Springblade #8: Betrayal

Springblade #8: Betrayal, by Greg Walker

August, 1991  Jove Books

I keep forgetting about the Springblade series…and then when I read one of the books, I remember why I keep forgetting it. Seriously though, this is military fiction more so than men’s adventure, and the escapism one expects from the latter genre is not to be found. It’s all military jargon, acronyms, and characters who talk about their time in the service. 

This one’s even more military-themed than the others, as the entire novel takes place during the Vietnam War. A more accurate title for this volume would’ve been Flashback, as that’s all we get for the majority of the 188 pages…series protagonist Bo Thornton flashing back to 1965 and all the shit he got into when he was in the SOG outfit in ‘Nam. 

What’s unfortunate is that the opening of Betrayal promises something else. Two DC politicians plot against the Springblade team and want to get them killed off; one of them holds a personal grudge, because back in #2: Machete his “balls were smashed in” by team member Jason Silver when Springblade was faking a hostage attempt for reasons I cannot recall. 

Well, these two guys have a plan up their sleeves to get Springblade, and it would appear that this is only so far as the copyeditor read the book…because that’s the story that’s sort of promised on the back cover, only it’s not the story we readers actually get. Instead, as mentioned, the entire damn thing is a flashback to Vietnam. 

Presumably occurring in the previous volume, Bo Thornton has finally married Lisa, aka the Smurfette of Springblade, the one who used to sit at home in the earliest books but has now been retconned into “the computer girl” on actual missions. Now she’s become Mrs. Thornton, and Betrayal opens the morning after their wedding, with the entire team hanging out at the Thorntons’ beachside home, which is where the wedding took place. 

Nothing says “men’s adventure novel” like telling us your main protagonist just got married, but Springblade is only packaged as men’s adventure. More than ever the focus this time is on the military life. While everyone else is asleep, Bo and Lisa sit on the beach and Bo lights a cigar and proceeds to tell Lisa, his new wife, all about his days in ‘Nam, down to the last Cong-blasting detail, and Lisa sits there avidly listening! But I guess Bo is smart to do stuff like this in the early days of a marriage…I could just imagine Springblade #25, in which Lisa tells Bo she’s sick to goddamn death of hearing about Vietnam, and when the hell is he going to fix that garage door?? 

We head back to 1965 and stay there for the duration. Betrayal tells the story of how young Bo Thornton become involved with SOG, the Studies and Observations Group, going deep in-country in ‘Nam and getting in various commando fights with the VC and NVA. His teammates are not ones who would eventually feature in the Springblade team, and there are also a few Montagnards who fight alongside him. Rather than telling a cohesive tale, the novel is more about the various things Bo had to do in SOG, like collecting dog tags at crash sites, and etc. There is also an extended bit in which they rescue some POWs, and curiously this is where the titular “betrayal” occurs, as there’s a turncoat soldier at the VC compound where the POWs are being held, so Bo and pals get double bang for their buck: freeing prisoners of war and killing off a traitor. 

The only enjoyment I got from Betrayal was that, apropos of nothing, it brought to the surface a memory I’d long forgotten, so I guess in a way I should be grateful. Back in college I was friends with this demented guy named Tim, a big football player type who I always thought looked slightly like Henry Rollins – this was back when the video for the Rollins song “Liar” would play on MTV, and we’d joke that it looked almost exactly like Tim at times. 

Well anyway, Tim was slightly “batshit crazy,” as one might say, and he’d go through various phases – like he’d go all-in, whole hog crazy over some new pursuit or activity, usually as a way to impress some girl (there were precious few girls at our college – as one very astute young woman once asked me, years later as she looked through my college yearbook and noted the lack of girls in the photos: “What did you guys do, jerk off all the time?”). 

For example, just a few of Tim’s phases were: “solving” the JFK assassination (which entailed Tim wearing a suit and tie every day, carrying around a briefcase that had nothing in it, and watching the Zapruder film over and over in slow-motion on the Oliver Stone JFK VHS); being a cowboy (which entailed wearing a cowboy hat, chaps, and learning to ride horses – we had an equestrian program in our college, and yes, one of the girls he was interested in for this particular phase was in that program); and also there was a brief phase where he wanted to play hockey, which entailed him wearing his hockey gear all the time, even at lunch and dinner. 

But my favorite of all Tim’s phases was the “mission” phase, where Tim would don black clothes, blacken his face, and go run around at night, like he was a commando in Vietnam. As I recall, the “mission” phase came soon after the “JFK” phase, so I guess it was a logical progression. Our college was in West Virginia, but it was early on the “multicultural” front, so there were literally students from all over the world, in particular from Japan. Well anyway, one night Tim insisted that I go out on a mission with him, and this is the memory Betrayal brought back for me. 

