TY is a quality book. Like Larry Bond, Harold Coyle is able to create a plausible scenario and to flesh it out with details, people and action. All of the technical details, drama, emotions of battle, overwhelming victories and near-run events are there. Like Bond, Coyle includes an appendix.I would wager that Coyle's books are more accessible than either Bond's or Clancy's. Coyle, who was at the time an officer in the same type of unit that he writes about, is reliant on referring to things and events as an actual military man would, even going so far as to provide occasional maps labeled with the symbols that NATO used to designate military units. Though the maps are less useful than anticipated because some of the unit labels are smudged or in very small print, they are still incredibly helpful in orienting the reader as to what is happening (especially since the author largely sets the action in fictional locations that could plausibly fit in real-life Germany). You won't have to know how many people are in a platoon, but by consulting the simple table next to the appendix, you will learn whether a brigade is larger than a battalion or not.Additionally, while the novel is told from 3 perspectives (Team Yankee, wife of TY's commander, Russian leaders that face TY), the POV is dominated by the various members of TY. When the author begins a paragraph from another view, he helpfully marks the paragraph with a single diamond (wife) or star (Russian). The other two views are there to lend extra perspective, but only to flesh things out, not to create an entirely new plot line.TY is set within the universe of Hackett's "Third World War" novels. Though I never read TWW and thus cannot really comment on how well TY ties into that novel, it doesn't really matter because Coyle firmly grounds the book from the perspective of a small unit in a large war. Except for occasional snippets from the Russian counterparts across the field or a series of snapshots of the war from the wife of the Team's commander, the reader knows as much about the Big Picture as the unit does - which is to say, not much at all. In fact, once the media blackout goes into effect a few days before the outbreak of hostilities, the only hints at how the rest of the war is going is from the rare briefings that the Team's commander gets during staff meetings. In short, TWW is not required pre-reading because most of the events in TWW would probably have very little effect on understanding on why Team Yankee was pushing to take this or that position. It is obvious that Coyle is writing from first-hand experience, as his description of how and why the soldiers act the way they do out of combat is very believable. The crew of the tank whose commander keeps screwing up does not violently stand up for in his defense like in a movie but instead silently wishes he were gone because they know their fates are intertwined (even though they are inside a seemingly-invincible 60-ton tank) and that "Pride was running a distant second to survival". Coyle makes passing remarks on the absurdity of events, such as what soldiers find funny at 2:34 AM, or how an entire column gets separated during a night march, or how soldiers sometimes come to depend on total strangers who they will never meet again to do their job so that they can do theirs, or how a tank falls into a shell crater and has to be abandoned, or the joy at seeing a brown-noser get taken down when the offender fails to perform. Even the smells are correct, as after one horrific battle, a soldier is seen as in terrible shape because the cut on his face is swollen and infected, his eyes are just deep holes, his beard is two-days old, every part of his skin is dirty, and the rest of his uniform is soaked with blood, oil, dirt, diesel and sweat. Mercifully, the smell goes unmentioned, but the same soldier smells "ripe" after 2 days while constantly fermenting in a chemical suit while going without baths for 2 days. Fatigue is a real factor, as happens when the Team has to move past a traffic jam, but cannot because every time the Team stops to yield to another unit, the Team collectively falls asleep from pure exhaustion, only to wake when they have to yield to another unit.What sets Coyle apart from Bond, however, and elevates him to the same level as Tom Clancy, is his ability to develop the people of the war at the same time he is developing the war itself. The members of Team Yankee are not the gung-ho apple pie-tossing John Waynes that infest Bond's drivel. Rather, they are very real people who are as average as could be (the Team's commander, who provides the main POV, is described in a preface with a list of impressive-sounding accomplishments until it mentions that he will "probably never be promoted above the grade of Lieutenant Colonel"). They are only able to carry on with their duties not because of their own personal willpower or because they are the Good Guys, but simply because of their reliance on training and equipment. Morale counts for a lot, but the first