Women Of The Green Berets

 
Women Of The Green Berets, by Rand Michaels

No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

I have to admit, I never would have thought of combining Robin Moore’s The Green Berets with Jacqueline Susann’s Valley Of The Dolls, but obscure author Rand Michaels thought of that very thing. Or perhaps it was publisher Lancer Books who came up with the genre mash-up and slapped a blurb on the back cover of Women Of The Green Berets, who knows. The important thing is that this paperback original of 223 pages does a fairly good job of juggling hellish ‘Nam battle sequences with soapy melodrama – the only problem is, there’s zero in the way of the exploitative stuff you might expect, with the novel ultimately coming off as rather anemic on the trash front. 

The novel also doesn’t really live up to its title, as it is more so concerned with the Green Berets themselves, instead of their women. Also, I was surprised that the entire novel is set in Vietnam; I assumed there would be stateside material with those lonely and sex-starved Green Beret women playing the field. Rather, there’s only one wife in the book, her name Evelyn, and she’s come to Saigon to see her husband, 27 year-old Captain Mike Colby. Otherwise we have a native woman who is involved with Ken Hubbard, another guy on Captain Mike’s force, and also a hotstuff doctor named Nina Field, who is involved with yet another of Captain Mike’s men, Dave Lawlor. And yes, “Captain Mike;” author Rand Michaels for the most part refers to all characters by their first names. 

It's Eveyln who serves as the main female protagonist, and Michaels takes her through hell over the course of the book. The plotting has you expecting that soap opera stuff, and what’s funny is the author seems to be catering to it…only to go in an entirely different direction. Long story short, Evelyn comes to Saigon to see Mike, but due to the war and all they’re unable to meet. Evelyn nearly gets picked up by another white guy here in Saigon on business, but he ultimately turns her down because as it turns out he is married, too, and wants to be faithful. So Evelyn then is determined to have some extramarital sex. She goes into a bar to get picked up, only to get drugged by yet another American here on business, one who thinks he’s accidentally killed Evelyn with an overdose, and thus orchestrates leaving her body to be found. As I say, the plotting is all over the place in this one. 

It only gets more frenzied, as it turns out Evelyn did not die of an overdose, just passed out. A kindly native kid takes her back to his home so she can change into clean clothes (the “faked death” orchestration entailed putting Evelyn’s “corpse” in a crashed car)…and then the kid’s dad comes downstairs, pulls Evelyn back up to his room, and rapes her all night! Actually, this does have a bit of a dark Jacqueline Susann vibe to it. Shockingly, this is I think the only sex scene in the entire novel, though its of course up to debate whether a rape scene even counts as a sex scene. Personally I’d say it doesn’t, but I’m only noting here because this is it so far as the sleazy stuff goes…and all of it occurs entirely off-page! 

So yes, folks, this is one of those curiously “dirty” books that isn’t dirty at all. Rather, it is as mentioned the war stuff that takes more of a focus in the narrative. Captain Mike can’t meet with Evelyn when she comes to Saigon because he’s been tasked with starting up a new base out in the ‘Nam hinterlands, and must put together an A Team to helm the base. So he spends the majority of the novel in the field fighting Charlie. Rand Michaels certainly has an understanding of the nightmarish life of an American soldier in Vietnam, with Mike and team alternately bored out of their wits or vastly outnumbered by an entrenched enemy. Michaels also has no qualms with killing off major characters in these battle sequences. 

Michaels also has no qualms with dropping potentially-interesting subplots. Nina Field, the hotstuff doctor who works the base and handles the injured GIs, has an early subplot that I thought was the most interesting thing in Women Of The Green Berets. She’s kidnapped early on, by the thugs who work for a native who is clearly wealthy, and taken to a place where a VC bigwig demands that Nina do plastic surgery to his injured face. Nina does so – and Rand Michaels displays some plastic surgery knowledge here, again giving the book the vibe of a Susann et al potboiler – but she also permanently disfigures the guy’s face with a “V” and a “C” on each cheek, so that he will be unable to hide his true nature. Nina manages to escape, and tells the military authorities…but nothing else is done with this. I envisioned a plotline of a guy with “VC” on his face coming after Nina for revenge, but it never happened. 

Instead, there is a lot of stuff about Mike and his crew out in the Vietnam jungle trying to get a base started while fending off frequent VC attacks. There is a definite air of defeatism to the battles, so this certainly isn’t a gung-ho combat novel. And yet, there’s no real violence, either. Mike and crew will “shoot down” VC and occasionally we’ll read of someone “blown to bits” by mortar or bomb traps. So this isn’t The Black Eagles, is what I’m saying, and is more of a prefigure of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, with the author managing to convey the nightmarishly surreal atmosphere of combat in ‘Nam. 

In this regard there’s a lot of material about Captain Mike and team trying to fortify the base while winning the hearts and minds of the natives. “Pacification” is the concept Mike keeps drilling into his team. This is an especially hard lesson for Dave Lawlor, sort of the “Animal Mother” of the group, for those of who have read Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers…or seen the film version, Full Metal Jacket (which pales in comparison to the source material). Even here, though, Rand drops potentially-cool subplots. There’s a part early on where Mike and team get some R&R in Saigon, and Lawlor goes out with a sexy native babe he’s fairly certain is a VC honey trap. He goes along with her, pretending ignorance, laughing to himself how she’s so clearly leading him into a trap…and ready to kill her VC pals with his bare hands. 

And the reader keeps waiting to get back to this section – in true potboiler style, Rand Michaels tells Women Of The Green Berets in a sort of snapshot style, jumping from character to character – and the reader is disappointed. Ultimately we do not see any of it happen; when finally Lawlor returns to the narrative, it’s from the perspective of Nina Field, and she has to mend the beaten-up Lawlor who is carried into her operating room. Only through dialog does a bloody but grinning Lawlor inform us that he did indeed kill those VC scum with his bare hands. Strange decisions like this ultimately sink Women Of The Green Berets; it’s like the author cannot fully commit to either a soapy melodrama or a violent war yarn. 

On that note, Mike and wife Evelyn handle the brunt of the melodrama stuff. They spend the majority of the novel separated, until briefly reconnecting during another of Mike’s infrequent R&Rs, late in the book – and here again all the lovin’ is off-page. The soapy stuff is all from Evelyn’s perspective, as after the rape she’s decided she will divorce Mike, due to shame or somesuch, but after a week together with Mike she apparently changes her mind. But Rand throws another plot curveball and things pan out much differently than Evelyn suspected – and the author doesn’t even bother to give us a resolution to this subplot, as the last we see of Evelyn she’s flying back home to America. 

Meanwhile Women Of The Green Berets ends on a big battle scene – we’ve already had a long sequence detailing a Khe Sahn-like siege the base endured – with the Green Berets withstanding a big VC attack. We get more “Animal Mother” stuff with Dave Lawlor cruelly toying with his prey before killing them, and also more on the hell of war with VC “kids” being gunned down in the crossfire, even after the American soldiers have let them go. And here Women Of The Green Berets comes to a close, the titular “women” long forgotten about and ultimately inconsequential to the narrative. All of which leads me to conclude that it was in fact Lancer Books that slapped this “The Green Berets meets Valley Of The Dolls” tag on the back cover, because as it turns out that is not the novel Rand Michaels actually delivers.