I first met David Poyer in 1983. I was a new member of the English Department faculty at the U.S. Naval Academy and would be teaching a course called Literature of the Sea. Dave (class of 1971) had just published The Return of Philo T. McGiffin (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1983), the wonderfully comic novel of midshipman life at the Academy. Five years later he produced the first of what would become a remarkable series of works of naval fiction.
For 35 years, through 21 books, readers have followed the fictional career of U.S. Naval Academy graduate Dan Lenson. Now, as Poyer publishes the 22nd and last volume in his Tales of the Modern Navy series (more casually “The Dan Lenson series”), we encounter Lenson beginning his twilight tour, as Superintendent of the Academy.
Tales of the Modern Navy
This series invites comparison to C. S. Forester’s 11–novel Hornblower series, or Alexander Kent’s 29-book Richard Bolitho series, each also narrating the entire career of its naval officer protagonist, or the 21-volume Aubrey–Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. However, these are all British and historical fiction set in the Age of Sail (though written by 20th century authors.) In contrast, Poyer’s Lenson series is American and contemporary—or indeed beyond contemporary, as the last half dozen novels actually imagine the near future with events based on Poyer’s strategic political speculation. There is nothing else like it.
As must be the case for every new superintendent, Lenson cannot help but recall incidents in his career, now ending where, decades earlier, it began. Loyal readers will recognize these moments from the earlier books, but large sections devoted to young Lenson’s Naval Academy experience as a midshipman will be new to them. Now in The Academy (MacMillan, 2023), with his characteristic technique of braided narratives, Poyer intertwines the story of Midshipman Lenson with that of Admiral Lenson. Midshipman Lenson’s conduct is no better than most, as shown by an accumulation of demerits climaxed by an incident involving drunk driving and the Maryland governor’s garden. Honor, however, is for him a question of black and white, for his own behavior and that of others. In this regard he is the perfect model of what the Academy claims as its ideal. However, with such an attitude, Lenson must confront the brigade tradition that one must “never bilge a shipmate.”
The braided narrative form generates one of its great strengths throughout the series—a rich array of secondary characters. Some appear only briefly, but others run through large sections of narrative, sometimes in multiple books. Readers will not forget Admiral Barry “Nick” Niles, a Black bear of a man who seems to live on Atomic Fireballs and develops an early dislike for Lenson’s failure to stay tidily within the lines of authority. Then there is Teddy Oberg, a SEAL Master Chief who combines appalling treatment of women with nearly unbelievable physical and mental toughness and loyalty to mission and country. Remarkable, too, is Aisha Ar-Rahim, a Muslim Black woman from New York beginning her career as a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agent in the Persian Gulf. Lenson’s second wife Blair Titus occupies increasingly higher government posts, and their daughter Nan grows up to become a medical researcher caught in the biological aftermath of a near-future war with China.
The series began in 1988 with The Med (St. Martin’s Press, 1988), in which Lenson is a lieutenant (junior grade) on a commodore’s staff. This was followed by The Gulf (St. Martin’s Press, 1990) with Lenson a lieutenant commander. With his third book, The Circle (St. Martin’s Press, 1992), we moved back to Ensign Lenson, fresh from the Academy and (as was the case for Ensign Poyer) assigned to a destroyer headed into horrendous Arctic conditions. Having picked up that stitch, we move back to Lenson at midcareer and follow him as he progresses to higher rank and greater responsibility. Of course, the progression is never easy. Fans of the series will have favorite elements as they, like Vice Admiral Lenson, look back over his past.
Stories of the Navy
The novels keep pace with the political, military, and technological developments of their time of publication. Over the course of decades simultaneously real and fictional, Poyer involves his protagonist in the events of the approximate time of writing—the Soviet confrontation, the Gulf War, the 9/11 attacks, the hunt for bin Laden, and the development of the Tomahawk missile. In the last six books we are taken to a future still thankfully hypothetical but not deemed improbable: nuclear war with China and its aftermath. In his career spanning these events, Lenson survives such calamities as the sinking of his destroyer after a collision with a carrier, a too-close detonation of a dirty nuclear bomb, torture by Iraqis, having to swim out of a sinking helicopter, and being in the Navy Command Center when that part of the Pentagon is destroyed by a hijacked airliner.
