Without Remorse

Without Remorse is the first book in the Jack Ryan series chronologically, but was written after The Sum of All Fears and before Debt of Honor. As a prequel, it fleshes out the backstory of series Badass John Clark and how he got his start as the expert CIA officer he later became when he was still named John Kelly.

Taking place during The Vietnam War, John Kelly winds up with a local prostitute named Pam, despondent after losing his wife. His attempts to rehabilitate Pam are tragically cut short after the drug ring she tried to escape kills her and nearly kills him. As he recovers, he decides that she will be avenged. Meanwhile, as the Vietnam War continues, Kelly's country asks for his services as a Navy SEAL once more, and his personal revenge and the duty to his country become intertwined in a story that examines the morals of personal revenge.


 * Alternate History: Aside from a few minor details to accomodate prior canon, this book otherwise has the least amount of discontinuity with real-world history.
 * Asshole Victim: Everyone Kelly kills involving drugs or treason to the U.S.
 * Boxed Crook: As Kelly realizes he will be caught sooner or later by the cops, he decides to turn to the US government which hired him for their own reasons, and explains his legal troubles. Given how effective he is, they hand him a partial chance at getting a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card. In exchange,.
 * Broken Aesop: Clear and Present Danger had an obvious moral that "the success of illegal actions does not make the actions justified". This book seems to offer the corollary "but if you are good enough at those acts you have certain friends in high places, they just might be anyway".
 * Later books do offer further commentary on this. While Clark admits to himself that he's able to sleep at night, knowing what he got away with, he's not willing to go as far as he did without either ironclad legal or moral reason to do so ever again. He concedes he felt justified in vigilante actions then, but now he's Older and Wiser, he does feel shame and regret for some of his blunders and rationalizations for them.
 * Captain Ersatz: A Heartbroken Badass who decides to become a One-Man Army against crime by means of Pay Evil Unto Evil. Did that just describe John Kelly or The Punisher?
 * Call Forward: We get an Early-Bird Cameo of a young Jack Ryan discussing joining the Marines with his father at one point.
 * Cold-Blooded Torture: Kelly makes use of this to get . He does feel a bit of shame for it, and even remarks in later books it wasn;t one of his prouder moments, but at the time he's so convinced the tortured person in question is an Asshole Victim he struggles to feel morally upset with himself.
 * Cruel and Unusual Death: One of the most horrifying examples Tom Clancy has ever put to paper is in this book, courtesy of agonizingly terrible pain brought about by extensive torture from a decompression tank.
 * Dirty Cop: Mark Charon is in pawn to the drug lords central to the domestic side of the story. While pretending to be building evidence against drug dealers for arrests of even bigger criminals, his real job for his criminal paymasters is to finger rivals for the cops to catch while shielding their own dealers by destroying evidence..
 * Dirty Coward; Several.
 * The Vietnamese have a bunch of Child Soldiers try to torture an American prisoner, and while the exercise is meant to make the children in question not fear the enemy, the American who resists the torture knows full well it didn't work.
 * The drug ring at the center of the story is riddled with men who are brutal thugs when they have the upper hand, and utter cowards when they don't.
 * Doomed By Canon: Jack Ryan's parents must be dead by the time of Patriot Games the next chronological novel, as they die in an airplane accident, and while we get a brief scene of Jack's mother and his father is a prominent character in this book, it's the only time in the series he'll be alive.
 * Drugs Are Bad: This trope is delivered with the subtleness of a bat to the face. Not only are the drugs shown to be responsible for destroying lives, but they are also distributed by utter scum whose drug rings are compromising local justice, brutalizing and raping female drug mules, and even has international implications, as their drugs are smuggled into the US via by corrupted members of the US armed forces in on the drug rings.
 * Generation Xerox: Inverted. While Emmet Ryan is a police officer and not an intelligence officer, he's written very similarly to his son from the earlier books.
 * Heel Realization: One of the reasons Kelly is so insistent on helping out Pam is realizing this about himself.
 * Historical Domain Character: General Vo Nguyen Giap shows up briefly in one scene to decide to the fate of some American POWs.
