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| Looking For Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World | 
 enlarge | Author: Ralph Peters
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 59215
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 339
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.5
ISBN: 0811734102
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.4092
EAN: 9780811734103
ASIN: 0811734102
Publication Date: June 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: perfect
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Product Description
Ralph Peters--career soldier, controversial strategist, prize-winning, best-selling novelist, erstwhile rock musician, popular columnist, and old-fashioned adventurer--has always been good for a surprise. Now, for the first time, Peters recounts the personal experiences that shaped his views of the world, from the collapsing Soviet Union to the drug wars of the Andean Ridge, from quiet forays into Burma and Laos to military missions to Pakistan and the Caucasus--and on to the Southwest border of the United States and the meanest streets of Los Angeles. As the U.S. Army's chosen troubleshooter before he took off his uniform to write, Peters saw the greatest international dramas of our times and the personal tragedies they created from a truly unique perspective--and took advantage of every moment "outside of the wire." The result is startling: the liveliest adventure memoir by an American in decades, a perfect balance of high drama and laugh-out-loud hilarity. Readers--among them his many devoted fans--will meet a faded beauty and former favorite singer of Josef Stalin's, now in her nineties and still a hopeless coquette; KGB officers who refuse to let go of the past in Moscow's back streets; a winsome princess adrift in a dying world; the corrupt Thai police general whose hobby was imitating Elvis to karaoke machines in rural bordellos; sentimental Caucasian gangsters; oblivious diplomats; wary Burmese colonels; doomed Mexican drug cops; Mennonite marijuana farmers; lonesome Nazi widows in Bolivia--and their Jewish friends; Muslim fundamentalists who write love poetry to imagined sweethearts . . . and, above all, the author's two loyal brothers-in-arms who sometimes shared the dangers and the wonder at the "back of beyond" and whose remarkable personal backgrounds, dashingly eccentric personalities, and appetite for adventure explode every cliche about military officers. Beautifully written and hauntingly told, Looking for Trouble is simply the book Ralph Peters was born to write. We can all be glad that he came back alive to write it.
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What Humans Knew in 1990's That Secret Mandarins Refused to Hear June 29, 2008
33 out of 37 found this review helpful
This book is not, as some might expect, a collection of past Op-Eds, but rather an extraordinary retrospective at the 1989-1996 time frame when officers like Ralph (and General Al Gray, myself, and a number of others in the Army and the Marines) were seeing the writing on the wall: the end of big war and the emergence of global instability in every clime and place). Ralph actually walked the ground and had "eyes on."
I was immediately charmed anew by the poetic writing and the visually elegant turns of phrase. I have in my notes: chuckled, amused, reminded.
This review is going to combine my fly leaf notes with as many short quotes as I can fit in within my 1,000 word allotment.
Notes first:
Deep reading of Tolstoy and others set the stage for *understanding* today's culture and mindset in Russia. Earlier in his life, a subscription gift from an aunt to National Geographic opened his eyes to the rest of the world.
Early on, disdain for how we spend billions on satellites and nothing on officers walking the ground. He notes that overt human intelligence can absorb and articulate what no satellite can provide: "the temper of the people, the taste of the land."
USSR in 1991 was potholes and rust. In his "walk-about" he gained direct invited access to an MVD commander's office, to all of the local "secret" messages, and had invited "eyes on" the MVD special intelligence communications room.
In the Bosnia-Kosovo run-up, which he and others anticipated, he learned that Europe cannot be trusted to act in unison or decisively in the absence of strong US leadership--France, Germany, and the United Kingdom all revert to their historical animosities, and despite their large standing armies, lack the political will or the deep strategic analytics necessary to use those armies in a coherent manner.
His respect for Armenia is deeply rooted in his on the ground experience among them.
Col Stu Herrington, whose book Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World I have praised, is strongly praised in this book. He and the author were part of a team that worked with the Russians to address the long-standing concern over Americans being held in the Gulag, and the pages in this book, covering each of the wars from World War II onwards, are a complete surprise and essential reading for anyone interested in POW/MIA accounting.
He blasts the US policy of crop eradication, and his devastating criticism of arm-chair politicians and ivory tower diplomats warms my heart.
Late in the book he focused on Pakistan and I find this chapter especially vital for the public understanding of how the US is destroying its once-close ties to the Pakistani officer corps. The older officers are fully trained by the British or the US. The company and field grade officers are not, and are so delusional about Islam and so ignorant about the rest of the world as to be very dangerous to us.
