Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 00:18:02 -0600
From: Tom Emerson <thomas@btl.net>
Subject: POET OF PHU BAI - NIFTY ED. FILE I
This might fit your military catagory, otherwise probably Bi Inc.or
Adult/Young Friends.
POET OF PHU BAI -- NIFTY EDITION
Copyright, T.C. Emerson, 2003
by T.C. Emerson
(Bi ped., inc., rom., mil.)
FILE I
Prologue
So Nang didn't park Daffy Duck, his water buffalo, because, while it
would be easy to do it, it would be hard to keep it done, the animal
weighing in at a huge near ton, and having, if slow, a wit of her own.
Rather, he left Daffy Duck in the paddy, and, responding to a wave from the
verge of the rice field, patted the animal and waded to the nearby bank.
As he joined his age-mate cousin, Nan To, thirteen, a flight of Marine
CH-46 transport helicopters churned over at a thousand feet, headed for Da
Nang, ten miles to the south. The year was 1968.
The cousins conversed in Vietnamese, though both were Eurasians,
humanities most stunning achievement when it comes to knock-down, drag-out
cute.
"I though you wouldn't reach the village until this evening," Nang
So said, hugging Nan To.
"We got a ride with an American journalist," the slightly older boy
said, "and we invited him to stay with us. That's why I came out to get
you. He's a nice guy, looks like a Viking, and Lin Lin has been going out
of her ten-year-old mind.
"About what we have talked of?" Nang So asked.
"We can't blame her," the second cousin said, "if we were she, we'd
feel the same about Mike Delaney."
"I suppose you're right," the plowing boy allowed, "as long as she
knows legends of the potency of the seed of the Anglo male have never been
clinically verified, and with war here, war there, and war all around, it
may be years before testing can be completed and the results subjected to
peer review."
"I explained that," Nan To said, "but she pointed out that with you
and I as witnesses, it might be a chance to at least gather raw data for
when the place turns into Ho Chi Minh by the numbers."
"Well," Nang So observed, "with us, being half French, data from
your friend would be more salient than if we lie with her."
"Maybe both our seed would equal his," the older cousin laughed,
stifling his mirth quickly as an image of the ethereal Lin Lin washed over
him. She was the daughter of his favorite teacher at the lyceum, Jacob
LaPonte, adopted daughter, as she was ethnically of her country for
countless generations. (In other words, a pure vessel for experimentation,
herself.)
"Where are they?" Nang So asked.
"Not a hundred meters," his cousin replied, "it would be, well, lots
of things to make them wait, so I hope you can come, now."
"Yes, of course," Nang So said, his voice clear in spite of the full
sprint at which both boys were traversing the dikes. In hardly over a
minute they slowed, and, unable to help themselves, bowed at the entrance
of a temple so ancient it was half buried in the silt-free, dust-free soil
of a more ancient hillock. Duty done, they entered to find Mike and Lin
Lin sitting on a thick rug, ankles crossed, facing each other. For a
moment the new arrivals stood in the marble archway, restraining their
panting as well as they could, until they realized their host and hostess
were breathing as hard as they were. That relaxed them, and they responded
to the American's nod by completing a foursome, knees almost touching. Lin
Lin looked shyly at her childhood friends, holding out a hand to each. "It
would have been you," she whispered to both boys, "and it will be you, many
times and even after we marry, and what will happen here is not just in the
name of science, but in the name of passion. Let the communists try
putting that in one of their little Marx boxes. You boys feel it when you
see a white girl, and girls have similar feelings to boys. Mike says
exactly the same feelings occur in his peer group; a perhaps excessive
desire for girls of my cast, for a beauty they see which is, he admits it,
partly exotic and foreign. I hope that settles any racial issues amongst
the four of us."
Nang So and Nan To nodded, smiling shyly at the impossibly tall,
craggy American.
"I have asked some of our elder women about his size," Lin Lin
continued (explaining to Mike and Nan To a brief absence as the latter had
found a hotel for his traveling friend), "and they said to be sure to have
at least two boys to protect me, also, to help me walk at the completion of
our experiment. Other than that, his body should not hurt mine any more
than you boys hurt each other when you wrestle and play sports."
"That's very good news," Nang So said, feeling simultaneously a
little let down at not sharing the beautiful pure-bred doll in private with
his beloved cousin, but also intensely excited, and the more-so as his gaze
wandered over the athletic foreigner. "Have you been with a child,
before?" the beautiful thirteen year old asked.
"Yes," Mike said. "I spent summers with a free-spirit family.
Emily was nine and weighed the same as Lin Lin, they could have been twins
as far as that goes."
"Did it happen repeatedly with her?" the other cousin asked.
"Yes," the American said, "and especially in the beginning, often
for hours at a time. I learned to be very gentle, she, perhaps not quite,
well, you know..."
"Then you don't need us," Nang So said.
"Possibly not in the physical sense," Mike responded, "but you are
very beautiful and very close to Lin Lin. In fact, to save face all
around, why don't I growl and pretend she's my midnight snack, and
must-needs you guys hang tight to defend her."
The smiles were less shy. Both heads nodded.
"You can't leave Daffy Duck too long," Lin Lin said, "she's a moron.
She'll pretend there's a bull in the area, forget to move her feet, and
sink down to her belly."
That made the smiles yet less reserved, though they were short lived
as the tension rose like the parachute flare from a cannon. Lin To, being
slightly the elder, and having met Mike and brought him to the village,
took passive command by bowing to the foreigner, then crossing on his knees
to the young adult. "You may rip my buttons if you wish, it's a compliment
to a boy," he whispered as he moved between Mike's long, muscular legs.
"Non-destructive customs are my favorite," the young man replied,
gently unbuttoning the boy's white school uniform shirt as Lin Lin and Nang
So moved close beside the experimenting couple. Mike's hands traced the
boy's long, slim neck, and followed his collar bone over his beautifully
smooth and colored chest. "Do many boys your age get touched here in
Vietnam?" Mike then wanted to know.
"It often does not happen," Nang So replied for his now panting
cousin, "but one can't help wondering if boys who reject the art of man and
willing child together might also reject other beauties beyond paddies and
sunsets."
"And," Lin Lin added, her eyes wide as she huddled close, "there's a
place for them with the communists because the ugliness of Marx and Lenin
are their criteria."
"You didn't answer his question," Lin To observed: "Some number of a
hundred," he said, "but probably less than a dozen. We are a distinct
minority, but highly tolerated as long as we respect most customs and
traditions."
"How much have you boys been molested?" the visitor asked
"We have been raped as individuals several times each, and gang
raped four times, the most recent being the ritual of the panther."
"And you welcomed your partners," the young man asked.
"Lin To and I were both very nervous the first time we were brought
here," the other cousin said, "but we had talked of what would happen, and
permitted to pick from a hundred young men who would first escort us, so,
yes, very welcome, and the more-so on successive occasions."
"Both your first experiences were here?" Mike asked. The boys
nodded, again smiling shyly.
"Were they full?" he then asked, a husk to his voice which brought
the children huddling close.
"Yes," the boys both said.
"Do you want to talk about it?" was the third in the series of
queries.
"Yes."
"Was each of your partners fully mature?"
"Sort of more than that," Nang So said, "because it's done by
ritual. Each potential partner wears a ring of shells around his neck;
some are half-shells, indicating how many days it has been since he
produced his ocean foam. That's not the only thing we judge on, but if two
of the young strangers -- they're from some miles away, to prevent jealousy
-- are nearly equal, well, then yes, seven or eight shells will win over
five or six."
Mike nodded. "How old was your partner, Nang So?" he asked.
"Twenty three," the boy said. "Lin To and I both picked champion
swimmers, because we swim a lot, too."
"And do you attend a dance or ceremony?" the American asked, voice
more curious than husky.
"It's very private and secretive," Lin To said, "a slight tap at the
window on a moonlit night. I have to lead him all the way, and can stop or
turn back any time before we enter the first marble archway. I can still
leave, but it would be considered bad manners."
"Did you hesitate?" the inquisitor wanted to know.
"I stopped several times just so I could stand close to him without
waiting. It was an exercise in discipline. Ying and Yang. To speed here,
or to move more slowly, yet get to know what it felt like being close while
we walked. I pretended the lamp was giving trouble, and he could see I was
pretending, so he moved closer and patted me very gently on the back of the
neck. More Yang, or whatever they call it, because then I wanted to stop,
like maybe forever, but I smiled and he did, and in a few minutes I led him
on. That happened three times, which is what usually happens."
Mike pondered on this average experience for some moments. Kids in
his country had sleepovers, but would kids together be anything like what
his three young friends were describing? "Sex with minors should be left
to minors" He'd read that. In his view, sex with minor should be left up
to minors. He made allowances for their dazzling level of education (they
were now all speaking (whispering) fluent English), but what difference did
that make? With most any kids, it would be a silly game, with a sensitive
adult, there was a high, perhaps even extreme aesthetic element, so intense
that images even hinting at juvenile sensuality were soured like black
pots. Good way to miss a lot. The boy he had now stripped to the waist
was so far beyond any sculptor's touch as to render marble
papier-mâché. Repeatedly raped in the past, he knew how to modestly
display, slowly raising his hands behind his raven-haired head and shyly
arching to the touch of the white adult. The twenty four year old traced
to the boy's left nipple, fondled it, then caressed him down over his still
childish belly. Lin Lin and Nang So joined him and Lin To welcomed them
with a modest thrust of his belly. Mike reached to the younger cousin and
as the tableau continued, gently eased him out of his simple farming shirt.
As Lin Lin used her tiny fingers on the panting boy next to her, the tall
American unbuttoned her school blouse from the back and pulled it gently
free. The ten year old was wearing an American training bra, and gently he
brought Lin To to his knees, slowly guiding the boy's hands up over the
girl's chest. As the adolescent reached the verge of the girl's
undergarment, the man guided Nang So to her, and then, acknowledging their
order of birth, guided the older cousin slowly in over the panting girl's
obviously swollen right nipple, following after a few discrete seconds, by
guiding the younger boy. Both huddled in close to the girl, Nang So, in
honor of his near equality, meeting her shining brown eyes and moving in to
be the first to kiss her. Mike stripped quickly out of his khaki shirt,
very glad it snapped instead of buttoned, and, his smooth, athletic chest
like that of a teen swimmer, gathered the half naked children against him
as they continued to experiment with sex.
The boys, eventually conscious of the half-naked beauty in their
presence, guided Lin Lin to him, gently pressing her breasts against his
rugged but not sculptured chest. They helped each other with the
mysterious catch on the tiny silk bra, and eased it from between the
lovers, leaving the girl bare chested with her stag.
"I can't kiss you until later," the girl said, look up with huge
almond eyes. She wore her hair short and was more pert and gamin than
languorous and beauteous. Infinitely sexy, and then some. Since he
couldn't kiss, he could talk.
"What is the ritual of the panther?" he asked, a little shocked that
the journalist in him would raise his callous head at such a moment.
"Now that is ceremonial," Lin To emphasized, "drums, dragons,
fireworks, the lot, but all miles out in the wilderness."
"We communicate with a caged and trussed cat they way we have taught
ourselves to communicate with our young male human partners," Nang So
explained. "
"You take the animal's ocean foam?" the man asked.
"First on our chests, as we did here the first time, then, yes, as
with our human partners, the second time we welcome the cat with our lips
and tongue. It may be superstition, but when you pull down our underpants,
you will see that, while not grotesque, we are somewhat more developed than
our Eurasian peers."
The term "boggle" wouldn't come into common usage for years, but
this might have happened back in '68 if Mike Delaney had been free to write
his story. In the meantime, he was boggled in the near extreme, and who
wouldn't have been -- imagining a small hoard of naked young men huddled
around a beautiful boy and huge, savage cat. On second thought, who
wouldn't b - - at least a little at seeing a tall Nordic athlete flanked by
two slim Eurasian teens as a bare chested young female cuddled against his
chest and reached up with her slim arms to toy gently with his ears.
"We call this the learning time," Lin Lin whispered, "the time
before when we show respect for each other as humans by talking. It is as
with a bride and her groom, with Nang So and Lin To on their first night
walk here to the temple, with all lovers other than those who are paid."
"How long does it last?" Mike responded.
"It depends on the degree of the love," the girl said, "and is often
governed by practical considerations, for example: a water buffalo with the
IQ of a tick left unattended by her young master."
"Might," Mike asked, surprised at being so quick off his feet under
the ever more boggling circumstances, "it work the other way? A writer,
for example, wanting to stay, able to stay, wanting to learn, perhaps able
to do so, extending the Learning Time?" No sooner had he committed the
thought to speech than he realized its absurdity. Talk? Converse?
Extend? Was he mad? The girl was gelled fire, panting more of it gently
against his neck as she stroked his face, her eyes huge and radiating half
an inferno. "Yet," he continued in his almost hissing reverie, "with Emily
it had happened slowly, and he'd survived. They'd spent hours talking
before the first touch; hours spread over days. On the fourth day she'd
become feline simply removing her blouse and commandeering his lap. Even
then they had talked as he carefully responded and finally mastered the by
now panting, mewing nine year old.. Ying and Yang. Was this their core?
The boys on their hesitating first night walks to this very temple; the
girl hot in his arms as he massaged and scratched her slim back?
Anticipation. Exploitation. Now. Later. His seed fiery at the base of
his spine. His seed spraying hotly to a hotter fire yet. The boys,
experienced, knowing what was coming, how about their wants and needs? How
nice, in such a complex situation, there was a dominate leader.
"Tell us," the Vietnamese girl asked, practicing what she preached,
"about your country's involvement in mine." That was one sentence. It was
followed by another: "The kiss I promised you will be of ocean salt from
Lin To. It will be ceremonial and last a long time, Daffy Duck or no Daffy
Duck." Ying and Yang.
"We are not fighting for anything particular," Mike said, his
respect for the bright-eyed child outweighing his passion (lust) for her.
"Communism will die of its inherent defects, in it's reliance on qualified
comrades while ignoring or even stifling excellence. It can only result
only in a despotic police states with one third of its victims spying on
the other two thirds. We need merely to blunt its advance at minimum cost.
If we were to fight this as a real war," the journalist continued, "we'd
win. That would add your country to a long list of others, headed by
Japan, out-competing our domestic interests. It will be a close fought
race in any event, and one more motivated, high-skilled, cheap-labor market
could easily be our doom.
"It is an exact parallel with Cuba. If we'd gone hammer and tongs
after the bearded sun raver and thrown him out, Havana would have sucked
the life out of Florida. Communism is like land mines, in a way. Plant
mines and the land becomes unusable, fit only for the procreation of small
wildlife. Communism takes land, so to speak, out of the picture, creating
necessary voids where dynamic capitalism would foster yet more competition"
"You make much of Learning Time," the girl whispered, her beautiful
young male escorts nodding in agreement. Is that good or bad? the American
couldn't help wondering, realizing how utterly it depended on how one
looked at it.
"It's all very accidental," Mike responded, "history. Spain should
be, hands-down, the dominate trading nation on Earth. It looted
unparalleled treasure from the New World, but had a Catholic king obsessed
with an English realm for his saints and holy icons. He built enough
armadas to strip his country of oak trees, the gold of the brutalized
slaves ended up in the Channel, and Spain is forever an impoverished husk.
Hitler held the Bolsheviks from trouncing a wobbly Germany in route to a
supremely wobbly France. He alone. And is nothing but a villain in every
book and film. Chin so ruined his nation with his wall, it was hardly
worth invading, but they did it anyway. Ho Chi Minh should have been
executed many times as a firebrand, but he lives on. Our
sacred-in-the-media Founding Fathers were brute pirates and smugglers
wanting the British off their backs. Our heroic Washington, at least it's
a nice name, imagine if he'd been son of Mr. and Mrs. Flubb, loathed the
very sight of his recalcitrant rabble, but even with his wife's
connections, his war crimes and assassinations as a young commander
disqualified him from the royal commission he avidly sought his entire
adult life. Toussaint in Haiti, one brigand with a peeling voice, and the
most beautiful and prosperous single spot on earth was rendered hell,
forever."
"But there is so much positive in America," Nang So said, "we dream
of it so."
"Our sane people," Mike Delaney replied, "dream of your pastoral
land, of much of your way with some of our things like window screens. But
we are not, by and large, a sane people. More like badly raised children,
obsessed, as are all foreigners who visit our shores, except the Amish,
with not just materialism, which has its just place, but with flagrant
consumption on credit. We have become enslaved by a small plastic card and
bow to the whip of the dunning telephone call. `Mr. Smith, we need to talk
about your balance with us.' `King Philip, we need a bishop in London.'
Mr. Kresge our research shows you will profit from thousands of marts.
Mr. Koch, our research shows you can sell burgers by the billions, all you
need is a glossy clown. `King Louis, America will be ours if we help with
their Revolution.' `Mr. Hess, I have no interest in meeting with your
corporal.' And the funnest quote of all belongs to the august Washington,
whose teeth hurt so badly he kept his trap shut."
"But it is interesting," the older cousin noted to his peer's nod.
"Got me there, kiddo," Mike laughed, "that it seriously is. Nothing
like a squadron of helos flying over a ten thousand year old rice paddy to
provide a little contrast with the humdrum."
"I much prefer a tall, blond athlete in a jeep," Lin Lin noted,
nipping the writer's neck. Again he'd been had. Anything more interesting
than the tableau in the ancient temple was inconceivable, though its
attributes were more ethnic than historical. And again, the youngest of
them exercised her natural, unhurried dominance. "I'm dying to be kissed,
ceremoniously," she whispered.