Poyer’s readers enjoy all the details of gadgetry and jargon as well as moments of horrendous violence and fingertip desperation appropriate to techno-thrillers. But this series offers any thoughtful reader a good deal more. As Kirkus Review remarks, the books are “notable for a sensitivity and scope lacking in other more popular sea adventures.” Often, Poyer’s pages vividly explore issues of serious concern at the time of publication that still excite controversy today. When in the real Navy homosexuality could still have resulted in discharge, a fictional homosexual officer who is a very successful and conscientious—but closeted—ship’s captain ponders his position. When Lenson is given command of the first Navy combatant with a combined male/female crew, we get a vivid sense of some of the complications encountered by actual U.S. Navy personnel at the time. In addition to practical issues like loss of personnel through pregnancy, Lenson confronts the many challenges of social behavior aboard ship and ashore—not least troubling a persistently growing attraction between himself and his female executive officer.
Lenson is constantly questioning his own motives and goals, as well as those of the people and institutions with which he associates. In Tomahawk, as he works to make that new weapon effective, he wonders if it is right to employ violence in the service of the state at all and ponders (as elsewhere) the responsibility of launching nuclear weapons. Ordered to program a target he finds questionable, what should he do?
From his own career as a naval officer and technical consultant, Poyer brings abundant technical and cultural understanding to these books. He also does his homework; the copious acknowledgments sections in nearly every volume attest to the author’s research efforts consulting publications and interviewing those with first-hand knowledge of equipment, tactics, and environment. Poyer has been remarkably fortunate too, in having the same editor for all 22 books in the series, extraordinary longevity in these days of corporate churn. George Witte’s skill and poetic sensibility at St. Martin’s Press resonate happily with Poyer’s talents as a writer.
No writer I know of is more skilled at describing the sea itself in all its many guises. With such a volume of sea-going material, repetition might be expected, but that is not the case. As for describing what it is like to be at sea, especially in the Navy, some readers, including this reviewer, have remarked that “I felt I was back on my old ship.”
Stories of Leadership
From a profoundly personal depth, Lenson desires to do what is right. As he confronts one external threat or challenge after another, readers also see him having to deal with personal weaknesses, temptations, and loss. His first marriage breaks up, then a woman he subsequently plans to marry is murdered. He resigns from the Navy, then asks to be taken back. He succumbs to alcoholism, and more than once even briefly considers suicide. Attracted to the Navy’s ideals of honor and service, he simultaneously is compelled to question as well as obey authority in institutions and individuals. As a junior officer in The Med, he disobeys the entire chain of command to do what he knows is the right thing and provide covering fire for marines assaulting Muslim terrorists. Lenson’s ambivalent attitude toward authority may stem from his growing up as the son of a police officer who was also an abusive father. Poyer’s own upbringing under a schizophrenic war veteran father is analogous.
Lenson’s continual questioning of what is the right action, and by what authority that rightness is determined, also reflects Poyer’s personal pondering over the years. In The Command (St. Martin’s Press, 2001), having just taken charge of a ship, Lenson suddenly feels everything he’s done was “wrong, too late, too feeble, not enough.” Through Lenson, Poyer raises question after question of the sort every military person should at some time consider. Is the use of force in pursuit of national objectives always justified? Even if the national objective is to keep our oil supply abundant and cheap? What goal is worth your life or the lives of others? What goal is worth probably killing innocent people, perhaps children? How and to what extent should one follow an incompetent or unworthy leader? Lenson remarks at one point that military officers take an oath as doctors do, because they are responsible for the lives of others.
While constantly questioning himself, if he is to be a good leader he must act unhesitatingly with no indication of doubt or uncertainty. Perhaps most military officers—most leaders—must at some times be conscious of playing the role of leader, rather than naturally leading. Lenson is successful to the extent that his subordinates do not detect the difference.
Behind these professional questions is the universal question of how in general anyone should conduct their life. Any attempt to answer immediately encounters the many temptations to self-interest. Poyer dramatizes this conflict nowhere more clearly than in The Med, with Commodore Sundstrom, a man who will accept responsibility only if there is no other option, and for whom the Navy is a career but not a profession. While writing this first of what would prove to be a 22–novel series, Poyer was personally working out his thinking on these matters. Toward the end of his first draft, he wrote in his diary: “I think I’m finally getting the idea—what The Med is all about.” The idea, he explains, is that people go through three stages of moral development—“at least I did.” First, we believe that if we are good, good things will happen to us. But then bad things happen to us, so it seems there is no use being good. Finally, most of us come to the stage that we are good simply because it is good and want to do right not for what it does for us, but just because it is the right thing to do. Poyer endows Dan Lenson with a deep motivation to do what is right. That of course can be easier to want than to do, as we learn with Lenson in book after book. Such would be the case, too, for any well-motivated reader for whom religious authority provides insufficient answers or clarity.
