Soldier For Hire #7: Pathet Vengeance

Soldier For Hire #7: Pathet Vengeance, by Mark K. Roberts
No month stated, 1983  Zebra Books

The penultimate volume of Soldier For Hire has blowhard hero JC Stonewall heading into Laos to square up an account from his days in ‘Nam. If you’ve ever wondered what it would’ve been like if Mark Roberts had written an installment of MIA Hunter, look no further. This is especially ironic given that MIA Hunter creator Stephen Mertz himself appears in Pathet Vengeance.

While he still kills a bunch of “commie pigs” and engages in the usual illicit sex, Stonewall is a bit subdued this time around. He rarely displays the lovably stupid jingoism of previous installments, and for the most part operates like a regular men’s adventure protagonist. Which is to say there’s very little of the assholic blowhardy typical of the dude. And while this volume sees Stonewall settling a score with an old enemy, a commie one at that, there’s only sporadic bursts of the usual “a good commie’s a dead commie” vitriol.

Anyway, Stonewall’s origin story – as apparently created by the series’s original author – has it that “the one woman he ever loved,” a Eurasian babe named Angilique, was raped and gutted by the commies in Vietnam. This was a personal attack overseen by the Pathet Lao. Stonewall we learn now refuses to take any jobs in Southeast Asia, thus he’s shocked when his handler Trojan insists that he, Stonewall, consider rescuing a few of Trojan’s captive operatives in Laos – not to mention a few ‘Nam POWs who are also kept in the same prison. Stonewall is pressed to consider it because the man who runs the compound, a sadist named Colonel Boupha, was the leader of the Pathet Lao squad that raped and murdered poor Angelique.

Meanwhile Stonewall’s busy getting laid. Roberts again delivers his over-the-top sex scenes that leave nothing to the imagination, with Stonewall initially scoring with his “liberal” girlfriend, Karol. (“Am I a better lay than my sister Karen?” she asks him!) Post-lay Stonewall as expected brushes the girl off and focuses on Trojan’s offered mission. The POW camp is at the Temple of the Moon Goddess in Laos, and when Stonewall learns that Boupha is in charge of the place, he can’t say no. He contacts series semi-regulars Hank Polanski and Tommy Mitsu to go along with him.

Roberts pads out the page count with arbitrary cutovers to the POW camp, where we learn that one of the ‘Nam prisoners is named Rob Randisi, Roberts again displaying his penchant for in-jokery. But the prison camp sequences get to be a chore, with lots of arguments between Boupha and his Russian overseer, Boris Zmeya, who tangled with Stonewall back in #5: Libyan Warlord and hopes to settle his own score with our hero. There’s also lots of lurid torture-porn stuff as we read about the sadistic camp torturer going to work on the captured Trojan operatives; the dude even brings along his two prepubescent sons to watch, one of whom gets off on the torture!

Speaking of getting off, Stonewall hooks up on the Japan Airlines flight to Laos; he hits on a sexy stew named “Mico” (should be “Miko,” btw) whom we’re informed is not only super hot but has bigger boobs than the average Japanese gal. From having already read #8: Jakarta Coup I knew this was going to be headed for some sleazy stuff, as Stonewall was still fondly recalling his encounter with Mico in that later installment. After a night on the town in Laos Mico takes Stonewall back to her hotel room: “Slowly, delightfully, she played her love melody on his satiny instrument.” It only proceeds to get more outrageous, with bonkers likes like, “His lips fluttered over her lush jugs.” Then there’s Mico’s penchant for kinky sex: “With each upthrust, Mico inserted a handkerchief knot into his anus.” Which ultimately leads to, “What started as a powerful ejaculation turned into a gusher.” No wonder Stonewall was still thinking about it next volume!

The usual method of sex scenes in men’s adventure novels is that the girl disappears promptly after screwing the protagonist, so we can get back to the manly stuff. Roberts takes this to ludicrious extremes, with Mico’s head getting blown off mere seconds after engaging Stonewall in another bout. This is courtesy a group of Laotians who break into the room, gunning for Stonewall; when our hero dodges the blast of a would-be killer, the bullet goes right through Mico’s opened mouth and blows out the back of her head. Stonewall spends a hot second mourning the poor girl, then figures out how to get rid of her corpse without compromising his cover.

