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China Beach

by Eastbayjag@aol.com

The day had been a bitch. I worked the flight line at Da Nang from 2 am until noon, then caught the flatbed out to China Beach with the handful of other guys on the base that had the afternoon off. My muscles ached from humping the munitions onto the trailers, off the trailers on to the loading carts, up to the pylons of the F-4s that were the mainstay of the base. I watched as they took off just after midnight and again just after noon on their missions of destruction, the beauty of the afterburners, the seemingly impossible leap into the air of great and powerful beasts with tiny wings and such destructive stingers.

My back ached, as it did most of the time. It was the first time in more than a month that I would have a whole day off. I intended to do nothing but drink a little beer, smoke a few joints you could get from the kids outside the main gate for a couple of dong, swim a little, eat a little, just enjoy some non-military time. Or at leasst as close to non-military time as you could get in-country.

I walked from the drop-off point down to the beach, where at least two hundred guys were sprawled on towels, soaking up rays, talking, and swimming. This was the in-country R&R spot for two and three-day passes for jarheads, grunts, ground-pounders and even some of us Air Force guys. It felt funny to be alone. Nobody in the unit had wanted to come down with me, as the BX was having a shipment of something or other, and everybody had to have one.

I swam for a good half hour, hard, to loosen up a little. I scored a couple of joints from a kid that dared to hang around at the top of the beach, inside the perimeter. They cost less than a soda. I dozed maybe an hour after the high from the joints, ate an awful-tasting hot dog at the tiny beach hut, swam a few minutes, and then reluctantly wrapped up my towel and headed back up to the truck pick-up point. We had to be back on base no later than 7pm, or there was a report filed with the squadron commander that inevitably meant you'd lose something - a day pass, a week at the enlisted man's "club." There was only one more truck after this one, at six thirty, and I had no jacket to ward off the cold wind.

I saw this rugged looking guy on the beach behind me as I got up. I'd noticed him before, all alone, just like me. Neither of us talked to nobody. He looked away quickly, almost as if he didn't want me to know he'd seen me. His hair was black as coal, so that the sun made it look almost blue. I remember that.

He looked to be tall and lean but you can't really tell when somebody is laying down on a towel.

"Howdy," he said as I walked a little nearer him, on the way up to the path.

"Hiya." I said, a little surprised that somebody would say anything here. The first time I went to China Beach, nobody said a word to nobody that wasn't with them, and I said nothing to nobody that wasn't with me. It just didn't seem a good idea, somehow part of the protocol. We all seemed to retreat into our own shell of isolation from the killing field.

"Headin' out?" an accent, couldn't tell from where, someplace in the south?

"Yeah," I said. "Have to be back before 7. They shut the main gate to the base."

"You Air Force?"

"Yeah," I said, as I squatted down to talk. He had dark, almost black eyes. His body was not tanned, a little burned. His arms were dark, up to the T-shirt sleeve line; so were his face and neck. "You're getting sun-burned."

"Happens," he said with a smile. His teeth were brilliant white. One of the front teeth stuck forward a little, not quite enough to keep him from being model-gorgeous.

"You a grunt?"

"Yeah," he said. He told me the name of his unit. But I can't remember it any longer. "Got a two-day after Chu Lai."

There had been a big fight up there last week.

"You got lucky."

"Yeah. Half my unit got lucky, a bunch unlucky, a few got wings."

"Wings?"

"Home in the white hospital ship."

"Hurt?" I was talking about him, not the others.

"Yeah." He knew what I meant. He looked at me, through me. "How long?" He was asking how many days before I rotated home.

"127."

"I got 131," he said.

"Did Tet, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Where?"

"Phu Bai," he said with a grimace.

I didn't know what that meant. I never paid that much attention to the war. I was just here, that was all. I did my job, kept my head down, waited for the day when I would get out and start living again, using the GI Bill to get into the University that I couldn't afford before my lottery number came up that said I was sure to go.

"Got the day off?" he was looking at my chest. I don't have any hair there at all. His was fine, sworls around his pectorals, a crosshatched line from the center down to his belly button. My muscles were a little better defined than his.

"Yeah. No duty tomorrow, at least not until midnight."