As it turns out, I also remembered that I’d taken a photo on this particular night! It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time it wasn’t very common to constantly take photos…I mean you needed a camera and you needed film. But for whatever reason, the night Tim insisted I go on a mission – which of course entailed dressing up all in black – I took a photo. And here it is, straight from the Glorious Trash Archives: that’s Tim with the blackened face, kneeling, and that’s me standing beside him: 

To the best of my knowledge, this photo was taken in late winter or early spring of 1995. Thirty-one years ago, as hard as it is to believe. I was a junior in college, and I would’ve been twenty years old at the time. That was my dorm room, and note the blacklight Grateful Dead poster, with the fun fact that I am not and have never been a Grateful Dead fan!! Also note the Japanese girl calendar on the wall…now that I think of it, I might still have both of those somewhere, the poster and the calendar. 

But as you can see, Tim went all-in when he was on a phase: note the blackened face and the thousand-yard stare. So this night we went out and our college was right in the woods, right in the mountains of West Virginia, and it was slightly cold and very foggy – very cinematic. Tim’s “missions” would have him sneaking around the dark woods and pretending to be a comando; I went along that night as an observer, because I realized even then it wasn’t too common to be around someone so batshit crazy, so why not enjoy the experience? 

Anyway, here is what Betrayal made me remember, and it’s a wonder I almost forgot it, because previously I’d always thought it was one of the more funny experiences in my life. There was a steep hill with a wooden bridge that connected two of the dorms, and as we were running around in the cold, misty night, Tim caught sight of two Japanese students coming toward us on the bridge – I remember we could just see their silhouettes in the moonlight, as it was pitch black out there, and the two Japanese couldn’t see us. 

Tim turned to me and whispered a certain slur you’ll often hear in Vietnam War movies, referring to the race of the poor unsuspecting Japanese students who were approaching us, and then he pushed me down so that we were crouching in the shrubs beneath the bridge as they walked over us. Folks it was just like a movie, I kid you not, because the two Japanese students even stopped on the middle of the bridge and each of them lit a cigarette, all while talking to each other in Japanese, totally oblivious of the fact that they were being watched by two American guys in black and facepaint – like something out of every single Vietnam War movie ever made! All the two of them needed was an AK-47 slung across their backs. 

Now I do recall at this point I was trying not to lose it, hiding below them in the dark, but one of the rules of a mission was to stay silent. But to make it even funnier, Tim leaned to me and whispered, “Give me the knife.” The two Japanese students obliviously went on their way, and then I recall Tim said something like, “That was close,” and then we were off on the mission…and I can’t recall much else, only that I got bored and decided to go back to my room and get drunk, which is pretty much how every night ended. And still does today, in fact! (Just kidding…sort of.) 

As I was writing this post, I realized the impact Tim had on my life: it was because of him that I moved to Dallas, back in 1996. He moved out here after college to get in the Dallas Police Department, but for reasons I cannot recall he did not get in (they probably found out about his JFK file), and he eventually left Texas.  But when he first moved here he convinced me to come down to Texas, and I stayed here after he moved on. I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I had not come down here and eventually met my wife and had a son...and honestly I can’t imagine a world without at least one of those two people, so batshit crazy or not, I owe Tim a debt of gratitude.

Anyway, if not for Betrayal I might have forever lost this memory of that crazy Vietnam mission in West Virginia, which once upon a time was one that would make me chuckle. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the incident, but man for a long time I’d laugh, because I kid you not it was exactly like stepping into a Vietnam War movie. But otherwise this novel has nothing to do with the Springblade series; it starts off being about one thing, and then veers off into an interminable flashback…something I’ve attempted to replicate in my own review, as you might have noticed.

Springblade #6: Battle Zone

Springblade #6: Battle Zone, by Greg Walker 

December, 1990 Charter Books 

I’m missing a couple installments of Springblade, and it appears there’ve been some changes to the status quo; whereas the previous books featured the three-man team of Bo Thornton, David Lee, and Jason Silver, with gruff old former master sergeant Frank Hartung serving as the organizer, “Springblade” is now comprised of a couple extra members…not to mention a girl(!!). This would be Thornton’s girlfriend, Linda, who previously only appeared in the opening scenes on Thornton’s Oregon ranch; now we’re informed she can shoot, drive, fight, and etc, “just as good” as any of the male members of Springblade! 

