in the absence of strong US leadership--France, Germany, and the United Kingdom all revert to their historical animosities, and despite their large standing armies, lack the political will or the deep strategic analytics necessary to use those armies in a coherent manner.

His respect for Armenia is deeply rooted in his on the ground experience among them.

Col Stu Herrington, whose book Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World I have praised, is strongly praised in this book. He and the author were part of a team that worked with the Russians to address the long-standing concern over Americans being held in the Gulag, and the pages in this book, covering each of the wars from World War II onwards, are a complete surprise and essential reading for anyone interested in POW/MIA accounting.

He blasts the US policy of crop eradication, and his devastating criticism of arm-chair politicians and ivory tower diplomats warms my heart.

Late in the book he focused on Pakistan and I find this chapter especially vital for the public understanding of how the US is destroying its once-close ties to the Pakistani officer corps. The older officers are fully trained by the British or the US. The company and field grade officers are not, and are so delusional about Islam and so ignorant about the rest of the world as to be very dangerous to us.

Throughout the book he laments the lot of women across most Islamic countries (with Indonesia and Malaysia as notable exceptions; I add this from my own knowledge and Ralph's official report to the Marine Corps in the 1990's).

Now the quotes. Page number, then words:

8 On [the Russian and Central Asian] frontiers, humanity is a brotherhood of smugglers.

29 Only its women allowed the Soviet Union to endure as long as it did.

38 ...I am convinced there is no Russian word for maintenance.

45 ...worry too much about dead facts and too little about their antagonist's delusions.

66 Artist and intelligence challenges similar: an eye for detail and ability to reduce complexity to coherence

73 ...no one in the US intelligence community was interested. If the data didn't come from a satellite, it didn't count.

87 What Belgrade lacked ... was human dignity.

108 I knew we could overpower [Iraqi] military....I had seen...his officer corps...drunk and whoring.

132 Conquest of Central Asia is a chronicle of...cruelty....Soviets are the champs....[others] tortured human beings. The Soviet Union tortured the earth itself.

141 Bukhara is where Islam turned dark...

146 The Clinton Administration was run by intolerant dreamers... With neither self-critical faculties nor experience of the world ...

151 Islam froze by the mid-fifteenth century when science-fearing zealots....

172 And there you have our diplomats. Unwilling to talk to our enemies... Unwilling to learn.

200 Azerbaijan was the first place where I got n inside look at the nastiness of our Saudi "friends."

204 Everywhere, the Saudis took an interest in human suffering only if it offered them an entry point for missionary activities. And any Muslim who wouldn't sign up for ... Wahhabi Puritanism was welcome to die.

218 ...the callousness with which our government had treated the family members of our MIAs...

231 [General McCaffrey] wasn't getting an adequate tie-it-all-together picture of the cocaine problem. Not from his staff, and not from the alphabet-soup agencies...

239 You cannot take away the livelihood of the poor [coca crops] unless you have the wherewithal to replace it immediately and enduringly.

244 Found wealth, when immature countries...hit the natural-resources lottery, is uniformly destructive of the souls of men and nations.

251 [Army saw the future coming.] It was impossible, however, to persuade the Clinton White House, the intelligence establishment, or even our own services (except for the Marines) that our enemies, rather than our desires, would shape the future security environment.

319 [Drug Czar] was not allowed to differentiate between hard and soft drugs.

335 [At the Plain of Jars] I saw my country's dark side....we go mad now and then. And when we do, we leave desolation behind.

This is an amazing book and for anyone who is concerned with strategic warning, honest intelligence, strategy, force structure, the need to rebalance the instruments of national power, and the future of humanity, will find this book inspiring.

E Veritate Potens--From Truth, We the People Are Empowered

See also:
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places: 5th Edition (Robert Young Pelton the World's Most Dangerous Places)
The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
The Warning Solution : Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information Overload
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great adventure from a master story-teller, July 7, 2008

