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.