The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

The book is The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy. It was first published by the Naval Institute Press in 1985. I read the 2010 mass market paperback edition.  I read it in March of 2025.

The title is the plot of the story. A soviet submarine called the Red October goes missing and both the soviets and the Americans are looking for it in the ocean.

I read this because I want to read more thrillers and I thought why not start with the mack daddy of military/spy thrillers, Tom Clancy. That claim may be disputed but he’s the godfather of thrillers as far as I know. I want to read more popular fiction.

This is Clancy’s first novel and it’s a Jack Ryan novel. Lauren and I watched the Jack Ryan TV show and loved it. We watched The Hunt for Red October movie starring Alec Baldwin. I basically had Alec Baldwin in my head picturing Jack Ryan.

Clancy was a patriot. This book is very pro America and anti-communist. But Clancy also shows the Russian people in a very generous light. The Red October goes missing because the captain Marko Aleksandrovich Ramius is defecting to America with his officers. He never believed in communism despite rising through the soviet ranks to become a military elite. But the final straw was when a drunk communist doctor (who gets paid as much as a teacher) botched an operation on his wife and she died. So he takes the sub and defects to America.

Clancy sees the humanity in the soviet people and their longing to be free. The catalyst for captain Ramius liberation was his Roman Catholic grandmother who secretly had him baptized. She told him religious stories and it stuck with him.

“but she did manage to have him baptized a Roman Catholic soon after his father had deposited him with her. She never told Marko about this. The risk would have been too great. Roman Catholicism had been brutally suppressed in the Baltic states. It was a religion, and as he grew older Marko learned that Marxism-Leninism was a jealous god, tolerating no competing loyalties.” (p41)

This is fascinating from Clancy. It was also great to find out that Jack Ryan is a Christian or at least believes in God.

“You are be-believer?” Borodin asked.

“Yeah, sure.” Ryan should not have been surprised by the question. “Hell, you gotta believe in something.” “And why is that, Commander Ryan?” Borodin was examining the Pogy through oversized night glasses.

Ryan wondered how to answer. “Well, because if you don’t, what’s the point of life? That would mean Sartre and Camus and all those characters were right-all is chaos, life has no meaning. I refuse to believe that. If you want a better answer, I know a couple priests who’d be glad to talk to you.”

Borodin did not respond. He spoke an order into the bridge microphone, and they altered course a few degrees to starboard.” (p494)

This is an insight into Clancy’s patriotic Christianity. It used to be simple. To be American pretty much meant to be Christian. If you went to another country and they knew you were American they could also safely assume that you were a Christian. That’s no longer the case. When someone hears that you’re American they probably assume you are an idiot. Who knows. I’ve only been out of the country once and it was to China. They think all American’s are geniuses and rich and beautiful. 

When Wes Huff was on Patrick Bet David’s podcast PBD asked Wes why Christianity is declining in the West. Wes basically said that it was most likely only fakers who were falling away from the faith, people who were going to Christian church out of convenience rather than conviction. PBD didn’t like that answer. He saw it as a cop-out. He compared it to one of his insurance agencies that was losing sales and salesmen. He sees it as a lack of enthusiasm in the leadership.

I could tell what he was getting at. He was comparing it to the rise of Islam and Andrew Tate being a very charismatic voice that is drawing young men. He wanted to know where the Andrew Tate of Christianity was.

I would have asked him this, imagine your insurance agency is doing record number of sales and has lots of salesmen and everything is going great and then you find out that more than half of the sales are fraudulent. Then after correcting the books and firing the corrupt salesmen your numbers go down. Did they really go down or did you just cut out all the false numbers? There was no actual decline in the real sales that were being made, the numbers were just finally honest. That would’ve been a good analogy.

My main takeaway from this book was to not take my American freedoms for granted. Until you see how awful it is in other countries and what people are willing to do to get to America, you don’t really appreciate how great we have it here. In the case of this novel, Captain Ramius and his officers were risking their lives and possibly nuclear war to escape the Soviet Union. The Americans didn’t know the Red October was defecting. They had to trust that Ramius was a true defector and this wasn’t a soviet ruse to lure them into war. It’s a great book.

