This is a work of fiction. Names of characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously; any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Dennis Milholland – All rights reserved. Other than for private, not-for-profit use, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in any form or by any means, other than that intended by the author, without written permission from the copyright holder.

Careful! This is a work of fiction containing graphic descriptions of sex between males and critiques of religion and governments. And last but not least, Nifty would like your donations.

Farewell, Uncle Ho

by Dennis Milholland

questions and comments are welcome. www.milholland.eu / dennis@milholland.eu

Chapter 1

I pull my mouth off Jules' angrily reddened, massively swollen, thickly veined cock for a brief check of the alarm clock on the nightstand. It's 09:42 in the morning and must already be 30° C and rising. It's humid, sticky, smoggy, overcast, and we're hearing and feeling the first tank roar by our two-storey, corner home, shaking its colonial foundations.

The hammer between the two bells straddling the top of the old Wesclox is causing a tinkling sound due to constant vibration. I get onto my knees and straddle his pleasantly muscled and very sweaty midsection to shove his, my favorite, phallus up my ass for possibly the fourth time, since midnight. We haven't been waiting idly. Sleep has been out of the question due to all the street fighting, rockets slamming into the main market section of the city from across the river and the last stand on Newport Bridge.

I lick his armpits to make him squirm. The air in the room still smells distinctively of exploded ordinance laced with whiffs of butt fucking and lemongrass incense, which we burn during the night to keep the river mosquitoes away; it's still burning. The eleven hours of rough, male sex, smoked dope, stale beer and cold tobacco are reflected in already full ashtrays, all of which are fighting the incense for domination. But slowly, this olfactory collage of our own making, having been mixed well by our now emergency-generator-driven ceiling fan, is giving way to pungent, diesel exhaust fumes from the invading tanks passing below. Artillery did not destroy the city, and us along with it, as we'd half expected during the past two nights.

"You wonna cum, now?" I whisper, almost out of breath, while violently pumping his cock in and out of my anus and clenching my sphincter muscles. I'm frantic to shoot.

We've been keeping one another wired up, on the painful verge of ecstasy since midnight, only pausing to eat what we'd already prepared yesterday, to drink cool lime water, sometimes out of one-another's mouths, to share a bottle of ba muoi ba with the trademark golden number thirty-three in quotes on the glossy red-and-black paper label or to smoke, every so often, cigarettes from the carton of Cotab on the nightstand, but more frequently than not, pre-rolled joints, soaked in opium, from the cellophane bag of fifty, propped against the carton of cigarettes, behind my ancient alarm clock. Drugs and the thought of dying together make the possibility of annihilation slightly more bearable.

"I'm almost there, Ben." his airy whisper blows into my ear, before he rolls me onto my back to gain deeper penetration, to continue his pounding, to ram my prostate. He lowers his profusely perspiring torso onto mine. Our individual sweat mixes to become collective sweat, allowing his hard belly to slide up and down over my excruciatingly engorged dick. The tingle at my core escalates to almost unbearable excitement.

My eruption of ejaculate causes a scream that might just go unnoticed despite the open windows, due to the background noise of war. Jules yells loud grunts and expletives as he fills my ass to overflowing, which, once, could possibly have caused raised eyebrows and clicks of tongue on the other side of what was once rue Catinat at the once piss-elegant Majestic Hotel, in what many claim to have been more civilized times. But not now. Times on present-day Tu-Do Street at the corner of Bach-Dang Wharf have become war-time brutal, just as our need for sex and closeness to one another has become obsessive over the past weeks of uncertainty, in order for both of us not to feel abandoned.

Chapter 2

We manage to get out of bed and take a hot shower together to cool off on this muggy, sticky, smoggy final day of what, we're guessing, used to be Saigon. Rumor has it that the North Vietnamese will be changing the name along with all the policies. The tropical deluge of rain yesterday did nothing to cool things down; it just made the humidity and stench of accumulated garbage all the more unbearable.

Jules grins at me while he screws on the top of our cast-aluminum espresso maker in our small utility kitchen off the bedroom. I turn to look directly at my man as I use our alum block on my armpits. It's the only deodorant that's undetectable, particularly in the shadows. Originally, it was just one less identifying factor for the Americans to pick up on; now, it has become a habit.

"What are you grinning at, Lover?" I put the alum block back into its plastic container, as I watch him across the hallway from the bathroom.

