You shouldn't come to any text by Tom Clancy assuming your vast knowledge of military acronyms will be needed to appreciate this tech-savvy author. On the contrary, Clancy's descriptions of the (increasingly complex) implements of war are decidedly down-to-earth and accessible to most any civilian.

In particular, you'll be fascinated to hear that a ride in today's M1A2 is "surprisingly smooth" and "resembles an American town car on a smooth street, even when traversing rough terrain." Firing the 25mm Bushmaster cannon on the M2 Bradley turns out to be "not much more difficult than playing a video game," and the funky smell upon liftoff in your AH-64 Apache is turbine smoke being sucked into the air-conditioning vents, "like the diesel exhaust you get when you stand behind a transit bus." So wizardly are the similes of Clancy the Adept in the lessons of digitized weaponry that he'll have you feeling like a battalion-level Commander in short order.

One in a series of non-fiction books Clancy has written describing the modern battlefield, fans of the virtual front lines will find much more than similes grimly fascinating in "Armored Cav: A guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment." This is where you can bone up on behind-the-scenes knowledge of all those blips on the FCR you've been supporting in recent months with your brace of Hellfires-the tanks, the APCs, the mauling MLRS, the Hummers, the fearsome M109A6 Paladin Self-Propelled Howitzer, even the choppers themselves.

Clancy's exhaustive effort to describe in detail these systems is never boring: clearly the author himself had some fun "researching" this book. One gets the great image throughout of Clancy tromping around a flightline in full battle-gear; Clancy standing out on a test-range with a shoulder-launched Stinger aimed at the sky; and Clancy sloshing around the interior of a M1A2, all to nobly bring his audience that elusive sensation of "being there." And there you shall be, learning in plain English the patriotic and the awe-inspiring, the brutal potential of these weapons.

While innumerable factors played a part in the victory of Allied forces in the Gulf War, perhaps the most decisive was the technological edge of the manned weapons. It's easy to stand back and say the U.S. Army was more highly evolved breed of cat, and leave things hopelessly abstract, but Clancy goes a step further and breaks this down.

Detailed here are the tactics of "shoot and scoot" used by mobile artillery like the M109, for instance, to keep the OPFOR at bay, maneuvering before counter-batteries can draw a bead. You'll come to appreciate the massive strength of the frontal turret-armor of the M1, which in one hair-raising incident survived multiple HEAT rounds from different T-72s. An AH-64 has the agility to turn, dive down, hover, soar up and do over fifty knots sideways, during which the author says he was "too busy being impressed to turn pale."

What's cool is that Clancy doesn't get you drooling over all this firepower and end the chapter there: he then sets up a typical "scenario" one of these systems might operate in, and proceeds to dream out, not unrealistically, the predictable results of such encounters. M1s are described blasting through an enemy tank/ mech unit while the tank commanders are busily "using their CITVs to scan other sectors of the battlefield." (At certain moments you begin to see how narrow the distance has become between real life and the simulations we're playing). My favorite is the MLRS vignette where Clancy can't help showing off a little fictional razzle-dazzle in his discussion of this wicked missile-launching artillery known by Iraqis as "Steel Rain."

Since the six MLRS vehicles deliver a total of some 46,368 M77 munitions onto the enemy artillery site, the results are horrific: In all likelihood, every gun and artillery tractor will be struck by one of the submunitions, and either damaged or destroyed. Vehicles containing ammunition will have their loads detonated by contact with the M77s. . . . This all happens before the guns have finished firing their third or fourth shell. All along the front, enemy artillery units simply "dissolve," without so much as a whimper from their commanders. In a little while, the enemy high command will call, but nobody will be home to answer.

You'll soon know that the M1 tank, chef-d'œvre of the modern military industrial complex, "Dracula," as some troops call it, is protected with a layer of Rolled Homogenous Armor known as Chobham armor. (If you had asked me what Chobham armor was a week ago, I would have looked around in wounded bewilderment.) The author treats you to a description of just how this stuff is made, "honeycombed ceramic composite layer sandwiched between steel plates" and its almost mystical power to protect, in terms that even I, chemistry dunce, could understand.

A HEAT round striking such armor apparently pushes through the outer steel and "tries to burrow through the ceramic." Instead of shattering as metal, the flow of ceramic dissipates the explosive jet to smaller, more manageable "jetlets," he writes-decreasing the destructive potential of the round. This is the kind of thing Clancy loves to dig into, taking you beneath the surface of these systems with the acuity and precision of a 3D cutaway, as if he'd been given a pair of James Bond x-ray goggles on the sly and uses them to hone his powers of observation (and to help churn out all those bestsellers, no doubt).

