LUST IN IRAQ Part 1
By Dolphin Dan
***** SPECIAL WARNING ***** In addition to the usual warnings (that if you are not of legal age, or otherwise prohibited from or offended by reading about sexual acts among consenting adult males, etc.) it should be mentioned that this story is not intended to be political in any way, shape or form, and that ANY political agenda or bias perceived here lies entirely in the mind of the reader. If you are not able to set aside the political aspects involved with the setting and theme of this fictional piece, than this story is NOT for you. ***************************
I didn't consider myself gay, or even anywhere close, until I went to Iraq. I confess, in my teenage years I'd had some thoughts that one might consider "gay," and even in my 20s I was kind of curious what it would be like to sleep with a man, but I certainly didn't identify myself as gay or even bi. When my unit got shipped over in the fall of 2003 I was 29 and pretty well-adjusted, and even had a steady girlfriend waiting for me back home in Ohio. I was a completely normal guy, like thousands of others in the Army, and I didn't even think about "don't ask, don't tell" because it simply didn't concern me.
PFC Toby Smythe changed all of that. He arrived about six months after I did with a large rotation of recruits. They were only a few weeks out of Basic. We were based in one of the many tents and Quonset barracks littering the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport, and when a bunch of reservists were rotated back to the States, these kids--and that's what they were, just kids--moved right in when they got out. At first I resented being handed a company of complete greenhorns. Simmons, our captain, had sympathy for me. "I hate to do this to you, Jim," he said one evening, offering me a cigarette after handing me a clipboard with the orders attached. "The Pentagon is shaking up everything. There's a lot of personnel changes. We got stuck with the newbies, and we've got to get them up to speed. There's no two ways about it."
I first noticed Smythe during my first inspection of the barracks after the new grunts moved in, and I couldn't explain why. He caught my eye in a way that was totally inexplicable. He wasn't what you'd consider classically attractive, at least, the type I would think most guys who like other guys would go for. He was a little on the short side, and, while as physically fit as any soldier in a forward combat area, he wasn't some kind of uber-muscular superman or anything although he was well-built. While he would have been quite a catch on Venice Beach in peacetime, he would have looked very out of place posing for a magazine. His hair was very blonde, and, rather than the flat-top or sidewall favored by many soldiers, his was shaved a uniform 1/8" all around his scalp. He had brown puppy-dog eyes, thick, straight eyebrows and a slightly aquiline nose. Honestly he looked like a cartoon character. His bearing was very military: his eyes were always directed straight forward, his chest thrust outward, and he looked like the prodigal sailor in those Horatio Hornblower movies, presenting himself before the mast to proudly and defiantly receive the cat-o'-nine tails after covering for another man's transgression. Honestly, although his appearance was striking, I didn't like him at first. I singled him out.
"Who are you?" I asked him at the first inspection.
"Private First Class Toby R. Smythe, SIR!" he cried at virtually ear-splitting volume. He had a thick Southern accent.
"Turn that voice down a notch, Private."
"Yes, SIR."
I glanced at his cot and foot locker. The blankets on the cot were stretched so tight they looked about to rip apart. The foot locker had virtually nothing in it. Already I didn't like Smythe. Overachiever. Eager to prove himself. Hell, he probably enlisted because he wanted to come to Iraq. I don't know why I did what I did next. Perhaps on a subconscious level I realized I was attracted to him, and some kind of reflexive defense mechanism deep in my brain was already reacting against it. I grabbed the blankets of his cot, pulled them up and tossed them back down. I pitched the pillow on the floor and nudged the locker with my foot so that it was skew. I walked around in front of him.
"Your cot is not regulation, Smythe."
He merely glanced behind him. Something flashed in his eyes; I couldn't tell whether it was cowardice or defiance. "No, SIR," he replied.
"You'll report to me immediately after mess, private."
"Yes, SIR."
"Goddammit, I thought I told you to stop SHOUTING!"
"Yes, SIR!"