He carefully places the espresso maker onto the propane gas burner. "I'm glad that you're here with me, this time."

"What do you mean: 'with you this time'?" My question causes his facial features to turn to stone, while he suppresses more pent-up emotions from his past. "Shit, Jules, I'm sorry." I hurry over to him from the bathroom, pulling him into an embrace, with which he also has difficulties when we're in public. His family used to be prominent, which required being discrete, and being prominent meant they had a lot to lose, which they ultimately did.

He breathes deeply, steadying himself. "The last time, this country was transitioning ideological forms of government, from colonialism into fascism, and the Diem mob had all the streets renamed, and everybody all at once became ultra nationalistic and tried to force even the Montagnards to take on Vietnamese identities.

“They didn't know what to do with me, a boy of nine, because I was actually French, according to my lineage, but they didn’t think I should have a French name. The eternal Vietnamese nationalism pissed off my mother, so she named me after the county in Guangdong, where she was from. That’s why my first name is Haifeng.

"My parents were clearly foreigners, who'd come here from other countries. They were not assimilated, spoke no Vietnamese and would, at some point, leave. But I was born in Saigon; I, therefore have the option of being Vietnamese. I even speak Vietnamese with a Saigonese accent," He laughs sarcastically. "although, in my own mind, I'm most decidedly French, one of almost ten thousand still here. To their minds, I have to be Vietnamese.

"But this time, almost at the age of twenty nine, transitioning from fascism to communism, with my parents gone, I'm here and have you as backup. We can have you toy with their overly simplistic minds. And, believe me, they really won't know what to do with you. You're a cosmopolite, the likes of whom generally run scared, getting rescued off rooftops at the last moment in a rush of panic. But both of us are still here. And after May Day tomorrow, we'll open shop on Friday, as if nothing has happened. We'll just refuse to take notice of what they're doing."

Recognizing it for what it is, simply anti-communist propaganda, upon which I was raised, at work in my head, despite my own rational political leanings, I do feel a tinge of panic about what will happen to us in the very near future. Trying to put that apprehension out of my mind, I hug him even tighter, partly for his sake but mainly for my own. And since we're not in public, he emphatically returns the affection, clinging to me like a drowning man to a life raft, which, in turn, causes me to express my usual bravado related to everything governmental: "We'll fuck them, before they can fuck us."

Before we leave the house, to see what's going on outside, since we've been under a twenty-four hour curfew, Jules goes downstairs to check, from inside the house, the iron, roll-down shutters securing the outside of the doors and windows of the ground floor, where he has his shops. Apparently, no looters have yet tried their luck at getting in.

Since we can now be fairly sure that no more rockets will be falling from the sky, he closes the doors and windows, which he had opened to keep any blasts from blowing out the glass. Finally, he throws the switch on the air conditioning. We wait for the first blast of cool, dry air, before we leave.

Although brought up as a tobacconist by his father, he trained as an economist and marketing expert at the Franco-Chinese College in Cholon. He also trades in spirits, and, as anyone else in occupied Saigon, sometimes in contraband. Well, truth be told, he and I trade a lot in contraband.

This also included, until '73, military payment certificates, which replaced real US dollars. MPCs looked much like a green back with some pink added. The major difference was this one dollar bill didn't have George Washington looking at you, rather it sported the profile of a woman who looked annoyingly like Pat Nixon. I'm sure the former First Lady would be thrilled to know how many of her look-alikes went to pay prostitutes, to buy drugs and illegal weapons, causing any number of GIs to return home in a box.

My thoughts, leaving occupational scrip behind, steer my sleep-deprived gaze to the cast-iron plaque at the bottom of each shutter, as Jules checks the locks below them. These small plaques, coated in paint many times over, warn anyone who still speaks French that they are messing with La Cuirassée, indicating that the shutters are indeed armored, thief-proof, fire-proof, although I seem to doubt tank-proof, and made by P.B. de Montreuil, located at 214, Boulevard Paul Bert, Saïgon.

This bit of totally useless information gives me an odd sense of security, although neither the street, for sure, nor the city, I guess, still officially exists. Just as I no longer officially exist, as far as the Americans are concerned. At best, I was carried on my old unit's morning report as missing in action or even killed in action, for awhile. I don't remember how long they keep that up, though. And at the moment, I don't have enough energy or stamina left even to hazard a guess.