All of which serves to piss off Trojan’s man in Laos, none other than “Steve Mertz.” Humorously, Mertz spends the majority of his “screen time” bitching at Stonewall, particularly for even getting an innocent young woman involved in the first place. But no worries, as there’s another sexy babe on the horizon: Arlene Farrel, a gorgeous blonde with Stonewall-mandatory big breastesses who is another of Trojan’s operatives, but who was able to escape while her comrades were captured and thrown in Boupha’s compound. Mertz introduces the two, and also tells Stonewall that he will have to listen to Arlene’s demands that she go along with the team to the prison camp.

More in-jokery ensues when Steve Mertz ridicules Tommy Mitsu for carrying around a sword, referring to him as “the Six-Gun Samurai.” “Hey, you read them too?” Responds Tommy. “Hell of a series.” Six-Gun Samurai was another series Roberts wrote at the time, under the house name Patrick Lee, William Fieldhouse being another writer for it. At any rate our heroes head off into the jungle for Boupha’s camp, and Roberts doesn’t waste any time getting to more of the good stuff: Arlene has the hots for Green Berets, and makes her interest in Stonewall quickly known.

“You’re a beautiful broad, Arlene,” Stonewall the ladies man says as Arlene slips into his tent that night. The initial boffing is, surprisingly, a fade to black affair, but later on Roberts provides the juicy details during another bout, Arlene becoming a frequent visitor to Stonewall’s tent (“My God, Stonewall, you really know how to use that economy size member you’ve been equipped with.”). For once Arlene is a female character who sticks around, even learning to kill in the novel’s periodic action sequences as the group is attacked by varios communist Laotian forces.

Speaking of action, Roberts finally lets loose with Stonewall’s customary anti-Red sentiments when they are attacked: “Bodies. Everywhere the ripped and splattered bodies of dead commies. God, how he loved it!” But as usual with the series, the action comes off more like military fiction than men’s adventure, with BRDM scout armor giving Stonewall and crew the most trouble. Which is to say, there isn’t much of the usual lone wolf stuff common for the genre; it’s more about Stonewall leading various “fire teams” of mercenaries and Laotian guerrillas against enemy armor and artillery. In fact there isn’t even any action until midway through, first with a big battle when the group first enters Laotian red territory, and later when they arrive at Boupha’s camp.

The liberation of the camp prisoners very much has the spirit of the later MIA Hunter series, even with the freed American POWs taking up arms and blowing away their former captors. Meanwhile Stonewall settles his account with Boupha, first engaging him in a digressive kung-fu fight and then chopping off his left arm and leaving him to bleed to death. Apparently Stonewall didn’t just put a bullet between his eyes because Roberts intended to bring Boupha back some day; in fact as I recall, in Jakarta Coup Stonewall figured he’d once again track him down. Unfortunately the series ended with the eighth volume, so Stonewall’s revenge went unsated.

Even Boris Zmeya escapes, and in fact assists Boupha, who would’ve died otherwise. The raid on the prison camp is over by page 164…and we still have like 50 pages to go. As with another Roberts novel of the era, Hanoi Hellground, the narrative free-falls in its final quarter, given over to an overlong chase scene through the jungle as Stonewall and the freed prisoners try to escape while the commie forces pursue them. Along the way Roberts delivers even more in-jokery, courtesy Stonewall: “I read some books by a guy named Joseph Rosenberger. He calls [communists] pig farmers, like they were peasants, up to their knees in pig shit. It fits, but it’s too simplistic.” I’m unsure if this is really what Rosenberger’s Death Merchant had in mind with “pig farmers,” though.

The climactic ambush sees Boris Zmeya possibly being killed by Stonewall; it’s left vague, with the horribly-injured Russian stumbling off into the jungle. Meanwhile he’s succeeded in hurting Tommy Mitsu to the point that the Japanese sword-wielder is unable to assist Stonewall in the next volume. Speaking of which, after another bed-tussling with Arlene Stonewall receives a new mission briefing from Trojan, who asks Stonewall if he’d be interested in heading over to nearby Indonesia for another job.