The nooks and crannies of "Armored Cav" provide other goodies in which to sink one's teeth. The Fox Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) wheeled vehicle deploys robotic arms with rollers of sticky silicone rubber, picking up traces of chemicals as it surveys an area for contamination. Sitting in the driver's seat of the M1A2, you no longer have analog dials and instruments but a Driver's Integrated Display-"a ruggedized orange electroluminescent display (similar to those on some portable computers) showing navigational instructions and vehicle status."

Makes me drool. Speaking of which, who needs a catalytic mitt for his MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) when you can just as easily employ the smokestack of an idling Heavy-Equipment Transporter: "wait for ten minutes, then have the driver gun the engine. The MRE package blows right out of the stack, perfectly heated!"

The text is more than a compendium of slick combat hardware, however. Two interviews with General Frederick Franks and a younger Cavalry Officer, H.R. McMaster-who led the famous battle at 73 Easting-provide insight into the careers and battlefield action of these two men. Since both soldiers are graduates of West Point, you begin to appreciate the lifetime of training that might lead up to their achieving such short-lived victories, in this case orchestrating the destruction of something like 50 enemy vehicles in less than 10 minutes.

On closer inspection you begin to see how the "man behind the machine," well-trained and aggressive, usually wins, just like those who helped lead "Desert Saber." Make no mistake, specialized training, technical expertise, and downright wisdom goes into successfully leading an M1 tank platoon.

Toward this end, the author observes the somewhat brutal regimen a typical ACR will endure at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin. This place, just a barren desert wasteland outside Barstow-as if the scorching elements weren't enough-sports the tough 177th Armored Brigade to act as the enemy force, complete with visually modified tanks and Humvees to help them look mean. This maneuver element simulates OPFOR based on the tactics of opponents America is likely to face in the world's trouble spots, and they don't take it easy on the trainees!

In the summer of 1990 I was barely sixteen and working at (aargh) a carwash. I remember it as a blisteringly hot line of work, particularly when you stepped into the interior of one of these cars that had been sitting in the sun to swab the dash or whatever-the brain veritably sizzled. It was out on the fringe of our suburb in view of the train tracks and whirring with insects deranged from the heat.

Anyway, one evening, as the sun set in the west and the cars thinned and the air mercifully cooled, a train rolled past. Its cargo was a couple dozen M1 Abrams tanks in desert schemes on their way to the Gulf: it was a strange, a magisterial sight. Everyone paused from what they were doing. No one spoke. The hulking forms of the tanks trundled to their awesome destinations; we adopted hushed, reverent tones when they had gone. This book elucidates the modern tank with a worshipful voice apropos to the fearsome power of those weapons.

As you've probably surmised, Clancy will have you slinging around Army lingo in no time: don your flak jacket to avoid "unnecessary perforation." Don't "slime" your boots with toxic agents. The crown jewel of them all, however, has to be "Jabberwocky," a projectile named after Lewis Carroll's poem, fired from the M109A6, this shell contains "a powerful little broadband-radio noise-jammer designed to disrupt enemy communications," and uses "a parachute to retard its fall . . . deploys an antenna and starts jamming." Defense contractors must think they're literary giants all of a sudden.

Reading this book also gave me a wicked hankering to play some Jane's Longbow 2-a sim whose praises go too often unsung (switch to TADs in a target rich environment and pan outside the Apache on the F6 view: as you select new targets, watch the laser range finder on your nose-mounted sensor briskly turn toward the new targets. Not only that, but watch your little pilot dudes turn their heads. What detail!)

You'll find plenty of chunky discussion about the roles of the three aircraft portrayed in that latest chopper sim by Jane's. Unlike the earlier AH-56 Cheyenne prototype, "where raw speed was the goal," the Apache was meant from the beginning to sneak along nap-of-the-earth, surveying the battlefield, weaving through valleys, firing from long ranges. Learn lots of things about Kiowas and Blackhawks, too!

Clancy has seen the face of battle and is dying to tell us about it. Educative and hugely fun, this book wins on different levels, and leaves you itching to strap into the cockpit of your Longbow-Apache, M1A2 or other earth-mover of choice. Pick it up.