Rainbow Six

Don't read it. Like his idiological antipole Stephen King, Tom Clancy's work has degraded steadily and continuously over the years to the point where this fetid pile of shit gets released and millions of dolts, myself included, buy it just out of intertia. Well no more, I say. The line is drawn here. No more Clancy for me.

Why did I hate it, you ask? Well, there are three things that really bugged me.

1. The characters are all the same
   You know how in some pulp novels, all the bad guys seem to have exactly the same viewpoint and philosophy? (A good example, by no meanse exhaustive, is anything written by Ayn Rand). Well, Rainbow Six is the first book I've read in which this condition is applied instead to the good guys. Every single hero in the book feels exactly the same way about every issue. They're not even one-dimensional...they actually have to share the persona of one one-dimensional character. Although the various terrorists we meet are also cut-out characters, at least they are distinct: Each group has different approaches to its craft, and different motives for its actions. Only one character in the book has any substantial depth, and he's a bad guy.
2. His evil movement is a pretty silly choice.
   After taking care of the standard bad guys--Communists, Iranians, Drug Lords, Irish Insurgents, and the Japanese (Hmm, we still don't have one for the Chinese yet...)--Clancy has turned his eye towards environmentalists as his new bad guys. Yes, it turns out that if the Sierra Club isn't doing enough for you, you can always join the group that plans to save the world by releasing a devestating virus that will wipe out all but a couple million people on earth. And, in the same vein as his earlier novels, every single subscriber to the beliefs of environmentalism is portrayed as sympathetic to the cause. Clancy writes as though all he got all his information on Greenpeace from conversations with Naval officers.
3. He has a strange obsession with exploding heads.
   You can't turn five pages without coming across a description of someone's head exploding as a bullet passes through it. In a kind of survey of the phenomenon, Clancy composes an ode to the Platonic Idea of the exploding head by describing it from all perspectives; from the perspective of the trigger man, from the perspective of the victim, from the perspective of the head as an object, from the perspective of the bullet, from the perspective of the witnesses, in every tense and time frame. Even the potential of exploding heads is explored ("Had Ding been firing at a real terrorist instead of a target, his brains would be all over the wall.")

After reading this book, I thought it sucked so hard, I actually went to the library and checked out a Clancy book I had enjoyed before, Clear and Present Danger, to see if this sucking was a new thing for Clancy, or if he had always sucked this hard, and I had never noticed. My conclusion: Clancy sucked back then too, but it was in the mechanics of writing and story development that he had since polished as his actual storytelling skills had degraded.

My advice: Stay away from this book, and everything else Clancy has written after The Sum of All Fears, which I thought was pretty good.

Many people have read and/or played the game of Rainbow Six, and some people think that a form of this covert operations squad exsits.

It is known that there are many covert groups that are similar to Rainbow. These diffrent groups have the same basic mission. Stop terrorism. The U.S. has Delta Force Delta, Seal Team 6 , United Kingdom has the British Special Air Service (SAS), Germany has the Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG-9), Italy has Carabinieri (CAB) and Russia has Spetsnaz.

All of these were made for counter terrorism purposes. While they are the top of their leage (that we know of) what use are they now a days. While the military groups can be used for special operations, their terrorist expertise is slowly being diminished. Many city police officers are now training for terrorist attacks. They will be able to attend a situation much faster than Delta or the GSG-9.

Terrorists are far from stupid, they know that when they hit a target, they have a limited amount of time. If they dont get what they want, they will do what they said they would right when their time is out. That gives the counter terrorist forces only hours to move. Let us say that a band of terrorist decide to take a bank in Los Angelas. That would mean that Delta would only have hours to get ready. Plus they would need a long flight to the Pacific side of the US. But let us not forget what many people loathe. Politics. There are so many levels of authorization needed to go through, that by the time they have the go ahead everybody in the bank is dead.

Of course this is a very unlikely situation, but it helps prove the point that CT forces must now be more localized, and have a small command structure. Mabey to the mayor, or perhaps the governer for state or federal attacks.

Another thing is that all this training might be useless, if we have more September 11th attacks.

Rainbow Six is a counterterrorism (CT) first-person shooter game based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name. You play an entire elite squad of up to eight operatives during missions involving hostage rescue, assassinations, bomb defusal, assault on terrorist enclaves and intelligence gathering missions. First published in 1998 for the PC platform by Redstorm Entertainment, it has since been ported to the Macintosh platform as well as most console systems. Rainbow Six expanded to several expansion packs (Eagle Watch) and a sequel (Rogue Spear) which also had expansion packs (Black Thorn and Urban Operations) and an encyclopedia/game package called Covert Operations that consisted of both more missions and the nitty-gritty insider research and details that are part of Clancy's novels.

The plot line of the game is introduced by the opening video of the game, which explains the year is 1999. Due to the collapse of one of the two major superpowers of the world (the Soviet Union), the world has destabilized and numerous factions have arisen. Hence, incidents of terrorism have skyrocketed. World leaders, convinced that a specialized unit consisting of hand-picked operatives that transcends international boundaries is needed. They form RAINBOW, whose existence is known to only a few high level government officials. Whenever RAINBOW performs missions, the results are either carefully hidden or attributed to well known organizations such as the SAS or the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. In fact, RAINBOW trains with the SAS at Hereford to prevent suspicion. Despite the appearance that RAINBOW has been formed to combat isolated incidents, it soon becomes apparent that a sinister eco-terrorism plot is in the works. Readers of the book will recognize many of the locations and incidents from the book, as well as several characters.

Playing the game consists of three distinct phases. First, the player is briefed on everything that is known about the situation, including important advisors to the mission, historical backgrounds of locations, terrorists and hostages as well as news relating to the world of global terrorism. The player is also informed of the objectives of the mission and the relative level of importance of each objective. Next, the player selects up to eight team members with different specialties such as assault, recon, demolitions and electronics. Each member must be outfitted with proper and realistic weapons for his or her mission, as well as with specialized gear and uniforms for the mission (including a level IV biohazard suit!). Then the player plans the assault using blueprints and 3D mockups of the target and assigns the operatives to up to four fireteams and chooses which one they will command initially (as the player may switch between the team leaders for each fireteam). Finally, the execute command is given, and the team is inserted. This is where the fun begins as the game's focus shifts from strategy to action shoot-em up.

Similar games include Delta Force, SWAT 3, and Ghost Recon. The Rainbow Six stable is not expected to continue as Redstorm has decided to devote full energy to Ghost Recon which features a less anachronistic storyline and an updated graphics engine. Nonetheless, Rainbow Six remains one of my favorite games as it was not enough to simply have an itchy trigger finger or crafty strategic foresight. The plotline was genuinely scary, and playing the game late at night with my bedroom lights off, and the subwoofer at full blast will remain one of the highlights of my gaming career. The realistic weapons sound effects combined with the cries of my team of "Tango down!" or "Man down! Man down! I need some backup... NOW!" still resonate in my dreams today. If nothing else, Rainbow Six is as close as most of us will get to the high-speed world of Counterterrorism, and it really gives you an appreciation for what these men and women train for everyday.