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 25 (Tues., Jan. 10, 1967)

About fifteen minutes before we were supposed to leave for the mess hall, Sean herded the guys out of the barracks and lined them up on the cinder patch in front. He spoke in a loud and convincing manner: "We are privileged to have amongst us, an old and trusted buddy of mine. Private Loughery and I served together on various assignments…" Haruki's words came to mind: 'it's about pageantry.' "…back in civilian life." Sean limped while walking in front of the troops, as I stood off to the side.

When he handed over to me, I took a deep breath to project from my diaphragm, just like Mrs. Morrison, my high-school drama teacher, had demanded. "Alright, men, my name is Ben Loughery, and I have been given the task of getting you to and from the mess hall in one piece. If we work as a team, that will happen. If we don't work as a team you could find your asses under a deuce-and-a-half." I spotted quite a few heads nodding, which was a very good sign.

"Do any of you have ROTC experience?" Luckily, there were three. And one of them was the fair-haired guy, who'd tripped over my knapsack at the induction station. "I want you at the head of the formation. You'll be leading the platoon." I pointed to the spots nearest the road. "Were any of you safety patrols in grade school?" Four raised their hands. "Excellent. You will be our road guards."

Here's where I saw the chance to make a lasting truce. I walked over to the kid with the scratched up face. "What's your name, Soldier?"

"Private Helmstedter." He looked slightly afraid.

"Okay, Private Helmstedter and I are going to demonstrate how to march." His face went bright, and his smile was wide, as he came with me to the front. "Now, gentlemen, we are going to discover our right foot." A collective snicker ran through the ranks. "Private Helmstedter, raise your right foot." He did. "Excellent. Now, everyone else raise your right foot." They did. "Now, stomp."

In that quarter of an hour, with Private Helmstedter's assistance - a gross misrepresentation since he knew much more about this military bullshit than I did, but again it was pageantry - we had mastered enough to get the men over, fed and back safely. And to guarantee his co-operation, I had him explain the concept of cadence and double time.

By the time we got out on the main road, I started in with response cadence, hoping for all I was worth that Haruki hadn't been bullshitting me: "I don't know, but I've been told."

"I don't know, but I've been told," came the response.

And here's where I crossed my fingers: "that Eskimo pussy is mighty cold."

There were some giggles, but the response was loud and clear.

***

I didn't expect the mess hall to hold a candle to Haruki's cooking, and it didn't. Sean sat with me but was quiet. His pale, Celtic blue eyes were watching me. He had them track my every movement. My own realization that I was happy for him to show me attention helped me relax in these unusual, surreal environs.

My sexual awareness, however, was on red alert. The mess hall held what, two hundred men? All in their late teens and early twenties. Haruki had warned me not to drool. At the time, I'd thought he had been kidding. And now, as I remembered the long trough urinal, toilets, showers in the barracks being all devoid of partitions, I wondered what the Fuck I was going to do to avoid what was presently trying to poke its way through the brass buttons on my jeans.

"In a contemplative mood?" Sean's voice jolted me out of trying to deal with my hard-on.

I leaned across my metal tray to whisper. "How do you keep from going hard every time you take a dump?"

He laughed, motioning for us to go. "You don't. Just keep your knees together to hide it."

We placed our trays on the conveyor belt. "And under the showers?"

"It's like what the billboards told everybody to do during the drought of '64-'65," He snickered. "shower with a friend."

I didn't remember the billboards; I'd been in France, at the time. But that was, on the other hand, the answer I'd been hoping for.

***

Directly after lunch, we marched the platoon to the Post Exchange. And I did exactly what Haruki had told me to do. I found a pay phone and called him collect. I told him about the marching experience, and he laughed himself silly. I also mentioned seeing Sean again after so many years. After I hung up, I knew that I was really going to miss him; this wasn't going to get any easier.

Second on my list was to get two shaving brushes, although I'd never used one in my life. The first shaving brush was sacred, and would be used only twice as not to appear new as would the stick of shaving soap and the new display razor. They were for inspection only. The second one would be used to dust off sand from the M14, once I had to deal with that.

Then came the extra toothbrushes, a new one to be used, a second for inspection and a third to clean the toilets with, just in case the rumors had any substance. The trick was, needless to say, to color-code these and never forget which was which.

I had to remind myself to get shower shoes, the obligatory can of Brasso and oven cleaner, which would come in handy, again, for cleaning the M14. And again, according to the Gospel of St. Haruki, I shouldn't forget to get a jar of Vaseline and a packet of wet wipes, 'cause you could just never know.

***

By the time we'd marched them back to the barracks from the mess hall at dinner time, the troops were actually getting good at marching. Helmstedter had them able to dress right after falling in. He had them practicing facing different directions and saluting during their time in the barracks, waiting for something to happen. Even though it was only the end of the first day of zero week, and they still hadn't been issued any gear, they were looking sharp. Even our four road guards were doing their thing at each intersection.

Sean told the guys that lights would go out at 2200 hours because we were going to have a stressful day, tomorrow, and wake-up would be at 0600. There were looks of disappointment until he told them that the stress was going to involve getting fitted for uniforms. And as he and I were walking down the center aisle toward the stairs, he told them not to forget to use the butt cans, which were the coffee cans, painted red, half-filled with water, one of which was located on every vertical support in the bay and used to extinguish cigarette ash and butts.

Once we were upstairs, Sean put a scoop of coal onto the fire. We sat down on the floor with our backs to the struts of the unfinished wooden wall next to the pot-belly stove. Since the streetlight was shining in the window, we didn't bother switching on the naked bulb in the center of the ceiling.