"Tell me what to do," the handsome American whispered back.
"Stand with Lin To and Nang So on either side," the child suggested
gently. Under other circumstances, it would have been easy to comply, but
with the pixie nestled snugly against him, and change had to raise serious
questions as to its worth. In gentle command, the girl helped immeasurably
by sliding slowly back onto her feet, and Mike was thus able to rise from
the marble bench centered in the ancient temple vault. Lin To moved to the
white man's left, Nang So to his right and the three braced their legs
against the trestle, the man's arms around the young males' slim flanks.
Lin Lin knelt in front of them, her hands going first to Mike's belt. Now
apparently inspired by her experiment, she worked efficiently, and in less
than a minute all three males were naked and she had shed the shorts of her
uniform and her panties.
"Did you have a male partner in addition to Emily?" Lin Lin asked in
a whisper, "you are very well developed and that is a sign."
"Yes," the twenty four year old replied, "I went on a cattle drive
when I was eleven. By tradition, the new boys, there were four of us, take
the role of girls at appropriate times."
"Was it a pleasure for you?" Nang So asked as the three males eased
Lin Lin onto the creamy marble, lying the panting girl on her back and
guiding their tall visitor until he wad positioned over her, his knees
between hers, which were widely spread. The stone seat was at the height
of a low bed and the two younger males were able to brace themselves
comfortably, providing their legs were widely spread like the young
females.
"It was my first time for anything past locker room talk, which I
didn't like," Mike replied, "so I was very nervous. One of the cowboys,
Jesse, picked me up at the bus station. It was an hour to the ranch and he
told me of the tradition -- about bringing girl's clothes even -- and asked
what I thought about it. I guess it was more me liking him than anything,
but I said I'd like to go on the drive rather than stay at the ranch and
hang out with the boys who already had serious girlfriends or were brought
up as homophobes."
"Did anything happen on the drive?" the girl said to the man high on
his muscular arms over her slim, childish body.
"Yes," Mike acknowledged, "Jesse asked if I'd like to spend some
time in an orchard before we finished the last of the drive."
"Was he gentle with you?" Lin To asked.
"Very," the man said, "he told me about his first drive, the first
campfire away from civilization, and then riding herd with a nineteen year
old cowboy on a warm, soft night."
"Yes," Nang So added, "I've read that you must make sounds at all
times so as not to startle the beasts."
"Legend has it that they sang to the doggies," Mike affirmed, "and
I'm sure that happened on other drives, maybe."
"But wouldn't more natural sounds be appropriate when it came to
soothing the sleeping herd?" Lin Lin asked, demonstrating an IQ a million
times that of Daffy Duck.
"Well," Mike mused, trying to stare the young beauty into his soul
so he'd remember her perfectly in his grave, "we never had a stampede."
"How long were you in the orchard with Jesse?" Lin To wanted to
know.
"Over an hour," the man said.
"Did you take the sea from his loins?" the same boy asked.
"As you did your first time," Mike said. "We called it masturbating
at the camp, school kids call it jerking off. He molested me for a long
time in the cab of the pickup, then we got out and he spread out a
blanket."
"Did he rape you just with his seed, or did he touch you?" the girl
asked.
"Just by spraying all over my legs and my belly," Mike whispered.
"It must be universal," Lin To observed, "for that is so close to
what happened as Nang So and I lay for our first partners."
"It gives the boy the option of getting out," Mike said, "of having
it be just an experiment without any real participation on the part of the
juvenile. If the child likes it, he'll know as he watches the adult's
sperm shower on his bare chest; if he doesn't, he'll know that, too, and
can avoid further contact without having excessively profaned himself."
"It's hard to conceive of not liking it -- loving it," the younger
of the cousins said, "but then it's hard to conceive of why your country
wants to send men into space when, without the stresses of gravity, they
will atrophy in months."
"That's why they invented tomorrow," Mike responded, "in hopes of
giving us time to figure it all out, or maybe just a little of it."
"Did you stay with Jesse after he knelt between your legs?" Lin Lin
asked, seeming, at times, quite one of the boys.
"Yes," Mike replied, "he made me cum with his hands while I was
still on my back and wet from what he'd done,, then he lay beside me and
taught me your boys' second way with the panther."
"What happened then?" Nang So asked. Mike detected a rise of
intensity in the youth's whisper and instead of replying immediately,
asked: "What happened with you boys after your night walk here?"
Lin To replied. "We were taken to all the young men from whom we
had selected our first partner, about twenty. They were highly aroused
from imagining what was happening here by lamp light, and wearing many
shells. Because they waited for us, Nang So and me, plus Tran Vat and Kim
Doc, the young men we'd selected, in a group, they were unable to avail
themselves of private release during the hours we panted with our first
mates, and therefore were in a state of very high excitement and readiness
on our entrance Also, we, by tradition, had in no way cleaned ourselves of
the passion of our first time, and that added to the tension in the air.
We were laid once again naked on our backs, and I hope my English is good
enough to get away with saying: `then cumeth the flood.'"
"Glad I asked," Mike mused to himself, then said: "While I was being
molested by Jesse he asked me if I'd like to watch him touch another young
boy. Being unable to speak at the time, I nodded vigorously, so when we
got to camp -- this was before the cattle drive -- we rode out with a
fourteen year old, Bill, and another wrangler, that's what our councilors
were known as, Kevin, and I watched Jesse manhandle Bill while he watched
Kevin take me. We lack the thousand-year history necessary to have
perfected the initiation ritual, but it was still very exciting." Both
Vietnamese boys nodded and the visitor looked at them anew. If nations
around the world could perfect their individual initiation rituals there
would be more thirteen year olds like Nang So and Lin To. They were not
quite huge, literally, an inch short of grotesque, but they were elegantly
circumcised, and, though showing no trace of hair, as developed as a
well-endowed adult. As he watched -- stared -- the youths each braced with
a left arm on their opposites' shoulders and began masturbating, foreheads
together. Lin Lin mewed welcome and encouragement, and the smoking
carnality of the scene made it impossible for Mike not to take the pretty
girl beneath him, finding her with a series of gentle probes with his own
seven inch erection, then press slowly to her as she began to writhe and
pant at the extreme tension she felt in the athletic body above her as the
male dominated her with dozens of quick, short strokes. He rose high on
his arms so the two boys could see what was happening between their girl's
widely spread legs, and Mike wondered if he had not been repeatedly with
Emily, and lost control, if they'd be able to protect their living doll.
It was an academic tangent, because his control became less an issue as the
ten year old beneath him began thrusting to me him with rapidly increasing
deliberation and purposefulness, yipping and gurgling incoherently as the
boys above her began tensing and the tall athlete now deep inside her began
to act fully the stag.
"I'm cumming," Lin To whispered, his long, slim penis against the
child's left nipple. Lin Lin raised her head (which she'd already done
several times to watch Mike's long, white penis penetrate high between her
light-brown legs) to watch. Mike and Nang So stared down at him, and after
a dramatic pause, the elder boy began ejaculating hard and fast, his
adolescent white semen covering Lin Lin's chest with a dozen hot spurts of
cum. The girl sighed audibly at the beauty and surety of his manhood,
then, with memories that would last forever, laid her head back on the
creamy marble as Nang So, almost shocked at the beauty of his older cousin,
also began cumming off hard and fast, his sperm gushing repeatedly over the
face and lips of their love child. Mike lowered to kiss her and her tiny
hands pulled him urgently as their lips met. Both boys half fell over the
powerful adult, each finding a nipple with their right hand, each
whispering encouragement, each fantasizing at what he was feeling inside
the little girl, at what it would be like when she would welcome the hot
seed of their juvenile loins.
The salty sea foam in her mouth, the hard, pulsing throb of the
adult deep inside her, and the gentle beauty of all three males
body-slammed Lin Lin into a full-seizure orgasm, all three men struggling
to hold her tightly against her ejaculating stallion. Sperm flowed
copiously from between the straining bodies of the male and female, glazing
the eyes of Nang So and Lin To and heavily slicking the marble under the
girl's cute bottom. It was a full minute before the tension began to
subside in the mating couple, until they could again whisper happily to
each other as the boys restrained themselves from thumping Mike's back as
they would have done to a victorious athlete. Another few minutes and they
once again breathed normally and lay on the verge of coma. But this is a
story of savage horror and insidious terror, so we need to keep moving.
Lin Lin whispered: "remember the moron," and the ever mature and
responsible Nang So rose to his feet. They all slipped quickly back into
their clothes and went in search of the huge animal. She'd buried her big
feet less than a foot, so with a few heaves, Nang So was left to his ritual
work in the rice paddy, his three visitors waving as they headed back to
fix his evening meal. The boy plowed on for half an hour, Daffy Duck so
energized by her ad hoc nap she practically sprinted down the soggy rows of
the dazzling green paddy. Thus it was when the plow struck a solid object,
the boy was thrown forward, landing with a splash along side the rear
quarters of the buffalo. He quickly regained his feet, and, after
investigating, found he could move the impediment by coaxing the powerful
beast. In ten minutes the stone appeared at the surface, and the boy knelt
to remove it from the mud. A stone it had been at one time, but the
intervention of a long-dead craftsman had rendered it a work of art, a
jade-shot bust of an eagle's head. Washing it completely in the standing
water, the boy stood, patted the ox, promising a quick return, and waded
free of the paddy, dashing off toward the village.
Half way to his home, Nang So paused for a moment, listening intently,
then raced on at double speed. He arrived panting at the perimeter of his
village, just in time to see a throng headed down his own street. The
wailing marchers bore a stretcher. The boy moved through the crowd and
along side their burden. A weeping woman pulled back a shroud on the boy's
arrival. Nang So's father lay dead, drowned, foam still on his clay lips.
Solicitous hands guided the child to his mother. She absently removed the
bust from her son's hands as the grieving throng laid out the corpse in the
living room of the home.
BOOK I
CHAPT. 1
The battered old Royal practically advertised: "writer at
work." It was the kind of machine one would buy in a pawn shot, so Mickey
Spillane any owner could hardly help having his hand at a little something
along a literary line. The type hit the ribbon spasmodically, the lines
appeared raggedly and slowly.
Paddy green, paddy green, paddy rice I have seen
Paddy gold, paddy no, paddy only grow green.
Paddy here, paddy why, paddy why am I here?
Paddy red, paddy near, paddy fear, paddy fear.
"Yo-Bing-go, heads up," a voice called out as four Marine
pilots entered their hooch on the Phu Bai airfield., "are you beginning an
epic or ending one?" Before the handsome pilot could answer another pilot
spoke: "One good night mission deserves another," Chuck Wagner said, "I'm
heading for the club."
"Did any of you princes of darkness check the bulletin board
on your way in from the flight line?" Bing Emerson asked, looking up from
his keys.
"I said `heads up' didn't I," Ed Nelson replied, pulling a
mimeographed sheet from a pocket of his flight suit and unfolding it. "To
Major," he read, "William Emerson," adding, "I didn't bother memorizing
your serial number on the chance you already knew it."
"It's the Navy you want to see for feats like that," Bing
replied. "A Marine is neither fish nor fowl, and therefore dumber then
squat -- speaking of which, you probably pulled down the wrong paperwork."
Ed paused and rubbed his chin, obviously thinking hard: "I'd
better go back and check," he said, "because it was beside the list of
demotions, KP, and guard duty."
Chuck spoke. "As if they'd demoted anyone who drinks nothing
but Cokes and spends his downtime writing stuff. How long since you've
been to the club, Emerson?"
"And how long since you've called me Sir, Captain?" the writer
shot back.
"Children," Ed counseled, "yonder darkness doth the enemy
contain, and we hope, restrain. I like it that way."
Chuck finished stripping for the shower. "By all means," he
said, "civil tongues for the princely presence, a/k/a Sir Greater than
Galahad, Sir Larger than Lancelot."
"Ah," Bing replied, "you've found more not to like about
me... Someone deserves credit for spilling beans and letting cats out of
bags in the name of keeping life interesting."
"Anything would be interesting to a guy who drinks Pepsi Cola
when they're out of Coca Cola," Chuck retorted, "plus I hear you own a
whole county on Cape Cod. A fucking county. My old man owned a pickup,
made every payment. How interesting is that?"
"What's he talking about?" Ed asked, "for chrissake tell us
it's a small one."
"Rest assured," Bing responded with a laugh.
Chuck scowled. "Okay," he said, now wrapped in a towel, "I
caddied on the Cape. How small? Where?"
The new major looked as him steadily. "Not to far from the
canal, south side. To a Marine, that's the side away from Boston." Ed
demonstrated the persistence that had gotten him through both a major
university and ROTC. "How small?" he repeated.
"Twenty miles by about one kilometer," the pilot answered.
Ed looked puzzled. "Sounds like a railroad right-of-way."
"Most of the Cape is pine barrens," Chuck noted archly, "it
must be lovely."
Bing assured his subordinate he'd grown used to it over the
years. Chuck's tone mellowed. What was the big deal? Someone had to own
it. But it was a lot of land. "And you really own it?" he queried.
"Family," Bing said.
Ed, trying to play the role of middle-man (it was better than
the usual yack at the club), found his patience perhaps a but tried. "For
Christ's sake, Emerson, you're and Emerson -- isn't that enough? You need
enough land for a metropolis, too?"
Not trying to be cryptic, just to be sure there was plenty of
perspective, the major noted he wouldn't be there without a grandmother.
"Would I?"
"Wa-it a minute," Chuck interjected, "I'm getting a picture
here. Ed, ask him, regarding this county of his, assuming his grandmother
is or will be dead, who is its eastern neighbor. Bing, looking a mite
abashed, answered himself: "I guess that would be Newport," he said, "if
you swam far enough."
"East would be Newport," the captain repeated, adding:: "home of
those who, whatever their relationship with god, never ate cod, though
there cats may have. Anyway, the plot thickens. How about your southern
neighbor?"
"You tell Ed," Bing suggested.
More dismayed than angry, Chuck did so. "Mother-fucking right I
will. Martha's Grapes-of-Fucking Wealth Vineyard. Heavy loot. Old loot.
"Look down, fellow birdmen," he continued having attracted the
attention of several of their hooch mates,, "upon our poet, who, by an odd,
and I do mean odd, connection, happens to the richest man on the planet,
the richest Marine of all time; probably worth more than the entire
remainder of the corps.
"And land, not funny paper on Wall Street, though there's plenty
of that, too. Beautiful rolling moorlands; the only virgin forest left
other than a small patch north of Mt. Katahdin. Lawns by the acre. Houses
made of stone blocks bigger than those in the Washington Monument. One is
five stories with an elevator and a widow's walk suitable for tennis. No
cars; horses and wagons; carriages. It's twice Newport and three times
Martha's Vineyard, or maybe the other way around.
"Here's the history," the Marine continued, bemused with a touch
of anger or hatred, "he's a closet Forbes. William no-middle-initial
Emerson. If he didn't come from a clan who delight in showcasing tacky
perversity, he'd be William F. William Forbes Emerson, why, since it's the
topic under discussion, is principle heir to Naushon Island and the
Elizabeth Islands, Woods Hole to Cuttyhunk. No place for a pickup, but an
eighty-foot Wheeler would fit, and fit right in.
"No trespassing, no camping, private property, keep out and keep
off, and they have a mounted sentry with a camera. Is that why you're
here, major, to sharpen you skills at dropping an intruder at three hundred
yards. You never can tell, it might be a child climbing up from the beach
-- difficult target to take cleanly. Maybe you should spend a few months
with the grunts, then, when the great day comes, you'll have the confidence
of instinct, because I'm sure no poet worthy of the name would want to
track down a bleeding seven year old."
"So far, it's all been chasing sheep," Bing responded.
"And with the place crawling with Ivy League princesses? Isn't
that `conduct unbecoming?'"
Bing laughed. "As it happens," he replied, "we stripped them
all. Rams, too. But now that you mention it, that was before I reached
field grade. I'll have to think more carefully in the future. Next time I
hear that certain bleating from a thicket, I'll merely shrug my gilded
shoulders and walk on."
Ed nodded toward the showers and Chuck followed. Bing returned
to the old Royal in his lap.
A day tomorrow, a day away?
Is that what the tea leaves say?
Seems unlikely as snow late in May,
Paddy green, paddy green, paddy I lay.
. . .
"Yeah," in radio drawl, "attention on the frequency: this is No
Ducks flight leader. We're a dozen Phantoms feet dry over China Beach,
estimating Football in five, approaching from the east, or the ocean, for
any Marines in the area. We will be active in the area for the next hour.
Kiss yourselves gone, or kiss yourselves good-bye." Bing triggered the
mike switch on the cyclic of his transport helo. "When low-down voice and
sky-high attitude go together so well, it brings back memories. I'm
searching for a name I don't want to remember."
More drawl: "No one has trouble with yours, do they Emerson.
Must be nice."
"Ah," the Marine pilot said, "Sandy Locke. Dixie side of the
Dixon. Five seconds after three years, you must have made an impression."
"How's the royalty business," the inbound pilot asked.
"Ah, you know," the helo commander replied, "the peasants growl,
but what can they do? They'd be exactly like us if their zygote had swum
in the right cubic inch."
"What are you flying?"
"As long as you use the term loosely," Bing replied, "a bus-size
helo named `Sad Suzanne', a forty-six. We're smack on your twelve a mile
east of the Football. You will watch out for us, won't you? The only
afterburner is if the flare gun goes off under my seat."
