Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle (27 page)

Digger was showing me how to stitch up the worst of the open wounds when I heard a voice behind us say, "They told me I'd find you in here. When did you turn into Doctor Frankenstein?" Hearing something familiar in the voice, I turned around. Andy stood just inside the door, shit-eating grin on his face.

 

"What?" he said. "Aren't you glad to see me?"

"What are you doing here?" I asked him, still not really believing it was him and not some hallucination brought about by the combination of hash, beer, Vicks, and scent of burned flesh coursing through my blood.

"Reporting for duty," Andy said. "They needed a helo mechanic, and I'm the best one around."

He walked closer, peering at the body on the table. "What's that, lunch?" he joked, laughing heartily. I saw Digger turn away and busy himself with something on the table. I was embarrassed by Andy's lack of compassion, and made a note to apologize to Digger later.

"Why don't I show you around when I'm done," I suggested to Andy.

 

"Great," he said. "I just got in an hour or so ago. When I heard you were here, I came to look you up. I haven't even found my hootch yet."

 

I remembered the sound of the plane that had woken me up. Andy must have been on it, I realized. If I'd known, would I have been there to meet him?

 

"I'll finish up here," Digger said before I could answer that question. "You introduce your buddy to Hotel Frenchie."

 

"Thanks, Dig," I said. "I'll see you later."

Andy and I walked out into a steamy soup of a morning. The rain had stopped, but the air was still heavy and wet. Andy gamely marched through the mud like a kid after a rainstorm, looking around at everything.

"You guys see a lot of action?" he asked me.
"Enough," I told him.

"Good," he said. "The last thing I want to do is sit around on my ass all day. I didn't sign up for that."

 

"You'll be busy," I assured him. "A lot of slicks come in and out of here."

"I'm putting my name in for door gunner," said Andy. "I like fixing the birds, but I'd rather be shooting at Charlie. You had any kills yet?"
I shook my head. "I'm mainly in the GR or stores," I said. "I do my share of patrols, but so far they've been clean."

"Too bad," said Andy, sounding genuinely sorry for me. Then he asked, "So, what's the pussy situation up here?"

 

"The what?" I said.

 

"You know," said Andy, grabbing his crotch and squeezing. "Me love you long time." "Oh," I replied. "There's not much of that as far as I can tell. Guys usually wait 'til they've got R&R."

 

"Shit," he said. "I'm fucking horny as hell. I had this hot little grunt groupie while I was at Eustis, but she up and married some jarhead last month. I haven't had any since."

I knew what he was asking. He wouldn't come out and say it, but I could tell he was thinking about our times at Penn. I knew I should just ignore him, let him think I had no idea what he was hinting around at. But the truth was, I hadn't had any in a long time either. I'd more or less buried those feelings in the red mud of Quan Loi. But Andy's reappearance had stirred them up again.

"You want to see my hootch?" I asked him after calculating the chances of my bunkmates being on duty and finding them high enough to chance it.

 

Andy grinned. "Lead the way," he said.

As I'd suspected, the hootch was empty. It didn't take long before Andy's pants were around his ankles and I was on my knees, taking him into my throat. My back was to the door, and I knew that at any moment, one of my roomies could walk in and find me sucking Andy's cock. It was a foolish risk to take, but I was driven by a need more intense than the fear of discovery. I needed to claim Andy once more, and this was the only way I knew how to do it. I told myself, as I had so many times before, that his pretense of casualness was a distraction for the feelings he couldn't express. What was important was that he'd come back to me.

He came quickly, and as I felt his dick throb with the heavy pulse of release, I was surprised to find myself coming as well. I hadn't even touched my cock, yet I was emptying a load into my pants. With nowhere else to go, the stickiness slid down my shaft, coating it with wet heat. Unexpectedly, my thoughts flashed back to the night seven years before when I'd come in my pajamas while sleeping next to Jack.

Andy pulled out of my mouth and zipped himself up. Still slightly dazed by both my orgasm and the conflicting memories it brought with it, I was slower in getting to my feet. I had just stood when the door to the hootch opened and two soldiers entered.

"Hey, Ned," one of them said. "Who's your buddy?"
"Oh," I said. "This is Ja—, um, Andy. We were in basic together."