Regardless, the series has if nothing else become even more in the vein of the “military fiction” thrillers that were, at this point in time, taking over the shelves of bookstores – shelves which once featured more-escapist men’s adventure fiction. I mean Springblade might as well just have a generic photo cover of some SEAL commando or somesuch; Battle Zone is stuffed to the gills with military acronyms, military strategy, insights into military life, and even military red tape – unlike the men’s adventure of the decades before, this one is on slow-boil for the duration, building up to the “realisitc” rescue of a DEA commando deep in the Burma jungle. Whereas say Phoenix Force would be blasting apart native soldiers by chapter three, the members of Springblade plot and plan for the majority of the novel’s runtime, not even getting onto the field until page 126. And the book’s not even 200 pages long. 

As mentioned there’s a lot of background on the military and Special Forces and whatnot. The book is dedicated to Colonel Nick Rowe, a real-life Green Beret who was a POW in ‘Nam, escaped, and wrote a best-selling book about his experiences. He went on to found a brutal Special Forces training program called SERE, which factors strongly into Battle Zone. Rowe was assassinated by Communists, in the Philipines, shortly before Battle Zone was published, thus his sacrifice is often mentioned. Walker clearly looked up to the man, as one of the “new” Springblade members, presumably introduced in the previous volume, has the same last name: Alan Rowe, “the team’s only Chinese-American.” Curiously none of the characters mention that he has the same last name as the recently-departed colonel. And also Rowe doesn’t do much, but we learn he enjoys painting in his California home, as this is what he’s doing when he gets the call to go along on this latest Springblade mission. Personally I imagined him doing fluffy clouds and trees a la Bob Ross. 

The other new member is Peter Chuikov, a former Spetsnaz commando who is just now getting Federal clearance to become part of Springblade, which we’ll recall is Thornton’s special commando team of active and inactive soldiers who do special jobs for the US government. He also doesn’t make much of an impression on the reader. In fact it’s Linda who takes up the brunt of the “new member” focus; this is the first mission Thornton decides to bring her on, concerned that the guys in the team will be ruffled a bit that a woman’s coming along. But Linda we are assured can hold her own…not that we actually see her do so. Her role will be “computer girl,” and like the female character in MIA Hunter she essentially stays off the field for the duration, running point on info and etc. The most action she sees is when she flies in a chopper with Hartung and watches him blow enemy troops away with a high-caliber machine gun – but shockingly enough, Walker keeps the vast majority of the novel’s climactic action off-page. 

This is especially shocking given how much padding there is in Battle Zone. Seriously, almost the entire novel is focused on the plight of the DEA agent, Thornton’s past with him, Thornton putting together the team, then finally getting them all over to Burma…where the hellfire full-auto action slaughter is, as mentioned, pretty much kept off-page…relayed via off-hand dialog in the final pages. Really the DEA agent is the star of the show: Mike Bannion, a former Special Forces comrade of Thornton’s who now heads up a SLAM commando team for the DEA which has gone through some hardcore SERE training. (You see what I mean with the acronyms.) The first twenty pages of the book, for some reason entirely presented in ugly italics, concerns his plight in Burma: his chopper crashes and he manages to escape with a bunch of guns and knives, soldiers of the Shan United Army chasing after him. 

Meanwhile Thornton stews on his old buddy’s capture, having learned about it a few days later. He’s chomping at the bit to get the clearance from DC to head into the green hell of Burma and get Bannion out…while also checking out Linda’s nice rack. We’re often reminded how hot Thornton finds his girlfriend, checking her out while she waltzes around half-nude in their place in Oregon (they’re clearly not married yet!). But as ever any hanky-panky is firmly off-page in this series…I mean it’s the early ‘90s now, and all that sleaze is just oh so ‘70s. I mean we wanna read about guns and knives and military acronyms, right?! Well anyway, Thornton eats a bunch of MREs (meals ready to eat) and gabs a lot on the phone with his DC contacts and checks out Linda in her revealing clothes, and meanwhile Bannion survives like a true badass in the jungle, knifing Shan soldiers in the dead of night and doing pretty damn well for himself for a dude’s whose stranded in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the enemy. 

After a meeting with “Reagan’s heir” (aka Bush – whom we’re later told is “a good man”), Thornton’s government handler Billings finally gives Springblade a go. At this point Thornton officially assembles the team. This is like 90 pages into the book, folks. About the only memorable part here, I thought, was how Jason Silver plays T. Rex’s “Bang A Gong” on his “recently-purchased CD player.” (Dude, keep your vinyl!) But boy is it an exercize in patience. Meanwhile Bannion takes up the brunt of the action scenes, becoming more animalistic as he flits across the jungle, slitting Shan throats in the dead of night. Oh, and suffering from bouts of diarrhea, Walker even thoughtfully detailing the act for us. Bannion’s plight is clearly intended as a callback to Colonel Rowe’s real-life tribulation; Bannion even often thinks of Rowe, not to mention that SERE training which prepared him for just the sort of situation he now finds himself in. 