Lenson is an existentialist—he is his own measure for what is good. He tells himself that if he removes any consideration of benefit to himself, he is likely to be making the right decision: “No matter how scared or tired you are, or how bad it might be for your career. You just do what used to be called your duty. Just do that—and no matter how it turns out, you can live with it.” In The Command, then-Commander Lenson recalls a remark by a congressional staffer that “no one in government had any other goal than to keep their jobs.” Lenson, in contrast, thinks “that if he couldn’t do what struck him as right, he didn’t need to stay in. Probably not an attitude that would get him flag rank.” Indeed, repeatedly in his career Lenson goes against the clear orders or wishes of his superiors, arousing enmity in high places—personified at times by Admiral Niles. Even Lenson’s Medal of Honor from Desert Storm was given at the Army’s insistence and against Navy wishes.
Of course, Lenson’s attitude fits well with the tradition of the Navy and the ethos of the U.S. Naval Academy: “Mission before self.” Lenson is a graduate of the Naval Academy who truly embodies its ideals. That he does so while being an imperfect human is surely part of what makes him so attractive to readers. Even at the end of his career, in The Academy, it takes a broken arm to make him realize he has made another wrong choice.
Coming Full Circle
With this final Tales of the Modern Navy novel, Poyer and Lenson return to their alma mater. With The Circle as the first of the series in narrative sequence, I cannot help thinking of this last book as Full Circle. Indeed, one of Lenson’s most remarkable decisions in The Academy is a grander, much weightier version of a choice he once made as an ensign in The Circle. In the earlier book he insists upon being charged along with other officers, some deceased, who were involved in the sinking of USS Reynolds Ryan. In The Academy, Vice Admiral Lenson, USNA Superintendent, chooses to turn himself over to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, risking life in prison, to defend his actions early in the conflict with China. Both decisions, like many others, show Lenson living up to his own ideal of what a naval officer—or indeed a good person—should be, a person who willingly takes responsibility.
When in Korea Strait (St. Martin’s Press, 2007) a submarine captain taking his command into possible annihilation wants to make sure his situation is recorded, Lenson reflects that “things like that were important to Annapolis guys. You could argue it as a plus or minus. But when you looked at the record of the place over 150 years you found a hell of a lot of heroes, not many incompetents, and no cowards or traitors at all. Not a bad record, all things considered.”
Taking up his job as Naval Academy Superintendent, Lenson and the reader immediately note a contrast with his predecessor. Admiral Cree keeps up with the admittedly heavy social expectations of the job but also lets the Academy run itself while he golfs unperturbed by indications of serious problems getting worse. One such is the perennial need to defend the mere existence of the Academy against those who see it as a privileged and expensive indulgence in a time of tightening budgets. A direct physical threat to the campus is the effect of rising water levels caused by climate change and other factors. Lenson’s proposed solution may not resemble the eventual real-world outcome, but at least it is a serious answer to a very real-world threat. A physical harbinger of that coming threat appears in Hurricane Olaf. While it floods the lower levels of the Academy, Dan assumes his final command afloat by taking a squadron of yard patrol boats down the Chesapeake to rescue the inhabitants of a drowning island.
Later, standing with the Vice President as the Brigade of Midshipmen marches past in the final parade of the year, Lenson still wonders, looking for an answer to it all. As always, the parading midshipmen are an image of ideals, of duty and country and truth to oneself. What imperfect reality is embodied within the visible ideal? Lenson’s answer is one not of logic but of feeling, as he “thank[s] whatever gods might be, that he’d been part of it all.”
As Lenson fans close the covers of The Academy knowing no 23rd book will arrive, they may feel a twinge of loss. At the same time, longtime readers will surely feel that Lenson’s tale ends exactly where and as it should. We have been vicariously part of it all—the adventure, the fear, the technical complexities, and the simple excitement. We have found with him a sense of rightness in a world of abundant wrongs and uncertainties. It may be that The Academy will spur some of us to pick up again books we read some time ago. On the other hand, new readers may be assured that if they enjoyed The Academy, a shelf full of Lenson books awaits them.