Throughout the book he laments the lot of women across most Islamic countries (with Indonesia and Malaysia as notable exceptions; I add this from my own knowledge and Ralph's official report to the Marine Corps in the 1990's).
Now the quotes. Page number, then words:
8On [the Russian and Central Asian] frontiers, humanity is a brotherhood of smugglers.
29Only its women allowed the Soviet Union to endure as long as it did.
38...I am convinced there is no Russian word for maintenance.
45...worry too much about dead facts and too little about their antagonist's delusions.
66Artist and intelligence challenges similar: an eye for detail and ability to reduce complexity to coherence
73...no one in the US intelligence community was interested. If the data didn't come from a satellite, it didn't count.
87What Belgrade lacked ... was human dignity.
108I knew we could overpower [Iraqi] military....I had seen...his officer corps...drunk and whoring.
132Conquest of Central Asia is a chronicle of...cruelty....Soviets are the champs....[others] tortured human beings. The Soviet Union tortured the earth itself.
141Bukhara is where Islam turned dark...
146The Clinton Administration was run by intolerant dreamers... With neither self-critical faculties nor experience of the world ...
151Islam froze by the mid-fifteenth century when science-fearing zealots....
172And there you have our diplomats. Unwilling to talk to our enemies... Unwilling to learn.
200Azerbaijan was the first place where I got n inside look at the nastiness of our Saudi "friends."
204Everywhere, the Saudis took an interest in human suffering only if it offered them an entry point for missionary activities. And any Muslim who wouldn't sign up for ... Wahhabi Puritanism was welcome to die.
218...the callousness with which our government had treated the family members of our MIAs...
231[General McCaffrey] wasn't getting an adequate tie-it-all-together picture of the cocaine problem. Not from his staff, and not from the alphabet-soup agencies...
239You cannot take away the livelihood of the poor [coca crops] unless you have the wherewithal to replace it immediately and enduringly.
244Found wealth, when immature countries...hit the natural-resources lottery, is uniformly destructive of the souls of men and nations.
251[Army saw the future coming.] It was impossible, however, to persuade the Clinton White House, the intelligence establishment, or even our own services (except for the Marines) that our enemies, rather than our desires, would shape the future security environment.
319[Drug Czar] was not allowed to differentiate between hard and soft drugs.
335[At the Plain of Jars] I saw my country's dark side....we go mad now and then. And when we do, we leave desolation behind.
This is an amazing book and for anyone who is concerned with strategic warning, honest intelligence, strategy, force structure, the need to rebalance the instruments of national power, and the future of humanity, will find this book inspiring.
E Veritate Potens--From Truth, We the People Are Empowered
See also:
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places: 5th Edition (Robert Young Pelton the World's Most Dangerous Places)
The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
The Warning Solution : Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information Overload
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
A great adventure from a master story-teller July 8, 2008
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
Ralph Peter's book should be required reading for every Marxism-besotted and multiculturalism-drunk humanities department in the United States. He stumbled upon an elemental truth in a youthful visit to Tito's Yugoslavia with its communism-lite: "There was nothing like firsthand exposure to the dialectical materialism to teach that the dialectic rarely delivered the material. Leftist rhetoric is wonderfully seductive. The tragedy is that those stirring promises are worthless." Most of the book adventures over the center of that contagion, or as Peters likes to describe it, "across the rotting corpse of the former Soviet Union."
This book gives that fingertip feel of anecdotal truth to this marvelous combination of memoir, travelogue, and social and strategic commentary. Not since the Comte de Custine traveled across Russia in the late 18th century (pegging the Russians as blond Orientals, by the way) has there been such a deft and insightful portrait of that immense and wasted land. Tongue in cheek he opines that he is convinced there is no word in Russian for maintenance; certainly the epitaph of the Soviet Union is "seventy-four years of deferred maintenance." But it is the lives blighted on the altar of ideology that draw out his empathy in the penetrating human portraits he sketches with his prose and everywhere is the waste of human potential, the lives emptied of a future.