So Thornton and team work with ground forces in Burma to mobilize various military vehicles to venture into the jungle and extract Bannion. And folks get this – the part where Thornton’s scout team actually finds Bannion’s comatose form happens off-page! Instead more focus is placed on his Thunderball-esque extraction, which sees a special flight suit prepared for Bannion; it pulls him aloft on a balloon, which is collected by a Talon plane or somesuch. Actually this part goes on for a bit, relayed from multiple perspectives. And get this, too – Thornton and team’s battle with the converging Shan forces is entirely off-page! Mind-numbingly enough, the chapter ends here, picks up the next day or something in a military hospital, and we learn that Thornton and some others picked up some injuries during the massive battle which ensued. I mean we waited the entire novel for the action to go down, and it all happened off page! 

At least Battle Zone ends on a memorable note, though again we must endure a lot of narrative padding to get there. It seems to me that the gimmick of this series is that Thornton uses the titular weapon each volume – ie, the “Russian ballistic knife” which launches its blade at a push of a button on the hilt. So the main Shan soldier guy, who has his own inordinate share of the narrative, has come to Rangoon to get revenge on Thornton, posing as a bellboy in Thornton’s hotel. It leads to a knife fight, of course, with that Russian springblade again saving Thornton’s ass. 

But while Thornton’s ass might be saved, the novel’s is not – Battle Zone was a little too padded, too listless, and the fact that it kept all the climactic action off-page was unforgiveable. In other words, I’m not sorry that I’m missing a few volumes of the series.

Springblade #3: Stiletto

Springblade #3: Stiletto, by Greg Walker
April, 1990  Charter Books

The “new breed of commando” series Springblade continues with another installment that comes off a little more like military fiction than men’s adventure pulp. Nothing in Stiletto matches the outrageous elements of the previous volume, and indeed for the most part it’s a long-simmer suspense yarn that saves its fireworks for the final quarter. However when those fireworks occur Greg Walker once again delivers some glorious gore, with noses bitten off, privates ripped asunder, and even anal impalements via pliers – so far as I know the latter being a first for the genre.

There’s no pickup from the previous book, and in fact much is made this time around about how main protagonist Bo Thornton is a “civilian” and no longer a military man. Meanwhile he’s already undertaken two covert military operations in the previous books. But then, Walker seems to have run out of steam, so far as his trio of protagonists goes, with the titular Springblade commando team playing second fiddle to a bunch of one-off Nicaraguan soldiers and terrorists. Bo himself doesn’t even appear until around thirty pages in, with the opening quarter devoted to a character named Angel Barahone, a Nicaraguan native who grew up in the US and currently serves in the Special Forces alongside series regular David Lee – the only member of the Springblade commando group who is still active in the military.

Angel, despite taking part in missions that wipe out the Sandanistan rebels, is actually a Commie at heart, and turns out to be a traitor in uniform; after an opening sequence in which he and David Lee take out some Sandanistas, Angel goes AWOL and delivers himself to the front door of a Sandanistan office in Managua, where he claims to be a believer in the cause. More importantly, he has intel which the Sandanistas can use to crush the Contras and the Americans. Later we’ll learn that Angel was not only trained by Bo Thornton, but is also “like a son” to him, not that Walker does much to exploit this relationship. Indeed, when Bo finds out Angel’s a traitor he has a few moments of disbelief, then basically vows to kill him.

We meet Bo as he’s practicing his knife-fighting technique with Jason Silver, the third member of Springblade, however this will be it for Silver this time around. The two get in a knockdown, dragout mock knife fight along the beach, complete with them rolling around in the sand and stuff – it isn’t the least homoerotic or anything – and after this Bo gets the call about Angel. This is also the only time series regular Calvin Bailey appears, ie the DEA agent who serves as Springblade’s handler. Bailey calls Bo with the bad news and Bo heads for Honduras, where he’s briefed on the situation by local army boss Major Gaston. Even here Walker manages to work in the series fixation on bladed weaponry, with Gaston showing off a butterfly knife he picked up in ‘Nam.

