A Worthy Adversary

There's something unbelievably appealing to me about games of mental skill. In college, I relished the opportunity to compete with others on my floor in Civilization II, a turn-based game in which participants created and managed competing civilizations. There were far-flung commercial trade routes, secret alliances, and brilliant tactical maneuvers carried out in times of war. Imagine commanding an empire over the course of several millennia, from the stone age to the launching of the first inter-continental ballistic missile, all at the age of nineteen from your own dorm room. The length of such games as well as the intelligence of the competitors always proved mentally taxing in a rewarding, adrenaline-pumping kind of way. Sadly, my opportunities for such things have dwindled in recent years. Oh, there is always the odd game of Settlers of Catan with any of the growing number of my friends who play, and I did play a fairly interesting game of Risk something like a year and a half ago with Jon, Lope, and Don. However, those two games, while primarily considered games of strategy, involve luck in the form of dice-rolling more than I would like. And these odd instances of gaming, though extraordinarily worthwhile and fun, do not satiate my yen for extended, hard-core, nearly pure strategy competition. It is through the memory of those dorm floor games of Civ II and my current craving for such turn-based glory that I have come to love The Hunt for Red October.

In that infamous Sean Connery submarine flick, one of the earliest actions of Captain Marko Ramius (played by Connery, of course) is to announce the ship's "orders" to the crew. He says, "...and once more we play our dangerous game, a game of chess, against our old aversary: the American navy. For forty years, your fathers before you and your older brothers played this game and played it well. But today the game is different. We have the advantage, and it reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. Now, they will tremble again at the sound of our silence. The order is: engage the silent drive. Comrades, our own fleet doesn't know our full potential. They will do everything possible to test us, but they will only test their own embarrassment. We will leave our fleet behind, we will pass through the American patrols, pass their sonar nets, and lay off their largest city and listen to their rock n' roll while we conduct missile drills. Then, when we are finished, the only sound they will hear is our laughter while we sail to Havana, where the sun is warm and so is the...comradeship." Firstly, the comparison of a military maneuver like the one Ramius has in mind here to chess is quite apt, no? It will involve thorough planning, the prediction of what one's adversaries will think and do, and a certain degree of mental fortitude in order to respond to the inevitable things that will not go as planned. But secondly, what a speech. Here, Ramius is addressing his crew of patriotic Soviet conscripts, an audience not as well educated as he is and far more susceptible to the blind nationalism that characterized the stereotypical, cold war era military personnel commanded by the USSR. For that audience, the mere suggestion of hot cuban women and the use of some form of the word "comrade" several times is more than enough to inspire blind loyalty toward Ramius, however misdirected it might be if the crew really is a group of proud Soviets.

As the film goes on, Ramius and his Russians sweat and smoke through the difficult ordeal of turning over an enormous, cutting-edge sub to the Americans while making the crew think it is destroyed and ensuring the cooperation of those same Americans. And I love it all. But really, it's the end scene that gets me. As they sail the Red October up Maine's Penobscot River, Ramius and Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) discuss the Russian captain's motivations for defection. The scene takes place in a blue twilight sublime enough to have post-coital connotations. This discussion reminds me of the post-Civ II glass of Chianti that sometimes happend back in those halcyon days of dorm room gaming glory. For instance, "Damn," someone might have said, "when I saw that caravan from Dhaka just strolling across Europe..." and then the hearty laughter. Oh boy; I'm a bigger dork than I thought.