"Ah, what the hell," came the cotton-voice reply, "thing go
wrong once in awhile. We have you, by the way, tally-ho. Anyway, like I
said, stuff goes wrong and even a Marine in a helicopter is better than
Charlie Come out another mile if you want, then orbit, right turns;
clockwise to a Marine."
"Wilco," Bing affirmed, "and just for your information, I've got
a passenger aboard. Double-first cousin. He has a movie camera. If you
stagger your run-ins so we're starboard side to your target, you'll be able
to teach some folks how it's done."
"Anything for Kodak," Sandy said.
"Try Panavision," the Marine replied, "the thing weighs sixty
pounds."
"Fuck, Emerson, what are you people, some whole different
species?"
"Me," the major said, "I'm just Harvard -- Tom, he's the cuz,
we'll, to sum it up, he's a slick sleeve Army private wearing a battery
belt and lugging around a `Gone-with-the-Wind'-size movie camera."
"Is he smart enough to know," the inbound pilot asked, "that if
we come in with our brakes on, we're mugging for the press, nod doing our
job by the book?"
"Tom," Bing asked in response, "are you plugged in?"
The twenty one year old "Stars and Stripes reporter cum amateur
cameraman replied that he was. "Anything you'd like to say to my old buddy
from Pensacola?"
"From the dramatic standpoint," the cousin said, "it would be
best if he came in with brakes out and flaps and gear down; released his
ordinance, then trimmed nose-down, leaving the stick alone."
"I believe he's your cousin," the drawled voice on the radio
said.
"Family trait," Bing explained; "helping others achieve fame,
nay, immortality. Thoreau, Alcott, French. You can trust both of us.
"The joke is," the Navy pilot responded, "is that I could fall
for it. This is a man-grinding meat grinder. Why not go out to the thrill
of the crowd?"
Bing triggered his mic. "Buck up, man, you're Navy. Surely
there's a swabbie worth coming home to? Hell, they say I run with sheep.
Have a little pride."
"Ah, okay, break, No Ducks, I think it's okay to use maybe about
half brakes; try 250 instead of 350. If everything looks good, fire just
after passing over the ugly green flying machine. Disregard comments from
the peanut gallery. In fact, pull up, maybe three Gs, a little vapor from
the wing tips does wonders at the recruiting office. November Delta Two,
you're first. Action!"
"Hi, Mom!" came a radio voice from the leader's wingman, "let's
go. Give the trying-trying flying machine at least a hundred feet
clearance so our vortexes don't flex the rotor blades. On my mark, single
file, twenty second intervals..."
Tom Emerson knelt on the left side of the helo, watching for the
approaching squadron of Phantom fighter bombers.
"See them?" Bing asked.
The Army private replied: "I see some dots, but they're not
linked up. I thought Nay fliers were more, you know, more comfortable with
each other." The chit-chat ends as the photographer spots the first
inbound jet. He established with a few seconds of film, then quickly
crossed to the larger starboard door, bracing himself against the machine
gun while the door gunner and crew chief kept him from pitching out after
the heavy, shoulder mounted camera. As the first Phantom passes over it
fires a salvo of white phosphorus missiles, pulling up just as the rockets
splash in their ghastly pyrotechnic of lethal white bloom. The timing is
perfect and Tom nodded to the crew chief who relayed the word. Jet after
jet dropped over the orbiting chopper, splash after splash walloped the
notorious free-fire zone. It would be a hell of a place to be an anteater,
or an ant.
"Remind you of anything, Tom," Bing asked as the photographer
eased the camera to the door gunner and pushed his talk button.
"A cute midshipman at a Tail Hook party; his point of view?" the
young soldier asked, realizing his older cousin meant the hot, livid flares
of white phosphorous.
"That makes you an honorary Marine," Bing laughed.
"Fuck you, cuz," the private replied, retrieving the camera,
"the Army ranks me as nothing, so next life, it's Navy or nothing."
There was a pause on the intercom. "You're not sensitive about
that; ending up a Private? I was afraid to mention it."
"It's not there fault," the soldier replied. "They said keep
you head down and shoulder to the wheel, and when someone said head up, I
was pushing too hard to hear."
"You couldn't even make Pfc. with a `Nam tour?" the major asked.
"I can't remember trying," Tom replied.
"Ah, attitude," Bing laughed.
"Fuck you," the younger cousin shot back, friendly like. "Some
of the guys I went through basic with thought ketchup was a novelty, and I
have a twenty-thousand-dollar camera. There are only so many pay grades to
pass around. Turned out Lonnie Johnson, who thought the sauce was left
over rom Thanksgiving, made better company than my ilk and preppie peer
group. I got to like it on his side of the tracks, and all I had to do to
stay there was keep my mouth shut and head down. Not trying, their way,
fit my altruistic nature."
Sandy's voice broke into the conversation. "So," he drawled,
"you guys going to race each other to the crown of Royal Ridge when you get
out?"
Bing laughed into the mic. "After flying this close to the Navy
-- me? I'm going into the mining industry."
"We were born there," Tom added, "it's getting safely down
that's the trick."
Sandy's F-4 was different. It lumbered over Tom's ship at 150
knots, speed-brakes fully deployed, half flaps and gear down. As had the
others, it fired its missiles an instant after it passed over the CH-46.
And kept to its dive. Tom was about to let go of the camera and reach for
his talk button; tell Sandy he'd just been kidding, when the wobbling bird
kicked a hard, orange fire and in five seconds was climbing vertically in
the frame of the Panavision camera.
The Navy pilot's voice came over the intercom. "Something for
the How Not To chronicles," he laughed, Nor was he kidding. A second after
his transmission a ball of fire tore the climbing jet in half. Tom
practically gagged at the explosive image suddenly flaring in the
viewfinder. Even before Bing could transmit the firs mayday, a chute
bloomed, a kicking and waving figure suspended from its shrouds. In the
time it took to put out an all call, the chute settled into a tree at the
verge of a clearing.
"Bing," Tom said into his mic, the door gunner moving the movie
camera to a safe place, "I'm out of film. Fly along low for two or three
miles -- slowly -- so the V.C. won't be able to figure out where your
friend is. I'll jump into his chute, then get out until someone can come
and pick us up."
"I can't think of anything better," the major agreed and circled
the ship far from the parachute, descended, then hovered slowly over the
treetops, never changing speed. The crew chief handed the dauntless young
hero his canteen belt, a knife, a .45, an AR-15 and a bandolier containing
five hundred rounds of ammunition. Bing kept the heavy helo churning
along, and, with a wave perhaps more jolly than he felt at the moment, the
Army private leaped into the center of the Navy pilot's chute.
"Are you hurt," Tom whispered through a gore in the canopy.
"No," came back the voice of the captain.
"Way cool," said the twenty-one year old,
For some minutes each of the new arrivals took their bearings.
Bing had briefed the rescuer, saying they'd all clear out and be back, in
force, in two hours. By the time he climbed the helo back to cruising
altitude, he'd covered fifty square miles of canopy, leaving any marauding
enemy units a wide search area.
"Can you talk to him?" Tom asked the suspended Phantom pilot.
"Yes," Sandy said.
"Tell him to leave the camera with the tech master sergeant at
the Phu Bai exchange," the private requested, "he knows what to do with
it." In a few moments Tom heard the squeal of the emergency handset.
"All taken care of," Sandy said, his voice a stage whisper.
"What next?"
"I can about half see you," Tom replied, "and it looks like it
might be possible for you to come up here, which would beat the living shit
out of our descending to the ground."
"I was brought up to listen to voices from on-high," the Navy
pilot said.
"Well, I'm not so sure," Tom responded, "because if god meant
you to commune with the angels, he'd have given you wings, not a
parachute."
"Yes," Sandy said, "I'm sure, but, say, just for, you know, the
hell of it, why don't we continue the ecclesiastical discussion while
you're cutting me some kind of rope."
"You mean like this?" the younger male asked, tossing down one
end of an improvised line he'd cut from the fabric of the chute.
Lucky Nifty readers. We have other fish to fry so you're spared
the tedious cliff-hanger of the Navy pilot retrieving the free end of the
line -- fingertips -- of his angel, precariously enough perched in his own
right, taking just enough strain to allow the jet pilot to punch out of his
harness and swing until a toe found the crotch of his tree, and the long,
sweating strain of his fifty-foot ascent and nerve-wracking crawl out ever
smaller branches until Tom hauled him onto the relative safety of the
tangled canopy. Both lay panting for a long minute as the soldier passed
the pilot his canteen, receiving, in return, the handset. "Your friend's
as safe as he ever would have been out drinking with you in Pensacola," Tom
said into the mic.
Bing's voice was faint in the distance, but readable. "Glad to
hear it," he said, "we've been in touch with S-2. They think there's a
major force in the area of the Football, and you guys are likely to draw
them. They've authorized a Puff and four Jolly Greens. Operation Very
Heavy Hand. Mum's the word for the next couple of hours. When everyone's
staged we'll give you a shout, then you make a racket. We'll give them
another fifteen minutes, from that point, to focus on your position,
pounce, then pick you up in Sad Suzanne."
"Just be sure my camera gets to Saigon," Tom said, ending his
side of the transmission.
"It's already half way there, and I'd be more worried about
yourself in the hands of the Navy," came the faint reply, and the radio
went dead giving the soldier time to appraise his new friend. Even a quick
glance at his now-relaxed companion gave him to know, like the man in the
story, he had nothing to dread.
"Hi," they said to each other, suddenly shy, and for good
reason. Both looked like winsome teenagers, cutest out of thousands; a
bit, in their military cuts, like fuzzy chicks. Sandy's name came from his
off-gold hair and Tom was such a sensation of youthful male beauty it would
have mattered little if he'd had no head, much less hair. The parachute
was their friend, draped in such a way over its supporting branches the two
were more or less forced to lie side by side in close proximity. "I hope
we can go on meeting like this," the Army boy said, feeling very uncertain,
I mean who wanted to go around believing everything they heard, yet
feeling, as the junior rank, any overture was best left up to him,
strictures on the officer class being what they were.
"I think if I'd known it wouldn't have taken a V.C. missile to
get me out into the wild blue yonder," the preposterously young looking
colonel responded. Their halting boldness with each other was a sign of a
more innocent time. In the present day, such a situation would be closely
monitored by spy satellites, quite a damper on any activities involving
fraternization.
"It looked like a cat's whisker in the viewfinder," the
cinematographer noted, "I was just wondering how it got on the lens, when
everything went to a big orange ball, highly elongated, with what looked
like an airplane tumbling in the middle of it."
"How far away was it launched," Sandy asked, "from where we are
now?"
"Six or seven miles," Tom replied. "Ten clicks."
"If I'd flown it by the book, it wouldn't have happened," the
young colonel mused.
"According to the book, that missile reaches a thousand miles an
hour in three seconds," Tom said, "so the fact that you were slow just kept
you from getting a complete body massage by a 300 mile an hour blast of
wind."
"Meaning you've saved my life, twice," Sandy sighed.
"They say one good turn deserves another," the young hero
responded, "but you would have survived even at speed."
"Ten knots faster, and I wouldn't have wanted to survive," the
pilot said with a boyish grin, rubbing his inner thighs.
"I've read that certain forces experienced during an ejection
constitute a great lesson in not letting things go wrong in the first
place."
"H'mm," the pilot remarked, "writer, too, are we?"
"It's a bitch," the younger boy, for they were hardly men,
agreed, "the Muses are females. All nine of them. When it comes to
resisting, denying even one would be a chore. Compliance is the easy way
out, so yeah, I write."
"Any good?"
"A total sensation, but it's largely in my own mind. It's hard
to think slow enough to get it all down."
"You should learn to type," the colonel suggested.
"I do," Tom said, "a hundred words a minute."
"It's a wonder they let you in the Army," Sandy observed.
"I joined," the private responded, "silly me. I thought it
might be a source of material."
"Well," the older male mused, "they advertise fun, travel, and
adventure, but of course they can't guarantee it."
They bantered on in like manner for some minutes, avoiding an
undercurrent not out of cowardice, but rather to let the intensity between
them build, then fell silent.
"There is a swabbie," the boyish colonel said after a minute of
silence.
"I've never done anything since I was a kid," Tom responded,
"but that's lack of opportunity (I'm not exactly a predator), not lack of
motivation."
"Did you do a lot as a kid?" Sandy asked.
"Pretty typical summer camp experience," the private said, "with
a councilor. He was about your age, now. I was nine."
"Robbie's twelve," Sandy said, "he's a cadet on a summer
program. If there's anything subtle about assigning a pilot a cabin boy,
in hopes he'll stay on, it's lost on me."
"Since Robbie will probably join when he's old enough, it sounds
like a two for the price of one deal."
"We could improve even that," the officer said, "you look about
thirteen, why don't you let me find out what it's like being a colonel by
seeing if I can make it happen."
"Are the cadets passed from man to man?" Tom asked.
"With a great deal of discretion," Sandy said, "as in `at their
discretion.'"
"Had Robbie been with anyone when he came to you?" Tom asked.
"No," the pilot said, "he'd been given what's known as the
Mature Subjects orientation; nothing overt, just reviewing the fact that
they'd be with young men cut off from the company -- why else would we
join? -- of women, and that the tradition of navies around the world, all
through history, varied from practices accepted as norms on dry land. Cute
as they are about it, they left things vague by the bucketful, suggesting
any cadet who was interested in learning more ask an officer he liked and
found attractive for details as soon as they berthed on their first
assignment."
"Subtle, with overtones of foreshadowing and mystery," Tom
mused, "add a little forbidden fruit and you end up with a package that
might have raised a respectful eyebrow in the time of Socrates."
"Well," the pilot said, "a carrier is a great place; noisy, with
lots of secluded compartments once you know your way around. They tell the
cadets in M.S. that if they're interested in having a particularly detailed
explanation of Navy secrets and rituals, they should ask the seaman or
officer of their choice about the Golden Spike."
"Sound like fueling the smoking lamp with lox," Tom noted,
referring to liquid oxygen rather than the kosher delicacy, "would result
in something of a paradox: a warship that was in actuality a floating fun
house."
"Yes," Sandy Locke agreed, "but the difficulty is publicizing
it, using the message to recruit. We can't come out and tell the truth;
that men's' attachment to boys begins at the core of philosophy and
intellectual development, as you said, in the time of Socrates; that it was
a substantial of not sole motivating factor when it came to organizing the
system of monasteries that kept useful Greek notions alive; that, while all
this was going on, yes, the Royal Navy dominated the globe giving us, as en
masse as was possible, civilization far beyond the wildest stories of
Atlantis, said navy attracting the best, and not just because England is an
island nation. In our era, I'm just getting a hint, through naval
electronic networks, mostly still top secret, that this same basic and
correct force of nature will engender sophisticated computer-based
communications between men and boys. It will take awhile, but if the drive
is strong enough to pile granite into monasteries and endlessly slog the
lousy Channel watching over the Frogs, who knows, an entire science-fiction
web of personal computers not only may come to pass, but probably will.
Next year, man on the moon, so how far can we be?"
"I wish they'd knock that shit off," Tom replied, "it's
precisely the football mentality someone of my class associates with a Mick
Moron. Ninety percent, it should be data links, and the other ten percent
should be terrestrial surveillance and astronomy. Maybe one for other
research, I mean shouldn't we leave something fucking up there for our
grandchildren to discover? Manned space flight, ending spam in a can, will
just delay the data flow and waste a lot of money. Rah, rah, junk."
"I'm with you," Sandy said, "but in my view it's all
tradeunions. Swing votes in districts where the extortion runs jobs for
votes. Hello? Huston is the problem. Even the plane I fly. It's a joke.
We can't support infantry with it, so why are we flying it? It burns a ton
of fuel an hour, takes forever to go supersonic, at which time it's out of
fuel and has to find a tanker and slog along at two hundred knots for ten
minutes, which would make Ronald Reagan bald, then fly approaches so fast
the pilot has to have the reflexes of a jackrabbit to hit anything; huge
initial costs, hours of maintenance per flying hour, and its only asset is
it looks good on a recruiting poster."
"And they're phasing out the Spad," the private added: "the
once, today, and always warbird. But the unions want to build the shiny
new one, and it is a beauteous bitch. Just so long as we never have a war
with some spoil sport actually shooting at your floating city, maybe
they'll get us through until someone wakes up and realizes that conflict is
only a game up to a certain point, then people get angry at each other, and
fifty thousand Spads with a hundred small carriers, with our communications
and ordinance technology, that China and Russia can't approach, would make
very sure no one got very mad ad us or any of our friends."
"I'll bet it did look good on camera, though," Sandy said.
"It fact," Tom responded, "but a dozen Spads would have looked
better. They send you absolutely poor bastard mother fuckers over Hanoi in
groups of four or six. With Spads it would be four to six hundred. Each
with eight tons of ordnance. You might lose five, guaranteeing, in the
process, expenditure of all anti-aircraft ammunition, with collateral
friendly-fire damage, down to the rim-fire cartridge."
"You have to meet Robbie," Sandy said, "because your theory fits
his of World War II. He thinks Roosevelt should have pulled us out of the
entire Pacific in '39, warning the Japanese if they continued their
invasions we'd be back in '43 with a thousand subs. If his dice had rolled
one digit differently at Midway or any of five other pure-luck battles, the
Japs, because of what they did to our p.o.ws, would have hammered the west
coast and the Canal with impunity, and that would have been a real clock
stopper."
"When unions call, presidents listen," Tom said, "and if they
take their eye off the ball in the name of populism, guess-who gets
deferred to build the junk."
"He was a colossally stupid man, and a mama's boy, according to
Robbie."
