GUNS AND YOGA ... AND OLD GLORY

 

Tommy loved that flag ...

Never once had he looked at it as a fantasy in which to lose himself. It was a responsibility, not a birthright, a glorious promise forever falling short, the best impossible dream man had ever dreamed. ... That flag would endure despite every lie thrown at her and every corruption set forth in her name. Her covenant was greater than that, a promise to heal and gather in the face of every last thing every last tin-pot despot, vainly cloaked emperor or crybully mob could throw at her. Spite and sin would not cling to her. She'd wash free of them again and again and still fly trembling and tattered with all her battle-scarred and hardwon faith intact and proclaim to the world: This. This is better than anything else.

Millions of readers know Orphan X. Evan Smoak, hauled into a dark program at the age of twelve to be remade into a highly trained former government assassin, is apparently made of teflon. After quitting the program in disgust (and somehow, rather mysteriously, filthy rich), he set himself up as the "Nowhere Man" who responds to pleas from victims to set the records straight. Being extremely good at his job -- what his friend, armorer and ex-military Tommy Stojack, describes as the most dangerous man in the world -- Evan invariably succeeds.  Battling an endless series of comic book villains, he emerges relatively unscathed. 

So there is a lot of violence in these books, a dismayingly high body count, and scenes of sadism that are best skipped.  And yet I recommend them. The attraction -- what makes the Orphan X series compulsively readable -- is not the fighting and the guns. It is the social and psychological damage that the training and the many, many murders, wreaked on Evan's nature.  This is where the yoga comes in.  There are a lot of guns, the technics are overwhelming, but there is a lot of yoga-style mental and physical repair, too. There are passages which -- and I kid you not -- teach you how to breathe. Quite fascinating.

Critically isolated by his job and his nature, Evan has only two real friends.  One is a teenager with awesome computer skills, and the other is Tommy Stojack, the worldclass creator and supplier of weapons. And the premise of this book is that Tommy has let Evan down.  He has sold out to the dark side, by supplying nasties with his fancy weaponry, and Evan, feeling grossly betrayed, is set on revenge.

Tommy has retreated to a one-eyed town in some deep red state on a mission of his own.  The son of one of his fellow military has asked for his help. Tommy finds that the son is holed up with other young men who have an armory of their own and call themselves a militia. They live in poverty stricken squalor, are badly fed, are in bad health, and are pinned to far right media on their phones, with an old TV blaring one certain news channel in the background. And, fired up with racism and hateful internet chat, they had attacked a Mexican family gathering in a local park. Meaning to terrify them by driving donuts on their picnic blankets, they had ended up killing a young couple, a child, and a currently serving marine.  

Now, the boys are holed up away from likely retribution, on the advice of corrupt local law, and that's why Tommy has been asked to help. 

And though old, crippled with past wounds and arthritis, suffering from constant angina attacks, he does his utmost to understand these boys, to reform their minds, clean them up, and make them understand his message, that in America everyone is One Under the Flag.

This, for me, made the book fascinating.  The author, obviously a fervent patriot, brings a clear message to the reader. Through the character of Tommy Stojack, I got a dim understanding of these boys, that they were indoctrinated to the stage where they had no minds of their own.  It was boys like them who attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2020, driven by a visceral hate that was illogical as the fact that they probably did not vote.

I strongly recommend you read Nemesis by Greg Hurwitz.  Then tell me what you think.