This book made me think of the Soviet Union and how Putin is definitely trying to piece it back together. It’s in the news all the time with the war in Ukraine and all that. I really don’t see an offramp that doesn’t include letting Putin keep his land gains. Can the free world sanction the shit out of Russia? I don’t know how it works. But it’s obvious that Putin’s goal is to reunite the soviet union and that should be stopped.

You have to be an absolute idiot to visit Russia right now. There is a currency in foreign hostages.

It surprised me how slow this book was. I’ve read a few other Clancy novels and they’re much more action packed. Maybe he increases the pace with each new book? This one was a pot boiler. Still good though, just not as thriller-ish as I was expecting.

It was a little confusing to keep up with all the characters. I had a hard time picturing some of the minor characters in my head.

The tone was suspenseful and ominous. Most of the “action” takes place by submarines under water. There were a lot of scenes where military men were staring anxiously at radar screens. Intense stuff. I imagined a lot of sweaty sailors faces basking in the glow of red lights.

Jack Ryan is definitely a hero to emulate. We don’t see his kind much anymore. He’s cool, rich, smart, brave, and anglo. He’s brave not only to face physically dangerous situations but also to be the only one in the room to stand up for his convictions about what he believes to be true. He’s trusting but not to the point of naivete. We should all try to be more like Jack Ryan.

The villains are the pinko commies. But not Ramius and his officers. They’re very sympathetic.

This book is peak dad mode. In fact, I had to prove to Amazon that I had at least one kid before I was allowed to purchase it. It’s a slow burn thriller. It will test your patience and imagination but still a good read.

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Notable Quotables

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In the Soviet Union every worker is a government worker, and they have a saying: As long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work. (p29)

“”””

Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravda editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service. (p39)

“”””

Her only son left home at an early age to join Lenin’s Red Guards, and while he was away she kept to the old ways, going to mass every day until 1940 and never forgetting the religious education that had been passed on to her. Ramius remembered her as a silver-haired old woman who told wonderful bedtime stories. Religious stories. It would have been far too dangerous for her to bring Marko to the religious ceremonies that had never been entirely stamped out, but she did manage to have him baptized a Roman Catholic soon after his father had deposited him with her. She never told Marko about this. The risk would have been too great. Roman Catholicism had been brutally suppressed in the Baltic states. It was a religion, and as he grew older Marko learned that Marxism-Leninism was a jealous god, tolerating no competing loyalties. (p41)

“”””

As a boy, Ramius sensed more than thought that Soviet Communism ignored a basic human need. In his teens, his misgivings began to take a coherent shape. The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life. (p42)

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The only people Ryan needed to impress were those who knew him; he cared little for the rest. He had no ambition to celebrity. His life, he judged, was already as complicated as it needed to be-quite a bit more complicated than most would guess. (p60)

“”””

The most wounding insult to an educated Russian was to be called nekulturny, uncultured-the term didn’t translate adequately-yet the same men who sat in the gilt boxes at the Moscow State Opera weeping at the end of a performance of Boris Gudunov could immediately turn around and order the execution or imprisonment of a hundred men without blinking. A strange people, made more strange by their political philosophy. (p229)

“”””

In a footnote a doctor commented that the most wounding punishment for Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was exile. As a patriot, being alive far from his home was more of a torment than living in a gulag. Ryan found that curious, but enough so to be true. (p362-363)

“”””

“You are be-believer?” Borodin asked.

“Yeah, sure.” Ryan should not have been surprised by the question. “Hell, you gotta believe in something.” “And why is that, Commander Ryan?” Borodin was examining the Pogy through oversized night glasses.

Ryan wondered how to answer. “Well, because if you don’t, what’s the point of life? That would mean Sartre and Camus and all those characters were right-all is chaos, life has no meaning. I refuse to believe that. If you want a better answer, I know a couple priests who’d be glad to talk to you.”

Borodin did not respond. He spoke an order into the bridge microphone, and they altered course a few degrees to starboard. (p494)

“””””

In the intelligence business if you look hard enough for something, you find it, whether it’s really there or not. (p543)

“”””

It was strange how easily Americans put on their freedoms. How difficult would it be for these men who had risked their lives to adapt to something that men like Ryan so rarely appreciated? It was people like these who had built the American Dream, and people like these who were needed to maintain it. It was odd that such men should come from the Soviet Union. (p562)