When he reported after breakfast I minced no words with him. "I'm going to make an example of you, Private," I told him. "Every company needs an example. And I've decided you're it." I set him right to work on numerous very dull and boring tasks, cataloguing ammo, running files back and forth and the like. I figured he would blanch at this, because it seemed to me he was one of those "hungry for glory" types who had come here to go home with a chest full of medals. I also verbally dressed him down in front of others nearly every chance I got. My own interest in Smythe, which had not yet risen to a conscious level, was not the sole reason for this treatment. I was a firm believer in the philosophy that, when presented with a team of raw privates who don't know your style, you'd better single out one as an example--even arbitrarily--and make sure he tells the rest of his company what a hardass you're being, and then the rest of them will respect you. So, over the next few weeks I employed this philosophy with Smythe. I'll skim over the details; they're not very interesting, and if you've seen any of the standard "you're in the Army now" movies made over the last six or seven decades you'll know the drill in any event. I confess there were a lot of things eating at me in those weeks. I resented the new recruits; I resented being passed over for OTS two months ago, which would have meant my temporary rotation back to the States. I missed Meredith, my girlfriend. I hated Iraq. I hated the heat and the flies, the bland food, the dust in my throat and under my fingernails, the hostile look in the eyes of the natives, the dreadful fear every time we went out on a mission that I wouldn't come back. For a few weeks Smythe personified that hatred for me, and I confess I treated him badly. But he never once complained. He was too much of a soldier for that.
We patrolled frequently. Our beat was the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Baghdad, known as the Wild West; our primary mission was to facilitate the delivery of infrastructure and supplies to construction sites and to provide security for patrols looking for insurgents. It was dangerous duty. Two weeks after the arrival of Smythe and the other newbies, Captain Simmons informed us that we were headed out to escort a company of tanker trucks importing gasoline into the city. The trucks were owned by civilian contractors, and as civilians and gasoline were both prime targets for insurgents in the Wild West, it was to be a hazardous assignment. I recall thinking, as we loaded up with ammunition, checked weapons and piled into our HMVVs at the base, that Smythe and his friends were simply not cut out for combat missions. But they were all cool as cucumbers, sitting in the back of the HMVV, weapons at the ready. Several of the new members of the company were metalheads, and on the way to the checkpoint Janney, one of the most likable and gung-ho of the new grunts, passed a little wallet of CDs to me. "They tell me the men under your command are allowed to pick the music on the way to the mission," said Janney. "Could you play some Judas Priest, sir?"
"Judas Priest?" I smiled momentarily. I remembered seeing Judas Priest in Columbus in 1990, when I was sixteen. "All right." I plucked Painkiller from the CD wallet and handed it up to Kinnear, our driver, who was also in charge of the stereo. When the music started I glanced back at the men. Smythe, who was chewing a wad of gum the size of Minnesota, smiled and made the little devil-horns symbol with his hand, pressing it against the front of his helmet. My eyes lingered on him. For the very first time in my life I had a conscious thought of finding another man attractive. The hue of his pale skin, the little golden stubble of his sideburns, the mole on his chin, the fine little blond hairs on the back of his hand--something about Smythe was utterly captivating and I couldn't understand it. I actually began to get an erection. You have to understand how unusual--even frightening--this is. We were headed into a combat zone, a part of the city rife with insurgents, into a situation where a terrorist attack or a live firefight might erupt without warning at any moment. Other men would be shitting their pants in fear, and instead I was tenting mine--and over a lowly private. It was incredibly inappropriate, and I felt shamed and callous.
We accomplished our mission, the contractors delivered the gasoline without incident and none of our company even fired a shot. That was good. On the way back we picked another of Janney's metal CDs to play in the HMVV; it was some band called Manowar, and several of the guys, Smythe included, were totally getting into it. That afternoon in the office, enjoying a cigarette, a cup of coffee and the relief of having survived another mission into the Wild West, I pulled Smythe's personnel file. He was what I expected--a raw grunt. He was from some little shithole town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that I vaguely remembered being in years ago, to hit the casinos one weekend after Basic. Smythe hadn't even graduated from high school; he dropped out and took his GED on his eighteenth birthday, six months before graduation, so he could join the Army earlier. I lingered over his photo. He really was a good-looking kid. When I realized I was getting another semi I immediately banished from my mind any thought of having anything to do with him. He was certainly hetero; his file did not indicate he was married, but a guy that good-looking had to have a girlfriend back home. I tried to forget about Toby Smythe. Any distractions from our mission were ill-advised.