By	Nikephorus Phokas (Alexandria, Virginia United States) - See all my reviews

Ralph Peter's book should be required reading for every Marxism-besotted and multiculturalism-drunk humanities department in the United States. He stumbled upon an elemental truth in a youthful visit to Tito's Yugoslavia with its communism-lite: "There was nothing like firsthand exposure to the dialectical materialism to teach that the dialectic rarely delivered the material. Leftist rhetoric is wonderfully seductive. The tragedy is that those stirring promises are worthless." Most of the book adventures over the center of that contagion, or as Peters likes to describe it, "across the rotting corpse of the former Soviet Union."
This book gives that fingertip feel of anecdotal truth to this marvelous combination of memoir, travelogue, and social and strategic commentary. Not since the Comte de Custine traveled across Russia in the late 18th century (pegging the Russians as blond Orientals, by the way) has there been such a deft and insightful portrait of that immense and wasted land. Tongue in cheek he opines that he is convinced there is no word in Russian for maintenance; certainly the epitaph of the Soviet Union is "seventy-four years of deferred maintenance." But it is the lives blighted on the altar of ideology that draw out his empathy in the penetrating human portraits he sketches with his prose and everywhere is the waste of human potential, the lives emptied of a future.
Yet, he does not overlook the beauty. Peters has a magic inkwell, I am convinced after reading almost everything he has written from his thrillers to his strategic essays to his incomparable Owen Parry series of Civil War murder mysteries. He dips his pen into a poet's ink of beauty and writes a description of the Baltic coast. "The route traced the Amber Coast, a stretch of cold, white sand as beautiful as Heaven on a holiday. Dark blue waves lapped a coastline of low dunes adorned with stunted trees, worn rocks, and golden reeds. Birds rose broad-winged from marshes, black against the blue-enamel sky. No end of books praise the palette of the south, the lemon light of Italy, or the hues of an Arab souk. But there are no colors so true and piercing as those of an early summer day I the north, when the white clouds temper the brightness, lulling your eyes before the sun reappears. The world grows deep and detailed: the gnarl of driftwood, talcum sand, the vast, competing blues of sea and sky. A walk on the shore becomes a stroll with God."
Peters reserves a special contempt for that group of arrogant, Ivy-League amateurs in the Clinton years who bungled our relationship with the bewildered fragments of the old Soviet Union. Prisoners of their own delusions, they insisted that the old Russia of czar and commissar had vanished in a dawn of good intentions, a breathless, evolutionary leap worthy of the crackpot Marxist genetics of that fraud Lysenko. Peters more realistically noted, "We had passed through the Soviet sickroom just before the hour of death. Our inheritance was a grasp of reality that . . . but my views of Moscow were on a collision course with the optimists who knew Russia only from books or brief delegation visits. . . . But so many dreams vanished in the Soviet twilight and its savage aftermath that it is hard to have confidence." For his forthrightness, he became a prophet without honor in his own country and the object of senior policy-maker vendetta.
But not all the obtuseness was in the White House. Peters' warnings about the new Russian being born were of no interest to the intelligence community. "If the data didn't come from a satellite, no one in the U.S. intelligence community was interested. The human factor was messy and unpredictable. Better to count tanks and ships and wait for a revival of the Cold War." It is a crushing indictment but one that rings with the clarity of a fine bell tone. Peters is not attempting to claim retroactive prescience. He was right on target for those of us analysts steeped in Soviet/Russian affairs. My own contemporary analysis on the same themes was dismissed as "fluff" by the technocrats.
I served with Ralph Peters on one of his adventures, the search of American POWs who were consigned to the Soviet GULAG. I attest that everything Ralph has stated in both detail and essence is the simple truth. He said that we failed, and that was no more than a painful but honest fact, but it was not for the want of gallant and intelligent efforts on the part of men like Peters. Without his facility in Russian and his knowledge of the country's people and history, we would never have got as far as we did. It would have been a miracle had we succeeded, but it would have required us to outwit both the stubborn Russian determination to admit nothing and the desperate collusion of the U.S. Government not to look under that very nasty rock.
Peters' final journey took him on a speaking tour of the Pakistani Army as a special guest of its chief of staff. Again he sounds the bell in the night as flames lick the dark horizon. Pakistan's great inheritance from the British Raj was the English language which gifts an incredible advantage to any people attempting to fully connect with the dynamism of the global economy. Instead he describes the loss of facility in English among the officer corps under the influence of Islamism. With that loss comes a haze of ignorance that cuts them off from the free flow of information and ideas and forces them inward to a closed circle of Islamist fanaticism and obscurantism. Considering Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, this is no little problem. He points out that the United States has abetted this problem by prohibiting the training of Pakistani officers in U.S. military schools in retaliation for their nuclear program, a classic act of cutting off our nose to spite our face.
If you want insight into a maddening world told by a master story-teller, buy this book. There are thousand and one treasures here. Pete Tsouras