Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 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-m ché. 
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.



   g "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 reater 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