military action in the book is a radio call to a noisy unit to maintain radio silence - a call made without a change of expression or any extraneous movement, not because the soldier is that disciplined, but because it's 2:34 AM, the soldier has been sitting alone in a cold and uncomfortable tin box for hours on watch, and real people enter a "zombielike" stage at 2:34 AM. Even the commander is human, being startled awake by the errant radio call and unable to go back to sleep because of the intense pain and cramps from attempting to sleep on the items that clutter a military vehicle. Three special mentions must go out to the description of people. One is the reaction of the unit to war. When the Team's commander gets his first indication that war is a certainty, his first reaction is excitement or even determination. It's disbelief, the "I-knew-it-was-could-happen-because-that's-why-we're-deployed-here-but-I-must-be-mistaken-we-can't-really-be-at-war-it's-just-not-possible" feeling that you wouldn't expect out of a ranking officer. The second, and more surprising reaction, is the distinct sense of failure before the fighting even starts. In a paragraph that writes "failure" 3 times in ~10 sentences, a thought races through the commander's head that the main purpose of the military in Europe is not combat but deterrence, and that the unit has already failed in its primary mission before it has fired a single shot.The second is the change that occurs in people when exposed to war. Scattered through the novel, subtle but noticeable, are the emotional reactions when tested through a contest of life and death. A 19-year old cheeky kid quickly becomes an expert in death. A normally good natured officer becomes a hardened man, almost too enthusiastic in carrying out his duties. The Golden Boy of the unit gets dressed down when his unit fails to perform its duties. Conversely, someone who was a total zero in peacetime because an outstanding soldier who ends up performing a lot better than anyone could have expected. Even the civilians, who so often go unmentioned or discarded in books such as these, are noticeably affected by the war: refugees are seen weeping as they pass by the unit, children who would normally flock to the soldiers for candy now cower in fear even when they know they soldiers are on "their side". In a passing moment, the Team's commander starts to understand the basis behind the peace movement, a movement started by those who had grown up with tanks rumbling through the streets and who wanted to spare their children from the same fears.Finally, the author deserves high praise for including the POV of Russian counterparts and of the dependents of Team Yankee. It would have been extremely easy to exclude them entirely or to fill them with cliches as diabolical cartoon villains and doting support people, respectively. Instead, the Russians are seen as real people (an officer, deciding that his food is not fit to eat, decides to play with it instead) and the wife of the commander, who starts of by doing cliched things (worrying, gossiping about what is happening, fretting about the children) becomes a changed person after living through a harrowing evacuation through a airbase under active attack. When the plane safely arrives, her actions, words and reactions mirror those of the soldiers of Team Yankee - someone who has lived through an intensely traumatizing experience and had a very real brush with death.Thus, TY definitely deserves 4 stars, "I like it, but I don't love it." I have 3 main objections with the book.1: The lack of re-readability. This book is short and episodic, and while what is there is very well done and quality trumps quantity, the fact remains that it's still short. In the end, I feel no desire to revisit any of the book again. Don't get me wrong; the book was well worth what I paid for it, and it's definitely in the upper echelons of my all time list. It simply promises little to see on subsequent reads that I didn't catch on the first pass.2. There is a certain lack of drama in the book. For all of the real losses in people and equipment, as well as all the close-run battles, nothing overtly bad really happens to Team Yankee or the people we get to know. All of the severe injuries happen to redshirts or people whom we barely know, while Team Yankee always manages to pull through - sometimes by the narrowest of margins or by pure luck, but always ending with a victory. Team Yankee never has to experience a real setback. It's like the author wanted to push the boundaries of what he could do, but decided to only stretch the boundaries instead of tearing through them.3. The author is biased in favor of the West, leaving the Warsaw Pact soldiers alone while occasionally taking potshots at the Soviet leadership for their intentions (which go unexplained in this war, because remember that we only know what Team Yankee knows).Overall, an excellent, but short account of a small unit in a big war that accurately paints a picture of war, mud and all.