Andy nodded. My bunkmates welcomed him as they would any new arrival, oblivious to my disorientation. Andy, too, seemed unaware of my momentary confusion. He clapped me on the shoulder and said, "I should go check in. I'll see you later, okay?"

"Sure," I said. "Later."

After he left, I sat down on my bunk, listening to my roommates talk but hearing nothing. The warmth in my pants quickly turned to an uncomfortable coldness as the cum dried and glued my cock to the hair of my legs. When I moved, tiny fingers of pain pinched and scratched at me as the matted hair separated from my skin. But the taste of Andy was still in my mouth, and that made me forget everything else.

CHAPTER 27

There is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who works with the dead in which a corpse will arrive with, or depending on how much time has elapsed since death, develop during examination, an erection. This can be unsettling to the uninitiated. You do not, after all, generally expect the deceased to display an inclination toward the erotic. But they sometimes do. The cause has no supernatural origins; it is simply the result of pooling blood settling in the genitals. Morticians, in a wonderful display of black humor, call it angel lust.

This is the effect that Andy had on me. Having buried my desires out of necessity, I found them resurrected again, against my will, by his presence. I was at first a reluctant participant in my own delusion, stubbornly refusing to admit that I wanted him. Once roused, however, my need grew in strength until I was thinking about him almost constantly. He, of course, responded by pretending to be completely unaware of my love for him. As he had in college, he came to me when he needed release, but withheld any real affection.

He was quickly welcomed into base life, becoming a favorite almost immediately and making friends with anyone who came into contact with him. His work on the slicks was first rate, and did not go unnoticed by his superiors. After a month, he got his wish and began training to be a door gunner, and a few weeks later he flew his first mission. When he returned, he had the elated, almost frightening, glow of a hunter whose foray into the woods has been most successful.

"You should have seen it, Ned," he told me that night over a beer in the enlisted men's club. "Those chinks were running like roaches, man, and I was just firing away. It was like one of those games at a carnival. Bam. Bam. Bam. We've got a winner, here's your teddy bear."

"They're not chinks," I told him.

 

"Gooks. Chinks. Slants. It's all the same to me," he said, missing my dig at his geographic misstep. "If it's yellow, I shoot it."

The door opened and a couple of Andy's new chopper buddies came in. They sat down at our table and immediately started talking about their day. I listened, nursing my beer, and wondered how I could want a man like Andy, who didn't seem to see that I was in love with him and, worse, who seemed to have become a man who derived pleasure from killing. Was this the same man I'd talked philosophy with only nine months earlier? It hardly seemed possible.

And what was wrong with me that I wanted to be with him? As I listened to him talk, I tried to pinpoint it, but the best I could come up with was that I wanted to save him. I was convinced that underneath the cocky, self-absorbed exterior there was a man of real merit. The bravado was an act, one many men in the army employed to cover up their more vulnerable selves. Andy, I told myself, was one of them. If I could just reach him, he might become the man he needed to be. What I meant, of course, was that he might become the man that I needed him to be. But it would take me many years to realize that, and in the meantime I was fated to long for something that was just out of reach. A soldier is a natural object of attraction. Strong, confident, and masculine, he's easy fodder for the imagination. The possibility of death only sweetens the deal. Those of us attracted to tragedy (and I believe many gay men are included in this group, as evidenced by our fondness for the likes of Judy, Marilyn, and other stars whose lives ended badly and with whom we are so intimate that we call them by their first names) find in the soldier the romantic ideal. If he finds it difficult to love us in return, we forgive him and ascribe it to his need to protect us from the eventuality of his death. That night of his first kill, Andy committed another first, making love to me in the deserted storeroom housing boxes of ammunition and cartons of oil. He was brutal, quick, and hungry, pumping into me while his dog tags jangled against his chest and his hands gripped my waist. After he emptied himself inside me, he zipped up and left, using as an excuse an early-morning flight time. When he was gone, I jerked off furiously, telling myself that he'd taken one step closer to admitting his love for me. What is it about the unobtainable that we find so irresistible? You might as well ask why we think if we just try hard enough, we can pluck the moon from the sky. We know the effort is futile, yet we put it forth anyway, without the smallest shred of evidence that we have a hope of succeeding. Like religion, we believe in it with absolutely no hard proof.