Yet, he does not overlook the beauty. Peters has a magic inkwell, I am convinced after reading almost everything he has written from his thrillers to his strategic essays to his incomparable Owen Parry series of Civil War murder mysteries. He dips his pen into a poet's ink of beauty and writes a description of the Baltic coast. "The route traced the Amber Coast, a stretch of cold, white sand as beautiful as Heaven on a holiday. Dark blue waves lapped a coastline of low dunes adorned with stunted trees, worn rocks, and golden reeds. Birds rose broad-winged from marshes, black against the blue-enamel sky. No end of books praise the palette of the south, the lemon light of Italy, or the hues of an Arab souk. But there are no colors so true and piercing as those of an early summer day I the north, when the white clouds temper the brightness, lulling your eyes before the sun reappears. The world grows deep and detailed: the gnarl of driftwood, talcum sand, the vast, competing blues of sea and sky. A walk on the shore becomes a stroll with God."
Peters reserves a special contempt for that group of arrogant, Ivy-League amateurs in the Clinton years who bungled our relationship with the bewildered fragments of the old Soviet Union. Prisoners of their own delusions, they insisted that the old Russia of czar and commissar had vanished in a dawn of good intentions, a breathless, evolutionary leap worthy of the crackpot Marxist genetics of that fraud Lysenko. Peters more realistically noted, "We had passed through the Soviet sickroom just before the hour of death. Our inheritance was a grasp of reality that . . . but my views of Moscow were on a collision course with the optimists who knew Russia only from books or brief delegation visits. . . . But so many dreams vanished in the Soviet twilight and its savage aftermath that it is hard to have confidence." For his forthrightness, he became a prophet without honor in his own country and the object of senior policy-maker vendetta.
But not all the obtuseness was in the White House. Peters' warnings about the new Russian being born were of no interest to the intelligence community. "If the data didn't come from a satellite, no one in the U.S. intelligence community was interested. The human factor was messy and unpredictable. Better to count tanks and ships and wait for a revival of the Cold War." It is a crushing indictment but one that rings with the clarity of a fine bell tone. Peters is not attempting to claim retroactive prescience. He was right on target for those of us analysts steeped in Soviet/Russian affairs. My own contemporary analysis on the same themes was dismissed as "fluff" by the technocrats.
I served with Ralph Peters on one of his adventures, the search of American POWs who were consigned to the Soviet GULAG. I attest that everything Ralph has stated in both detail and essence is the simple truth. He said that we failed, and that was no more than a painful but honest fact, but it was not for the want of gallant and intelligent efforts on the part of men like Peters. Without his facility in Russian and his knowledge of the country's people and history, we would never have got as far as we did. It would have been a miracle had we succeeded, but it would have required us to outwit both the stubborn Russian determination to admit nothing and the desperate collusion of the U.S. Government not to look under that very nasty rock.
Peters' final journey took him on a speaking tour of the Pakistani Army as a special guest of its chief of staff. Again he sounds the bell in the night as flames lick the dark horizon. Pakistan's great inheritance from the British Raj was the English language which gifts an incredible advantage to any people attempting to fully connect with the dynamism of the global economy. Instead he describes the loss of facility in English among the officer corps under the influence of Islamism. With that loss comes a haze of ignorance that cuts them off from the free flow of information and ideas and forces them inward to a closed circle of Islamist fanaticism and obscurantism. Considering Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, this is no little problem. He points out that the United States has abetted this problem by prohibiting the training of Pakistani officers in U.S. military schools in retaliation for their nuclear program, a classic act of cutting off our nose to spite our face.
If you want insight into a maddening world told by a master story-teller, buy this book. There are thousand and one treasures here. Pete Tsouras
Kipling meets Twain, Elvis, Orwell, and von Bismarck July 3, 2008
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
Marine Corps officers would call this a collection of sea stories -- tales of seedy fortune, hard-knock education, and derring-do that leaves readers in stitches, tears, or both. After three decades of globetrotting on behalf of America, this is a book that Ralph Peters has earned the right to write. All his hallmarks are on display in "Looking for Trouble": Kissinger-esque insight, Jeremiah-like candor, and a wit (and karaoke partner) that Mark Twain would envy. Reading this is the most fun I've had with travel writing this side of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Steinbeck.
A cynical bookbuyer might discount the five stars and voluminous accolades as just a literary comrade's pep talk. However, this is Peters's first work of nonfiction that I thought rated five stars. His strategic tomes were interesting, colorful, and well-written. But Peters wrote those books with urgency, attempting to square away the post-9/11 U.S. military and educate the Pentagon's minions to prevent them from doing anything stupid (well, at least he tried). They didn't quite have that extra spark.