Really. It was just ok. I wanted to like this more. I was counting on nostalgia for the 80s when I was a teenager convinced that WWIII was just around the corner. In Germany at a place called the Fulda Gap.Well, this book was recommended to me so I figured I'd pick it up and rip through it. And it's a passing description of what a tank unit on the front lines in Germany might have to face against similar Soviet forces. I'm not a military man, so I'm assuming the author was spot on with descriptions of the weapons and tactics that the soldiers would use. And that was very well done and interesting to me.What wasn't interesting was the characters. Bare descriptions that did nothing to establish the personalities of the main characters made them all seem like the same carbon copies of each other. The author seems to prefer to describe conversations between characters as opposed to actually giving us dialogue. Passages such as "the captain went on to explain that they were supposed to guard the flank" as opposed to giving us the dialogue that would actually set that situation up were quite common.After awhile, it became a little bit of a chore. The Soviets started the war and it was never really explained why. Not that they had to go into too much detail, but some idea of why the balloon went up when it did would've been nice.All in all, just ok.
Do You like book Team Yankee (1988)?
This is the first book of Harold Coyle's I read, and I'll almost certainly be reading everything else he writes. This story is about a small group of tanks fighting against the Russians during the 3rd world war. That premise alone would make you think it's a sweeping story with lots of characters and lots of different locations (sort of like Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising...which, incidentally, is probably be best modern war fiction book I've ever read). But Team Yankee doesn't go there. It focuses on the small team in charge of is group of tanks (Team Yankee) and the battles they engage in. The scope is small, and though you know there's a world war happening out there you don't see it. Your focus is on what's happening to these men.It's a great story that teaches a lot about the tactics necessary to win tank battles. It focuses on the people within the armor, but it relies on the various battles as its story (definitely not a soap opera, as with WEB Griffin). It's a gritty narrative that leaves you feeling you've actually engaged in the combat yourself.If this is consistent with how Harold Coyle writes, I'll be reading many more of his books. Really well done.
—Scott Rachui
Harold Coyle's Team Yankee is a nice companion piece to Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising. Both tell of a Europe-centric (mostly) conventional World War III, but whereas Clancy tries to tell the big picture through a number of characters seeing the war's crucial battles first-hand, Team Yankee relates a similar war in the context of a single tank company fighting in Germany. Not only does the book provide a more intimate picture of the toll of fighting such a vicious conflict but it also provides a fascinating look at the nuts and bolts of mechanized warfare in the (pre-digital) late Cold War era. As with other books of the '80's techno-thriller genre, there's a LOT of jargon that can be prohibitive to the non-initiate and there isn't really all that much of a plot mostly just a narrative of a series of combat engagements and how a combined arms mechanized force responds to each engagement. I admit, I eat this stuff up with the sort of nostalgia only someone born in the '80's can understand (old enough to have understood MAD and the Cold War but not old enough (at the time) to have really feared them).
—Daniel Shellenbarger
It takes me back...I never picked up Harold Coyle's work when I was reading some of his other contemporaries as a boy back in the late 80's and early 90's. As the son of an Air Force and Vietnam veteran, I was led to Dale Brown and Tom Clancy both of which are different from each other, let alone Mr Coyle's work.Being an Army veteran and M1A1 tank crewman, "Team Yankee" takes me back to my years in the late 90's and sweating my way through field problems from the driver's station. The book picks up with a developing war between Warsaw Pact and NATO forces in Europe - the kickoff of World War III, if it had started in the 80's. The story is tightly wound and quickly paced, keeping the readers buckled in as the tank company which the book is named after is first deployed and then engaging in Soviet and communist Polish forces in central Europe. The characters are well rounded and the story is tightly paced, keeping us reading because the story is less involved with the capabilities of the military equipment (sorry, Dale Brown and Tom Clancy fans) and more concerned with the people that are fighting this war with all the modern horrors it has.You may not get a three page description of how the tanks are built or how they work, but if that's what you want - look those things up online, and still consider reading this book.
—William Stone