A week later, though, a chance encounter forced me to deal with it. Our unit had a set of makeshift communal showers in one of the Quonset barracks, and, like everything else in the Army and in Iraq, there wasn't a lot of privacy or comfort. One evening it remained particularly hot long into the evening, and just before hitting the rack I decided to have a quick run through the shower. Smythe was the only person there. As soon as I saw him there I knew I should have turned around and left, but how would I have explained that? I resolved to remain calm and not get rattled. Smythe was beautiful. He really did look like a kid, and in a way I guess he was. His chest was smooth and hairless, his nipples perfect little round dimes of dark-colored flesh. Muscles that looked honed in Basic rippled unconsciously under his pale skin. His ass was perfectly shaped, his thighs and calves thick but not lumpy or sinewy. Thankfully his back was to me and I couldn't see his dick. As it was I tried to keep my eyes off him. I selected a showerhead as far away from him as possible, but in close quarters that was only a couple of feet. The water that came out of the spigot was whatever temperature it was in the holding tank--and in Baghdad in late spring everything is hot. I wished it was ice-cold.
"Evenin,' sir," bade Smythe cheerfully when I saw him. He was soaping up his chest. He turned to rinse it off. Hanging in his crotch, dusted with dark-blonde pubic hair, was a lovely penis. It was of average length, but, like everything else about Smythe, it was perfectly-shaped, perfectly-proportioned. His balls did seem to be on the large side.
"Hello, Smythe." I tore my eyes away, but my mind simply couldn't help itself. The old curiosities of my adolescence came rushing back. I had the strongest urge to touch Smythe's penis. It wasn't even that I wanted to have sex with him. I just wanted to know what it felt like in my hand. The warm water coursing over my belly merely hastened the inevitable. My mind was disconnected from my body in that moment. I allowed myself one quick split-second glance back at Smythe. He had shut off the water now and was standing there dripping, and I realized he was staring at me. With a sinking feeling in my stomach I realized I had an absolutely rock-hard erection, and that he had caught me looking at him.
I was never more mortified in my life. Given a choice between repeating that moment or being sent out into the Wild West unarmed in my skivvies in the middle of a Baathist rally, I'd take the Wild West in a heartbeat.
Smythe said nothing, but it was useless to even pretend my six and a half inch dick wasn't standing at full attention and that he didn't notice it. He grabbed a towel and casually walked past me, out of the shower. His expression was blank. I had no idea what to make of it. After that he avoided me when possible, and I noticed his snappy "SIR!" was not at its usual deafening volume.
The next few days I was in a strange sort of emotional agony. For one thing I was conflicted: for months now the thought of returning to Meredith's sweet embrace--and her equally sweet pussy--had kept me going, but now she was almost a faded memory, like a character out of a book, whereas Smythe was alive and definitely in my face on a daily basis. For another, I was very worried that Smythe might tell someone what he'd seen. "Don't ask, don't tell" is one thing, but even a whisper among the men that the sergeant of the platoon might have been queer could change the dynamic of our unit, and that would surely interfere with our mission. Indeed I actually began to think whether I should request a transfer, and on what grounds I could make it stick. Then sanity came back to me. This was MY unit. I wasn't going to transfer out because I secretly jerked off in my bunk at night thinking about one particularly good-looking soldier under my command. The whole thing was ridiculous.
Then toward the end of the week another mission loomed. Captain Simmons called us all together and, with maps spread out on the table, informed us of what was coming. "We've got reliable intel that an insurgent leader is being held in a safe house in this part of the city," he said. "We're going to to a standard snatch and grab, only it may not be so standard." The problem: this safe house was a tough one to crack. The insurgents holed up there were believed to be heavily armed with everything from AKs to RPGs and more. It would be a dangerous mission. He was putting us together with Captain Peterson's unit. The insertion would begin at 0145 that night.