Gaston and Bo figure that the damaging intel Angel’s taken to the Sandanistas must have to do with the recently-built US base in Choluteca, right on the border of Nicaragua. Angel was part of the team that built this base, thus he would know the best means of destroying it. Here Walker injects a bit of commentary on the situation in Central America; Gaston claims that the situation is shit, with the US-backed Contras suddenly showing their sadistic impulses, butchering people right and left, yet the politicians would still rather back them than the Commie Sandanistas. Bo meanwhile is more pissed over the fact that a Green Beret has turned traitor; he’s never heard of such a thing happening before. 

Bo’s plan is to go in with just one other guy to head off the squad Angel will be leading on his attack. He requests David Lee, mainly for the reason that Lee’s familiar with the area and also has stake in the game, given that he served alongside Angel. Armed with a Stoner machine gun, an M-16, various sidearms, knives, and explosives, the two are dropped into Nicaragua and begin the arduous trek through the jungle. I suspect Walker must’ve been familiar with such operations as he brings a lot of authenticity to the narrative, down to Bo and Lee arguing over which of their prepackaged ready-to-eat meals (aka MREs) are the worst. However there’s still been no action for our main characters thus far, unlike last volume where Walker would toss in random but insane action scenes – most notably when Bo and Bailey were attacked by transvestite bikers with intentions of sodomy. (Now that's the story Jussie Smollett should’ve gone with!!)

In a Manning Lee Stokes yarn, our heroes would bump into some native gals who would serve as their guides and soon get all nice and cozy on the jungle floor with them. But we’re in the ‘90s now, and all that pulp stuff is frowned upon; the focus is on “realism,” so there go the sexy jungle babes with their pidgin English and “full breasts.” In fact the only woman in the novel is Bo’s girlfriend, recurring from previous books; they have an off-page sex scene shorty after Bo’s introduction into the text, after which she disappears from the narrative…with Bo often wondering if he’s in love with the girl. Oh wait there’s also a buxom waitress David Lee hits on before the operation in Nicaragua, but we don’t get any more detail on that.

However as mentioned the feeling of realism is strong and Walker does a great job of putting us in that green hell alongside Bo and Lee. There’s some good foreshadowing – not to mention Walker again working in the grander theme of knives in relation to the series concept – when Bo and Lee are surprised by some helicopters which are circling the area, and in their quick escape Bo manages to lose the trusty combat knife he’s carried since Vietnam. He and Lee get in a long discussion about it, Lee concerned that Angel’s men will find the knife and Angel will realize Bo is here, but Bo disbelieving this will happen. However the veteran reader will know that, given the amount of dialog which has been devoted to the topic, this is indeed what will happen. And it is.

But there’s no big “you were like a son to me!” climax here. Bo and Lee set up traps in the jungle and wipe out several of Angel’s Sandanistas before they can reach the American base, and at one point in the melee Lee is shot, his rucksack abosrbing most of the damage, but losing most of his ammo in the process. This leads to an awesome sequence where Bo and Lee split up, the former to head off Angel’s mortar team before they can hit the base, the latter to act as a one-man army and wipe out the rest of Angel’s squad. The stuff with Lee is the best and the highlight of the novel. He proves his badassery in a grand way, using Bo’s Stoner, various weapons, and even his own teeth as he takes on the attacking squad, biting off one guy’s nose in a brutal brawl.

This is just Walker getting warmed up, though. After this insane fight, Lee briefly passes out – only to wake up as he’s getting pissed on. Turns out there was one more Sandanistan in that party. But while the Nicaraguan is busy shaking himself off, Lee grabs hold of the only weapon in his reach: a pair of pliers. First he rips off some of the dude’s dick, then he flips the pliers around and jams the barbed handles up the guy’s ass! For the coup de grace he blows the guy’s brains out with a Magnum. Given this, Bo’s confronation with Angel is spectacularly anticlimactic; they get in a brutal martial arts fight with Angel ultimately getting the upper hand, training a gun on Bo. However the series title Springblade not only refers to the name of Bo’s commando team but also to the Russian-made springblade knife he carries in combat – a knife he hasn’t used yet this volume. Walker of course saves this for this climactic battle.

Walker at times approaches David Alexander levels; there’s a great bit where Bo’s Stoner is referred to as a “death guitar.” And in addition to the copious gore we’ll occasionaly get combat description like, “Lee blew the point man’s shit away.” But it’s in the gory details that Walker really shines, with Lee at one point cutting a guy in half, from crotch to head, with the Stoner. The knife-fighting stuff isn’t as prevalent as last time, though when it happens it too delivers heaping helpings of bloody violence. There’s also a memorable moment where Bo offers Lee some speed, to give them a boost of energy. 