And here ends Pathet Vengeance, which also turns out to be my own personal end for the series, given that Jakarta Coup was the first one I read. Overall this one was on the level of the others, but it missed some of the OTT right-wing stuff, with the caveat that the sex stuff was actually more outrageous than the series norm – save, that is, for Jakarta Coup, which was the most OTT in all departments, and thus was by far my favorite of the series.

Soldier For Hire #6: Commando Squad

Soldier For Hire #6: Commando Squad, by Mark K. Roberts
No month stated, 1982  Zebra Books

Mark Roberts's second go on the Soldier For Hire series is nearly as outrageous as the others I’ve read, once again featuring our “hero” JC Stonewall acting like a regular horse’s ass, but this particular installment goes to some dark extremes that put the novel on a scuzzy level. More damningly, Commando Squad is kind of boring. And it’s certainly padded, Roberts trying to accommodate Zebra’s overlong word count requirements.

But make no mistake, Stonewall’s still a bastard this time around, denouncing any and all who would even dare to question him and salivating over the prospect of killing more “commies.” His victims this time around are the members of a rebel faction in El Salvador, lead by Juan Escobar, El Proletario; these people have made an unwitting but huge mistake by abducting pretty young American tourist Janice Kurin, who happens to be the neice of Trojan, Stonewall’s handler.

El Proletario is the expected walking cliché, who has carved out his little kingdom in the El Salvador jungles with little resistance from the government. Spouting socialist invective while brutalizing and ruling the natives without mercy, Escobar displays zero leadership qualities, but regardless is a darling of the liberal US media (more of whom below). Even worse though is Hector Garcia, Escobar’s second in command. Garcia is the character who takes this novel into a darker realm, as he is a rapist and murderer of little girls. And Roberts doesn’t just tell us this – he shows it as well.

The titular “commando squad” is a group of soldiers Stonewall puts together after Trojan offers him the job – and Roberts gifts us with one of his awesomely purple-prosed sex scenes right before this, as Stonewall is seduced while he’s in a hot tub by his girlfriend’s “kid sister,” Karen. However this is just the first of Stonewall’s conquests in the novel; as the narrative progresses he’ll score with a few more ladies, and while it’s all appropriately goofy none of it is as preposterous as the stewardess screwing of the previous volume.

But anyway Stonewall’s 7-man team is made up of Theo Levi, the black commando of previous volumes, as well as Ed Cotter, who showed up in the unforgettle #8: Jakarta Coup. The other five men are a variety of redshirts, from an American Indian named Julio Whitebear to a Japanese dude who likes to go into combat with a samurai sword, sort of like something out of a William Fieldhouse novel – and Roberts by the way indulges in his penchant for in-jokes, namedropping Fieldhouse himself in the narrative as a guy Stonewall met in Fort Bragg who had a theory that America’s socialists should be rounded up and dropped off in Siberia!

After some training in Mexico the squad splits up and travels down to El Salvador in twos; we’re informed that due to the friggin’ liberal media, the locals are very aware of soldier-type Americans coming into their country for mercenary purposes. Stonewall’s mission is to keep the extraction of Janice Kurin nice and quiet, and then to kill El Proletario and his people, so he’s not to draw any attention to himself, even though he will have the secretive help of the El Salvador government. It’s here in El Salvador that Stonewall “reconnects” with Margaret Collenbrander, a gorgeous reporter who apparently first met Stonewall in one of the earlier, pre-Roberts books in the series.

Roberts graces us with yet another hot and heavy sex scene that leaves little to the imagination, but never reaches the stupefying “fill me with that enormous phallus before I lose my cookies” heights of Jakarta Coup. In fact the same could be said of the entirety of Commando Squad, which comes off as rushed and padded throughout, Roberts trying to hit all of his marks and get in his page count so he can move on to the next project. There’s sort of a listless feeling to this volume, and though it has all the stuff of the other Roberts Soldier For Hire offerings, it just comes off as forced.

Roberts does excel at a sort of Jack London feel when Stonewall and Theo reside for a few weeks in a village near El Proletario’s base. Here Stonewall fishes and hunts with the natives, and also of course scores with Soledad, a pretty young girl who per series tradition throws herself at him and practically demands they have sex. But Stonewall’s called away when Senator Ned Flannery (aka the Ted Kennedy analog who plagues Stonewall throught the series) shows up in El Salvador due to reports of the presence of “white American mercenaries” in the country. Stonewall leaves the village for a confrontation with the man.