"Letting Hitler and Tojo run amuck at the same time does make
him kind of Harvard," the young Army private agreed.
"It's all flukes and extremes," Sandy said. Instinctively, both
males knew the longer they temporized by getting to know each other, the
more intensely they would be able to pass some of their enforced hour and
more together. "J. Edgar Hoover, Hyman Rickover, two totally insane
officials running vast fiefdoms while presidents play in the bathtub. We
should be so terrifying everyone shuts up and behaves from Belfast to the
Mid-East and here to Timbuktu, instead it's film at eleven."
"Two dimensions of the extreme:" Tom said, "the hippies don't
want us to be the world's policeman, but ask them who should be and they
become extremely quiet. Add the fact that every village on the globe of
over a hundred inhabitants has a policeman, and you cripple them."
"I thought marijuana did that," Sandy observed.
"Jesus, thank you, sir," Tom responded, reaching into the sleeve
pocket of his borrowed flight suit and extracting a metal cigarette case.
He decanted a fat joint and lit it. Toked and handed it to his superior
officer. "Imagine having to be reminded."
"I won't grow a beard or anything, will I?" the boyish colonel
asked.
"No problem," Tom replied, "I was paranoid too, then I read a
cover story in `Consumer Reports', I'm not kidding, and they gave it a
clean bill of health. Pointed out the fraud in `Reader's Digest' type
scare stories; also, that Jamaicans, for example, who smoke it the way we
do cigarettes suffer no ill effects, mental or physical. The first few
times, you do get some mild -- amusing -- hallucinatory effects, after
that, just a mellow buzz of no greater magnitude than, but different from,
a second cup of coffee."
"Nuclear submarines are good, grass is bad. How insane is
that?" Sandy mused, taking his first drag and coughing.
"It has its bad side," the writer said, "if you while away the
day with one joint after another in stoned lassitude, people are likely to
disapprove. On the other hand, you can function perfectly after smoking
any amount, something that's not true of alcohol or hard drugs, in addition
to which you can waste a day with `The New York Times' as easily as
anything."
"I'm beginning to function perfectly," Sandy agreed.
"The first time I smoked," Tom said, "was up at LZ Sharon. Half
an hour after my first joint they fired up about twenty flares just as I
was staggering -- I thought I was eighteen feet tall -- out the back of the
tent to take a leak. It was sort of Beethoven."
"Well," Sandy said, "I feel super, but it would be cool if
something exciting happened."
The two let it rest there for a few minutes, now settled
shoulder to shoulder in the bower of the parachute.
"If you have an extra," Sandy said after a cough-free exhale,
"I'd like to take one home to Robbie."
"I've only been doing it for three months, and over here," Tom
said, "I've never, you know, tried anything when I was stoned." He handed
over four of his dozen marijuana cigarettes and the colonel secreted them
in his own tin cigarette case.
"What does Robbie look like," Tom asked.
"Plain at first, tall, skinny redhead, but he has a sort of
half-shy smile that's more exciting than a year of Bunnies."
"And he reads a lot, obviously," the private said.
"That's how he picked me," Sandy acknowledged, "he asked around
as to who had the biggest library, and knocked on my door. The rest was
not necessarily history, though we read lots of that, too."
"I don't know if it's the pot talking or not," he continued,
"but I'm suddenly feeling overdressed. There's enough cloud cover we won't
roast, so what do you say to some rays?"
"Let's just be sure our boots don't drop off the chute," Tom
replied.
"If we need them, we're dead, anyway" the officer noted, and
after a mutual struggle lasting a couple of minutes they were lying back in
their camo boxers, clothes, arms, and accoutrements stored in a neighboring
pouch of the military grade parachute. So young did they look, so
youthful, original and svelte, they felt like children, like little boys,
like kids the age kids are when nothing suits so well as a story. Well,
Sandy Locke had a story.
"Mister Locke," Robbie Jones said, still trying to wean himself
from the "sir" thing, "can we go look for it now?"
"If you don't start calling me Sandy," the brand new commander
(colonel) said, "I'll have to draw up paperwork certifying you as a moron,
and your spike will have to wait."
"Okay," the twelve year old giggled happily, "it's just a little
hard to break the habit."
"Habits are dangerous," the pilot said, "flexibility and the
ability to adapt; respond to each situation as it arises, whether it's one
percent different or completely different, is essential. Ideally, you'd
never call me `sir' when we're alone, and never `Sandy' in company. In
other words, adapting on the fly and never flying with your head
up-and-locked."
"I guess they do kind of tell that in orientation," the boy
said.
"That's why we started off with that passage from `Hornblower',
" the commander said. "They're dying of thirst. A rain squall sweeps the
ship. Only Hornblower has the discipline to wait two agonizing minutes for
the salt to wash out of his shirt before he wrings it into his mouth. Only
Hornblower survives. And what habit is more primal than drinking when
you're thirsty?"
"But traditions are cool, too," the cadet responded.
"You don't know the half of it," the teacher laughed, patting
his student's head. They were sitting side by side on his bunk, the elder
male dressed in his tropic khakis, the boy in the traditional midshipman's
uniform.
"What?" Robbie asked.
"What you were just asking about," his older friend said, "The
Golden Spike, going to look for it. There's a secret tradition attached, a
habit pattern, if you will; we don't just go off helter-skelter and
willy-nilly."
"Oh," the twelve year old responded, looking up at the handsome
six-one aviator at his right flank, his face a study in curiosity.
"Talking about it goes right to the heart of Mature Subjects,"
the young man advised the boy, "so I want to be sure you're ready. That
you know me well enough and like me well enough for me to be the one to
teach you."
"I do," the boy reassured the man with all the solemnity of a
bride in a pastoral chapel.
"Good," the young man smiled, "because we go all the way from
habit, discipline, and conformity to the wildest edge imaginable, guided by
tradition. Do you want me to tell you how?"
"Please, Sandy," the boy affirmed with a nod.
"Okay," the officer said. "First, take things procedurally,
believe it or not, and step one is for you to step into the head and change
into your civilian underwear. I'll do the same while you are. Just tap on
the door and come back in here when you're ready. Okay?"
Robbie nodded, smiling shyly. He found the new garments on the
top of his duffle bag, blushing at its similarity to a girl's hope chest,
and at having packed the set of new, white full cut Fruit of the Looms
last. While he was gone, Sandy found his matching, by tradition, set and
slipped quickly into them, sitting back on his bunk and trying not to
fantasize excessively -- discipline -- on the slim, coltish redhead six
feet away. In a minute there was a hesitant tap and the door to the tiny
bathroom opened slowly.
"Hi," the boy whispered, blushing.
"Hi," the adult responded, standing to welcome the child's
return and guiding him to his seat on the bunk.
For two minutes they sat gazing up and down at each other.
"I'm meant to ask you questions," Sandy said, his voice a
half-broken throaty whisper, "to find out how experienced you are. The
tradition is that partners tell each other the truth, nothing made up,
nothing left out, but that can take awhile to get used to, so it's sort of
optional."
"I guess it'll have to be sort of left out with me," the cadet
said, "because nothing's happened."
"Okay," the instructor said, "how about in general? Do you know
what happens when people make love?"
"No," the boy said, "just some names for things."
"Okay," the elder repeated, "that brings up a good starting
point. Officers use the more formal names. Enlisted, their choice of
academic or funky. It's actually quite important, which you choose. The
subject is well covered in Shaw's `Pygmalion'."
"I think I understand," the boy in the white underwear said.
"Have you ever said `sperm' out loud?" Sandy coaxed.
"No," the boy whispered back, blushing.
"Okay," the man said, "same with me. "I had to be guided by
Father Sebastian. He brought me along until I used it. Since traditions
with altar boys are similar, at least in better congregations, to the
rituals of the Navy, we'll obey them, and maybe you'll want to say the word
at a very special time."
"Okay," the still flushed child answered, a hint of relief in
his beautiful boy's voice.
"Since you're a virgin," the instruction continued, "you'll
probably find the next part of the ritual pretty embarrassing, too."
"Okay," the cadet replied.
"You're a white shirt. What happens, if you're ready, is this:
we remain dressed as we are, if you were experienced, I'd take you
undershirt off, but you're a White Shirt, so we'll leave it on. Then we
take a few turns around the decks, holding hands, just walking around
saying hello to the guys. Sort of like publishing bans in the olden days;
letting everyone know we're about to become a mature couple. This is an
antidote to secrecy and furtiveness that result in confusion and jealousy,
plus the sight of a mature male hand-in-hand with a willing youth is
erotic. This is mostly the case with older males, but it's possible a boy
your age has seen a similar sight that might have excited and aroused you,
even though you didn't know why."
"That did happen at a motel once," Robbie whispered, "the man
was your age, the boy was like about nine. They played a lot in the pool
together, then walked back to their room, holding hands."
"Did you think about what was happening behind the door?" Sandy
queried.
"Yes," the boy whispered, again with his slow, shy smile.
"Okay," the man said, "then you understand. We'll spend about
half an hour walking around our general area of the ship; officers and
ratings, and everyone will be smiling and happy by the following watch.
Plus," the man added, "you'll be able to make other dates. Our promenade
together means a lot, but a sailor's value to the service is his ability to
navigate on the slippery slopes, though the lubricating agent is as likely
to be blood as ice. You're at liberty to choose a number of other
partners. The discretion you show in doing so, somewhere between committed
monogamy and lower bilge slut, will be counted as an open display of your
caliber as a person. Operating between the extremes, while occasionally
yielding to them, then pulling quickly away. Specifically, one extreme
will be the two of us being constantly together for the first week or so.
At the other end, will be occasional carefully organized orgies where
you'll spend an hour or two in a secluded compartment with a dozen young
adults. Between these, a typical profile would be you and I spending five
or six nights a week together, with each of us having two or three
semi-steady alternate partners. "
"What happens to boys who become sluts," the cadet wanted to
know.
"Nothing," Sandy said, "The only way anything ever happens is if
you let play interfere with work or duty. That's true anywhere. You will
be rated on the same criteria any student or employee is rated whether
you're a frigid ice maiden or Ronny Round Heels. It's the same lesson
Father Sebastian taught me in the tent on retreat. `Partake with modesty,
and you can take part forever. In spite of the intensity of the sensations
involved, it's all a huge exercise in common sense. One version keeps you
from driving ninety miles an hour in the city, as fun and useful as that
might be, and the other keeps your mail box filled with letters from old
friends until your eyes are too weak to read them."
"And we'll have something to write about," the boy said, seeming
now to glow rather than blush.
"Bull's-eye," laughed the handsome young teacher. "Stick to the
underlying doctrine, and yes, you'll even have something to write about
from time to time, without Penitentiary appearing in your return address."
"Why is it against the law?" Robbie asked.
"To protect children," the man explained, "because the way
American kids are brought up, many become homophobic at early ages and
would freak out at being touched. Since molestation is commonly ranked as
a fate-worse-than-death, the indoctrination causes high degrees of
paranoia, so various legislatures try to prevent the extremely prevalent
practice with blanket laws so they can tell their balloteers they've done
something. Enforcement ranges from a judge laughing `Get outta town,' to
twenty or thirty years in prison for an utterance or touch."
"How come nobody writes about it honestly?" the boy wanted to
know.
"Mailer tried," the officer said, "about two adolescents doing
kid's stuff on a camping trip. One of them kills the other a few years
later, but at least he doesn't use the word: `fug'."
"You have to be quite an optimist to see anything that good in
him," the boy said. "I like that."
Sandy laughed. The boy was a political savage, arch and highly
aware, an outright prodigy. Keeper, squared. How would he ever get any
sleep with that dazzling young head on the pillow beside him? He was
grease free, no assignments penciled on the post-up board for forty-eight
hours, so it was a problem for the back burner.
Meantime...
"You're in command," he whispered to the boy on his left, "if
you want to take the tour, just get up and lead on."
"I really like talking," Robbie responded, "but I guess we can
do that later." He stood, holding out his hand and slowly the two left the
compartment and walked barefoot down the linoleum hallways of the night
shrouded ship. No salutes, no fanfare; the universal response to their
presence was a friendly nod with moral seeming to increase palpably as the
long legged colt with his boy's classic rear drew no wolf whistles, yet
left whistling yeomen in their dozens in his wake.
"This is the highlight of the tour," Sandy whispered sharply
over the noise of the running ship. He threw the toggles on a heavy
bulkhead, and they stepped onto a waist gun turret hardly twenty feet above
the rushing water, and they fastened the water-tight door behind them, then
looked around.
"Wow!" Robbie exclaimed, whistling himself. It was the stars.
They can be a real shock to a suburban or city kid, never before having
been fully visible due to the ambient light of civilization.
"Ralph Waldo Emerson said what a story they'd be if they
appeared but once in a thousand years," the boy recalled. "Now I know what
he was talking about."
"If we were a country governed by men rather than vote mongering
poltroon," Sandy observed, "we'd have a star night every year. Turn out
all the lights from nine to ten on a warm clear, moonless night."
"Yeah," Robbie agreed, "tie it in with Sadie Hawkins day.
During the blackout, the girls can ask. Or," the dazzling child added:
"boys."
"Democracy is playing itself out about as the ancients said it
would," Sandy responded, "so, who knows, if we can survive the transition
back to monarchy, we might get a man up there yet."
"Meantime, join the Navy," Robbie suggested. And indeed the
spectacle was stunning. The so many billions of them. Once again, in
modern times were are less innocent; the Hubble telescope show's us that
planet Earth is stuffed in a relatively uninteresting backwater of the
known universe, but the scale is such that even though there might be
better, the good was sensational. The two most beautiful sites on earth
are a star drenched night sky and a coltish boy in his white cotton
underwear. Ethereal and material.
Robbie moved back against the tall athlete standing just behind
him. The adult's hands rested lightly on his shoulders. They watched,
wordlessly, for long minutes, stepping to the turret railing to gaze down
at the streaming sea, dazzling with its own star fire of phosphorescence.
"Is it going to happen now?" the boy finally asked.
"No," Sandy said, "too windy and noisy."
"I agree," came the lilting voice in answer. They stayed
longer, and only left because they knew variations of the show would be
available to them in the future. They toured the reactor, spent long
minutes watching the massive starboard propeller shaft spin all the horses
in Texas into the sea, then descended deck after deck until they were in a
carefully marked warren of passageways spreading out from the massive keel
of the ninety thousand ton ship.
"It looks impressive," Sandy commented, "but a team of frogmen
could slice it with a barrel of ammonium nitrate. And explosion this far
below the surface, something like sixty feet, results in forces of
displaced water that double the shock effect. Added to that the chances of
fire or accident and general breakdowns, and it's way too many eggs to have
in one basket."
"History says no entity has ruined as many civilizations as
their navies," the boy said, "so maybe if they exist to take boys to sea,
the kids should stay ashore."
"That's a reverse of my theory on the subject," Sandy laughed.
"What's that?" the handsome twelve year old asked as they made
their way into an anonymous compartment.
"That cowboying was such a popular trade, because they took boys
on the trail, that the price of beef fell, bringing it to the table of the
common man, who demanded more, thus necessitating the expansion of the
railroads and resulting in the meat and potatoes, no pun intended, of the
Industrial Revolution between 1880 and 1920."
"Is the attraction really that strong?" Robbie asked.
"It's overwhelming," the older male replied. "Probably the
underlying reason for the strictures attached to it, for making it taboo.
Something so intense must be bad, because there's no equal significance to
anything deemed good, especially religion. A man who has a willing boy,
first as a friend, then, occasionally, as a lover, pretty much has it all.
For example, if some sci-fi scenario like a plague wiped out almost all the
people of the U.S., but left the infrastructure, and everyone had tons of
cash and goods, how could you motivate a few of the survivors to do the
dirty work necessary to keeping up a civil lifestyle? The only possible
motivating force would be pedophilia, with the government taking over all
attractive children between eight and twelve, brainwashing them, and
renting them out to the workers in return for their labor. Either that or
whips and the brutish ways of slave labor. And as wacky as we are, we'd
probably choose the latter if the eventuality ever arose."
"I see why you wanted to come in from the turret," the boy said
as they seated themselves on folded tarps in what looked to be a store
room, "it's neat to be able to talk and not to have to be in a rush."
"Father Benedict taut that the first experience should be a full
one," the teacher responded, "that the man and child should spend at least
an hour or two together, preferably more, so the child doesn't come away
confused and upset from a furtive session of fondling and half-complete
groping "
"I understand," the boy said.
"Well, it's more complicated than that," Sandy explained,
"because we, church and navy, believe that a boy should be introduced
slowly, giving him plenty of opportunity to change his mind if things
aren't to his liking."
"Oh?" Robbie asked.
"Don't worry," his teacher assured him, "everything you want to
happen will happen tonight, but in stages."
"I hope they like the stages of a rocket," the boy mused, "you
know, not too much wasted time."
"Well," the adult said, "the first one is for you to sit in my
lap, facing me. We'll use our hands on each other, still wearing our tee
shirts. If that's successful, we'll retrace our steps back to our cabin,
displaying the success of our relationship by wetness on the front of our
white shirts. When we get to the cabin, you can invite me into the head
with you for a navy shower, loosely defined as bathing with a hot boy and
no water."
"When do I get to say the word?" the boy then asked.
"There's no rule, but most cadets figure it out on their own."
"Have you brought a lot of boys down here?" Robbie said.
