Book Review Unit 416
TITLE: Unit 416
AUTHORS: J. Leon Pridgen 11, A. John Vinci
PUBLISHER: St. Martin’s Griffin
Readers expect to find something in book pages to delight or frustrate them, based on their life, reading experience or what they regard as the perfect world.
Mine is a world without killing, without war. That is a pipe dream so I bought Unit 416, with its cover that is upfront: a soldier in military fatigues holding the killing toys in his hands. I know, thanks to Hollywood and movies that idolize the American soldier fighting enemies who don’t look like them, thousands of miles away from home.
The initiation was swift. The first two pages in this book separated Hollywood myth from reality, with Master Sergeant Miles Keeble schooling his men about why it is not advisable to think about home, while in the trenches, somewhere in Afghanistan.
Keeble was one of the lucky ones. He did not go back to the U.S. in a pine box draped with the American flag. He lost a leg but thanks to the genius Colonel Lawrence Jameson, Keeble got a second chance of serving the army.
“I am a soldier,” Keeble began. “It is what I do. I don’t know anything else, nor do I care to. De oppresso liber. To free from oppression. As you know, that is the motto of the United States Special Forces.” Page 30.
This sounds interesting so I soldiered on and read Unit 416, then I hit a brick wall, the CIA. When Colonel Jameson told Keeble he wants him to train 12 men for a secret operation, I nearly threw the book in my basket full of uncompleted books.
Not another CIA book! Why do publishers do this to us, book-loving readers? Same story! Same CIA, FBI, DEA tired script! Steady. Steady. Be cool, as kids say.
What kept me on board was the calibre of the men Jameson had assembled for Keeble. They were not flag waving I-love-my-country puppets like Keeble.
They were men from the streets, rejects who never typed a resume because America never allowed them to resume anything. Hard core. They were in Unit 416 because they knew there was a catch, and were prepared to catch it.
Keeble trained them. Only six survived the vigorous training, which I did not enjoy because Hollywood has served me enough boot camp training scenes to last me a lifetime. Unit 416 is about how one man, Colonel Jameson thought outside the military box.
He gave Keeble the opportunity to produce polished diamonds from ‘non issue’ men like young Mike Winston; an unlicensed pharmacist from California, Levern Smith, all muscle and libido from Texas; Darrell Jones, premium tech hacker from Chi-Town, Illinois; ‘preacher’ Tyrin Turner from Little Rock and Jack Daisy from Brooklyn New York, a rapper who stutters, but has an amazing gun aptitude, thanks to his father.
Darrell Jones is my favourite character because he is a computer geek, which is unusual in fiction. Both black and white writers assign that to characters of Asian descent, which is unfortunate because it presupposes that some races are superior than others.
I finished Unit 416 because it is not about American patriotism. It is about ties that bind, and have to bind, if all Keeble’s men are to survive the trenches of Afghanistan and lies the American army feeds soldiers.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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