As a young Lieutenant in Germany in 1987 reading Red Storm Rising really drove some things home. I've enjoyed his books, although the last one I read was The Dragon and the Bear. At which point I felt he was out of ideas and that he made things more technical as well as logistically and tactically impossible to cover for that shortfall.
Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games were good movies. The only ones that even remotely followed the plot of the books.
If you are going to read Harold Coyle's Team Yankee which is an excellent book and get the technical stuff pretty right (he did change some things simply because the M1 Abrams was very new, and some items on board and capabilities were classified at the time. But he does mostly get the fire commands correct.
He was an Armor Major with the 1st Armored Division in Ansbach when he wrote Team Yankee.
Do read General Sir John Hackett's The Third World War first. Coyle used his novel with it's broad overview to write a novel, using that scenario, about a small unit, the Company Team that's part of a Battalion Task Force, fighting WWIII.
Again these came out in 1986-1987. We were all walking around with a pretty high pucker factor after reading those books.
The Brotherhood of War series by WEB Griffin is fun read. Not sure how accurate the technical stuff is and most of the military stuff (battles, names, places, events) are mostly made up, some real events are altered, like the Song Tay raid (but not the part about some Captain, putting all the parts together and then going in and asking his boss when the raid was planned.) Apparently he's played fast and loose with how close and/or good his military connects are.