"I always figured it bent a boy," the young commander replied
softly. "You have to remain so focused to get slowly ahead in the world,
you have to do so much unrewarded dirty work to make yourself valuable,
that there really isn't time for much in the way of deviant activity, and
if you look for shortcuts, for transient and superficial gratification, you
must-needs end up like Biff and Hap Loman; all shaken up with not boots to
wear, impressionable, flighty, thinking, for example, any writer is more
than a straw in a hayfield; that anyone has anything to say, when they
don't. You score grades in math. You become and accountant. You exchange
anonymous struggles with your own mind for a paycheck, or lose by letting
the mind win. Life is most perfectly illustrated by a throw away line in
"Death of a Salesman". An article of value has been sold to pay for Hap's
radio course. The voice from the ether. I can be part of that. Fill out
a coupon. Enclose a money order. Discover in volume one, chapter one,
that a vast amount of tedious concentration makes you a conversationalist
because no one else has bothered. That you are great for wanting to learn.
That you love rolling the nomenclature of the club off your tongue: ohm,
impedance, amplitude, potentiometer that you can call `pot'. Chapter Two
is discouraging because you're starting to learn that someone else thought
all this stuff up, and you can't even learn it. The futility of the
remaining text amounts to the No Trespassing sign in front of Fort Knox.
Why bother? Thus was invented the yard sale. Leaving a boy your age two
choices. First, inherit enough money to live on, or, second, hang tough on
all that miserable homework, grind and swallow with tired eyes, one inch at
a time, never looking more than an inch ahead. Ten unremitting years of
it, and lo and behold you are of value. It's not a case of `attention must
be paid,' that's just a line that happened to fit, but `attention will be
paid,' because it's worth someone else's valuable time to pay attention.
Get fierce out of bed and get rolling. Learn to love the smallest possible
role, the slickness of detergent on a dirty plate as it grows squeaky clean
in your hands. Learn to love the navy's philosophy: `take a steady
strain.' Learn to allow others to gallop and prance, rear and toss their
raven manes. Learn your algebra until you dream in it and love it. Learn
that the great philosophers dealt in ephemeral chaff and disagreed in whole
and in part on all aspects of religion, demonstrating the entirety of their
ignorance by even discussing it, and proving it by excluding reference to
man and boy, father and daughter, brother and sister. Learn that friends
are the most dangerous drug because their weaknesses are fun and their
diligence, boring. Learn that happiness must be paid for in advance, and
can only be rented, assuming you have the price. Learn that learning as
often as not results in yet more disconsolation; an educated person has
worries and frustrations undreamed of by the dumb-dumb. Learn that the
seed is craft skill and everything else, however it glitters in the rays of
the setting sun, is chaff. Learn that you are either exceedingly lucky, or
unlucky, to have a span of seventy-five years in the here-and-now. Learn
that the ultimate reward is for a man to take a boy in his arms and
whisper: `steady on, young fellow; let me be your all and get back to your
homework.' Under such circumstances, the man hopes the boy cheats, for
imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and a spark is brighter than
an ash. Learn to focus the guilt associated with excess into excessive
concentration on the mundane. Learn that things take decades, not days or
weeks. Learn that posturing is as important as performance, the difference
between the two, and their relationship to short and long-term gain. Learn
the Dewey decimal system. Learn that Horatio Alger wrote the only
significant books in history. Learn that as reading incites complexity, so
does wealth. Learn that the only gift of god is stupidity because it
simplifies things, making room for faith. Learn to type. Learn to
memorize. Learn that the pointless was put there for your entertainment,
in other words, to laugh at it. Learn that the world is always turning
toward the morning, that the sun also rises, and try not to let it piss you
off. Learn to forget and while you're at it learn the difference between
learning to memorize and learning to forget."
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind,"
Robbie said, going again to Emerson.
"Yes," his teacher agreed, "but remember Mr. Emerson, for all
his occasional forays into elegant prose, lived for years off his dead
wife's estate, would otherwise have eked a mean living as an iterant and
forgotten teacher and preacher. Essentially, he knew Greek, not geometry,
and Harvard or no Harvard, was of a set largely regarded as frivolous and
useless, a handful of them making something of a name for themselves as
entertainers."
"So learning is for its own sake?" the twelve year old asked.
"It's simply there," Sandy replied, "perhaps more accurately
described as an addiction than anything else. It is fun to go back through
history and hang heroes with an adroitly applied slip-knot, but only that."
"Who would you hang?" the beauty asked with his shy, half-smile.
"Shackelton," the man replied. "My boyhood hero, but I kept
reading and now see him as an empire building absurdity and lunatic
hypocrite obeying nobody while expecting unearthly obedience. His heroism
amounts to far less than that of a boy throwing a last grenade before
coughing his lungs out into the mud. His "Endurance" voyage would have
been pointless in times of peace and prosperity, and should have been a
hanging offense on the brink of war. He relied utterly on his boatswain
and refused the man any reward for his temerity in suggesting that
manhandling heavy lifeboats across three hundred miles of ridged ice might
not be the brightest idea ever to grace an English mind. "
"Cynicism as entertainment," Robbie responded. "I like it."
"You're learning," the man said.
They call it "bonding" nowadays, but in '68 it was still known
as "falling in love."
"I think so," the boy allowed, "I asked you if you've ever
molested a boy here, and get chapter and verse from the deviant book of the
facts of life."
"Hobgoblins need exercise," the officer explained, "and if I was
inconsistent, it's because there seems nothing worthwhile, at this point,
except being with you, and I'm mourning all I missed, the opportunities I
let pass while I pounded my typewriter re-writing and humanizing half the
training manuals on the ship. It got me a pair of eagles ten years before
my peers, but having let even one boy like you pass me by, in retrospect,
seems too high a price for anything."
"It's kind of neat being the first," Robbie noted.
"Almost religious, the way it's meant to be," Sandy responded,
"the long wait for the big miracle, for a boy like no other, and the
inconsistency of it, because I'm only twenty six."
"I don't think you can be in your twenties and fly through the
missiles of Hanoi," the child observed. "You must be eighty-six."
"Maybe that's why the world turned upside down when you came out
of the head in your white underpants," the commander agreed.
"Well," Robbie said, "I suppose lots of boys dream of being `to
die for.'"
"At least I can, now," the adult said, "knowing I've missed
nothing. That every reward in every Alger story has been dumped in my
lap."
"If you take my underpants off, I'll feel the same," Robbie
whispered.
"The sensation of feeling you nestled against me is beyond
comprehension," the pilot responded, "of being wet from you. Of your
liking it and wanting to be naked together once we get back to the cabin.
Of your waking up tomorrow the same boy you are now, uncorrupted, and not
having a sexual scapegoat, `oh, don't expect anything of me, I was molested
when I was a kid.' All beyond books, beyond religion, beyond even the
Desert of Doubt."
"How about the opposites?" the boy asked, "if I said I was a
stooge of the I.G., sent to turn in any officer making unseemly advances to
a youth dedicated only to serving and interested only in duty, honor,
country. How incomprehensible would that be?"
"There's more than one story of a pilot who had to amputate his
own limb to extract himself from a crushed airplane," Sandy said, "so I
guess we get by by archiving extremes in the land of the other guy.
Shackelton was heroic for almost freezing and starving to death,
repeatedly, and returning for more. I'd have gone into banana farming as
close to the equator as I could get after two days on the ice. So, I guess
your analogy fits and all I could say in defense of my honor would be to
deny nothing. You seem an enormous prize. Worth any risk. And, that shoe
on the other foot, for sake of conversation, how would I feel if I'd
rejected you on the chance you might be conniving? That's a puppy with a
bite."
"We were," the boy admitted, "indoctrinated to be on the lookout
for rapists, but that possibility disappeared the minute you pulled
Forester off the shelf."
"And to many boys your age," Sandy noted, "two hours of Horatio
Hornblower would be a form of rape."
"Extremes," the boy agreed with a nod and shy smile.
"Are you ready?" the adult whispered after some minutes of cozy
silence.
"Very," the boy whispered back, moving off the young man's lap
and standing, long, slim legs together, between his knees. He huddled to
his master as Sandy placed his hands gently on his hips, skinning the boy's
cotton briefs slowly down his thighs, until they dropped to the deck, then
stood so the child, his face nestled against his hard, athlete's belly, did
the same. Sandy sat, pulling the twelve year old slowly to him. Both
males realized `intensity' and `incomprehensible' were gross
understatements. So extreme were the sensations of their young loins at
the first carnal touch of child boner against adult erection that neither
spoke above a whispered mew.
"I wish we were naked," Robbie said.
"I'll consider that a command as soon as we get back to our
stateroom," the commander said.
"All night?" the boy asked.
"Yes," was the answer.
"Do we have to touch each other to get our shirts wet?" he
wanted to know.
"I'm not sure," Sandy said, "I feel kissing you would make me
cum in about ten seconds."
"I want to feel your hand on me," the boy said, "as soon as we
finish." He turned up his face, and the two became one in a way a
prostitute won't let a john be one with her. "I like it," the child said
some minutes later, "but it interferes with talking, and that's what I like
almost the most."
"We can talk while we do this," Sandy said, guiding Robbie's
hard penis under his tee shirt and coaxing the panting child to take his
seven-inch erection against his silky, twelve-year-old belly.. Well, in
theory. In actuality, they panted against each other, the intensity of
their breathing rising rapidly as they began tentatively masturbating each
other, bare thighs wriggling urgently together. Wordless for long moments.
"Is there anyone at home you can do this with?" Sandy whispered.
"Nick Fields," the boy whispered back, "he plays tennis with my
dad. I think he really likes me."
"Good," Sandy said, "you can be pretty open in approaching him.
Maybe tell him something happened to you on your cruise, and that you want
to talk to him about it in private. And try to find a younger boy, too,"
the adult added, "seven or eight years old. Legend has it they can be
extreme lovers."
"It'll give me something to write about," Robbie panted.
"Just earn it with algebra," the man advised, "be the best kid
you can be. Steady strain. Heavy on the mild, easy on the wild. If
you're nervous about turning out to be a homosexual, remember that by
survey, seven out of ten parents would not have their children, given a
second chance. The Sixties have broken something abstract and
ill-definable in our national spirit, Fonda and that cream of the cesspool,
so those statistics may get worse. And speaking of family, I've forgotten
to ask if you have any siblings."
"Five sisters," the boy panted against the man's chest, "eleven
down to six."
"Are you especially close to any of them?" Sandy quizzed.
"Angela," the boy said, "she's just nine, but we all get along.
I think mom and dad would have us again."
"If something happened between you and Angela, would they freak
out?" the adult asked.
"I think they'd think it was cute," the child whispered, "she's
always flirting and saying stuff like I'm the only husband she'll ever
need. If you come visit us sometime, maybe she'll change her mind and if
she's stubborn, Joan or Audrey can be pretty predatory when they put their
minds to it."
"I got on extra month's leave with my promotion," the man said,
"so if you think it would work out I can get a hotel near you and we can
all swim our brains out."
"I get itchy from chlorine," Robbie noted, "would you rinse me
off in the shower?"
"Unless you'd prefer that Angela do it," the officer replied.
"You could teach her to do it, you know, Navy style." the boy
said.
"I can hardly imagine taking a steady strain with a nine year
old girl," Sandy panted.
"Nor would she be likely to let you," the boy observed and Sandy
could feel his beautiful smile against his left nipple, even through his
cotton undershirt.
"Do you want to fantasize about something?" the man husked.
"If there's time," the boy rasped in reply.
"We're coming out of the bathroom of the hotel suite. You're
still reacting a little to the chlorine. By chance I have a bottle of
lotion in my luggage. Angela coos in delight and I teach her to apply it
thoroughly and evenly from your neck to your knees. If she sees us
together, she'll know you're very well developed so she'll probably want to
very mature with your naked body."
The couple became intense and urgent with each other, panting
and straining. "Do you know what she'd see?" the adult was just able to
gasp.
"My sperm?" Robbie said.
"Yes, baby," Sandy choked, shuddering, then silent save for the
huffing grunts of his release on Robbie's smooth belly as his own was
heavily slicked by the quaking, lolling preteen.
Both males in their nylon womb had skinned out of their boxers
and were cumming heavily on each other. Their passion half exhausted they
licked each other off, wildly kissing away the last minutes of their
reprieve. They quickly wiped off with their shorts and in five minutes
were again in uniform, addresses and invitations exchanged. War time.
Extremes.
"Any survivors of naval intervention are asked to respond, ASAP,
this frequency," Bing's voice came over the emergency transceiver. Right
on schedule. Sandy handed the radio to Tom.
"Did you see Tech Wilke," the photographer asked.
"Affirmative," came the crackling response, "they say a good
Marine supply sergeant can work more miracles than any six ancient gods.
He sent in your film, reloaded the camera with four hundred feet of
negative film. I have it with me."
"That's why they invented poker," the Army boy said.
"What did you guys talk about," the inbound pilot asked.
"We quoted Emerson to each other, what did you think?" Tom
replied.
"I don't think around the Navy," Bing said, "I run."
"I always thought your side of the family was a bit heavy on
morons," the cousin replied.
"Okay," the chat continued, "heads up. You're going to have to
sweat it out for twenty minutes. S-2 has you both in for Congressionals if
we can spring this trap."
"Sandy has five sister, it turns out," Tom responded, "they'd
really like that."
"Yes, the folks back home," the radio said, "speaking of which,
I can make a preliminary quick pass and drop you the camera."
"Negative," Tom said, "there's plenty of stock footage of Puffs.
I couldn't get anything meaningful."
"Okay," Bing said, "probably save a lot of hassles."
"That's what I had in mind," the private responded.
"So what do you have in mind?" the older cousin asked, wondering
what the boychick would do in the absence of his beloved Panavision.
"A little target practice," the soldier responded. "Twenty
minutes should be about right. Tell your inbound warbirds ground zero will
be three hundred meters on a radial of seven-zero from our position."
"Wilco," said the little radio, the voice now clear. "Be
careful."
"Wilco, same to you, see you in thirty," Tom said, handing the
radio back to what he took, being Army, to be a colonel.
"And your idea is?" Sandy asked.
"Something that came to mind while I was fantasizing about you
with Robbie's sisters," Tom replied.
"Himmel," the pilot said.
"Just a scheme. Elementary, my dear Watson."
"I'll just bet," the older male laughed.
"What I need," the private responded, "is a silencer. Maybe a
cocoon of chute and some boughs."
Preferring action, what with time pressing, the younger male
retrieved the bush knife and started hacking the vegetation surrounding the
trapped parachute. "I get the picture," the officer said, taking the knife
and forgetting anything about `steady-strains' at least for the moment.
Tom used the interval to retrieve the AR-15 and nestle down into a pocket
of the nylon canopy. Sandy wrapped the rifle, extending the cocoon well in
front of the muzzle as Tom toyed with the rifle's peep sight and wriggled
into a prone position. "All those girls -- I hope you'll forgive me
someday -- reminded me of a troop of monkeys," the soldier explained, "and
while we were talking -- I hope you'll forgive me someday -- I noticed a
troop in yonder tall tree."
Satisfied with tactical aspects of the situation, the boy
squeezed off his first round. Even at the thousand foot distance Sandy and
his little friend could hear a screeching ruckus "Enormously cool," the
officer said.
"Keep your eyes peeled below," the soldier said, "if anyone's in
the immediate area they might react."
Again the highly muffled crack of the rifle with its echo of
frantic chatter. Sandy squeezed his shoulder. "V.C.," he whispered, "but
they're falling for it at flank speed."
"Poor bastards," Tom whispered back. "It's hard to remember
they drill holes in the heads of the children of village elders, at a time
like this."
"The communists in mysterious ways, their wonders do perform,"
Sandy responded, little pity in his voice.
There was nothing to do other than wait out the remaining
fifteen minutes as the prologue played itself out. Tom fired at long
intervals, each shot becoming more muffled as his partner continued working
quietly on the improvised "silencer." This facilitation became unnecessary
after three more shots as the local troops opened fire with rifles and
grenades. A second squad of Viet Cong sprinted under the love nest, none
looking back to beckon followers, a good sign. "Jesus, it's just like a
movie," Sandy said, "they always have a scene with some kind of counter
clicking off the seconds."
"I think it's meant to add to the tension," the photographer
said.
"What tension would that be?" Sandy laughed. "From here the
score looks like Army sixty, Navy two, with ten seconds to play in the
fourth quarter."
"That score will be evened the moment the shower door clicks on
the two of us with Robbie and Angela," Tom responded.
"Throw in a tour of Concord and it's a done deal, Emerson," the
commander said.
"Enormously cool," the private intoned.
They passed the final minutes in silence as the distant fire fed
off itself in the manner of a feeding frenzy. A few stray rounds tore
through the canopy of the improvised tree house adding an element of
tension to the scene. Bing's voice came over the radio as the second hand
of Sandy's watch swung through the twelve. "Rick wants to know what to set
the lens of your camera at," he said.
"I guess f-8," Tom replied.
"He's got the lens at the wide angle. Thirty-five millimeters.
How's that?"
"Perfect," the photographer.
"Okay," Bing said, "we're tally-ho on you guys. You should hear
the Puff any second. He'll come low over your backs and circle your tree
at two hundred meters."
"Good," the private said, "they're having at it all by
themselves, but who needs survivors in a case like this?"
"Understand," Bing laughed.