St. Clare of Assisi, founder of the ascetic order of Poor Clare nuns, refused marriage and, at 18, entered a convent. Devoting herself to the eternal adoration of the Divine, she wrote what can only be considered love poems to God. In one of her four celebrated letters to Blessed Agnes of Prague (the former Princess Agnes of Bohemia, and Clare's patroness) she described her most fervent desire, to be one with Christ:

Draw me after You!
We will run in the fragrance of Your perfumes,
O heavenly Spouse!
I will run and not tire,
until You bring me into the wine-cellar,
until Your left hand is under my head
and Your right hand will embrace me happily
and You will kiss me with the happiest kiss of Your mouth.

Clare's infatuation with what she could never truly have may indeed be purely metaphoric (although her clearly-imagined fantasy rivals that of any letter written by a 14-year-old fan to her favorite pop star), but her passion is unmistakable. And whether God or man is the focus of such fierce faith, nothing is as strong or as torturous. I saw past Andy's faults to the man I believed existed behind them. I projected onto him everything I wanted, but hadn't yet fully articulated to myself. As the days passed and we reached the latter part of the year, the rains ended and the sun returned, drying the mud into rock-hard brick. The temperatures fell, although they remained much higher than anything I was used to experiencing in the fall, and warm enough that we spent many of the afternoons cooling off in Frenchman's Pool. Watching the men jump from the high dive into the water and splash one another in good-natured games, I was reminded of Treasure Island and the three summers Jack and I had spent there. I hadn't had a word from him since his letter in June, which I hadn't responded to, and bit by bit I was coming to accept that our friendship was over. In October, following a week of intense skirmishes with the NVA during which Digger and I spent long hours in the GR, we celebrated Halloween with an impromptu party. The most popular costume, unsurprisingly, was a Viet Cong soldier, complete with actual items taken from the bodies of the downed enemy. These items, taken as souvenirs by men who mostly didn't know any better, lent an unintentionally macabre touch to the night, which was made even more sinister when a grenade, hurled out of the darkness, hit a hootch, sending dirt and metal into the air and causing all of us to fall on our faces, hands over our heads as we'd been taught in basic training. When the rain of earth stopped, we got up to survey the damage. Fortunately, the hootch's occupants had not been inside, and the only casualty was the building itself. But we took the attack personally, and moments later, weapons in hand, we were looking for the perpetrators. We found them—a group of sappers—still making their way through the field of concertina wire on the camp's southeast perimeter. The grenade had been thrown by an antsy scout as a distraction, but he'd thrown too early, and we caught the enemy soldiers with fifteen yards left to go.

They were sitting targets. Trapped beneath the razor-sharp wire, the harsh lights of the guard tower turned on them, they had nowhere to go. All they could do was return fire and hope we missed. The air was filled with the sounds of a hundred M16s firing at once, the angry cries of soldiers wreaking revenge, and the muted sounds of bodies being pierced by bullets. Not one of the sappers screamed; they died silently, just as they'd come.

Beside me, Andy was firing repeatedly. I saw him take aim at a soldier attempting to turn around in the nest of wire. A moment later, the man's head exploded in a spray of blood. "Pink mist, baby!" Andy shouted, pumping his fist. "Pink mist. That's what it's all about." He high-fived the man next to him and looked for another target.

It was over quickly. Afterward, a call went out for volunteers to drag the dead out. In general, the handling of North Vietnamese casualties was avoided as much as possible. Although officially we were supposed to collect any recoverable bodies and deliver them to Vietnamese officials, in reality we usually left them where they fell. Exceptions were made when their presence would result in inconvenience to U.S. troops. Faced with the prospect of a yard full of rotting NVA, we had no choice but to retrieve them.

I stepped forward, along with a handful of other men, and we began the tricky process of removing the bodies from their wire coffins. It was difficult work. The wire, designed to trap anything foolish enough to walk into it, was hardly a hindrance to the sappers, who had made an art out of learning how to crawl through it both unheard and uncut, but for us it required patience and care. Even then, we frequently felt the sting of the sharp-edged wire as we parted it with gloved hands. I pulled out two men and went back for a third. Positioned toward the rear of the group, he was lying on his stomach. Blood had pooled around him, suggesting a belly wound, and his gun was a foot or two from his body. Stepping on the concertina wire to flatten it down, I made it to him and knelt down. I didn't want to drag him face-first over the wire, so I grabbed his wrists and flipped him over.