So in the end, Springblade is kind of an anomaly. It veers a bit too close to “realistic” military fiction for me, but when the shit goes down it happens in a gory manner that’s more akin to what we expect from men’s adventure. At any rate I’m missing the next couple volumes, but will return to the series anon.

Springblade #2: Machete

Springblade #2: Machete, by Greg Walker
January, 1990  Charter Books

Jeez, I pretty much plumb forgot Springblade, that 9-volume “Special Forces” series from the early ‘90s that features a protagonist a bit too fond of bladed weaponry. It’s been so long since I read the first volume that I had to go back and re-read my (typically long-winded) review to refresh myself on the gist of the series before reading this one. Not that I needed to, as it turned out; as typical for the genre there’s scant reference to the previous book.

Again, this series shows how the men’s adventure genre slowly metamorphasized into military fiction. The focus is more on how an off-the-books black ops outfit like Springblade would work in the real world, with more of a slow-burn approach than the constant action more typical of the men’s adventure genre. Like the previous volume, Machete hardly has any action at all until the very final pages. But the series lasted for a respectable 9 volumes, so clearly it resonated with many readers.

Author Greg Walker again turns in a novel that revels in the grungy world of an army lifer; hero Bo Thornton and his gang are as crude and rude as can be, “blowing farts,” endearingly referring to one another as “cum bubbles,” and engaging in banter that would melt modern snowflakes. As with the previous volume, there’s some dialog here that wouldn’t be publishable in today’s world, and if all that weren’t enough, there’s a wildly outrageous part where Thornton and his pal, DEA agent Calvin Bailey, are nearly mugged (and raped!) by transvestite gay bikers.

It’s some unspecified time after the previous volume, and when we meet up with Thornton again he’s on his land in Oregon, hacking down the marijuana plants someone’s planted there. After this it’s on to some off-page sex with his girlfriend, Linda, returning from the previous volume. Like with most other entries in the genre at this time, Springblade is not overly concerned with sex – or women in general – and this will be it for any hanky-panky on Thornton’s part. The focus is actually more on the fiery banter these two exchange; Linda is a hardcore liberal, having been raised by left-leaning parents (“God help me if Mom ever finds out you were a Green Beret”), and Thornton often pokes fun at her liberal sentiments.

Thornton is contacted by Bailey again, who brings our hero and his outfit into a mission that is pretty convoluted. But it goes mostly like this: down in the fictional banana republic of La Libertad, despotic ruler Aguillar has sicced his loyal and sadistic henchman Melendez on the freedom-loving revolutionaries. The novel opens as Melendez butchers a bunch of them, though leading revolutionary Ricardo Montalvo is able to escape the massacre along with his family. Montalvo is popular among the people and, if a free election were to be held, he would easily beat Aguillar. Montalvo makes his way to America, into the safety net of the State Dept, but his story of Aguillar’s butchery isn’t fully believed.

Speaking of the State Dept, boy is it taken through the wringer in this book. Walker clearly held some strong opinions about them. Throughout the book the Dept is mocked as being run by a bunch of bumbling fools; in particular there’s Richard Lippman, mockingly referred to by all and sundry as “Dick Lips.” Walker takes a special relish in abusing Lippman; the convoluted setup at one point has Thornton and team staging the “kidnapping” of Montalvo and his family, and Thornton’s boys beat up Lippman a bit too thoroughly. As if that weren’t enough, Walker has to constantly remind us of the agony the man endures.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Bailey, again representing the DEA, hires Thornton and his “Springblade” outfit for the job of feinging Montalvo’s kidnapping (due to a bunch of convoluted reasons) and then protecting him from any forces Aguillar might send up to America to exterminate him. Eventually Thornton will learn there is more to this, much to his chagrin: the DEA, despite Bailey’s own dislike of the idea, also wants Thornton to use Montalvo as bait. Anyway Thornton puts together his team, which is the same as the last time – total cipher Jason Silver, who is referred to as Thornton’s “alter ego,” and mother hen Frank Hartung, Korean War vet who actually sees some action this time. But David Lee is off on official military duty, so Bailey brings in a hired gun replacement named Mike Bannion.

Like last time it’s mostly page-filling until the fireworks finale, but boy do Thornton and Bailey get in a lot of fights throughout, all of them as arbitrary as can be. The action moves to San Francisco, which Walker presents as a liberal hellhole with an almost surreal proportion of crime – the comments on SanFran’s gay community in particular would raise the hackles of the sensitive readers of today. It becomes an intentional recurring joke that each time these two go out for dinner, they encounter some sort of bloodshed, from an arbitrary drive-by machine gunning to those aforementioned tranny bikers. Thornton as ever carries his knife, and Bailey, a sword fanatic (who drops lines from the Koran), has a cane that conceals a long blade.

