The Green Tan: Life and Death Under the Rigs

The Green Tan is a novel about a tough breed of men who worked in an environment where instant death was always close. They did the deep water saturation diving for oil companies in the oil boom of the late Twentieth Century. They were paid high wages for very dangerous diving, and more than a few lost their lives. Many came from the old Navy UTD teams and then the SEAL teams that followed. Those men had been to hell already and often adapted best to the rigors of saturation diving. The main character is one of these. But all the divers lived hard and some died suddenly, victims of a mega-money industry that could play with the divers' lives. Because of the harsh conditions of their work, many divers partied hard, and this story depicts graphic sex and the use of drugs that were often involved in relieving the intense stress. It is an explicit and violent book, but it is also comic, even tender at times when the story of the other side of the men's personalities are revealed. Like other dangerous professions that take men from their loved ones for extended periods of time, the divers' personal stories are often crashed love stories. The main character, however, does find a redemption of a sorts in a personal transformation where love and justice for him take on new meanings, though not the kind of justice you would find with lawyers and judges in court. The Green Tan is a story about two commercial diving partners in an series of jobs whose events escalate to the brink of where even the best of divers will meet his fate. It is a story of survival, love, betrayal, death, retribution and emergence.