"Looking for Trouble" does. And then some.
I had thought about ending this review with quotes from the outstanding statements I found in the narrative. If I was going to grant Peters a perfect score, I figured I should at least show him off a bit to justify my judgment. As I was reading, I folded back each page that I found a remarkable sentence, unexpected insight, or laugh-out-loud outrageous illustration.
I bookmarked 53 pages.
The Peters Principle July 7, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
"Looking for Trouble:
Adventures in a Broken World
by
Ralph Peters
(367 pages, Stackpole Books, 2008)
Reviewed by
Frederick J. Chiaventone
One of my favorite tales from childhood, and one which I've happily shared with my own sons, is Rudyard Kipling's marvelous tale "Rikki Tikki Tavi." A story of a plucky young mongoose who embodies the insatiable curiosity of his breed and their collective motto "Run and find out!" Rikki is the favored guardian of an English family in India and his natural instinct is to seek out and destroy the threatening serpents in his family's house and garden. Krait or cobra each is dealt with summarily in Rikki's enclave. Ralph Peters is about as close as we come to a latter day Rikki Tikki Tavi in human form. A retired Army intelligence officer with an insatiable curiosity and a scintillating intellect to match, trouble has almost a magnetic attraction for Ralph.
I must admit to having had Ralph as a close friend for decades now and can recall while we were both still on active duty a number of his friends would gather in a quiet office at the Foreign Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth to read Ralph's letters out loud. Be they from Tajikistan, Moscow, or Azerbaijan they were priceless. His private letters invariably contained the intimate and telling details of a life on the road that would never make it into his official reports and yet were as revealing as anything one could hope for. Ralph is blessed with an insatiable curiosity, a crusading belief in justice and fair play, and a stubborn determination that is legendary. His ability to assess a situation and anticipate violent changes in society is exceptional. Take for example his assessment of the former Soviet Union just before it began to come apart at the seams;
"The USSR was a hopeless case, in need of a mercy killinig. We sensed that its hour was coming, perhaps in months, certainly in a year. Later that summer, as I sat in a staff-college classroom in Kansas, tanks would fire into the Russian parliament and the face of the tall white building would burn black. The Soviet Union would die overnight and Boris Yeltsin would begin his reign in a fit of exhiliration that ended, as things Russian so often do, in drunken exhaustion."
Repeatedly and with incisive and well-documented proof of his enights Peters would submit written reports of what he had seen and experienced up the chain-of-command. All too frequently his input was ignored, pigeon-holed, or relegated to the circular file and the bureaucrats responsible for our international relations would plod blindly ahead into catastrophe. Time and again, upon returning from a trip of exploration and inquiry Peters would find..
"...no one in the U.S. Intelligence was interested. If the data didn't come from a satellite it didn't count. The human factor was messy and unpredictable. Better to count tanks and ships and wait for a reviva of the Cold War. Intelligence failure is as old as it is willful."
Anyone who has followed Peters' career can only marvel at the prolific nature of his writings. He has written books on political and military affairs, countless articles for the New York Post, American Heritage, The Washington Post, and a host of other periodicals, not to mention his marvelously imagined novels to include the masterful series on Civil War soldier-cum-detective Abel Jones penned under the name of Owen Parry. This latest work however, is the equal of anything which has gone before and here I include such stalwarts as Bob Kaplan's marvelous "Balkan Ghosts."
In "Looking for Trouble" Ralph chronicles his adventures and misadventures doing precisely that. In his unending quest to find out he wanders to the back of beyond with little more than a backpack, a keen sense of observation, his own powers of self-preservation, and an insatiable curiosity. The tales which come from these myriad, diverse and frequently risky experiences are incredibly revelatory and nothing less than priceless. Over the years he has traveled extensively in over 70 different nations on 6 continents and not a one of them particularly peaceful - from Moscow to Tiblisi, from northern India to South America, and from Kurdistan to Thailand Ralph Peters has an unerring nose for trouble and strife and he follows it like Galahad following the Holy Grail. His philosophy is neatly summed up in an early chapter when he says; "The way in which the finest artists see more acutely than others mirrors a top-of-the-game intelligence analyst's ability to block out humanity's white noise and listen to the revealing undertones." Nobody does it better. Nobody.