The part with the gay bikers is the highlight of the book, and a damn mini-masterpiece of sleazy pulp. Led by Turk, with colorfully-named members like Teddy-San (who dresses like a “geisha girl”), Charley O, and Oboe, the bikers plan to rape, kill, and then mug our two heroes, who of course respond to the threat thusly:

“Fuck me to tears,” grunted Bailey. “Look at ‘em, Bo. They’re all queers!” 

“Big, mean queers, too,” whispered Thornton.

Of course, our two battle-hardened heroes make short but grisly work of the gang, slicing and dicing with their bladed weaponry in full graphic splendor:

Ignoring Teddy-San, who was spewing vomit over Oboe’s head, Bailey stepped directly behind the injured man, raising the waki high above his head, then brought the whistling blade down with all the power he could muster. With a sound like a coconut being split by a hammer, the hard cranial bone parted, offering the off-white softness of the brain to his eager cutting edge. Calvin, his muscles swollen with adrenalin, continued the stroke, pulling the blade back toward himself as it roared through the sponge-like mass of brain cells, effortlessly parting the tough cartilege of the neck and throat, and continuing into the dead man’s upper body.

Compared to this graphic insanity, the finale can only pale in comparison. Sure enough, Melendez – who by the way is the wielder of the titular “machete” – sneaks into the US with a group of enforcers, their goal the murder of Montalvo and family. Springblade of course prevents this, in what is unfortunately a rather anticlimactic fight – though Melendez at least buys it in fitting fashion, his heart impaled by Thornton’s springblade. So I guess the series’s titular weapon trumps the volume’s titular weapon. (That sentence made sense in my head, at least.)

But the book for some reason isn’t over yet, so Aguillar sends another dude after Montalvo, and this guy’s like the replacement for Melendez. His name is Azo and it turns out he once received combat training from none other than Bo Thornton. This final battle is a bit more spectacular, taking place in the San Francisco zoo, and features a nice blockbuster movie-esque send-off for one of the villains, as he falls into the zoo’s alligator pit. Meanwhile temporary replacement Mike Bannion has received minor injuries, and it’s doubtful if he will return in a future volume, who knows.

Walker injects a little in-jokery with the tidbit that Jason Silver enjoys reading men’s adventure novels, in particular a series entitled “Night Raider.” We see him finish the latest installment, grumbling to himself how unreal the events depicted in the book are – and then getting into a firefight just as outrageous as those in the series. However Walker drops the ball on this one, or at least didn’t even realize he had a ball in play, as at the end of the book when Thornton tosses the villian into the alligator pit, Walker describes Thornton as “the powerful night stalker.” Seems to me like his intention was actually to write “the powerful night raider,” thus serving up the payoff to the “Night Raider” setup earlier in the book.

Overall Machete is okay, mostly saved by all the insane, arbitrary stuff. One almost wishes that Walker had forgotten about delivering a “realistic” setup of our heroes guarding Montalvo and family, and just turned in more surreal stuff along the lines of the arbitrary fights on the streets of San Francisco. Personally I could’ve read an entire book of Springblade slicing and dicing tranny gay bikers who were trying to mug and bugger them.

Springblade #1

Springblade #1, by Greg Walker
October, 1989  Charter Books

This was the start of a 9-volume series detailing the black ops missions of Bo Thornton, a Vietnam badass who now heads a small team of “techno-commandos” who are hired out to the US government to do the dirty work. Series creator and author Greg Walker is a real person (ie, it’s not a house name); he himself has a special forces background, and has also published a few books on knife combat.

Springblade #1 is a strong start to the series, with a good focus on its main character. However as is customary for latter-day men’s adventure series, this first volume is much too concerned with scene-setting; in the ‘70s the first volume of a series would start right in, maybe doling out the origin in backstory (if at all). But by the time the genre was dying in the early ‘90s the focus was more on playing everything out. Hence, it takes a long time to get to the blood and gore in this book; in fact, there’s no major action until the final thirty pages.

Another indication of the publication date is that much of Springblade #1 veers a little too close to military fiction, at least for my taste. Another thing I preferred about ‘70s men’s adventure was that, for the most part, the protagonists were lone wolves. Teams were all the rage in series fiction in the ‘80s, and as the decade progressed the teams became more and more similar to your average Delta squad or SEAL team.