This is actually Stonewall’s second battle with the liberals in Commando Squad; in an earlier, humorous scene he runs afoul of two “socialist” American actors who have come down here to spread news to the world how heroic the “freedom fighters” of El Salvador are. These two men are Bob Templeton and Brick Brewster, the latter a muscle-bound gay who friggin’ lisps when he gets upset, providing Roberts all sorts of room to lampoon gays in general. These two guys get in a bar fight with Stonewall, who beats the shit out of them…but what’s funny is, they’re so easily outclassed. I mean, Stonewall’s this battle-hardened warrior. These guys are just actors. And Brick Brewster keeps getting back up to fight him. And yet Stonewall (nor Roberts) never once acknowledges how courageous this is.

Anyway the Stonewall-Flannery match is pretty fun, mostly because it’s the first (only?) time the two meet. Posing as a UN rep(!), Stonewall attempts to convince Flannery that there are no American mercenaries in El Salvador. But soon enough Stonewall starts putting down Flannery and his idiotic liberal ideas. Here Roberts exposits on a grand scale, with Stonewall belittling Flannery as he rants and raves about current US politics. And like the two actors, Flannery actually holds his own, and indeed Stonewall comes off like the bigger ass (believe it or not). It’s funny, because throughout the series Flannery is presented as the villain. 

Flannery properly put in place (and one could argue stupidly put in place, as Stonewall’s blatherings do nothing more than make Flannery aware of who Stonewall is and vow to get vengeance upon him someday), Stonewall heads on back into the jungle, only to find that El Proletario’s men have attacked the village while he was gone. While Soledad was able to escape, blowing away people with a borrowed gun alongside Theo Levi, the villagers themselves suffered mightly, in particular a little girl who was taken by El Proletario’s depraved second in command, Hector Garcia.

As mentioned, Roberts pushes some buttons in Commando Squad. Hector Garcia is a murderous pedophile, and with each raid he always takes the opportunity to rape a little girl. Roberts actually shows this happen midway through the novel, as Garcia rapes a ten year-old girl in a shockingly explicit sequence that goes on for like two pages. Strangely enough, Roberts employs pretty much the same words, phrases, and style that he’d use for a regular sex scene. Needless to say, something like this could not be published in today’s market. But also, I felt it didn’t need to be here anyway, and came off as too much.

Anyway, Stonewall’s plan is to infiltrate El Proletario’s terrorist camp, he and his squad posing as commie American soldiers who want to help out the cause. And Stonewall suceeds! Able to meet with El Proletario through rebel contacts, Stonewall successfully presents himself as a disaffected American commando who has a squad of similarly-inclined Americans at his disposal. Here Roberts again gets to indulge in some commie-baiting, having Stonewall prove himself to a mock tribunal, spouting out how much he hates America and how great Communism is. Roberts even takes digs at various veteran-run organizations, claiming that they are commies themselves.

Oh, and kidnapped Janice Kurin is still here, though she’s gang-raped practically every day. In another button-pushing sequence early on Roberts has Janice raped after she runs her mouth at Proletario, and apparently this has become a daily treat for the rebels. Stonewall is even asked to join, but he merely lays overtop the girl and tells her he’s here to free her. Not that he hurries about it; his demands not being met, Proletario starts cutting off little pieces of Janice and mailing them home. Yet Stonewall keeps biding his time.
 
And indeed when the battle finally begins, it’s because Hector Garcia runs into Stonewall while he’s rigging explosives around the camp. This leads to a practically endless denoument (with even “commie” actors Rob Templeton and Brick Brewster showing up) in which Stonewall and squad blast the shit out of the rebels, run into the jungle, evade their pursuers, and try to make their way for safety. Along the way a few redshirts on Stonewall’s team buy it, of course, though Stonewall himself is unscathed, blowing people away with his Sidewinder submachine gun or hacking them up with his assegai blade. Strangely, El Proletario’s death is anticlimatic, and not even depicted; Stonewall calls in a friggin’ napalm strike, and that’s that!