In this, what we can only hope is a first volume of several, Peters chronicles his wanderings through Russia, Eastern Europe and the Caucusus - first as a long-haired student and erstwhile musician with wanderlust and later as a commissioned Army officer - sometimes with official sanction but all too often on his own hook. Administrative Leave, as the Army calls it, allows the individual rather a broad latitude and Peters takes full advantage of this convenient loophole. Thus, when his duties permit, Peters heads for the back of beyond -- be it Yerevan, Samarkand, Bukhara, Grozny, or Nagorno-Karabach. Steeped in the literature, languages, lore, and culture of the places he visits Peters is equally at home in an ancient mosque, the eerie quiet of the City of the Dead, the mind-numbing noise of a local disco, or careening through Tblisi at four in the morning with a drunken local madman at the wheel.
It is these encounters and his enchanting ressurection of them which mark Peters as a true visionary in the worlds of both intelligence and human relations and as a writer of the first order. The people he meets on his travels are as diverse and complex and worthy of study as anyone limned by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. In these pages, which fly by all too quickly, you will meet the brilliant Soviet artist, the grieving young father, and the faded yet imposing songstress who was beloved by Stalin. Here also you will meet Boris Yeltsin on the cusp of his historic run in history and a disillusioned MVD officer - the MVD being Russia's dreaded security police - who is more interested in finding out about the ins and outs of venture capitalism than the fact that his new mentor is an American intelligence officer who has simply stumbled into his station. With Peters as our guide we are transported to a safe-house in Mexico, a meeting with a corrupt mayor in South America, a frightening warlord in Thailand addicted to karaoke and Elvis, and brilliant army officers in Pakistan. Compared to Peters, the famous network 'talking heads' and foreign correspondents are superficial dilettanttes without a clue as to what comprises the real world around them. Peters lives by a creed which makes him seek out what "...no academic texts or intelligence documents can give you: the scent of daily life, the temper of the people, the taste of the land. Traveling, you take in far more than you understand, calories of knowledge waiting to fuel some future intellectual labor."
"Looking for Trouble" is the contemporary Holy Grail of travel literature. Peters' descriptions of the world he experiences and the people he encounters are true gems of the genre. Humor, pathos, awe, and incisive powers of observation are here for the reader who is lucky enough to discover this volume. One can only imagine that the shades of Peters predecessors -- Sir Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, and Fitzroy MacLean -- would heartily endorse (and secretly envy) this marvelous and timely work. This book should be required reading for all Army officers, network anchors, foreign correspondents, and State Department officers. If there is a sober and sensible head left in Washington DC after the upcoming election they would do well to look towards Ralph Peters as the next Director of Central Intelligence. Yes, he is that good.
Frederick J. Chiaventone, novelist, screenwriter and commentator on international affairs is a retired cavalry officer who taught National Security Strategy, Counter-insurgency and Counter-terrorism at the U.S. Army's Command & General Staff College.
Candid and Relevant July 12, 2008
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
LTC Peters' best work thus far---and I've followed his writings (fiction, non-fiction, columns---and the Army War College Quarterly, Parameters) for years. Peters lays bare the world as it is (or was during the late 80's/early 90's) warts and all. This isn't a collection of columns but a record of travel to places most people will never, nor would ever want to see.
I spent a great deal of time in the Former Soviet Union in the early 90's and can vouch for the conditions Peters' describes and the crack-pot/thug/mafia wannabes that rushed into the vacuum the communists left behind (in most cases---the communists changed hats/affiliations). One story which mirrors Peters experience in the FSU was during a humanitarian aid mission in the early 90's in Kazakhstan. We were delivering food-stuffs and medical supplies, but had no idea "what" was in the delivering railcars before the railcars appeared. One car was full of canned pork---and concerned about the Muslim populations dietary restrictions, we informed our counterpart---he quickly assured us that the product would be described as "American "white beef"". We laughed at the time, but truth is, we had no idea what happened to any of the "relief" supplies after our Kazak counterpart signed for custody----but we all guessed the materials ended up on the black-market and there was subsequent evidence to bear this out.
Back to Peters---great story of reflections/impressions and clear judgements. If policy-makers still did their own reading---this book would be high on the list. Perhaps someday, Peters will return to government as a SECDEF or CIA Director---now, that would be interesting.
Many thanks to LTC Peters for a great read. Highly recommended!!
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