I will not go into great detail on the mission; that's not the focus of my story. It should suffice to say that those hours leading up to 0145 were excruciating for everyone. Our unit had had bad experiences before in that part of the city and every time we went in there it was a pitched firefight. As I loaded ammo clips, Private Smythe came up to me. He looked as cool and as collected as ever, a cigarette hanging from his lip, as if this was all in a day's work. "You nervous, Sergeant?" he asked me.
"Don't you worry about me, Private."
"Good luck, sir."
"You too, Smythe."
We went in, two companies of well-armed guys in HMVVs. The shooting started within a block of the safe house. It was exactly as I expected, but you can never really be used to the fear, the horror and the adrenaline. After 20 or 25 minutes I found myself pinned down with Janney, Parham and Kovacz behind a crumbling wall, and an insurgent with a tripod-mounted machine gun was giving us hell. "We've got to take out that weapon!" I cried over the roar and chatter of gunfire all around us. The plan was to take it out with a shoulder-mounted grenade. Parham, Kovacz and I would provide cover fire while Janney launched it. That moment was one of the most terrifying of my time in Iraq. As soon as I began firing I heard the answering chatter of the insurgents' gun. Then I heard a loud PING! and I was thrown backward as if someone had hit me square in the front of my helmet with a sledgehammer. I heard the whoosh and roar of the grenade and felt the heat of the blast of the resulting explosion. But I was very disoriented. I assumed I'd been shot in the head but I couldn't feel any blood steaming down my face as I would have expected.
The next thing I remember I was on the HMVV and we were on our way back. The world was swimming back to me. Beamer, the medic, was swabbing at my head. I had a splitting headache. "I hate to say this, sir," said Beamer, "but one more millimeter to the left and you'd have been a KIA for sure."
"What happened?"
All the guys on the HMVV--I noticed Smythe was among them--stared at me like I was nuts. "You don't remember?" said Beamer.
"I remember getting shot."
Janney handed me my helmet. There were two neat bullet holes in the left side, very close together, an entry and an exit. Astonishingly the bullet had gone into my helmet, grazed my scalp and popped out the other side. It was literally as close a shave as they come. I was addled and had a nice raw gash on the left side of my head, but I was alive.
I was very shaken by the brush with death. We got back to the base as dawn painted the sky, with, thankfully and almost miraculously, very few casualties of a minor nature and no KIAs. We had accomplished the mission, sort of--we failed to capture the guy we wanted, but he was believed to have been killed in the action. I collapsed into my bunk in the barracks and slept fitfully. Killing people is never a good thing to do before bed.
When I woke in the morning, still shaken, I went to put on my boots and found a piece of paper inside my left boot. Astonished, I took it out. The blood drained out of my head when I read it:
"SGT., I KNOW I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO ASK AND YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TELL. MAYBE THERE'S NOTHING TO ASK OR TELL ABOUT. BUT IF THERE IS WE HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON. YOU KNOW ME, I SAW SOMETHING THE OTHER NIGHT YOU WISH I HADN'T. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. LOVE TO CHAT IN PRIVATE (AND I DO MEAN PRIVATE). IF NOT, OK, AND YOU CAN COUNT ON MY DISCRETION IF I CAN COUNT ON YOURS."
The note was astonishing; it was brazen, and extremely dangerous. I didn't even know how he got it into my stuff. By all rights I should have crumpled it up, thrown it away and never thought of it again, for it was the kind of thing that could get both its author and its recipient in a world of trouble--even court-martialed. Probably at any other time I would have done just that, even despite what I felt for Smythe. But all of us were in a strange mood, living day by day with the shadow of death. Still shaken by how close I'd come to getting killed, I was in a strange and risky state. But you also have to understand that I viewed the note as an act of love, of kindness. We were in the middle of a war, surrounded by violence, butchery and hatred that ground us down. Being the recipient of an act of love, under those circumstances, makes it all the more imperative to act on it.
The next night, while the men were having some rec time watching Comedy Central taped from the states, I approached Smythe in a brusque manner. "Private, report to me in the office right away." The other men looked at him and at me. He looked momentarily terrified; perhaps he thought I was going to report him over the note. "Yes, sir," he replied.
