Just over a year ago, I reviewed the movie Six Days. I was excited to find Go! Go! Go! – The Definitive Inside Story of the Iranian Embassy Siege at our annual St John Ambulance book sale in Taumarunui. This was about six months ago when I was still living in at the old Roy Turners in National Park Village.

I didn’t start it until we had moved into our latest forever home in Owhango. To be honest, having seen how Rusty Firmin’s input was translated into the quite excellent Six Days, I was savouring Go! Go! Go! for a time when I could sit back and really enjoy it…you know THE definitive inside story…

I need to learn to brace myself for disappointment.

Go! Go! Go! really disappointed me. It reads more like the type of account published before the smoke clears to make the most of a current news story. The only names on the cover are Rusty Firmin who led one of the assault teams on the day and Will Pearson who is cited on the back cover as the author of Tornado Down. I enjoyed Tornado Down but on checking, the authors are listed, as per my recollection, as Flight Lieutenants John Nicol and John Peters (the crew of the ill-fated Tornado ZD791): no mention of any Will Pearson.

Similarly, the name Gillian Stern does not appear on either cover but is listed with Rusty Firmin and Will Pearson under the acknowledgements. A quick Google finds an English ghost writer named Gillian Stern with this extract from the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2019:

So no problem per se with ghost writers. I think they are a great way for someone to tell their story when perhaps they lack the skills to impart a great story to a general audience. I just have a feeling that, in this case, the ghost writers outnumber the subject matter expert. I was eagerly awaiting the inside story from an SAS team leaders perspective but instead it felt like a Sunday News serial story.

Go! Go! Go! does cover the siege and its background but it always feels quite false and superficial. It feels like it has been written by people who don’t really have a good handle on the subject matter and just just regurgitating what they have been told, without any real value add. I could go on but I’d rather just say that anyone interested in this story should watch Six Days and read the relevant section from a recent version of Tony Geraghty’s excellent Who Dares Wins: The Story of the SAS.