The engines of the converted transport rose quickly to a
thundering roar, the C-46 roared over Position Bravo, and in seconds was
banked in a hard left turn over Position Alpha, its three mimi-guns firing
at a combined rate of 180 rounds a second. For half a minute there was not
sound other than the lethal grinding growl of Puff the Magic Dragon, then a
shock of silence as the transport leveled its wings and flew off. Next
came the heavy Jolly Green Giant helos, firing white phosphorus missiles,
then the lumbering CH-46 Tom busied himself with his knife, cutting shrouds
around the perimeter of the canopy as he and Sandy gathered the chute
around them. Bing brought the chopper to a hover in the treetop and the
young couple piled aboard their equipment, scrambled aboard themselves, and
hauled the canopy aboard after them. Many hands made light work, and in
half a minute they were off, Rick, the crew chief, squatting at the rear of
the helo cabin, catching the action on the fresh roll of movie film.
Before they left the area, Rick handed Tom the camera and the private
posted himself against the door gunner's .50 and filmed the Rangers
repelling from the hovering Jolly Greens. Body count
CHAPT. 2
The battered Royal tapped smoothly and steadily. Fast.
Follow chase, follow pace, follow race
Always place, never place, maybe place.
Ketchup is, ketchup red, ketchup by the case.
Ketchup head, ketchup eyes, ketchup face
Bing entered from the showers and sat beside his younger
cousin, looking at the flying keys. "They say seeing is believing," he
said, "but if you don't slow down I'll never know."
"It's too bad you graduated from Harvard in '66," Tom replied,
typing on, "I hear they've decided to teach reading."
"Those rumors come out of the woodwork every two or three
years," Bing nodded. "I just can't believe you do poetry at the speed of a
Katy Gibbs secretary."
"It a literary cop-out," the typist said, "poetry. Oscar
Wilde's rebuke, he on the receiving end, led to his knocking the rhyme and
meter crap off and writing `Ernest'."
"Now you tell me," the older cousin said. "Since you're
officially off duty and here in transit, I'm going to hazard a wild guess
that you have not read the bulletin board."
"Sorry," the soldier replied, "I was sending Rick's film off.
Shoulder to the wheel. You've heard the story. What did I miss?"
"My first order as field grade was a command performance of
your work, and maybe a couple of mine -- as long as the Coke bottles miss."
"And we have...?"
"Most of an hour."
Tom keeps typing, maybe, to please his cousin, a little the
faster.
War of toys, war of noise, war of boys
War of bang, war of Trang, war I sang,
War of hoof, war of hand, war of fang,
For a boy war of bell rang and rang.
Glamour high, glamour low, glamour in the air,
Glamour lights, lights the eyes, of the lady fair.
`Cept the Navy, yes the Navy, for that is just
where
A doubling of the queens makes a perfect pair.
"Let's see," he mused, pausing, "I could rhyme `stick' with
`dick', but that would be yet another Navy thing, and if the urban leftists
and their pet yappers and snappers keep winning round after round, we may
need a ride out of here.
"My assumption is," Bing responded, "you know more about it
than I do."
"The Navy or the snappers?" the private asked.
"Probably both," Bing admitted.
The journalist went back to his typing. "I just wish they
wouldn't call it a war," he said. "We probably won't lose a hundred
thousand men. That's hardly more than a battle or two, and a fraction of a
single major battle.. It's a minor police action at an intense stage for
the moment. Cheap victory, win, lose, or draw."
"Easy for you to say, three days from a one-way ticket on
Seaboard," the major groused.
"The Germans lost ten million slowing down the Bolsheviks,
just for one item of perspective" the writer replied, typing on. "But if
we catch a break and Russia is flat-footed enough to try something to
achieve their idea of a world police state, something to even the score, it
may get kind of bloodless. They can't afford it. They'll be ruined.
Hell, the subs are doing a good job of that, of an by themselves, and
bilaterally, unless I miss my guess. We have the advantage of Master
Charge, so we'll win in the short run, but the payday and Armageddon may
turn out to be more than kissing cousins."
"Sure you're not just rationalizing your Navy jokes?" the
major asked.
"If I was king of the scrambled eggs," the younger male said,
"I'd run recruiting ads themed on meeting that special someone. Not
holding hands or blowing kisses, nothing noxious, but, you know, for a few
years of a kid's life, it's not the worst choice he could make. Join the
Navy and see each other. But more subtle than that. Maybe a new motto:
`We can Handle It. Emphasize Childless couples. No nappers nipping or
nipping nappers; no need for multiple crappers. Tie it into freedom of
choice and the American way. In said of wailing, lingering good-byes in an
emergency, it would be: `race you to headquarters.'"
Bing watched as Tom typed on.
Rue the day red, the day the Red rules,
Slay the beast cool with capitalist tools.
Stalin was host to a party of fools,
With Roosevelt and Churchill as tethered
...mules
"I take it that's not for `Stars and Stripes'" Bing said.
"History's half backhands," the cousin responded, "makes it
fun. If it hadn't been for the grand acting-out of personal paranoia and
individual vendetta, the population explosion would have been worse for
Europe than three wars. Hitler half bled the bear, and Vietnam will cook
it a good one, probably sooner than later.
"Churchill hated Hitler because he was a corporal, when he was
sober enough to put rank to face, otherwise, he would have allied with Hess
and the dangerous and pointless Russians would be dining in the very home
of caviar and wearing mink from infancy. Toward the end of the war the
great cameraface issued an extreme order than no correspondence was to be
destroyed. When Himmler, unlikable enough, I'm sure, extended a peace
feeler, brandy breath tore it up, puffed, pouted, and sent more boys.
"His former glories included vastly escalating the First World
War by disguising gun boats as trade vessels and ambushing German subs
approaching by the book, and Gallipoli. He should have been shot,
repeatedly, but his face was half the front page, so the media stooges gave
him to England as her kind of tears.
"Meantime, the bad one was hand-designing the VW, the
Interstate system, and encouraging his scientist to work on synthetic fuels
and plastics, high-fidelity audio, jets, rockets, and a fit and focused
youth culture.
"If he overdid it, look at our Founding Father; nothing more
than a pack of Boston pirates and smugglers trying to kiss the tax
collector. We're in a very bad position to criticize. The first rebels
attacked Loyalist families by boarding up the exits, and burning their
houses. They starved Boston so ruthlessly, most of the survivors ended up
in Halifax.
"Think of our own ancestor, William Emerson. He walked
thousands of miles exchanging pulpits with other New England Anglican
ministers, spreading the word: raise troops, drill troops. Send supplies
to Concord. They did, for years, under the tyrant English king. `We may
be wrong a thousand times, but we still know what's right, and our king of
a thousand years we'll fight with all our might.' That might as well have
been their cockade
"Eventually, the British marched to Concord, not on it, with
strict conduct orders, in writing. William Emerson was the first one to
answer the alarm bell and raved on the ridges until cooler heads prevailed.
"And it's a story with and ending. William Emerson moved
Harvard out to his church in Concord, and was appointed Chaplain of the
Revolution by Washington. Bravo.
"Self-same William Emerson then joined his parishioners on the
march to Ticonderoga to join Ethan Allen. Guess what happens. Hardly are
they over the first horizon when the men taste freedom from damned old god.
Emerson is so appalled by their drinking, cursing, and behavior, in
general, he resigns his commission on the spot and books for home. The man
of ten thousand wilderness miles, undoubtedly mortified by his enduring
idiocy, contracts dysentery and dies of it in West Rutland, Vermont.
"It's all History 505, everything else is saccharine
liberty-tree swill and flummery concocted for lowest-common-denominator
consumption, by the very accidental winners."\
"If you had a big face, one to match your mouth, that was the
criteria then and often enough still is. Fuss and noise for the media
boys; let mothers and wives find other joys. And sometimes they're right.
T.R. was in building the Panama Canal. James Polk, in Manifest Destiny.
Scholars probably know of other examples where a president actually did
something; acted, instead of re-acting very, very late."
"You should run for Congress," Bing said.
"From it, fast," Tom laughed. "How can you tell the truth if
someone might be listening? Besides, a someone the U.S. Army thinks is
worthless might raise questions in voter minds, however gleaming such a
credential would appear to the ever-dippin' hippies and allied hep cats and
cool-comb cruisers."
"How about flight school?" the major asked, by this time
inured to the rapidly growing stack of foolscap beside the rattling Royal.
"What happened there?"
"You mean: `what's my excuse, this time?'" the writer replied.
"Bigotry. Good life lesson for a white bread like me to be singled out do
to ethnic origin.
"I came in first in the ground-school segment, out of four
hundred, just as I'd come in first out of four hundred on the p.t. test in
Basic. I wrote for the Ft. Wolters paper, the only Candidate ever to have
done so. On my twenty-first birthday the whole mess hall, four hundred,
sand `Happy Birthday', the only time I ever heard that even by a single
table.
"Once, when I marched my Flight by an intersection, the whole
of them, on the march back to base, sang `We Love you Birdie,' from the
musical, but it was `Emerson', not `Birdie'.
"I ran into a weird flight situation," the private continued.
"The I.P. cut the throttle for an autorotation. We were out over
featureless terrain, so I headed for a tree to give me a better sight
picture for the flare. The instructor thought I was going to hit it. I
compounded this by really making a mistake. I rolled the throttle the
wrong way when I was initiating an autorotation at a staging field. The
engine revved instead of cutting. The I.P. said if it had happened
anywhere else, he would have just laughed, but everyone heard it, so he
gave me a second pink. They recycled me to another training company.
There I had the honor of meeting a porker of a Southern Gentleman and his
even fatter corn pone sidekick. Not a good place for a dead cute Yankee
boy, and they nitpicked me on spit and polish. The major who made the
final decision was fat. Coming in first in ground=school, writing for the
paper under extreme pressure, meant nothing. `Happy Birthday' and `We Love
you Emerson', meant nothing. Three fat ole boys didn't like my smart, trim
ass, so I went off to be a full-time journalist.
"In their defense, I should point out that one-third of
Candidates were eliminated, so being a Tac must have been the most
miserable of jobs, unless one's into that kind of thing. I'm glad I made
it easy for them in one instance.
"Plus, there's a good side. Being defined at useless -- my
elimination was for `lack of motivation' -- limits future options enough to
take writing seriously as a heart attack."
"You'll make it there," Bing said.
"Never commercially," Tom replied, "I've read too much
history. I know how wrong things can go, and how fast they can go wrong.
The extreme importance of national attitude and moral. This makes me a
Chicken Little. Not one wants to read it, and I hardly blame them.
Fiction before forty is the province of the one-trick pony, meantime it's
pander to the urban left or go to hell. That leaves going for all the
gusto, like the Schlitz ads advise, try to gain enough experience, in
general, to make the grade at some point. Probably good to finish my duty
tour, including a combat tour, at the same rank I left Basic. Perspective.
A thread, if not a rope, around the extremes, is the name of the game."
"You've proved to me," Bing said, "you are the most talented
person in the world. I'd almost say you have more talent than all other
artists, combined, but that would be hard to measure."
"One paean to socialism," the younger male grinned, "and I'd
be the wonder of Fifth Avenue. But I'm a mongoose to their cobra, no
changing those spots. They dote on Machiavelli and I'd slit the
manipulating moron's throat. Nor would they suffer my agenda with the
least trace of gladness. I believe history is so filled with opportunistic
buffoons and empire-building lunatics, with multitudes of lazy
ineffectuals, that it offers a paucity of guidance in our day; that there
are completely viable and historically successful alternatives in personal
relationships that are flat-out damned and in all states against the law --
laws made by the same congenital idiots letting monster stores and
fast-food joints turn our home towns into ghost towns, by the thousands.
No commercial value to a love-oriented sexualist who thinks age and
relationship are irrelevant, even if I doted on the convenient boxes for
things like Great Writers which so besot the liberal."
"In any event," the Marine said, "they should have promoted
you to captain when you graduated; on the ground school placement, if
nothing else. That's what we really use out here. Jockeying the ship is
donkey's work, once you've got a hundred hours. You wear it more than you
fly it."
"The first day at Ft. Wolters," Tom said, "they assembled us
in an auditorium. `Eyes left,' they ordered, `eyes right. Eyes down. One
of the three of you will not graduate.' I'd have done the exact opposite.
Look left, look right, look down, the only way the three of you won't get
your wings at Ft. Rucker is if we export you in an aluminum box. Four
hundred instant fire-breathing dragons. And it's all such a pollywog joke;
over here, zero. From hourly inspections of navel lint to no inspections
at all. If they'd ever hit us hard at Sharon, we had word zero on where to
assemble or what to do. Of course Charlie would have been tinkering with
about three thousand guys armed to the teeth, and cowboys and Indians, born
and bred, so we'd have figured things out as long as the Os stayed out of
the way."
"It's just a little hard keeping up," Bing mused. "What
happened today. Now you're turning out manuscript at about a hundred words
a minute, conversing the while. Different. `Extreme', to use your word."
"Incest," Tom replied, grinning happily. "Grandpa and Grandma
were first cousins. Who the hell was an Emerson or a Forbes going to
marry, a Cabot or a Lowell? I'm the god in the equation. A savant, easy
on the idiot. Genetic wonder boy. Problem is, such a level of talent
requires a cool few decades of practice to harness and focus. It'll be
awhile."
"Speaking of which," Bing said, "its time for the Command
Performance. How many pages have you got?"
Tom removed a final sheet from the typewriter and riffled the
stack. "It's only poetry, ten."
"Too bad we're double-first cousins," the officer responded,
"I wouldn't be accepted as a witness for `Guinness'."
"Jeez, man, it's poetry, it writes itself." the private
replied, unable to hide a trace of a flush.
A captain entered leading a cadre of fellow pilots from their
own and the surrounding hooches. They formed two ranks against the wall of
the Quonset hut and came to attention. The leader turned to face the newly
promoted officer. "Begging the major's permission," he intoned, "we
believe it's a performance of thyme and verse we have in store. A bunch of
the boys decided to add a little more."
"The Concord Hymn," he announced, "written by our new major's
great great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in commemoration of the
dedication Daniel Chester French's "The Minuteman" statue which stands at
the point of first American fire."
Written as a hymn, the ensemble sings it to the original
(traditional) score.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze
unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard
`round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept, Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And
Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps
On this green bank, by this soft stream We set with joy a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem, When like our sires our sons are gone.
Sprit that made those heroes dare To die and leave their children free, Bid
Time and Nature gently spare This shaft we raise - to them - and thee.
As is the poem, the rendition was beautiful and
stirring. "Yeah, cuz,, only poetry," Bing whispered.
. . .
The flight line an Phu Bai. Every boy's fantasy of how the
world should be arranged. Scrambling Phantoms by the dozen, blasting off,
blasting off, helos churning, fuel trucks, munitions carriages, more jeeps
than Los Angeles, loud, shrieking, jet perfume, rippling sight lines,
scenic, million-dollar-a-minute chaos, but, mostly, hot.
Bing huddles with his crew, gesturing toward a nearby ship.
Finally all nod and he walks to the craft and settles in the right seat.
He places a can of coke on the deck of the co-pilot's station and goes
through the starting procedure as the technicians continue their
maintenance routines. The outside air temperature measures 112 F. The sun
glared through the windscreen. The only breeze is the exhaust of taxiing
fighters. The thermometer in the cockpit reads 126 F. The engines whine
to life and the rotors begin turning. Gain speed. The crew chief stands
at the verge of the radius of the spinning blades. He holds a long pole
vertically and, with the rotors at speed, eases the marking stick against
the tips of the spinning blades (each is marked with a different color
chalk). A ship undergoing a similar inspection, a hundred feet up wind,
pours its turbine gasses over "Sad Suzanne". Interior temperature rises to
130 F. Bing removes his helmet but it does little good. Looks at the
dripping can of cola three feet away, at the spiking thermometer, back and
forth. The crew chief is having difficulty obtaining the precise
measurement as he blasted by jet and rotor wash from taxiing ships.
One-thirty-three. Simultaneously: the crew chief looks to make eye contact
with the pilot. The pilot makes a quick grab for the cold can. The crew
chief's hand flies to his mouth, his scream of warning lost in the pulsing
overburden of ricocheting sound. The cyclic control stick slams to its
forward extremity with the speed and violence one would expect releasing
the steering wheel of a truck arching through a turn at speed. The tips
are traveling at the verge of the speed of sound, in opposite directions.
Out of control, as the front wheels of the truck would be, they crack into
each other. Instant catastrophic imbalance. In the beginning, shrapnel
everywhere. A yard of scaling rotor blade pierces the crew chief. He's
half dead before he hits the ground. As the violent forces fully grip the
Boeing, it quakes and humps, bucks, and lurches. In two seconds, all the
maintenance specialists are entangled in the exploding ship. None survive
ten seconds. For thirty more seconds the machine pounds itself, quaking in
ground resonance, and finally, looking like a dropped egg, comes to a
smoldering rest.
Men run to help. Protected by the pilot's position
immediately forward of the front rotor mount, Bing has survived. Shaken,
he stands slowly, in his left hand, the entire collective control stick
trailing enough colored wires to constitute an order of spaghetti. As he's
guided to an approaching ambulance, a final drop of Coke spills from the
dented can to the twisted wreckage of the cockpit deck.
"That happened six weeks ago," the major said as they flew
along on a routine mission. "They blamed it on a maintenance problem, or
maybe undetected combat damage. Mack was dead so he couldn't speak for
himself.
"I've still got the collective in the bottom of my locker.
I'll show it to you when we got back. Forgot with all the poetry."
"Nothing much hotter than the cockpit of a stationary
aircraft," Tom said. "Are you sure you didn't pass out or anything?"
"Wish I had," the pilot said. "I happened to be looking
right at Mack when the piece of blade hit him. The ultimate punji stake.