 * Nixon gets a few mentions, given the story is set around 1970-71 for the most part.
 * Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Played for tragedy. Kelly's attempt to help one forsake that lifestyle gets her killed.
 * Improbable Weapon User: One of the more unorthodox kills in the books is done with what amounts to a primed shotgun shell on a stick. The aftermath has a cop remark it's sheer ingenuity will earn it a place in a medical journal.
 * Inspector Javert: Emmet Ryan quickly becomes suspicious of John Kelly and despite Kelly's clever misdirection and attempts at throwing Ryan off, Ryan still manages to figure out what Kelly is doing. The trope is subverted in that Ryan is correct and is merely interested in serving society despite his sympathy for Kelly's actions, even giving Kelly an hour to get his affairs in order before bringing him in on charges.
 * Kick the Son of a Bitch: An entire plot of this. Kelly invokes this as to why has no reason to suspect Kelly took a single innocent life towards the end, which he agrees with in spirit but still intends to bring in Kelly for murder.
 * Make It Look Like an Accident: After John Kelly spills his covert vigilante activity to his government handlers, they are willing to help him escape the legal consequences, but only once he pulls off this trope at their behest to.
 * Later, this is how they, so they can have him reborn as the man who would be John Clark.
 * Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The drug ring leaders attempt to silence any possible leaks as brutally and quickly as possible. While otherwise prudent, this tips their hand when it looks like their activities have died down, which refocuses police attention back on them after it was starting to flag.
 * Rich Idiot With No Day Job: One initial reason Kelly is at first beyond suspicion is the belief he's this.
 * Screw the Money, I Have Rules: Kelly refuses to take money from the people he kills save to disguise his motivations, he has no interest in it otherwise given it was earned by selling drugs.
 * His refusal to touch money unless he has to does wind up backfiring and tipping off the drug lords who he is . Given it was a lot of money, this helps narrow down the list of possible people who could be working against them considerably.
 * Spotting the Thread: Is the impetus of several plot points.
 * Emmet Ryan and the rest of the police have good reason to suspect they have an information leaker supplying the drug rings official information. What gives away that is Ryan noticing how all the times they chase a lead, the same cop in question always winds up knowing about it regardless of how and where they got the tips.
 * Kelly cottons on to how the drug ring being investigated are smuggling drugs into the US using to evade detection by drug inspectors.
 * Too Clever by Half: Mark Charon in spades. He's certainly effective at staying ahead of the non-corrupt cops while helping out his criminal associates by keeping them in the loop. Unfortunately, he's TOO effective at the latter, prompting his non-corrupt co-workers to start looking into how the criminals were so good at staying one step ahead of them, which causes suspicion to fall on him because he's so convinced he's above suspicion he neglects to realize his fellow cops are getting wise to him.
 * Torture Technician: Kelly's skill in this is showed in graphic majesty.
 * Torture Always Works: Played straight and subverted.
 * The straight example is when Kelly tortures a drug ring lieutenant for information. Given the man in question is a Dirty Coward unused to being on the receiving end of pain, this works like a charm.
 * Subverted in the case of a US Air Force officer who is brutally tortured by the North Vietnamese. That is endured. Instead, when a Soviet interrogator switches gears and decides to show decency and humanity to the man, it works because he gulls the US \ officer into lowering his guard and spilling his guts.
 * Vigilante Man: Kelly does this for a huge part of the story, even reflecting on the origins of the trope name in the process.
 * What an Idiot!: An instance of this is Kelly's first mistake during his vigilante spree, specifically . While noble and he took pains to prevent being identified, it tips his hand to the police and provides them a starting point for zeroing in on who he really is.
 * Emmet Ryan blows a chance to catch Kelly at one point by being a bit too zealous in trying to get those who might know where he is to talk about it.
 * Charon gets himself killed by being too stupid to know when not to draw attention.
 * Whole-Plot Reference: The story is basically Rambo , only recast to give the main protagonist a much more sympathetic perspective for their motives.