[.ca] Inside Delta Force: The Story of America's Elite ... (ISBN 0385339364)

Couldn't put it down:
Though the book is short on details of actual missions, the details of Haney's training to become a Delta operator is compelling and vivid. I know a lot of people are disapointed by the lack of mission details but it has to be acknowledged that the Delta force isn't even officially/publically recognized by the government due to its sensitive and top secret nature. Undertsandably this makes details of missions not appropriate for public consumption. But for anyone who ever wanted to know more about Delta operators, how they are trained and what the force is SUPPOSED to be used for (counter-terrorism), this book is a must read. It really puts you in awe as you read the skills and concentration and dedication these guys have to be able to do the things they do. I read it in 2 nights, easy. Couldn't put it down. A great read.

He's baaaaaack....New name, same bile:
Without even bothering to rewrite much of his earlier text, Mr. Mechawatsis from waaay west of the Mississippi (Thailand, perhaps?) re-posts his non-review under a new, but still anonymous, name. Mucho macho, eh? Sooooo knowledgeable about Delta Force. Soooo savvy about Special Forces. I bet that works well in the bars, doesn't it? Please. Spare us your pontification. Once again, Haney's book is a memoir, not an annotated history, of his years in Delta Force. It was written from his point of view (as is his right) with tremendous respect for his comrades, for Col. Beckwith, and insights into humanity that have impressed people all over the world by now. Read these reviews. You'll understand why one magazine writer called him, "The Philosopher Centurion." You're not a philosopher, sir, no matter how polysyllabic you wax. The day you'll impress me -- and doubtless other readers of these reviews -- is the day you write something under your own name. If you can't sign your name to something as simple as a book review, I'm skeptical that you'll ever have the cojones to write the annotated, anal-retentive book you seem itching to write.

Great look at the secret units in the US Army:
When I first picked this book up, I could not put it down. Mr. Haney is a talented writer and he keeps the reader interested with his tales of what he did as a member of the Delta teams. Understandably, there are things he could not tell us, or he had to gloss over, and to me that added to the book because it allowed you to imagine what really happened. It would be cool to see Mr. Haney write fiction books based on his military experience, becuase he knows his stuff and is such a talented writer.

Throw salt between the pages and run a cold shower:
Take a chill pill Miss Edwards, for there are few things in life worth becoming so indignant over, the least of which are the "quasi-literate" rantings of CSM Haney. Sorry that you were treated rudely by another patron sometime in the distant past, but as a new Amazon user rest assured that neither this alleged character nor former author's collegue W.T. Opperman(lives in Thailand, pe- ned an equally skeptical critique)I are the same persons, and had you bothered to actually read my review you would have no- ticed that I gave IDF three stars and been emphatic that it was a pretty exciting book. No, I don't espouse on geopolitics to pick up girls, as innovative but unpragmatic a notion as that may be. Forgive me for being the douche bag to break the mold by not being brow-deep in media darling Haney's rectum and instead attempting to inject an iota critical thinking to this forum. As stated prior, the absense of innumerous intimate but decently docume- nted data and sheer emblishment in this "memoir" is more than conspicious. For all the author's lip service towards being a proud SOF operative, he doesn't seem to mind taking a cue from the mainstream media(his primary benefactors for the past two years now)in painting Delta soldiers as little more than assasins and demonic henchmen in an array of hyper-bizzare shadow conspira- cies not even the writers of "24" would be interested in glancing. At the heart of these, according to Haney, is virtually always the ever so-evil CIA . For all the US goverments flaws, this has be- en a largely invalidated line taken by so many self-loathing "exp- erts"at such length that it has now lost even parody value. Cons- idering all the swill our nation and her armed forces have been expected to eat before World War I and post-World War 2, would highlighting some of the more positive aspects be so terrible, such as our resolve to retrieve POWs even after the war in question had been over for close to 11 years? You are correct Miss Edwards, the veracity of IDF and Er- ic Haney himself cannot be tested when the Pentagon denies the unit's existence. How plausible, however, would "Speak, Memory" be sans the effect of the emigre experience and "Lolita" to the life of Nabokov?

From the cutting room floor of The X-Files:
Don't despair just yet, for Eric Haney's writing is forcefully exciting and at times even hairaising(though not always in a good sense), the perfect companion for a 4-8 plane ride. An even mildly perceptive reader, however, will probably leave this book with ling- ering doubts, and justifiably so. CSM Haney's absense from Bec- kwith's memoirs is reasonable enough(there were too many guys in CAG for him to reasonably mention. Contrary to one reviewer, "Allen" was actually the pseudonym for a sergeant identified by both Haney and Beckwith as a pointman during operation Eagle Claw, not Haney himself.), mention of Delta's first succesfull oper- ation in Bangkok, conducted a year after the Tehran debacle and in which a hijacked airliner was wrested via the smooth liquadati- ion of all four terroists, without injury to the crew, is sorely absent, as is any mention of the Achilles Lauro fiasco, another successful- l resuce in Venezuela, and the unit's role in the ultimately lethal hunt for Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Haney writes of De- lta subserviently from a counterrorism perspective as a matter of fact, with scant discussion of the operatives' more prominent dutie- s(high-risk LRRP ops, cross-training with foreign units, Olympic se- curity details), and one would imagine that as the sole member of the JSOC to sport women, such a topic would be game for some heckling or veiled braggadios, but this was also apparently to sun- dry a topic for Haney. The guy spells out numerous times that he and his comrades were "in the dark", yet for a unit who at the time of the author's service was only 70some strong, aren't some of these omissions pretty glaring? Perhaps for filler's sake the reader is instead offered my- riad half-baked cloak and dagger tales, the most outrageous pe- rhaps being the assasination of a Delta trained CIA operative wor- king undercover as Honduran guerrilla leader(?!) which the CSM claims to have himself perpetrated, although the Laos section c- omes in at a close second; should anyone be inquisitive, Bo Gr- itz with the support of ISA(the U.S.'s answer to Israel's Mistr'avim) did in fact raid the suspected facility, and found themselves the dupes of urban legend. One hardly has to look farther than the book's backjacket bio to sample author Haney's frequent use of loaded language, describing his current existence as one spent "r- escuing kidnapped American children, negotiating the release of American hostages(this former snakeater has apparently thrown "To free the Oppressed" to the wind and is now focused solely on his own yard) and protecting CEOs and princes(nothing like mixed m- essages)." Perhaps most disturibing of all however, is this former count- terterror maestro's chalking up militant fundamentalism to a "Mus- lim attitude problem"; amusing will be the day when one of Eric Haney's guest spots on the O'Reilly Factor is perturbed by a call- er who confronts both dudes with the news that pre-9/11 the most horrific terrorist act on U.S. soil was commited by American of Anglo-Irish extraction against other Americans. In time, IDF may serve not as an "insider account", but a curious relic to future so- ciology and linguistics students reflecting upon the concept and meaning of the word "poser."