The novel actually ends on one of Roberts’s sex scenes, with Stonewall, who we’re informed is sore from an all-night love session with Margaret, surprised next morning when Janice Kurin comes knocking on his hotel door. Now mind you, Janice has been gang-raped throughout the novel. However, despite flying all the way back to the US for an emotional reunion with her family, she’s snuck on another plane to come back down to El Salvador, so she can “pay” Stonewall for saving her!

But just as they’re about to have sex, Soledad storms in! Janice and Stonewall try to calm her down, and Stonewall proposes that they all sleep together – and the gals are all for it. Ironically, the exact same thing once happened to me! Okay, maybe not.

Soldier For Hire #5: Libyan Warlord

Soldier For Hire #5: Libyan Warlord, by Mark K. Roberts
No month stated, 1982  Zebra Books

This was the first of four volumes Mark Roberts wrote for the Soldier For Hire series, and it’s just as over the top and Team America-esque as the last one he wrote, #8: Jakarta Coup (which unfortunately was the last volume of the series – Mike Madonna told me that a Zebra editor once informed him that Soldier For Hire was canceled due to low sales, by the way). Libyan Warlord is just as unhinged as that later volume, featuring lots of gory action and goofy but explicit sex, mixed with frequent Right Wing sermons and random rants against commies and liberals.

Our “hero” is JC Stonewall, a white-haired ‘Nam vet who now works as a soldier for hire (he hates the word “mercenary,” by the way, referring to it as a “communist” word). I wonder how Stonewall fared in the hands of the first author who worked on this series, Robert Skimin, for in Roberts’s hands Stonewall is a complete bastard, a loudmouthed know-it-all dick who rants and raves and doesn’t listen to any opinion but his own. He is in every way an awesome spoof of the typical men’s adventure protagonist, but I don’t think Roberts intended him that way.

Also we learn that Stonewall is just an outright murderer. I knew from Jakarta Coup that something happened in Stonewall’s past to make him hate communists so much; here we learn that a squad of Pathet Lao soldiers killed a woman he loved (and was married to?) during the Vietnam war. She was hacked apart and mutilated in horrible ways before dying, and Stonewall gained vengeance by destroying an entire village of suspected Viet Cong supporters, killing “every man, woman, and child.”

This is shocking enough; even more shocking is how Roberts shuffles this under the carpet and instead plays it up that fortune was on Stonewall’s side in that he pulled this before the My Lai massacre – another ‘Nam atrocity that Roberts implies was justified, and was only played up as a “massacre” by the Liberal press – and thus was able to get away with it scott free. There’s a part in Libyan Warlord where Stonewall gets in one of many arguments with Left Wing reporter Melissa Gould, and he uses this butchery of his wife to explain his hatred of commies and liberals…and I always love how these rabidly Right Wing sentiments are always based off of fictional inciting incidents.

Anyway, we get a bit more detail on Stonewall’s operating parameters here. His contact is an older Texas millionaire patriot who goes by the handle “Trojan” and hooks Stonewall up with missions all over the world. The usual deal, those high-priority missions that the regular military can’t handle due to all of the goddamn liberal bureaucrats who get in the way. This time word’s come to Trojan that Qaddafi is currently putting together a nuclear plant somewhere in Libya along with a missile-launching service that could carry out strikes on the US. Helping Qaddafi are a few rogue US soldiers and CIA agents, one of them the infamous Marc Tolliver, an officer in Vietnam who came under fire for openly praising the VC and their methods.

Stonewall’s mission is to destroy the nuclear plant and kill Tolliver and his men. He decides to bring along only one man: Hank Polanski, apparently a muscle-bound type who comes off as a complete clone of Stonewall. I really couldn’t tell them apart, other than that Polanski only has about 10% of the narrative. Also, Polanski prefers to drink beer while Stonewall hammers scotch; indeed Stonewall comes off like quite the lush, always worried about when his Black Label is going to run out.

Much like John Eagle Expeditor #4, Stonewall holes up with some Tuaregs in the desert of Libya and trains them into a strike force. The military feel is not so prevalent here as in Jakarta Coup, parts of which came off like military fiction; the training isn’t given as much focus this time and Roberts instead doles out action scenes more expected of a men’s adventure novel, with Stonewall usually going up solo against Libyan forces while on recon missions or whatnot. However it seems that part of the schtick of this series is Stonewall training native forces in proper military conduct, so there is some of that here.