It's pretty much all or nothing in this game; pilots rarely see anyone get
hurt, just like we never see the V.C."
"I've been lucky that way, too," the younger cousin said.
"Sharon gets hit a lot, especially at our end, but it's just 81mm mortars,
about like hand grenades. Bursts the tires and radiators in the motor
pool, but all we ever got was holes in our tent.
"In a way it was funny," the soldier went on. "We had three
155mm howitzers within two hundred feet. They used to salvo late at night.
Then we'd get hit and everybody'd yell: `Incoming!' just like in the
movies."
"You might try humor, you know," Bing suggested, "Funny can
be money."
"Money isn't the thing," the private responded, "it's too
extreme a talent to be tampered with by editors, however well meaning.
Solo act. God's voice to the people's ear. They made the bible such a
hodgepodge of wacko nonsense anyone can use it to justify or deny anything,
with no more scholars agreeing than lawyers agree. The Sixties have
muddied things up so -- Abbe Hoffman-wise -- it's going to take some icy
clear talk to filter the slime. No one wants jokes on themselves, free or
paid, and yet the dithering foodles of the left are not only the only joke
in town, they're the biggest joke in history. Unfortunately, slicing and
dicing them is so easy it's worthless, which is doubly sad for the industry
because tree huggers are so stupid that if it paid to ridicule them, you
could do it forever and never run short of material."
"Comic perpetual motion," Bing commented.
"Yeah," Tom responded, "but the rub is they're burning the
whole country to fuel the funny fire, and the jokes won't last longer than
they do, because they'll destroy everything on their own way to oblivion."
"I guess I see," Bing mused over the intercom."
"No one does," the writer replied, "no one can. I've read a
thousand books, hundreds aloud to Gran, who's read fifteen times that
number. MENSA tested my I.Q. Taking the test cold, I aced it in half the
allotted time, then cut that in half. The number came out at four hundred.
Of course, that's a bit of a puzzle because I don't think I'm half as smart
as the guy who thought up the test. Anyway, by their standards I'm the
smartest person in the world, probably who ever lived, but there's only one
way to prove it to myself, and that's to end up as a novelist. Long-ball
virtuoso, out there on a wing and a prayer for seven or eight hundred
pages, far exceeding, on every page, anything which has come before other
than a few highlights of the classic greats. Even then, I have no shot at
the mainstream. All I'll ever be is a niche writer, and, if I find a
suitable specialty, I'll leave it up to future audiences to determine
whether that's my problem, or theirs."
"Well," Bing said, "you zapped `em high and zapped `em low
last night."
"But that was just poetry."
"Remember Nassau, Christmas, '59," the older cousin asked.
"Affirmative," Tom said into his mic. "That was a study in
extremes. Dad spent a fortune on that great ingot of a North Sea pilot
boat, the thing almost drew nine feet of water, and the best fun, by ten
times, was when you rented that little Pen Yan with a twenty-five. Skiing
and exploring the sub pens on the far side of Nassau Harbor, a place I
could definitely have lived forever."
"They were amazing," Bing affirmed.
"Imagine the audacity of the Germans building sub pens on
English soil right on the Caribbean trade routes. Talk about cool."
"You're kind of for them," the pilot noted.
"We come from the Elbe," Tom responded, "so I thought I might
try being a bit objective. My fancy camera got me into a place I shouldn't
have been and I saw things I shouldn't have seen. Specifically, raw
intelligence data from East Germany, with a clip of film. It showed a huge
warehouse holding seventy-six thousand big mail bags, acres of them, each
stuffed with dossiers gleaned by a secret police force consisting of
one-third of the population of the country. That was what Hitler stopped,
the total and mindless police state. Yes, he also ran one, but in his,
mankind advanced dramatically, while Stalin stole industrial secrets and
killed at his dinner table. Three thousand miles is a lot of water and it
does a convenient job of diluting the reality: the Germans were going to
become Bolshevik slaves, as millions of Russians did, or the Slavs, German
slaves, the answer of last resort. Hardly gunboat diplomacy in a banana
republic."
"Thick," Bing murmured over the headset.
"Too thick for poetry," his younger cousin agreed.
"I didn't know that much about the first William Emerson,"
Bing said, "just that he was town minister for some years before the war.
"Grandma just finished her book on him," Tom said. "She let
me read the galleys. He was the third generation of the family to graduate
from Harvard, though he was suspended for throwing ashes at the door of the
Hebrew school. He served Concord for over a decade before April, 1775, as
I said before, exchanging pulpits with other official ministers all over
New England. He writes with delight of occasionally making part of a
journey on a borrowed horse.
"He must have been the densest man who ever lived, preaching
against a tyranny that hardly raised an eyebrow as he formed militia
battalions -- The Minute Men -- by the dozen and had arms, including
cannon, sent to Concord, seventeen mikes from English headquarters, by the
ton.
"And not only was he bad news on the national front, he was
hardly much of a man when it came to his family. He got mad and quit after
a few weeks, over a little bawdy behavior by men headed into the jaws of
war. What a loudmouth creampuff. And the story ends on a note that
typified American behavior for centuries, and probably still does. Because
he'd resigned, Phoebe and the kids got no pension. Ten years of all-out
effort, with the result of winning early conflicts which otherwise would
have been routs, and not a dollar for his family from a grateful nation
a-bornin'.
"It's not just bad, it's outright sewage. The lot of them.
Hancock and Sam Adams, scoundrels and pirates, the half-mad pamphleteers,
Washington groveling for a British commission. Tavern scut and
recalcitrant rabble, the same garbage you find me-firsting it when it comes
to the extortion of tradeunionism. A great big slop of a joke, that,
different wind on a different day, would have made Frogs, thanks to
Franklin, out of the lot of us. And then the backhanding gets extreme.
Louis XVI bankrupt France, taking it out of the majors, forever. The
Haitian brigands truncated the country's presence in the Caribbean, leading
to the Louisiana Purchase. Bing, bang, enough random and fickle miracles,
we make it through, thanks to a few hundred inventive and entrepreneurial
geniuses with things to work with like mountains of coal, oceans of oil,
and ranges of iron, and no thanks to the ludicrous inanities of democracy,
of letting the children rule the family."
The turned right, south, and headed down the coast toward Da
Nang. Bing spoke: "Add The Bell System and The Burling ton Route, plus
RWE, and governors Winslow and Bradford of the Mayflower, and I guess we've
done our share."
"Your name alone," Tom responded, "the first dying on the way
back from Vermont, our uncle, Bill, killed training for the Eighth Air
force. Not to put too fine a point on it, you, the third, are in something
of a family hot seat."
"I'm going to name my boy Sue," the pilot laughed. "By the
way, cuz," he added, "if you look off to the right, you'll see Moon Beach.
Everyone uses it for you know what, this time of the morning.
Scene without words. The six helos continue south, altitude
about a hundred feet off the water. "Sad Suzanne" suddenly descends to an
altitude of less than six feet, speed, one-thirty knots.. The water is
covered with a smattering of fishing sampans. :"Sad Suzanne" aims for one,
speeding over with such violence the fisherman leaps in panic, capsizing
his hollow-log dory. In panic, he's barely able to get a hand on the slick
bottom of the boat, he claws uselessly at it, and disappears below the
surface in a mad flailing splashing. "Sad Suzanne" heads for another
sampan.
"I hope that guy could swim," Tom said, not having the heart
to look out the open rear loading door of the speeding aircraft.
"Gran was famous for her early morning dips at The Narrows,
and she's the world's healthiest eighty year old (she lived to be 102), so
I'm just spreading the wisdom."
"Wouldn't maybe fifty feet, you know, sort of do the trick?"
Tom mused into the headset.
"This is the Marines," Bing replied, "fifty feet would be you
Army guys.
"And inches would be the Navy?"
"That's my cuz," the pilot laughed. "So, having done flight
school, how'd you ed up a private E-2?"
"Help from my friends," Tom replied, "I had a strange time at
Ft. Hood, which is where I was assigned from Ft. Wolters. I worked on `The
Armored Sentinel'. Yes, I was above the fold on every issue starting with
my first, and yes, I did a lot of my own photos, but they'd stick me on
motor stables nine hours a week to maintain my jeep. I got sort of the
heebie-jeebies at the colossal waste of time. You haven't lived until
you've polished and entire jeep with oil from the dip stick and a piece of
cloth in the freezing wind and blowing dust. Then it was Army Game Time.
Two chairbound lieutenants made very pointed suggestions as to how my jeep
needed a new spare, looking significantly at Second A.D.'s motor pool. In
my Army mind, I'd been given an order to steal a tire. The thought of
breaking in at night was not even my kind of funny, so I put my head down
and did the best I could, what the Jews call chutzpah, just wandered
aimlessly, wheeling my tire, until I ended up, whaddya know, beside a
plump, fat spare.
"Next day, same lieutenants, and time for a court marital,
technically, and Article Fifteen. Guilty. I think the expression `duh'uh
was invented for precisely that eventuality. Anyway, cool. I got three
more the same week, one for not wearing a steel pot on a field assignment.
General Stillwell patted me on the shoulder and told be sure to wear one,
next time. Captains and lieutenants, three deep, so I told Charlie Hicks,
my boss, figuring someone else would. I cant remember what the third and
fourth were for, but the cool part is, they didn't bust me. I was an E-2
then, and I am, today.
"We had this really weird captain take command of our
admin. company," te private went on, half trying to get the glimpse of the
frantic fisherman out of his mind. "He was a West Point ring knocker and
Airborne Ranger, and commanding a bunch of Remington Raiders, clerks, wow,
you meet all kinds when you sign with Sam.
"He called me into his office once, and it was my proudest
day in the Army. He sat behind his desk, his very weird looking head way
too far above the shoulders, and sad, `Emerson, I think you're nuts. I'm
going to ty to get your out on a 210.'
"What that poor bastard thought of himself when he found out
I was the darling of half the senior O-corps for writing friendly copy
about their medals, personal histories, hail and farewells, training
procedures, dogs, cats, roosters, and hens, I don't know. Wish I'd been a
fly on the wall, but very briefly.
"Anyway, not to let the cool part slip away, I'm the only
individual in military history to be court martialed four times in one
week, and not get demoted. They grounded me for a few weeks, fined me a
hundred dollars, and forgot to promote me, forever"
"They didn't ask you to re-up?"
"Very funny, but only Army funny. If they'd spent ten
minutes looking at the real me, they'd have sent me, a, back to Ft. Rucker
to finish flight training, then, b, to Virginia, and made an information
officer par excellence out of me. I'd have stayed for another hitch. I
love this place, Vietnam.. I used to take my jeep up to our `C' Battery,
right on the DMZ and the northern-most point of our forces in country.
Miles of rolling country with rice paddies around every corner. Usually
there'd be two or three girls swinging sickles. World's cheapest movie.
Just set a camera on a dike and catch the shoulder-high grass, the green,
the sweeping knives, simple white costumes, and conical hats. I used to
hope I'd run over a mine so I'd be blown sky-high with that as my last
sight on earth.
"And it got better in the city. Danny and I traded Salems
for wee dozens of times while we were running in convoys. Neat people. We
used to cross the bridge at Dong Ha. It had been damaged, only one lane,
very tight. The girls had to walk across it in their formal attire; white
saris and with raven hair to their waists. Even Ronnie Griggs might have
hesitated to call those ethereal Eurasian creatures slopes or gooks"
"Did they let you smoke grass?" Bing asked.
"No one every said anything," his cousin replied. "Danny and
I would come in whistling and kidding like gay lovers on a Fire Island
honeymoon, having smoked, shall we say, extremely heavily the night before.
The Os would come in growling and out of sorts, to use on of Gran's
favorite expressions. What a difference. They had booze, we had weed.
Fuck."
"I'll stick to Co..." Bing said, interrupting himself. "So,"
he continued, "approach has told us to orbit for thirty. Entertain us."
"Well," the twenty one year old admitted, "democracy
entertains me, so what the hell, share the wealth. We should have remained
a proud, happy colony, perhaps to this very day.. It's not to hard, in the
scheme of things, to find happy families that live more-or-less together,
so why the imperative to flap off here and flutter off there? By 1850
there was not a standing forest within seventy miles of any American city.
The children hat cut down ALL the trees. If Pennsylvania hadn't happened
to be loaded with accessible anthracite, the great experiment in democracy
would have been doomed at that time. Literally, frozen to death. At the
time of the Revolution, they were working on various schemes of
representation, and, admittedly, a brilliant king would have said, look,
these colonies are new, they're far off, they're of great value, let's give
them extra representation. Workers of the World, Unite. Taxation without
Representation. One liners, for sure. Brazil solved its slavery issue
with a thirty year plan. As a colony, we would have. For example, free
every slave at age thirty-five, then drop the free age one year, each year.
Guaranteed smooth solution. As a democracy, we chose precisely the very
worst of a hundred possible options, and are paying for it to this very
day. One of these days we're going to choose an option we can't pay for,
and Rickover's nuke subs may, in the end, prove to be just such an
inescapable minefield. Example: processing the scrap from retired subs
will slowly irradiate the processing machinery, the stuff builds up, thus
hamstringing the steel industry. Every WW III scenario I've ever read
seems to be based on the subs starting the war with one goofus charade or
another. And you know the sad footnote? As far as I know, they've never
tried to use the concept commercially. A transport sub, non-combatant,
wouldn't need a conning tower, might hit nearly a hundred miles an hour
under water, and would never have to go deeper than a hundred feet. Think
how the Nazis experimented with airships, how well they served in spite of
the `Hindenburg'. Couldn't we have at least tried? Will we ever? Leave
us not hold our breaths.
"I think the military is all wrong," the soldier went on as
the ship turned in its holding pattern. "What does Julius Caesar have to
do with 1968? The whole system should be built around the Spad. The
Douglas A-1 Skyraider. Every pilot and strategist says it's the best. It
goes four hundred miles and hour, or can loiter for eight hours. It's
tough as a truck and carries eight tons of ordinance. Specially equipped
it can operate out of half of half a runway, perhaps near where the
fighting is, and would, in battalions, be extremely useful in fighting many
kinds of fires and in many civil disasters. Most importantly, it should be
flown, in the main, by enlisted personnel, a, because that's all that's
needed for most missions, and, b, to motivate good guys to join and stay in
the service, and, c, not to waste men like you doing, as you said, the
donkey job of stick and rudder piloting.
"The future of aviation is the ordinance, smart missiles and
bombs, and sophisticated command and control of small and large elements.
The plane is just a platform, the cheaper, safer, and more durable and
flexible, the better. If we had fifty thousand of them, at the cost of a
handful of Hyman's ludicrous subs, we would come to fear no evil, tolerate
no evil, and have most of a trillion dollars to spend on the left out,
which, who knows, might leave us without an enemy in the world."
"Write it man," Bing crowed.
"Credentials denied," Tom laughed. "Prince to Crown Prince,
you survive this, and write it, and meantime, leave the poor fishermen
alone."
"Hey, fuck `em if they can't take a joke," the pilot said,
"rank has its privileges."
They continued orbiting at twelve hundred feet.
"So how about college," Bing asked after awhile, "you had an
S-2 deferment, why didn't you stay for your degree/"
"It was a scaffold from day one," the writer replied, "the
kind executioners use, not builders. I was doomed from my first day as a
freshman. I managed to dance around the math requirements for four
semesters, then it was time to go. One does not fulfill literary
aspirations the magnitude of my own by wasting time on that for which he
has proven to himself, repeatedly, he has no aptitude, much less talent.
Nor was English anything like a sure bet. At the higher levels, they knock
down ten percent for each spelling error, and whatever positive genes I got
are offset by one that says: thou shalt not spell. In the end I did lots
of photography and wrote for the paper, that's why I got journalism instead
of infantry or MPs like everyone else thrown out of flight school, so I got
my two cents worth, and made my share of A's before it was calculus or out.
"And I should be fair about all of this. I was lazy. >From
age two, when you and my aunts and uncles used to read me `Out Jumped Boo'
`till I wet myself with fear or laughter, I knew I was a writer, so when
someone wasn't holding a gun to my head to perform tricks, I was curled up
with a fat book. Part of the appeal was that if you could read sitting
down, you could probably write in the same position; perhaps even in bed,
which had an even greater appeal. I came in first in p.t., but I had about
zero interest in anything to do with sports, far less in exercising for its
own sake. I was and am very passive and inactive. If being a writer
required diligence with an ax, I'd mute out in a hurry. If it required
solving for x, I'd take up tin smithing and tinker my life away. I was
born, or perhaps bred, to loll around drifting and dreaming and fantasizing
about the great novels I'd write, and some deep instinct -- perhaps that of
a house cat -- told me not to excel at anything. Be mediocre, perhaps a
little less, if anything. See what it's like to be average, to be treated
with contempt, you know, like one of the guys, and not to be petted and
stroked and set on the door of the finest academies, like you side of the
family. The conventional path, grades, degrees, working in journalism, are
the novelist's death march -- what on earth do you have to say at the end
of the day? Waffle and waft about, on the other hand, and lo-and-behold
you inspire others to live large enough to take on dimension, to one day
appear as characters in your work. I suppose it's back-handed and
perverse, but that same instinct tells me it's working. Yesterday, for
example. For the most part, I just lay around in a parachute swapping lies
with Sandy, yet someday I may have the skill to tell it without making it
sound like a boy's own adventure."
"Well," Bing laughed, "the next time I drop you in the old
war zone I'll try to find more stimulating circumstances. Wouldn't want
you going home to Janie all fat and out of shape.
"You going to marry her?"
