摘要：Tom Siegriste's brief paperbound book purports to be the biography of a former sergeant major who served in Britain's Special Air Services (SAS) and was later recruited from his regular regiment to serve in a specialized unit known as the Military Reaction Force (MRF) operating in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. That unit is also named more accu-rately in scholarly sources as the Military Reconnaissance Force. The identity of Siegriste's protagonist, who used the pseudonym Jack Gillespie, remains unknown. According to Siegriste, Gillespie died while swimming in his pool in Spain, where he was living out his retirement in septuagenarian seclusion.Unfortunately, since this book contains no supporting documentation, no interviews with anyone who could support Gillespie's recollections, and is written in a fashion that indicates the author might have had a screenplay in mind, its veracity is naturally suspect and its usefulness by scholars is seriously undermined. Nonetheless, the existence of the MRF has been substantiated, as have at least some of the operations discussed in the book. If Gillespie's tale is true, however, Siegriste's ghostwriting effort has done him a great disservice by presenting the story in a fashion that raises suspicion about its truth. In short, it reads like a bad adventure novel. Moreover, the MRF was short-lived, supposedly due to recognition of its amateurish, heavy-handed tactics. Gillespie's tale seems to add credence to that notion
