May 21 2008
“Enter the Past Tense” by Roland W Haas
Enter the Past Tense: My Secret Life as a CIA Assassin by Roland W Haas was a disappointment, to me at least. I spied the book while checking it out to a patron at the library, and had thought it looked like a very interesting book. After all, who wouldn’t enjoy a tell-all book from a CIA assassin?
Me, apparently.
My biggest problem with the book was the man himself, Roland Haas. He is NOT a good guy. Perhaps I’ve been steeped in too many Hollywood movies where the soldier is the good guy, or perhaps it was being raised by a dad who served in the Marine Corps for 20 years and talked endlessly about duty and country and “doing the right thing even when no one was looking” but to me, this guy was just a creep. At one point, upset with his up-to-that-point best friend, Roland took an ice pick and swung with all his might into the side of his best friend in an attempt to kill him. This was in either junior high or early high school – the book wasn’t quite clear on the timeline. His best friend lived, but they were not (shocking!) best friends after that. A murder attempt tends to put a damper on things.
He also spent most of college higher than a kite, he listed every drug he ever used, and even described in detail the various delusions that he suffered through. All of that would have been fine, if he had gone on to somehow redeem himself by changing his life around, etc etc, but instead he agrees to be an assassin on a lark, and then spends his time either learning how to kill people, or getting drunk or high (sometimes both at the same time). He just isn’t likable.
And all while reading this, I kept thinking, “Is this guy for real? Could he have honestly done all of this, or is he just writing this fictitious life in order to sound a lot cooler than he really was?” Maybe he wanted a good excuse as to why he was kicked out of college, and thought being a CIA assassin was a good cover story. Who knows. So I hopped online to read reviews on Amazon.com, and there were more than a few reviews on there that said that they believed the book was fictitious. We’ll never know for sure unless the guy confesses, but I have to say, I truly doubt half the stuff in this book.
I only got a third of the way through before deciding that I didn’t want to read about this guy any longer. He was depressing, he wasn’t a very nice human being, and I didn’t see this getting any better any time soon. I didn’t expect him to be a Boy Scout (after all, it was about an assassin!) but some of the stuff he did as a kid was just outright horrid.
Perhaps an adventurous soul could read through to the end and find a kernel of goodness and worthiness in the guy, but I would say there’s better books out there to spend your time reading.
2.25 stars out of 5
Havs
I really don’t mind an honest critique of my book, but in this case I fail to see how somebody who admits that they only read one third of it (and yes, there is turn-around later in the story) and even that one third was only superficially read (I did not attempt to ‘kill’ my best friend and it was in grade school, not jr high or highschool. This incident was about much more than me being merely ‘upset’, etc). The critic talks about her Marine father who always ‘did the right thing.’ More often than not, doing the ‘right thing’ in the Marines involves killing the enemy at the orders of your country, which is all I ever did. She talks about the soldiers in movies who are ‘good guys.’ Movies often show a romanticized version of reality. Real war is hell, and real soldiers do what they have to to survive that hell. How can you question the reality of what I did on one hand and accept the totally naive belief in what a scriptwriter, who has never been in the trenches, does to elicit sympathy for his protagonist. I spoke at the U.S. Naval War Museum in Washington, DC, at the requset of the Department of the Navy, and am featured in an exhibit in the U.S. Museum of Patriotism, both of whom would know much better if what I did was real or not. They would most certainly not have invited me if I were a phony.
As I said, I do not mind honest criticism, but this review is far from honest, claiming to know what kind of person I am and what might have motivated me WITHOUT EVEN READING THE BOOK!
The Central Intelligence Agency is not in the habit of recruiting multi - lingual , sociopathic college sophomores for ANY position.
Hava,
The man is human. The risk of real openess.
Sectionhand,
I suggest that Roland would be more of the expert on this than you.
I recommend the book.
No way he talked with a spook recruiter for the first time under those circumstances, wherein the recruiter told him he would be killing people even before he accepted the job. That entire conversation read like some tired Hollywood script. Then he’s goes to both Istanbul and Kabul and almost randomly happens into the exact people he was attempting to meet, whose names(along with everything else he needed to know) he hadn’t seen in months? When he didn’t even know the language(tough to recognize pronunciations in pashtu or urdu if you’re not familiar)? And kills three men for the first time without getting a drop of blood on himself? And then, the kicker to me, was his reasoning of why he wouldn’t be suspected. How could he possibly have that insight into Afghan culture after a few days? Wasn’t he set up by a big german guy and a local to meet with this person? Was that not something of a dead giveaway?
Yes, Mr. Haas, this is the point in the book that I could no longer continue reading because I had to get online to see if you had been proven a fake. And who knows, maybe conversations were dramaticized and details that I would consider important were left out for sales purposed(editors and such), but I am highly suspicious of your autobiography. I will continue reading it, but even in your introduction I was suspicious by your disclaimer as to why you don’t have proof beyond passport stamps. That in itself made me wary, and my suspicions seem to grow with each flip of the page.
I’ll never know the truth of the matter, but I’m certain of a few things. If I am wrong, forgive me my doubts. Hell, if you’re telling the truth and people doubt you then it should come as no surprise and you shouldn’t mind.
On the other hand, if I am right, which I believe myself to be, then you are a complete turd and aren’t worthy of the time it took me to write this review.
And another thing - maybe times have changed, but you said on your first static line jump you had 35 seconds of free fall. It’s actually between 3 - 5 seconds, and I used old school chutes.
-Paratrooper, combat vet, Afghanistan