Sean rolled us a joint from the bit of Black Afghan that Haruki had given me for my first couple of nights away from home. "Tell me something, Ben," he started out in a low voice. "are you still a good listener, like you were back at City College when Janet walked out on me?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, I guess." I held my toke as I passed the joint to Sean. "Got some shit to unload?"

"Guess you could say that." He passed the J back. "How good are your nerves?"

"Probably better than most." The joint was getting short. "Uh, got a roach holder?"

He laughed, scooted across the floor to his bunk, rummaged in a bag and returned with something that looked like a weird pair of scissors. "Bullet forceps." Again he gave off a weird, dopy sound. "One of the perks of being a medic."

When we'd finished smoking, he started talking.

"When I completed my ninety one-alpha training, I volunteered for an aeromedical evacuation unit. So, they assigned me to the 57th Medical Detachment at Tan Son Nhut, just after the big attack on Camp Holloway up in Pleiku." He recognized my confused expression as a need for clarification. "Ninety one-alpha is the code name for a medic, that's my job. Pleiku was where we sometimes worked out of in the Central Highlands." A sense of pride was very much present in his voice. "You know, we're the original Dust-Off unit, the very first one in Nam?"

"Okay, I have no idea what Dust Off means, but let me guess." I gave it some real thought. "When the evacuation choppers leave from collecting the wounded, they cause so much dust that they no longer lift off, but dust off?"

"You're much too logical to be in the Green Latrine. But, no, it was the call sign of our first chopper lost in Nam." He chuckled. "Anyway, when I got there in the middle of February, I was stationed with the unit at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, directly northwest of Saigon. Actually the Air Force Base is part of Saigon International Airport, that's how close it is to town. And then they would send us up to places like Pleiku on ten-day standbys and then we'd go back to Tan Son Nhut."

"What made you want to become a flying medic in a fucking war zone, in the first place?"

"I wanted to make a difference and be a hero without killing people. Superman was my hero as a kid because he would fly off to save somebody, and nobody knew that he was that pussy, Clark Kent. That's sort of what I did. I could fly in and save people, and nobody would know that I'm a faggot." I could tell that his mood was deteriorating. His voice was becoming unsteady.

"There was a Crew Chief, Greg, who I worked with a lot, and who I got close to--"

"--a Crew Chief?" It dawned on me that virtually every little group in the military had its own jargon, and I understood none of it.

"He takes command, when we're over an LZ…" He looked up at me and shook his head. "LZ is a landing zone." He lit a spiked Salem, put it into my mouth and lit another for himself. "So, we'd be hovering over a landing zone, that's when the commander hands over to the Crew Chief to get us positioned. He tells him how to maneuver: peddle left, peddle right. It's also his job to keep the rotor blades clear of the trees and to operate the rescue hoist, things like that."

"You and Greg got close?" I was wondering what his definition of close was.

"Hell, yeah, Ben, we were so close that we would sometimes sleep on the same bunk, when it would get cold out at remote bases up in the Highlands."

When I got up to get the butt can, I gave him a questioning look with raised eyebrows. When he started shaking his head in a negative response, I grinned suggestively.

"Naw, it wasn't what you're thinking, well, mostly it wasn't. We just needed the comfort of being close and alive.

"Anyway, halfway through my last ten-day, field standby, Greg and I are out in the sandbag bunker smoking and taking it easy. The others are in our hooch, dozing and well out of earshot. I'm feeling sort of down because I'm a short-timer and would soon be rotating back to the world, leaving him there. And he asks me if there's anything wrong. So, I tell him what I feel for him.

"I mean, it's a lot more than anything I ever felt for Janet, and trying not to tell him before I leave is killing me." His eyes were filling, despite my attempts to lighten things up. "So, we have this heated discussion about how he can never feel that way about me, and how I should just get over it, since you can't take that kind of thing between men seriously." Sean wiped his now overflowing eyes.

"Right in the middle of all this, we hear the urgent rescue request, coming into the radio bunker close by. Jack, the AC, uh, aircraft commander, runs over to the radio operator with his map board, and the rest of us race to our Huey with the big red cross on a white field, which is supposed to protect us.

"Greg and I untie the rotor blade, strap on our helmets and chicken plates, uh, body armor, while the second pilot does an emergency start and brings the engine and rotor up to the full-flight RPM of 6600 to get us off the ground. The aircraft commander arrives with the coordinates and mission details, straps in, and we leave with the usual bravado.

"We're going into a hot LZ and wait in orbit for the fighting to simmer down and Greg and I are squaring things away to treat the two badly injured 11Bravos, uh, grunts, uh, infantry foot soldiers. The fighting finally stops and the AC takes us in for a quick extraction.

"We get the first litter on board, the guy is still conscious but he's shot up pretty bad. They're approaching with the second guy, when all Fuck breaks lose. Bullets and flares are coming from everywhere. The guys carrying the second man drop him and run for cover, and the AC tries to take us up, but can't get the RPMs. Greg leans out and reports that the tail is burning. The gunships above are yelling at us over the radio that we're on fire and for the AC to take us down. We just barely clear the tree tops, and he rolls us into a nose roll in the sand of a dry clearing. Greg and I are thrown clear of the chopper beyond the embankment of a drainage ditch before our ambulance explodes.

"I don't even realize that I'm injured until I see my leg. Greg is in the sand next to me on his back but with a really bad chest wound. I manage to scoot back a little and sit up with my back against the dike to get leverage, so I can lean over and apply pressure, but it doesn't work.

"He's still conscious, and makes me promise to stay by him. My equipment to patch him up is burning along with the Huey anyway, so, all I can do is to hold his head, stroke his hair and keep him company until he dies."

"When was that?" I pulled him closer to me for comfort.

He was sobbing into my jacket, but I could still understand him. "Six weeks ago, tomorrow."