Showing posts with label Black Eagles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Eagles. Show all posts

Thursday, January 29, 2015

The Black Eagles #14: Firestorm At Dong Nam


The Black Eagles #14: Firestorm At Dong Nam, by John Lansing
February, 1988  Zebra Books

After reading the first volume, which was courtesy Mark Roberts (and the only volume of the series he wrote), I didn’t really consider another installment of the Black Eagles series. But when I came across a pristine-condition copy of this 14th volume for half off the cover price, I couldn’t pass it up.

The copyright page acknowledges a Patrick E. Andrews, who supposedly was the author who wrote the majority of the series, which was edited by William Fieldhouse. I don’t know anything about Andrews, what or any other series he might have worked on, but so far as Firestorm At Dong Nam goes, he has a very breezy and readable style, which plunges you facefirst into the bloody hell of ‘Nam.

Don’t get me wrong, the novel’s no The Short-Timers. I mean, just look at the cover! As I mentioned in my review of the first volume, the Black Eagles series was graced with some of the greatest covers ever; each and every one of them could’ve been like the cover of a Megadeth or Metallica single. But beyond that, this book doesn’t delve into the “war is hell” angle mandatory of “real” Vietnam fiction; the novel’s as mired in realism as the average David Alexander book.

Like every other Zebra publication, Firestorm At Dong Nam is too long – 256 whopping pages. But boy it’s got some big ‘ol print, and Andrews’s style is so breezy that I read the book in record time. Little concern that I’d missed 12 volumes since readng Roberts’s initial installment; while this one makes the occasional reference to previous missions, there’s really no heavy continuity. But even if you’re still worried you missed something, Andrews helpfully shoehorns aout 20 pages of background into the first quarter of the book, an entire chapter which, believe it or not, synopsizes every previous volume of the series!

Anyway, there have been some heavy changes to the series regulars, with apparently lots of redshirts dying in the interim. That appears to have been a schtick of this series, killing off “regulars” at regular intervals, but my friends, these characters are such ciphers that you don’t even realize they’re alive. Honestly, eight of the seventeen Black Eagles die in the events of Firestorm At Nong Dam, and only maybe one or two of those deaths even register with you. And of course, each of them are dudes who just showed up in the previous volume or such.

But the series regulars are still here – Lt. Colonel Robert Falconi, strong-jawed leader of the squad, and Malpractice, the medic. Andrea Thuy is also still afoot, though much less psychotic than she was in Roberts’s hands. In fact Andrea has been removed from the squad; in an underexplained development we learn that she was removed from active duty by the squad’s CIA rep, Chuck Fagin, due to her “love affair” with Falconi. Andrea’s still around, but now she works as Fagin’s admin assistant…and rushes off to screw Falconi whenever he’s off duty.

To clarify though, Andrews unlike Roberts doesn’t provide a single damn sex scene. He’s more in the Fieldhouse realm of men’s adventure writing, more so into the guns and action side of things, and less so about the lurid or sleaze element. Anyway, Archie Dobbs is also still around – apparently the jokester of the squad, and busted down to private for going AWOL in a previous volume. Oh, and Malpractice has married a Vietnamese girl named Xinh, whom he insists upon calling “Jean” in a total disregard for cultural sensitivities.

Anyway, the plot of this 14th volume concerns Lt. Colonel Gregori Kraschenko, leader of the newly-organized Red Berets, the “cream of the Iron Curtain’s elite forces.” Kraschenko, a monster of a man, has whittled 100 recruits down to just 30 men due to rigorous training; the novel opens with the further whittling down to 17 total, including the Lt. Colonel. Sewing a patch emblazoned with a red bear onto their jungle camo, the Red Berets head to ‘Nam to take on the Black Eagles.

Kraschenko apparently was the KGB liason with the NVA forces in previous volumes, and thus is familiar with Falconi and team, but Andrews doesn’t make it clear if the dude actually appeared in those previous volumes. We do get the clarification that he and Falconi have never met, and even Falconi has never heard of Kraschenko. But at any rate, the KGB commando has a burnin’ yearnin’ to kill Falconi, and thus through his intelligence contacts issues a challenge.

This is where you know you’re reading pulp – CIA goon Fagin informs Falconi that the Red Berets have challenged the Black Eagles to a battle to the death in a neutral zone. No backup, no heavy weaponry, just whatever they can carry in on their backs. And if the Black Eagles refuse, the US will be badmouthed in intelligence circles! It all sounds ridiculous of course, but Brigadier General Taggart, who has the final say in what the Black Eagles do or don’t do, demands that they accept the challenge.

Falconi makes it clear that it’s a volunteer mission, but of course the rest of the squad is all for it. Andrea Thuy fights back tears as the men all leave to go fight their secret little battle, and you wish she’d go along, as she was by far the most memorable character in the first volume. But as mentioned Andrews is in the Fieldhouse/Gold Eagle realm, and this is a man’s world; women can’t take part in it. We do though get the occasional page-filler sequence where Andrews cuts back to Andrea and “Jean” as they worry over their men out in the field, as well as Archie’s white trash nurse of a girlfriend.