Stonewall’s weapon of choice this time is a Sidewinder submachine gun, which I couldn’t find much info about online. Roberts actually dedicates Libyan Warlord to the creator of this gun, and has Stonewall enthusing about it throughout the narrative. Roberts also displays his usual gift for in-jokery by mentioning that Stonewall has heard of the Sidewinder before, reading about it in “articles written by that guy Roberts,” ie Mark Roberts himself. (I wonder what magazine this was in??)

And this volume of the series wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t have frequent sex scenes. Stonewall scores with a whopping five ladies this time out, starting with his blonde beauty of a girlfriend (a lawyer who argues with Stonewall over his political views); a stewardess (who does him right there on the plane, drawing some curtains around his first class seat for privacy!); another beauty who happens to work in a consulate in Cairo and throws herself at Stonewall immediately after meeting him; Najeed, the “liberated” daughter of a Tuareg sheik who also throws herself at Stonewall; and finally the liberal reporter Melissa Gould, who garners the most narrative time, arguing long and often with Stonewall over his political views. It’s to Roberts’s credit that he doesn’t have these two go at it until the very end of the novel, even though you know it’s headed that way as soon as Melissa appears and Roberts mentioned that she’s not only, you guessed it, beautiful, but also that she has large breasts, another prerequisite for a guaranteed Stonewall shagging.

One thing I’ve found typical about veteran pulpsters like Roberts is that they have a steady command of their narrative, chugging along and doling out action, sex, topical detail about the environment and customs of whatever place they’re in, and etc, but when it comes to the climax they rush right on through it. Which is to say the finale comes off as too hurried, which is odd given the amount of page-filling stuff earlier in the book about various desert-crossing trips Stonewall takes (all of which feature action scenes, thankfully).

To wit, Roberts basically forgets about Tolliver and his band of turncoats until the very end, having Stonewall deal with them rather quickly. Strangely though, it isn’t until this time that Roberts decides to fill us in on who exactly these guys are, giving us pages-filling backstories that have no bearing on anything. So by the time Roberts gets to the long-simmering Stonewall/Melissa sex scene, he blows right through it in a sentence or two and then has Stonewall back in the US in the very next paragraph. He also just barely remembers to tie up a lingering question about someone who set up Stonewall at the beginning of the novel, but the resolution is pretty great, with Stonewall and Polanski hurling the poor bastard off of a rooftop.

The action scenes occur frequently and are filled with lots of gore, moreso than in Jakarta Coup. Stonewall kills hordes of Libyans with his new toy the Sidewinder, and also gets in a lot of close-quarter fights with an assegai tribal knife he picked up on an earlier adventure. He uses this thing to lop off several heads, and Roberts is sure to provide ample colorful detail about the ensuing carnage. Also worth mentioning is that Roberts is just as enjoyably detailed in the many sex scenes, leaving nothing to the imagination.

These Soldier For Hire books remind me a little of Norman Winski’s The Hitman series, with that same sort of ultra-heroic protagonist and overall goofy vibe. I prefer this series, though, just because Roberts is even more unhinged than Winski, delivering a nutcase “protagonist” who rants and raves against commies and liberals with such venom that he’d even put off Richard Camellion.

So I say again, if you are a fan of the movie Team America, you should check out this series, as it hits many of the same points…only it seems that the author of this one wasn’t being satirical. Which actually just makes it all the more entertaining!

Soldier For Hire #8: Jakarta Coup

Soldier For Hire #8: Jakarta Coup, by Mark K. Roberts
No month stated, 1983 Zebra Books

I learned about this series through Michael Newton's 1989 book How To Write Action-Adventure Novels. Newton ranted and raved about this particular installment of the series throughout that book, going on about the author's not-very-veiled political commentary, the "repulsive" female villain and her weird sexual quirks, and on and on, even mentioning a scene where blustering hero J.C. Stonewall (!) cursed at the sea for nearly drowning him, thus almost robbing him of the chance to "continue killing commies." (In point of fact, I've discovered this scene doesn't actually occur in Jakarta Coup; it's in the fifth volume of the series, Libyan Warlord.)

