HOWARD GORDON (CREATOR OF “HOMELAND”) REVIEWS “UNMANNED” BY DAN FESPERMAN
http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-unmanned-by-dan-fesperman-1409178481
When a drone operator follows a strike order that kills 13 Afghans, he comes undone. Sounds like a plot from ‘Homeland’ or ’24.’
Since antiquity, storytellers have cautioned us about the hazards of men using technology to trespass into realms where only the gods are allowed. For giving man fire, Zeus condemned Prometheus to an eternity chained to a rock with an eagle pecking at his liver. Daedalus’s clever wings melted when his son Icarus flew too close to the sun.
Dan Fesperman’s excellent and timely ninth thriller, “Unmanned,” isn’t quite so archetypal, but it does explore the ethical conundrums of the most potent new weapon in the American arsenal: the unmanned aerial drone. Watching our enemy from the sky is one thing, but what if those same eyes are looking down at us? And who is watching the watchers? “Unmanned” is a smart and thoughtful exploration of the unintended consequences of waging war by remote control.
While the technical details of this exhaustively researched book certainly contribute to its authenticity—the author is a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun—it is his sharply drawn characters that make the novel tick. Capt. Darwin Cole’s transition from F-16 fighter jock to Predator drone operator is going smoothly: He conducts missions against terrorists thousands of miles away from behind a screen in the Nevada desert. “Each twitch of his hand,” Mr. Fesperman writes of Cole’s work, “flings a signal of war across the nation’s night owls as they make love, make a sandwich, make a mess of things, or click the remote.”
Everything changes when Cole receives a command via Internet chat from his mysterious J-TAC, or joint terminal attack controller, whom he has never met, to fire at a target in Afghanistan. The result is 13 civilian deaths, among them several children that he has become familiar with while monitoring the village of Sandar Khosh. Cole is especially haunted by the pixilated image of a young girl whose arm is severed at the shoulder yet who manages to survive the strike. She is, in the grim vernacular of drone warfare, a “squirter,” a person who has escaped the strike and is “so called because on infrared they display as squibs of light, streaming from the action like raindrops across a windshield.”
Cole is undone—or, if you like, unmanned. After being dishonorably discharged, his wife leaves him, taking their two children with her, and Cole becomes a recluse. His “memories, circling like buzzards,” are his only company in his rundown trailer, except for Jeremiah Weed, which Mr. Fesperman tells us is the bourbon of choice among pilots, though the brand reference feels more like product placement.
Unmanned
By Dan Fesperman
(Knopf, 315 pages, $26.95)
Cole’s chance at redemption comes when he is tracked down by a trio of journalists— Keira Lyttle, Steve Merritt and Barb Holtzman —who suspect that the faulty intelligence Cole received that day may have been intentionally disseminated. His unseen commanding officer, it turns out, was running a shadow operation on behalf of private military contractors and has now gone missing. Cole agrees to give them information—but only on the condition that they make him a full partner in the investigation, like “one of those embedded correspondents, tagging along with a combat unit.” He discovers that Lyttle, too, is haunted by guilt (hers is over the death of her married boyfriend, who died in a plane crash). Yet Cole nearly destroys their incipient romance when he spies on her with a homemade drone.
As Cole investigates the mystery, he encounters Nelson Sharpe, a brilliant, half-mad designer of drones. Once a proselytizer, Sharpe is now a Cassandra about the hazards of a technology run amok. Contractors, he tells Cole, are using theaters of war in Iraq and Afghanistan as “glorified test labs, proving grounds, marketplaces for the barter of influence, and, most important of all, state-of-the-art technology. Those women and children at Sandar Khosh were guinea pigs in somebody’s ill-advised experiment.”
Sharpe introduces Cole to a group of amateurs who’ve built their own state-of-the-art drones for a few hundred dollars. They are mostly hobbyists, oblivious to the terrifying implications of the fact that this lethal technology is no longer the exclusive provenance of governments. “You could fly these things just about anyplace, right past security checkpoints and every metal detector known to man . . . a nightmare waiting to happen.”
I have a particular appreciation for those nightmares—and for the unique challenge Mr. Fesperman is taking on by trying to dramatize a subject as topical and morally ambiguous as drones. On the last season of “24,” a homegrown terrorist hijacked several American drones and turned them against innocent people in London. And in the first season of “Homeland,” drones were crucial to the plot of the show. Why did the show’s protagonist, Sgt. Nicholas Brody, a Marine held captive for eight years in Iraq, turn against his country? Spoiler alert for those who have yet to watch it on iTunes: It was all because of a drone. During his captivity, Brody became close to his captor’s young son. One day at school, that child was killed in a U.S. drone strike—an attack the U.S. government covered up.
People accused “Homeland” of being morally squishy for the way we portrayed American drone usage and even more for the idea that such an attack could really make an American soldier sympathetic to the bad guys. I suspect some readers will accuse “Unmanned” of the same. But what Mr. Fesperman understands is that in the brave new world of modern warfare, there are complicated questions with no neat answers. The drone is a remarkable invention, much like Daedalus’s wings. But what price will we pay for soaring so high?
Mr. Gordon is a television writer and producer whose shows include “24,” “Homeland,” “Tyrant”
and “Legends.”
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