Another thing to mention about Firestorm At Dong Nam is that there isn’t much action, until past the halfway point. There are no opening firefights or anything; it’s all just plot development, incidental dialog, and previous-volume catchup. The sparks don’t fly until the two squads parachute into the neutral zone in which they’ll wage their war. But even here Andrews fails to give us the OTT blitz we’d want, by throwing a group of Vietnamese refuges into the mix; soon enough, Falconi’s team is saddled with protecting them.

By prior arrangement this zone was supposed to be free of any natives, yet the refugees of course are unaware of such pacts; they’re just trying to escape the battleground that has become of their previous village. The Red Berets make short work of them, blowing away all of the men and going for the women. While scouting the jungle Archie Dobbs and a squad come across the fleeing women, and after a quick firefight with the Soviets they head back to the Black Eagles camp.

Here Falconi remains for the duration, playing mother hen to the natives. He sends out small teams to take on the Red Berets, which leads to several action scenes which are written like military fiction. It’s not that they’re bad, just that they lack emotional content, to quote Bruce Lee. It’s all sort of rendered in summary, relaying the tactics of the various “fire teams” as they shoot at each other in the jungle. And as mentioned while plenty of characters die, even the deaths are quickly rendered, which further undercuts the emotional impact.

The “biggest” team death would probably be Doc Robicheaux, another squad medic, and who apparently joined up a few volumes ago. This death appears to affect the team the most. (Speaking of which, Chen and Park, two characters I seem to recall from the first volume, were killed off a long time ago.) As for the Red Berets, the only character we spend much time with, other than the leader, is a cossack named Ali Khail, whom Archie Dobbs is determined to kill in vengeance.

All of the action is saved for the second half of the novel, and it goes on and on, with periodic cutovers to the three gals back home. It appears Andrews has worked a soap opera aesthetic into his storyline, in particular with Archie and his white trash girlfriend, but so far as this volume goes, nothing much happens on that front. It’s more about Falconi trying to get the refugees to safety while the Red Berets chase after them. And for that matter, the Soviets basically win for the first half of the battle, until Rocky style the Eagles come back and win the day through superior strategy.

Andrews also stays true to the military fiction style with aiming for “realism” for the most part, with no big “action moments” or anything. The Eagles basically just kneel in the foliage and blow away whatever Red Berets they can with their M-16s. Luckily Kraschenko’s send-off is played out a little, with the Red Beret leader being the last survivor of his squad, pleading for his life, and then trying to outfox Falconi, only to suffer for it as expected.

The novel ends with the Eagles flying back into camp and the three gals shedding tears that their men, at least, have survived. Falconi doubtlessly went about refilling the empty slots, but he didn’t have to go all out; the next volume was to be the last. If I see it someday I’ll grab it, but it’s not high on my list. But if you ever see a copy of The Black Eagles for half off the cover price at a used bookstore, you’d really have nothing to lose by picking it up.

Monday, May 27, 2013

The Black Eagles #1: Hanoi Hellground


The Black Eagles #1: Hanoi Hellground, by John Lansing
September, 1983  Zebra Books

I used to always see copies of this long-running series on the racks of the local WaldenBooks store when I was a kid, but it looks like these days the Black Eagles series is relatively forgotten. I had a few volumes back then but never read them; the series was set during the Vietnam War, and I much preferred the “modern” men’s adventure series. However the covers were great and basically designed to capture a young boy’s attention: awesome paintings of headband-wearing skulls with weapons crossed behind them.

I’d read that someone named Patrick E. Andrews mostly served under the house name “John Lansing,” but Mike Madonna recently told me that this first volume was actually written by Mark Roberts. Well, I instantly had to read it. I hoped for another blast of Soldier For Hire-style patriotism and commie-bashing, and for the most part that’s exactly what I got. However the impact was dilluted over the 330+ pages of small print – I really have no idea why Zebra Books insisted on making their series novels so damn long.

The Black Eagles is the name of a CIA-backed squad of special operatives formed during some unknown part of the Vietnam War (I had a hard time figuring out when Hanoi Hellground took place). They are formed around Major Robert Falconi (don’t you love those convenient last names for protagonists?) and are made up of Americans from each branch of the US military as well as soldiers from South Vietnam and even Korea. First though a little more information on the series, courtesy Stephen Mertz:

That series was a Bill Fieldhouse operation. I don’t recall if Bill actually wrote any of the books solo but he did develop the series, and then farmed out those titles to his buddies. Lansing, by the way: my favorite of Bill’s work is a series of novellas that appeared in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine from 1979-1982, about a US Army CID officer in Europe named Major Lansing. There’s 10-12 stories in that series and they’re all worth tracking down. MSMM was a digest but in reality was the last of the pulps, with a “Mike Shayne, private eye” story in every issue. It’s a place where a handful of us then new guys (me, Fieldhouse, Lansdale, Reasoner, etc) were first published regularly.