Anyway, Newton's comments had me raring to read this book, which by all accounts sounded like full-on parody. And the book really was everything I wanted it to be -- just an over the top explosion of Right Wing sermonizing and terrorist killing, with a lot of goofy and explicit sex thrown in. The book is more Team America than Team America, and reading it you'd never guess that this is the same Mark Roberts who wrote the even-numbered volumes of The Penetrator. The tone, style, and antics of the protagonist are wholly different than anything I've read from Roberts in that earlier series, so the question is, was he just hamstrung by Pinnacle Books, or did Zebra Books ask him to go over the top with Soldier For Hire?

The series was actually begun by a different author, Robert Skimin, who wrote the first four volumes. Mark Roberts took over the series with the fifth volume, writing it all the way through to this last installment. The "hero" of the series is the aforementioned J.C. Stonewall, white-haired Vietnam vet who basically lives to kill Communists. Seriously, the man has such a red-hot burning hatred for them that even Richard Camellion would be taken aback. Stonewall's wife or something was killed by them, and now every Communist Stonewall kills is seen as a retribution for her murder. But then, Stonewall is very liberal in his definition of what a Communist is -- terrorists, criminals, Democrats; they're all commies, and they all deserve to die.

Reading Newton's scathing (but curiosity-generating) comments about this book had me certain that it had to be a parody. Understand then my shock when Mike Madonna, owner of The Fabulous Mrs. Poopenplatz blog, told me that it was his understanding that Roberts did not intend the Soldier For Hire books as a parody! Mike knew Roberts pretty well and has shared with me a lot of great information about him and other action-series authors he has known over the years (including the interesting tidbit that Dan Schmidt, whom Mike also knew, was pals with Joseph Rosenberger!). Anyway, Mike has told me that, though Roberts had a sense of humor, he was quite serious in his political views, and was not using the Soldier For Hire books as a way to spoof the Right Wing mindset or anything else.

But reading Jakarta Coup, though...to quote Frank on Everybody Loves Raymond: "Jeez oh lou!" If you sat down and tried to come up with a list of things to spoof in an action novel, you still couldn't top this novel. Stonewall, our "hero," is a chauvinistic blowhard who hates everyone, picks up ladies and casts them aside, lives to kill commies and terrorists, and takes every opportunity to rant and rave against his arch-enemy Senator Ned Flannery, a far-left Democract who is in no way similar to Senator Ted Kennedy, at all.

Mike Madonna has also told me that Kennedy's people actually found about about the blatant Kennedy-bashing in the Roberts installments of this series, and I guess word made its way to Roberts, who was told to ease up, but he didn't -- though he doesn't appear in Jakarta Coup, Flannery's name is invoked by not only the Liberal politicians but even by the terrorists, both of whom admire the guy. Hell, the Liberals even openly side with the terrorists, complaining about "the savage" currently in the White House -- ie Ronald Reagan, whom the good-guy Right Wingers lovingly refer to as "Good ol' Ronnie!"

The plot is really just a framework for the Kennedy-bashing and the frequent sex scenes, which I will get to posthaste. Stonewall's m.o. is that he hires himself out to whoever needs him, and if he can use the job as a means to kill more commies, then so much the better. Stonewall is hired by the Indonesian government to train an anti-terrorist taskforce; a Communist-backed terrorist force called KAM is causing dissent in Jakarta, and the government needs help in dealing with them. Stonewall has a team, apparently, but this time he only brings along two of them: Theo, a black soldier (and boy, are we reminded every time he appears that Theo is black), and Ed Cotter, a nonentity who I think only had about four lines in the entire book.

A goodly portion of the novel is given over to Stonewall training the Indonesian task force, and it all reads like some WWII novel. Indeed, much of Jakarta Coup is similar to a war novel; even the action scenes come off in that regard, in particular the finale, which finds Stonewall and his men making a beachhead assault, complete with mortars and tanks. But the pulpy stuff makes it all more than worth it. Also worth noting is that Roberts doesn't play up too much on the gore. In fact I believe the Penetrator books of his I've read are actually a bit more gory. But then, none of them I've read have been as laugh-out-loud funny as Jakarta Coup.

