A few years back I discovered the Navy Seal team novels by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman and got hooked on them. The first Marcinko book, Rogue Warrior, was his Vietnam autobiography and was not so much fun due to being real, but he is an interesting person. The novels, however, are different. Any one of them would make a great action movie, if they cast the right person to play Marcinko himself. Someone as big as Steven Seagal but with an equally big sense of humor. Apparently they haven't found anyone suitable, although movie companies did buy the rights to at least the first book.

John Weisman, the coauthor, writes other war/suspense novels but I haven't read them. But maybe I will. One night, after reading partway through one of the Rogue Warrior series, I stopped in surprise because the main character has been torturing the guy he captured -- a bad guy, sure, who is involved in dealing a suitcase nuclear bomb to America's enemies or something. He tortured him until he got some sort of answers from the guy. I don't recall this ever occurring in the novels before. The main character is always Richard Marcinko.

On the book jacket was Weisman's email address, so I wrote him a message asking him if he didn't think it was awful to have our good guy torturing someone. (He beats up the bad guys, kills them, etc -- but this person was not in a fight. He abducted him, then took him away to torture him all night.) I felt a difference in it, and didn't like it in the character.

Weisman sent an answer really fast, he must have been up late and in his email. He said, but it happened -- American soldiers tortured enemies during the such-and-such conflict -- so this is an attempt to match reality. His tone was a bit angry, or maybe I just imagined that.

I thought: But that's not the point. Of course at certain points we have tortured others in war. Brutality is always going to appear when nations engage in combat. But this is fiction, this is our hero, and at no time in the books has the character ever been: unpatriotic, or cowardly, or extremely stupid.

Now he is all three. Torture is a lousy method of interrogation, proven to produce false info, which makes him stupid for using it. And I don't like him being unfairly brutal to another person. But I didn't send another email, because I didn't want to get an answer that would make me dislike this author. Sometimes, you don't want to know too much about writers. Not often, but sometimes.

Maybe I should wean myself off that kind of entertainment, but I still like John Woo movies and a lot of that stuff. They're so exaggerated, so outrageous, so -- unreal. And I'd like them to stay unreal.

*******Strange and ironic day. Packing boxes to move, I found a business card from someone who was murdered a number of years ago. I wish I hadn't googled it again, because for 6 years I haven't known the details of the case. I was glad not to know. Now I can't unread those news stories. Poor, poor man.

And here's another picture of Dippy, who hangs around the museum. He is like a faithful dog; nobody notices him much.