POET OF PHU BAI

Copyright, T.C. Emerson, 2003

by T.C. Emerson / Feather Touch

(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