Special mention must be made of the villains. Leading the KAM faction is Pomo, an Indonesian rebel with dreams of conquest but who takes the opportunity to run from every fight. Most enjoyably though we have Margot Anstruther, an 18 year-old blonde Australian beauty who was raised by left-wing parents who sent Margot to a radical terrorist camp in the Middle East when she was 13. While there, we learn in a brief background, Margot discovered sex and "practically raped" the few-hundred men and boys in her camp. Now she gets off on combat, becoming sexually aroused while fighting and killling. It was this character whom Newton found so "repulsive" in his How-To book, but, as you could no doubt guess, her scenes were my favorite in the book -- I consider warped and evil female villains to be the very essence of pulp fiction.

As for the sex scenes...again, above and beyond anything else I've read by Roberts. Stonewall is described as a veritable mountain of muscle, and apparently irresistible to the lady folk. While in Singapore in the opening of the novel, Stonewall manages to pick up "the only white woman" in the city, and Roberts writes a graphic scene between the two (quoted below). Then, just a few pages later, Stonewall, now in Jakarta, picks up another lady, this one a cute Indonesian model named Lisa who joins our hero for an even more explicit scene -- one complete with "pearls of heaven," which Lucy inserts into various of Stonewall's orificies...that is, after she's given the man an apparently 30-minute blowjob...!

Anyway, I'm just gonna start quoting stuff, because the book sells itself.

Not-very-veiled Ted Kennedy-bashing:

"At least he won't be running for President," Theo observed.

"Don't fucking count on it," Stonewall snapped. "He said the same thing last time, then campaigned like mad for it. It was the same old shit four years before that. He's just angling to get the loyal party hacks to beg him to take the nomination."

"The Flannerys do seem to think they are the rightful pretenders to the throne of North America," Ed allowed.

"Yeah. King Ned the First," Stonewall shot back. "King of the sewer rats, if you ask me."

Jaw-dropping sex scenes with equally jaw-dropping dialog:

Audry did something at the side of her surong and it fell away, revealing her ripe, alabaster body. She came to him in a rush, fingers flying to undo his belt and open his trousers. She let them drop and pressed her naked flesh against the bulge that distorted the front of his undershorts. Her blonde-thatched mound, glistening with moist readiness, throbbed against the pulsing organ separated from her center of passion by a thin weave of white cotton cloth.

"You are the stuff of my dreams, J.C. Hurry, fill me with that enormous phallus before I lose my cookies right here."

The depraved female villain, complete with incorrect ammunition detail (AK-47s actually fire 7.62mm "slugs"):

They entered a wall-less, roofed-over drying shed and sprinted to the other side. Margot raised her AK-47 and sent a squirt of 5.56mm slugs at the legs of a soldier who stood with his back to them.

He uttered a short, harsh cry of pain and fell to the ground. With an effort the man rolled over toward his enemy. Grinning wildly, Margot raised the muzzle of her Soviet-made weapon and fired again, trashing his genitals. A gasp of passion, that sounded more like a sob, escaped from Margot's lips and, with her left hand, she began to grope her crotch. Pomo shook his head and turned away.

Political commentary, courtesy our learned protagonist, with additional not-very-veiled Ted Kennedy bashing:

"Bullshit. If it weren't for fuzzy-brained, pseudo-intellectuals like you, with your heads stuffed full of Liberal crap, terrorist slime like Pomo wouldn't last five minutes in anyone's country. Christ! I don't know why I'm wasting my fucking time with you. You're no better than that Leftist bastard from Iran who joined forces with the anti-gun pricks in California last year. You both do an excellent job of reflecting the philosophy of that bunny-bashing wimp who gave you your posts."

There are only two disappointments in Jakarta Coup. For one, Margot Anstruther talks Pomo into allowing her to seduce Stonewall, who has never met her. Margot's plan is to take Stonewall to a nearby hotel room, where Pomo's soldiers can come in and kill Stonewall while Margot is "frigging him." While Roberts sets up this scene, he has Pomo's men act too early, thus we never get the scene that would have undoubtedly been the most fun in the book. Secondly, Roberts intimates that the next volume would feature Stonewall in action in the US -- and possibly going up against Ned Flannery and his armed goons as well.

So far I only have one other volume of the Roberts-penned installments of the series: #5: Libyan Warlord, which was his first. I can only hope it will be as enjoyable (for all the wrong reasons) as Jakarta Coup.