Seal Team One

The Vietnam portrayed in this violence-glorifying first novel is unlike the real Vietnam. It is a Vietnam full of gung-ho soldiers who are almost all white and completely drug-free. Lieutenant James McConnell, the leader of the elite Navy SEAL Team One, has the outlook of a teenage boy, and he is the old man in his platoon: ``The SEALs were consistently the wildest and probably the raunchiest of the bunch. What tied this collection of officers and hooligans together was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of women.'' We follow McConnell from his boyhood as an ace marksman in skeet club through his signing up to be a frogman, the standard basic-training-is-hell, and his deployment to a Vietnam he knows nothing about. Despite the earnestness with which McConnell questions his purpose theree.g. p. 153 (Couch was a SEAL commander), the tale is rife with racist and misogynist comments, and the dialogue and ``humor'' detract from any possible moral seriousness. One of McConnell's drunken boys says to him: ``Yuh know, Lootenant, yer not such a bad guy fer an ossifer.'' (June)