"I go back tomorrow at noon."

"Chu Lai?" I shuddered at the thought of what it must be like to be going back into the meat grinder.

"Yeah," he said. "Gotta do my time."

The truck horn sounded the five-minute warning.

"Guess I better go."

"Stay here a minute," he said. His voice had a vulnerable element to it, but it was more than a suggestion.

I wondered if the extra hour and a half would be time well spent. What the hell - I'd only spend it reading for my English Lit course I took in correspondence from Penn State, or getting semi-blitzed at the beer tent. He might have an interesting story or two to tell.

"I can wait for the last truck," I said.

"I need . . ." his voice added into nothing.

"Yeah," I said. It's so alone when the guy next to you could buy it tomorrow and you don't want to get hurt any more than you have to. Just to have a friend for a little while. I wondered if he wanted more than just to have a little company, if he was, maybe . . . queer. No matter, I suppose. It wasn't like he could do anything to me, there were other people around, and I can take care of myself in a fight one-on-one. I sized him up, just in case. He looked real masculine, not at all like he was "funny," but his hands didn't look like they'd seen many fights, and his face had no scars. Not that mine did, but I only got hit once really bad in a fight in High School, and there was no scar.

I lay next to him, on my own towel, and we talked. I learned where he was from (Kentucky) where he went to school, how he was drafted 'cause his number came up, and right off the job he'd just started after high school. His girl friend sent him a Dear John" letter three months after he got to 'Nam. His Dad was long gone. His three brothers all in their early teens. His Mom wrote, but nobody else. She wasn't very book smart.

His hands had long, slim fingers, with hairs on top between the knuckles. His feet looked half again as long as mine, although we looked to be the same height, at least stretched out on the towels. I wondered if it was true that people with big feet had big penises. He was wearing really bagged trunks, and I couldn't see through them.  I never noticed in the showers at school. I wasn't interested, or at least I didn't want anybody to think I was. I don't think you could tell here --  the showers were cold, enough to shrivel your dick up to your Adam's apple.

I told him about Massachusetts, my mom and Dad, the little Cape Cod I'd lived in all my life, my kid brother. The sun started to get lower in the sky.

"Would you put some lotion on my back?" he asked. "I think I got a little burned."

"Sure," I said, thinking nothing of it.

He rolled over on his stomach after handing me the bottle of Coppertone. His skin was pink. The muscles stretched from his shoulders to the spine, trying to escape outwards. His butt stuck up from the place at the small of his back that dipped low from the mass of his shoulders. There was no hair on the back at all, except a little tuft just above the waistband of the swim shorts.

I put some lotion on my right hand, and smoothed it over his back. His skin was taut, and I could see shivers of ticklishness, like the flanks of a horse trying to dislodge the flies. He groaned a little.

"Tender?" I asked, thinking maybe the sunburn was already burning.

"Nice," he said.

I felt a little funny, touching him like that. It felt . . . right. I put more lotion on my hand, and put some on his neck and shoulders.

"Would you rub it in kinda deep?" he said softly.

"Sure," I said.

I was hesitant to sit on his legs to rub him, so I got up and kneeled in front of him, and put some more lotion on the top of his shoulders. I looked down the length of his body, and admired God's handiwork. His wide shoulders narrowed to a slim waist, and his butt looked like he ran track and swam a lot. As I began to massage the lotion into his skin, he groaned again, and lifted his head onto the backs of his hands, making the skin on the back of his neck ripple. I leaned forward a little to rub into his back a little lower. I had to spread my legs a little to keep my knees from hitting his head.

"Could you do it a little lower?" he asked in a soft voice.

"Sure," I said. I had to move forward some, straddling his head with my legs, so I could press down on the small of his back, and I rolled forward to press straight down..

There was sudden warmth through the nylon of my Speedo's, hot breath blown there. I stopped moving, my hands glued to his back, my crotch not two inches from his face. My mind said "RUN!" but my heart and my body said "stay," and they won the argument.

I kept leaning forward, pressing down, and his head lifted just enough to nibble on my dick, suddenly painfully hard and bent double underneath me.

"Hold still," he said.

