Crew of the USS Tom Clancy, Apologies for the dry February; I’d been working on a piece about the Melania film that I will have out soon but frankly February always kinda sucks and I had a hard time writing anything worthwhile that month. Thank you for your understanding, we’re back to our regularly scheduled dispatches. I appreciate you all. Matt

Izmir, Turkey—January 1991 We’re at ThreatCon Delta so school is canceled. The Bombs start to fall, live on CNN. We just got CNN in our apartment building, which has a view of the Izmir Bay and the Soviet ship with the big hammer and sickle that just sits there. Our friend from church who works in the NATO land component office tells us the Soviets aim a laser microphone at the windows so they have to draw thick blinds when they talk about classified things within the building. I am six years old. Before school was canceled a Turkish Askari (soldier) with an MP-5 would ride shotgun on the bus that took us American kids to our Department of Defense elementary school, housed in a former tobacco warehouse and still redolent with the smell of drying tobacco, the same smell I’ll encounter in tobacco drying barns in Yorktown and Williamsburg, Virginia later in life. • • In response to the war, a Turkish cell of revolutionary leftists called Dev Sol activates and begins a bombing and shooting campaign in the city. I hear a bomb go off while I am playing Nintendo. The commissary is briefly closed because of a bomb. A Lieutenant Colonel named Alvin Macke is stalked by two Dev Sol operatives to the door of his apartment building. He moves his head at just the right time, the bullet goes through his sinuses rather than his brainstem, he chases the assassins down the stairs before passing out from blood loss. The Hunt for Tom Clancy exists because a core group of dedicated subscribers has decided to support the finest in independent journalism and writing. Are you ready to join the USS Tom Clancy?

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