"No," Tom replied, "she's great, but my only chance in that
field is to find and artist who understands the drive, in the first place,
and can put up with the semi-invalid lifestyle of a fledgling writer, which
amounts to lots of reading and thinking -- 'the poet shall not dig,' as our
illustrious ancestor said.
"Plus," he went on, "living in the tropics is almost
mandated. One of the advantages of being a writer is you read a lot, and
if you read enough of the right stuff, you get almost a step-by-step
instruction manual on the mechanics involved in following the dream. For
example, ten pages of Hemingway taught me never to waste time in Paris or
Key West. Ten pages of C.S. Forester set my sights on the Caribbean, and,
truth to tell, hanging out here in Vietnam, at sixteen degrees north, has
amplified the message tenfold. Not many girls would put up with that,
family money or not. They like to find fault, just like the girlish Army,
so it will probably never be the isle for me."
"I wish I had an absolute like that in my life," Bing said,
"like writing."
"I don't have it, it has me," Tom responded, "and by the
short hairs. Nothing is of importance unless it's the best choice to
experience and learn."
"Dangerous in time of war," the major observed.
"Writers are like loggerhead turtles," Tom said, "most get
eaten as eggs. Most of the surviving hatchlings get eaten on the beach or
in the surf. One in some thousands survives and gets to paddle the tropic
seas for centuries. I guess like communists, too. The fledglings kill
each other off and commie cheese one is the survivor. All proving you have
to have substantial blood of the moron to pursue the career, an
ignore-death wish in fulfillment of a do-something-with-your-life wish."
"How about the royalty thing," Bing asked.
"It's like the Great Writer box for Hemingway," Tom replied,
"the Kennedys are in the urbanites' Royal Family box. So far, it's been a
zero. Few know, less care. I was at a hotel once and a lady in the lobby
was bragging to her friend that her sister had stayed at a resort where
Earl Schieb was a guest. If I'd laid my trip on her she would have thought
I was a congenital imbecile and repeated the story of her sister."
"But she probably would have told her sister about you," the
older cousin observed.
"That would be sort of an ultimate for a writer," the private
responded, "to have your stories go from one to the next, but never have
anyone in your face, so to speak. To preach, one on one, do this, don't do
that, stay slim, read, teach willing children, don't overeat, don't buy
junk on credit, don't deny a child you might have a successful relationship
with, and let that be that. No publicity, no centerpiece of group
discussion or debate, anonymous, person to person and essentially as pure
and unfettered as it's possible to be. Of course it's impractical. I
suppose if I were a multi-millionaire I could write books and distribute
them, free by direct mail: this is your prince talking, listen up, but to
do that I'd have to determine the vector for rubbing people's noses in
their own folly, inoffensively."
"Well," Bing mused over the microphone, "I say the same thing
I said before: try humor."
"It is an option," the writer agreed, "sort of the opposite
of a court jester, a public jester, laughing at the balloteers; baiting
them, badgering them, castigating them, and condemning them for their
slavish attention to the jitterbugs of the urban left. For sacrificing
their first born at the golden arches, for allowing the schmo class utter
domination of children's television, for their acceptance of the
socialistic boxes of Marx, for their debt loads and most economists predict
will skyrocket until of and by itself it will bring us to a gloomy end. I
mean it's all funny for someone my age; class of '68; hell, I could die on
this flight and have lived beyond the life experience of every king and
prince of a century ago, or half a century ago, for that matter, so it
doesn't matter for me, but it's going to be tough on future kids brought up
in an every blander -- boxed -- world. Example: the colleges are lowering
their standards dramatically because liberal profs don't want to flunk kids
into the infantry. These second-raters will be tomorrow's teachers, so
Hemingway will be safe in his Great Writer's box, but that's the end of the
story. Superiority is a climb, inferiority is a slide, and who likes his
seat in a chair better than a particular breed of metro leftist?
"It's a big country, but it's also a big drain and Vietnam
has set us circling instead of steaming. Machiavelli was right; it's
manipulation and posturing that count; image and perception. Nothing else
matters. Roosevelt dithered us into a world catastrophe, chomped on his
cigarette holder, manipulated his huge Dutch face for the photogs, and was
returned by the balloteers when he should have been whipped and imprisoned.
"Look at the Army. Bing, I must have known, at least
casually, four or five hundred guys over the last two years. Not one of
them wanted to stay in one minute past their enlistment. If it was
properly run, you'd have to keep the best people out because they'd be more
useful in the private sector. Even in times of combat you'd have
re-enlistment rates nearing a hundred percent, and for every guy who left,
five would want to come in. Bases should be country clubs. The motto on
the gate should read `Tomorrow you may be called on to die, so play,
today.' The bus should pull in, and your first stop should be the athletic
center to draw whatever sports equipment suits your interest. Yes, their
should be reveille, at maybe nine a.m. Yes unit standards and drill in
fast assembly and movement should be rigorous, and yes to maybe ten percent
of what goes on now. But the basic ambience should be casual, social,
athletic, and fun.
"The fraternization thing. When I was a senior flight school
cadet I ran into an old schoolmate who was a second lieutenant. I went up
to shake his hands and he backed off as if I was a leper. Since I was a
cadet major at the time, and he was a captain, by his own standards, he
should have saluted instead of doing the backstep. Coaches hang out with
their athletes, put on their game faces, and hang out the next day. You
couldn't possibly tell winning or losing coaches from their social
attitudes, proving the whole thing is nonsense. People of equal education,
experience, and similar interests, or who just happen to like each other,
should hang out together, and yet it goes on and on, and virtually a
hundred percent of recruits celebrate becoming two-digit-midgets on the
ninety-ninth day before their discharge. Again, picking the worst -- most
demoralizing and expensive -- option out of many. Example: K.P. It should
be, and would be, almost fun; something different, hanging out with the
cooks in a warm, dry kitchen, but every afternoon, because it's in a box,
you G.I. the entire kitchen. This involves soaking the area with a hundred
gallons of water, throwing out a pound of detergent, scrubbing for half an
hour, rinsing for half as cooks with hot trays of food dodge your brush, an
hour, then squeegeeing and mopping for half an hour. Two hours of wet,
hot, slippery work on a floor that was absolutely spotless to begin with.
The motor stables that got me in trouble. Nine hours a week to maintain a
jeep with dual spark plugs and magneto ignition. It's mental filth like
this that drives everyone out. It's mindlessness, it's making of your own
defense institution the worst enemy any bright and alert person could ever
have. The Nazis knew. In anything resembling a fair fight they'd have
cleaned the floor with us, land, sea, or air. National Socialism was
brilliant from top to bottom. Out with the unions, way out, and in with
common sense; out with pettifogging, puling, whining, nitpicking
hairsplitting and in with turning the page and getting on to the next task.
When Hitler took over, it took four trillion, eight hundred billion marks
to equal a U.S. dollar. In twenty years he came within maybe three
torpedoes of conquering Europe, probably to Europe's extreme best interest,
judging by the gloomy muddle they're stuck with under their grinding labor
party socialism; something for everybody, nothing for anybody. If they
were honest about it and chanted: `live for today, and die on payday,'
they'd be telling the truth, but I think they think they can live for today
and present the bill to their grandchildren. Lucky nippers. All in all,
it's not a pleasant place to write for. Here's an emblematic experience.
It was three twenty in the morning. I stopped at the red light on Rt. 2.
No traffic in either direction, so I moved across onto Sudbury Road. Just
after I started to roll, a car came over the hill behind me. Cop. I was
completely sober, on legitimate business, and he gave me a full ticket --
the name on my driver's license meaning no more to him, though we were not
only in Concord, but at the junction of Emerson Street, than if it had been
John Doe. Think of the abiding cultural indifference demonstrated by that
act, and try to imagine the level of skill it would take to slice and dice
the balloteers without pissing them off."
"How about Blacks," the pilot asked.
"All our Anglo inventions would not have meant much without
the economic engine of slavery," Tom replied. "it created both the need
and the capital. Our debt is colossal, but if they sink the ship, they're
on it too. Their tragedy is Fonda and ilk brainwashing them, without
emphasizing that slavery of all races, by all races, and for all races, was
ended as a legal institution all over the world by white Anglo Saxons,
catholic and protestant. Life in Africa was, by and large, a savage,
impoverished hell. Perhaps one in a thousand American blacks would be
happy living as their closes aboriginal cousins do. But again with the
Machiavellian, the posturing, the flummery, and the schmo class, Jew and
gentile, to profit off it. Owe them though we do, we can't pay, so it'll
be suppression through gambling, booze, drugs, and the offal of the
ghoombas. Tokenism and ruination for there are not other choices.
Discontent where there should be respect and appreciation; endless webs of
lies, distortion, and indoctrination -- half by omission -- where there
should be the opposite. Full employment for prison guards, but otherwise,
next to our overall materialism, something for the back burner."
"That's us<' the major said, pointing to the radio stack.
"Want to shoot the approach?"
"Now you're talking like a real cuz," the private grinned as
they exchanged places. Rick, the copilot, gave the rookie a thumbs up and
he began toying with the strange controls. "It's a serious limo after our
training ships," Tom said, quickly settling the needles to where it looked
like they should be and looking around for traffic.
"He's smoother than you, Bing," Rick laughed.
"Not that it's an issue," the private said, "but what about
turbulence in these things? Any chance of the rotors coming together?
"Nah," Bing said over the intercom, "the centrifugal force
makes them pretty rigid. What you have to watch out for is any kind of
strike. Couple of weeks ago I was following a guy name Chet Beal into an
LZ. He picked up a flare parachute, probably weighted two ounces. No
survivors."
"Bad story," Tom responded.
"Too much to think about," the Marine agreed. "Part of the
reason it's great to have you here -- other stories. Tell me the coolest
thing that's happened to you in uniform.
"Assuming you don't mean riding around with you, it happened
at Ft. Hood, when I was new in the information corps. I was getting a troy
from a major who'd come into the office. I liked almost all the Os I dealt
with, but this guy was a puffed-up jerk and had next to not story at all.
I was wondering how to politely end the interview, sitting there with no
discernable rank, when I heard a Huey on final approach to our parking lot.
`Excuse me, sir' I said, `but that's my ride out to the field exercise.' I
shook his hand, picked up my camera and pad, and left, my chariot, and it
was mine, I'd ordered it, I was the only passenger, awaiting. Rank doesn't
have all the privileges."
"That's be-bopping," Rick laughed.
"It was a moment. A little vicarious get-back at Squires,
the one who approved my elimination. The little dumpling sat behind his
desk, like the weird captain, and said, `Emerson, if I ordered you into a
zone, how do I know you'd show up?' I should have said: `you ignorant,
lard bellied mother fucker, why would you order me in, if I was already
thee?' He almost made William Emerson, the first, look smart."
"What DID you say?" Bing asked.
"I'd written in my appeal that Griggs had read my love
letters from Val to the whole Flight. He, the fat ole boy, came in and got
all whispery and nice. The guy looked like a pig. Wore his helmet half an
inch off his nose. Everyone hated him, where, in my first Candidate
company, the tacs had been practically adored. He was born to be fragged,
and for sure, no one was likely to sing `Happy Birthday' to him.
"Fuck it, I had my trust fund, let them go their way, and I'd
go mine Be a trooper. I cleaned up my appeal, and lost. Duh'uh.
"They rubbed salt in by making me stand the final formation.
Squires emphasized the fact that MOST of `us' would be going on to
Ft. Rucker. Maybe the feel if they're going to give you a story to keep
from your grandchildren, the might as well give you a good one. The joke
was that Val was a willowy, long-legged redhead with a preteen body, so
that was a last laugh on my side of the score card.
Tinkling ice in crystal. Napery glowing white. A dozen
pilots around a large table at the O club on China Beach, Da Nang. "Things
got a little shaky this morning, eh, Tom?" Bing said.
"I had time to thing, mother fucker, is this a cool way to
die, or what? all the way through, beginning, middle and end. Then Bing
pulled back on the stick and instead of paddy there was sky."
"We took some hits going in across the beach just south of
Marble Mountain," Bing elaborated to the assembly. "We had a load of
p.s.p. on a sling and I pickled it when I felt the hits. Dove the hell our
of there, and I guess from where he was kneeling, all my cousin could see
was paddy."
"For twenty seconds," the guest said, "it was beautiful."
"Much damage?" Ed Nelson said.
"Should have been," the major replied, "all the rounds went
up into the engines. Tom was the lucky one. The bullets came up through
the aft loading ramp where he's always lying with his camera, shooting
through the open door."
"It looked like the Cape," the private said, "I wanted to be
up front when we went over the dunes. Guess it's a good thing I wasn't
raised in Cleveland."
"An Emerson knows Ohio?" Chuck interjected. "You know the
joke they tell about Boston blues? A visitor comes from the Midwest,
alights on Beacon Street. `I'm from Iowa,' she tells her hostess.
`Darling,' the dowager replies, `here, we pronounce that "Ohio".'"
The writer looked steadily at the carbon copy of a
belligerence he'd faced since attending New York grade schools. "I went
attended college in Iowa," he said, "flunked out because I spent all my
time riding my motorcycle over the back roads, trying to get the ugliness
of tree-festered New England out of my system. It worked, but the ugliness
of math, to a writer's brain, won the war of the G.P.A."
"And your military career has made up for your failure as an
undergraduate, I see," the captain taunted.
"Sir," Tom responded so quietly all could hear him,
"yesterday my agent wired that based on the reports from Saigon, I was
being offered three hundred seventy five thousand dollars for the footage I
took with Bing. Something I'm also not a failure at is making fools out of
assholes, so you might watch your proverbial s-i-x."
Chuck scowled. "Bet your King Cousin to let you fly down
from Phu Bai tomorrow," he growled, "Maybe you can show some gook fishermen
the ultimate in posterior orifices."
"At fucking-lunch-time ease," Ed barked. "Class warfare
deserves cigars and a tot, so, lacking both, Bing, sir, why don't you
debrief us. How could you tell you were being hit? I've always wondered,
you know, helmet, radio traffic, noise and vibration?"
"Sort of a snapping feeling in both sticks and probably a
little coming up through the rudder pedals. Pretty distinct."
"How long before you made the decision to pickle?" Ed asked.
"Those guys needed that stuff."
"It was the wrong decision," the major said, "but time wasn't
the factor. I made it in maybe one full second. If we'd been damaged, it
would have been right, but we could have flown it in."
"Seven hits?"
"Yes," Bing affirmed, "but AK-47. It had been a .50, we
would have gone down."
"Any estimates on ho many V.C.?" was the next question.
"There were two of them," Tom said.
Chuck growled. "Shut the fuck up, Private Concord Mass." he
spat, "no one asked you."
"Does that mean I didn't see them?" the writer asked softly.
"Am I wrong about you, in seeing you as an O and G? Sorry. Remember,
these eyes only got me into flight school, not out."
"Hey, Chuck," Bing said, "he may have pissed off some low
Army brass, but he made the turn of at ten knows, rear wheels only, first
time. Rick didn't even reach for the controls. I can't do that and I've
got two hundred hours more than you. When we used to water ski on the
cape, he'd skiing the channel buoys by half an inch, leaning out on the
slalom. We used to yell at him, be he did it every time. Just shrugged
and said he liked the sensation of speed."
"It was on account of missing my mother," the private
explained to the by now rapt audience around the lunch table. "She yelled
about everything. It was nice to have a reminder, when I swam up along
side the Lyman, of how little I missed her. Whatever stretch of the
imagination it takes to stretch the analogy to fitting yourself,
specifically including your manners, I suggest you try stretching it that
far, else I'm likely to put this table on you."
"I did see them," Tom said softly, "I was kneeling on the aft
end of the radio stack, at least six inches higher than Bing or Rick, and,
by chance, happened to be looking down, instead of out, something neither
pilot should have been doing. Two of them. Popped up from behind a dune,
the second one in from shore. They wore black pajamas and conical hats,
exactly like the movies. They were probably swinging up their weapons
because I don't remember seeing them. If I had time to think, it was:
`what are they doing here?' and nothing about combat.
"I saw them for at least a full second, more like two. I
know, thinking back, the were both right handed. If they hadn't been
wearing the hats, I could pick them out of a lineup, and probably could,
anyway. Both in early forties, which probably means early twenties, both
of typical appearance. Viet Cong.
"Fuck," Chuck exclaimed, then stood slowly. He picked up his
water glass and began rapping it with a fork, louder, until it broke. He
sounded off for the entire lunch crowd.
"Mother fucking, cock-sucking, absolute screaming terror of a
double bitch, Emerson, snake screwing, twat lapping, porcupine-diced
asshole, TEN-HUT!!"
The Army doesn't grind slowly, nor exceedingly small, but it
had ground the private in question enough that he responded like a
Pavlovian shepherd, jumping, or perhaps, more elegantly, `uncoiling' to
attention in half a second. At a second barked order, he stood on his
chair.
"Gentlemen," he orated, "nurses, doe we have some? well,
fine, gentlemen and ladies, in spite of my flattering introduction, we do
have among us and unlikely hero. An Army private visiting, war zone or
not, as is the wont of his class, his cousin, our own Bing Emerson. His
name is Tom.
"Why is he standing before us?"
"Because, one and all," Chuck concluded, "he has seen -- he
has witnessed -- the truth. The mother of all bitches is wrong. Tom
Emerson has seen the enemy, and it is NOT us.!"
The speaker remained standing. Brought his hands together in
a slow cadence. Quickly picked up by the entire cadge. Growing, slowly at
first, then a hat flew, then a hundred.
END OF FILE I