"Someone will see," I said, looking around. There was nobody within a hundred yards.

"No one will look," he said. His right hand pulled the string of my suit, and the bow came undone. His hand reached in and unfolded me, lifted me over the top of my suit. "Keep massaging me, really slowly," he said.

I did as he said, and felt his lips on my dick, then the incredible warmth of his mouth as he engulfed half of me. I moaned, despite trying to keep totally silent. I rocked back and forth a little, not just massaging his back, but fucking my dick ever so slightly into his mouth, looking around to make sure no-one was paying any nevermind to what he was doing to me. I trembled like a leaf.

The suction of his mouth on me was like I imagined a milking machine worked, rolling away from the base of my dick towards the tip. It took only a few seconds, and I had to tell him "stop, I'm going to come."

He stopped moving his head back and forth, just nursed on me, even stronger, and I felt my muscles under my dick begin the trembling that presaged an orgasm.

"Stop, really, or I'm going to come in your . . . " But it was too late to stop. My muscles went all funny, and I felt the orgasm start from just under my belly button, and I was shooting into his mouth, my eyes closing automatically, the warmth of the sun on my back making me shiver uncontrollably. I hadn't found a quiet place to jack off for more than two days, so I was pretty full, and just kept shooting. He took me completely, sucking it into him. I felt him swallowing my juice.

"Oh, God!" I whispered, "Don't stop!"

He held me in his mouth until I went soft, as I pretended to massage him, watching all the time in case someone might look, might see, might suspect.

He finally let me out of his mouth, my dick semi-soft, and his hand put me back under the nylon.

"I needed that," he said. "I been wanting to do that since you came to the beach."

I stopped massaging him and went back to my towel, sitting on it cross-legged. "You do that a lot?"

"Only a couple of times," he said, turning his head towards me, looking right in my eyes. His eyes were flecked with green, I noticed. "A buddy in my unit and me . . . traded."

"Why me?" I asked.

"You looked as alone as me," he said, smiling again.

"Do you want me to . . ."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I . . . want more than that."

"You want to . . . fuck?" There was absolutely no possibility on earth that I would consider doing that. At least not yet . . .

"No," he said. A shadow went across his face.

"What?"

"Make love."

I hadn't thought of that. It was so alone again. For the brief seconds that I had been in his mouth, it had gone away.

"With me?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"I want to hold you on my arms, kiss your lips, your mouth, your eyes, your nose. I want to fall asleep with your body next to me, and wake with it pressed into me."

The thought of it made me shiver. I wanted to. I really wanted to be with him like that. I looked at his lips and thought of them against mine, so soft and full. I thought of his arms around me, caressing me, like I had just caressed him under the pretext of putting on the Coppertone. I so wanted to be held, even by a man, and if it was to be a man, by him.

"I mean . . . how can we . . . here?"

"There's an empty bunk in my tent," he said shyly. "You could stay."

My mind raced. What was I doing? I'd just let a guy suck me off, in the full sight of anybody who might have looked, and had thought about kissing him back, about . . . about sucking his cock like he'd done me, returning the . . . compliment, the . . . loving.

Just then, the five-minute warning horn came from the last truck.

"I better go," I said, looking away from his eyes, wanting to stay, afraid to stay, wanting him to tell me to stay, afraid to decide to stay on my own, because that would mean . . . I . . . wanted him.

"Yeah," he said. His face told me I hurt him, and it stayed in my mind as I got up, rolled my towel in front of me as I adjusted my dick. He didn't move.

"See ya," I said to him as I took the first step away from him.

"God's Will." He said at me.

He never looked up at me. I looked down at him, and realized how clean and sleek his body was, how . . . attractive . . . his ass was, all round and yet slim below the hips, the long, finely muscled legs, lightly covered with tiny black hairs.

His cheek glistened from a little bead of sweat, or maybe . . .

I trudged towards the truck, confused about what had just happened, feeling sad and so lonely I wanted to cry, but men don't do that. As I got to the top of the beach, I looked back, hoping that he would be looking at me, that we could at least wave good-bye, that he would call me to come back . . .

He was gone, and I never even knew his name, nor he mine.