Anyway, our hero Bo Thornton is in his early 40s, unmarried, and now makes his living running a dive shop in California with Frank Hartung, an old war buddy. Thornton, like his creator, has a preference for bladed weapons and misses the rush of combat; after ‘Nam he did some special ops work for various agencies, and now an old DEA contact, a former SEAL named Bailey, calls Thornton while he’s on vacation in Oregon to see if he’d be interested in flying down to DC to consider taking on a special project.

A drug kingpin named Tony Dancer, no doubt modeled on Pablo Escobar but more fashionable, is plotting a new cocaine empire with which to take over the entire coke pipeline into the US. For reasons of bizarre coincidence, Dancer’s headquarters for this operation will be in Oregon! He plans to mask the place as a resort, and the intel the Feds have acquired shows that Dancer will host a party among his lieutenants on Christmas Eve, officially unveiling the place for business.

The DEA, through Bailey, asks Thornton to put together a special ops team to both destroy the coke lab and kill all of the occupants. This last order comes direct from the president of the US, who wants Tony Dancer dead. Thornton, sick of the social mire the modern world has fallen into, accepts the mission with relish. He makes his resort cabin in Oregon his new base of operations and calls in Hartung to act again as Seargent Major.

Thornton puts together his team from his old experience as well as a list of candidates the DEA provides. From his ‘Nam days he gets Jason Silver, a LRRP, and through the DEA he gets David Lee, a Delta commando and the only member of the team (dubbed “Springblade”) that’s currently on active duty. These three men, with Hartung acting as a sort of mother hen, will infiltrate Dancer’s complex on Christmas Eve and kill everyone inside.

Walker has a bit in common with Dan Schmidt in that he has too many characters and too many subplots in too short a book. While Silver and Lee barely get much narrative time (and indeed come off as ciphers), Walker does focus on incidental characters. In particular, Monk and his wooly gang of biker outlaws, who have been screwed over by Dancer’s unifying of the coke trade and now want revenge. They too plan an attack on Dancer’s place on Christmas eve, but it all just sort of fizzles out, and the biker subplot could be removed with no effect to the narrative.

Another thing is that Springblade #1 doesn’t have any action until the very last pages. Walker keeps it moving with a taut narrative style and good characterization, but he does insert the most goofy “I need to put an action scene here” moment I’ve yet encountered in one of these series novels. Early in the novel Thornton meets Linda, the attractive receptionist at his resort, and he takes her on a date. After dropping her off Thornton picks up a hitchhiker, just for the hell of it.

Yep, turns out the hitchhiker’s a murderer, and he attempts to waste Thornton. Little does he know that Thornton carries around a ballistic knife in his car. There follows a brief sequence where Thornton easily dispatches his would-be killer, pulls the body out of his car and stashes it off of the night road, covers his tracks, drives home…and cracks open a beer! The incident is never mentioned again, let alone reflected upon by a beer-sipping Thornton.

Otherwise Walker delivers good action scenes, with lots of detail on the particular weapons the Springblade team takes with them. (The “techno-commando” stuff mostly comes down to their nightvision goggles and comlink equipment.) The finale is entertaining, with the team infiltrating the drug compound in the dead of night, silently taking out guards. Walker packs on the violence here, though not to extreme levels. He seems to save his gorier descriptions for the knife battles, like when Thornton is jumped by a SEAL who happens to be employed by Dancer, and the two go at it with their blades.

Walker shares another similarity with Dan Schmidt in that his finales are pretty anticlimatic, which just as in Schmidt’s work is a bit surprising given how good the build-up is. He spends a lot of time showcasing Thornton’s battle with the aforementioned SEAL, a character who is basically a nonentity so far as the plot goes, but brushes off Dancer’s fate in an off-screen fashion. Unlike Schmidt though, there’s more characterization here, with Thornton given to a lot of introspection and self-doubt, plus his camaraderie with Hartung leads to a lot of military-style banter.

I also need to mention that Springblade #1 is unabashedly pre-PC. Every black, hispanic, or other minority is a drug dealer, gangster, or murderer; there’s a goofy scene where Thornton and Bailey, driving through DC, point their fingers gun-style at a black dude they pass on the street…and Walker is sure to inform us that the black dude is indeed a gun-carrying drug dealer! (Though obviously Thornton and Bailey couldn’t know that…)

A brief inspection of future volumes of Springblade proves that this will only increase…I opened up to a wacky scene in the next installment where Thornton takes on a group of gay transvestite muggers – who intend to rape him – hacking them up in super-gory detail! I tell you, the bizarre joys of the men’s adventure genre will never be matched in any other literature…