Knowing this helped explain the acknowledgements page, where author “John Lansing” thanks WL Fieldhouse (“a gifted creative artist”), Michael Seidman (“a terrific editor”)…and Mark Roberts (“scribbler extraordinaire”)! This might be the very definition of post-modernism, an author thanking his own psuedonym. Anyway I believe this was the only volume of the series Roberts wrote, and it’s a strange thing because throughout it tries so hard to be what it’s not: namely a big and bloated piece of “war fiction,” complete with unecessary and digressive backgrounds on each and every one of the many, many characters.

This first volume lays the groundwork for the series. Falconi is called away from his already-successful strike force to helm another one, this one a multinational squad that will report to the CIA and handle black ops affairs. The first target is sort of like the Nazi pleasure castle that was the target of The Dirty Dozen -- a pagoda deep in ‘Nam that is run by the depraved General Song, a pleasure palace where all of the lurid needs of the NVA elite can be met in private. The focus though is Song’s recently-acquired Russian descrambler, which allows him to intercept Russian and American coded broadcasts or something like that. This detail was a bit vague, but anyway it was a MacGuffin so who cares.

Roberts really fills some pages with background on the many characters who are assigned to the Black Eagles. The only memorable one is Andrea Thuy, a pretty young Vietnamese lady who hates the VC and lives to kill them. Thuy is basically insane but this is only hinted at by Roberts; she was raped as a teen and her family slaughtered, and now she finds joy in murdering the commies. She even gets off on using her looks to ensnare them, happily relating a story to Falconi of how she once got a high-ranking VC on a date and then took him back to his place and, instead of giving him the offered blowjob, instead emasculated him, put a dagger in his heart, and then stuffed the severed organ in his mouth! All of this related, by the way, on Falconi’s and Andrea’s first date!

Falconi and Andrea you see take an instant shine to one another, and Roberts delivers one of his gut-busting sex scenes between the two. Nothing as hilarious as in Soldier For Hire #8, but still pretty great. In fact there are a few graphic sex scenes in Hanoi Hellground, like an endless scene midway through where General Song enthusiastically screws a young VC-lovin’ gal in his pagoda. (The girl is later blown away by Andrea when the Black Eagles storm the pagoda, which I actually found a little off-putting, given that she was just some innocent kid who had nothing to do with anything…plus she was just standing there nude and confused when Andrea wasted her; another sign of Andrea’s insanity, perhaps).

Anyway once a lot of jump-training goes down the team finally undertakes the mission. HALO-jumping into the jungles of Vietnam they slowly work their way to Song’s pagoda. Even here during the mission Roberts still intersperses background info on the characters, which really makes for a slow read. The assault on Song’s pagoda is well staged (despite the aforementioned bimbo-killing), and again much like The Dirty Dozen, with the Black Eagles mowing down undressed VC and NVA who are in the midst of all sorts of shenanigans. Song meanwhile manages to escape.

The only thing is, the pagoda-assault takes place just a little over halfway through the book, and there’s still a long way to go until the end. The rest of Hanoi Hellground is anticlimax of the worst sort, comprised of the Black Eagles trying to track down Song and also escape Vietnam. It just goes on and on, finally culminating in a good action sequence as the Eagles attack an NVA base, taking on superior numbers with their advanced training. But it’s too little too late, and besides which Roberts just ends the novel like he hit his (unwieldy) word count and said to hell with it – Falconi and squad just barely getting on some US ‘copters and taking off to safety.

So it’s muddled and digressive, but on the whole Hanoi Hellground still offers quite a bit of Mark Roberts’s patented goofiness. Such as…

Pointlessly-detailed gore as Black Eagle medic Malpractice blows away a VC he was just trying to save:

He saw the movement via the corner of his eye and ducked away from the Viet Cong’s knife thrust. The blade missed him by more than an inch. Malpractice drew his issue .45 Colt auto while the VC tried a backhand slash.

Muzzle blast singed off the Viet Cong’s eyebrows and crisped the skin around the entry wound. Hot gasses, added to hydrostatic shock, bulged the would-be murderer’s eyes until one popped free of the socket to dangle on his powder-flecked cheek. His head seemed to explode and bits and pieces of the ungrateful Cong splattered on Malpractice’s hands, arms, and face.

“Shit. Now I gotta clean up,” the medic complained.

Dialog that would make Stan Lee cringe, followed by more gore, as a VC tries to get Andrea Thuy to help the Cong effort:

“…Throw down your arms and join us in the struggle.”

“Not likely, son of a snake,” Andrea returned coldly.

“You are a betrayer of the masses! A camp-following whore! Daughter of a diseased sewer rat!” he screamed on, adding more insults.

“I am an orphan whose parents where killed by the Viet Minh. Whose refuge was destroyed by the Pathet Lao, who also raped me. All in the name of liberation. You are a traitor and the son of a traitor. The excrement of a leper smells sweeter than your foul, lying breath. You are going to die in the name of liberation, but you will be no martyr. No one will know your name.”

Slowly, deliberately, Andrea shot him in the groin. The man squealed like a wounded pig, dropped his rifle and clawed at his bullet-ravaged genitals. Massive shock blocked out the nerve passages and Captain Muc sat down abruptly, stunned and immobile. Again Andrea took aim and shot him in the stomach. Then she turned the selector switch to full auto and emptied the magazine into his face.

Headless, the ambitious Muc became truly anonymous.