It was late and the office section of the main barracks was empty. The office was a prefab unit, like an indoor trailer at a construction site. My heart skipped a beat; I knew what an awful risk we were both taking. After he came in I sat at the desk, picked up my coffee cup and lit a cigarette as if I was talking to any other private. "Remain at attention as if I'm reprimanding you," I said softly. There were blinds on the office windows but I did not pull them; I didn't want anything to look out of the ordinary.
"Yes, sir."
"You sent me that note?"
"Yes, sir."
"Why?" He looked terrified again, so I tried to set him at ease. "It's all right. I'm not going to turn you in. But why?"
Softly, he replied, "I'm very attracted to you, sir. After I saw what happened in the shower I thought you might feel the same way about me."
My heart skipped a beat. This was almost unbelievable, like some kind of dream. I smoked. My hands were shaking. God, what about Meredith? What was I doing? "Toby, don't call me 'sir' here. My name is Jim."
His eyes looked down at me, those beautiful blue eyes. I felt a twinge of excitement in my groin. I wondered if he was getting hard as well.
"We must be COMPLETELY on the Q.T. with this, Toby," I told him. "I mean, totally."
"What do you have in mind?"
I dragged on the cigarette. I realized I was making a date. Of all the places on earth, Baghdad in a war zone would be the last place I would ever expect something like this to happen. "This office, 0230 tonight," I told him. "Lights will be off, blinds drawn. You must be quiet. Don't knock. Just tap on the doorknob very softly. I'll be here."
Toby's expression hadn't changed. He was still the stern-faced military boy. "0230," he said.
"One more thing, Private. This does NOT change anything out there. We have a mission to do. This is separate. The second you forget that, the second we have a problem. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
I didn't sleep. I didn't even go to bed. Until 2:15 I lay awake on the small cot in the office, stripped to my khaki boxer briefs and tank-top, sweating in the heat and realizing with amazement that I was about to have sex...with a man. It occurred to me that maybe Iraq really had changed me.
At precisely 0230 there was a gentle tap on the doorknob. I ground out my umpteenth cigarette of the night in the ashtray on my chest, sat up and cracked the door open slightly. One hollow-looking blue eye stared at me. I let him in. He was dressed in BDUs and a khaki T-shirt. He carried nothing with him. As soon as I closed the door we stood there in the darkness, face to face, our noses almost touching. I was frozen, not knowing what to do.
"This is weird," said Toby.
"Yeah. For me too."
Very gently we moved together and our lips met. At first it was strange and awkward, but Toby put a gentle hand around the back of my neck, pressing me close into him. I could smell the aroma of sweat and oil, that ever-present smell of the Army. We all smelled like that. It excited me. I grew almost painfully erect. We were kissing for a little while before we began to press our bodies together, especially our hips. Even through the thick camouflage-spangled fabric of his BDUs I could feel the hardness of that lovely member I'd seen that night in the shower.
"I've been attracted to you since you came to the unit," I told him when our lips parted. "I didn't know what came over me. I always thought I was--you know, straight." I felt like I should add: "I have a girlfriend back home."
"I've never been interested in girls." He kissed my neck. Feeling his tongue pressing the skin just under my left ear nearly drove me crazy with desire. "I liked what I saw in the shower. I was surprised, but...I liked it. I thought about it a lot."
We kissed some more. Between kisses I whispered, "Do you want it now?"
"Yes."
"What do you want to do to it?"
He was already lifting up my shirt and kissing my stomach. "I want to suck it." Then he pulled down the waistband of my boxer briefs and freed my aching penis. I had to steady myself as I felt a warm, wet kiss close around the head of my dick. I gasped. He took me all the way into his mouth. ALL the way. Then he pulled me out, so only my head was inside his mouth, and then all the way back down to the root again. The pleasure was unbelievable, almost super-human. Toby either had a gift, or a great deal of experience. I didn't care which.
As wonderful as it was, feeling his lips wrapped around my shaft, the gentle playing and probing of my balls and my anus with his fingers, strangely that wasn't the feeling I remember most. I remember rubbing the palms of my hands over the top of Toby's head. His hair was so short and the little hairs felt so stiff and bristly that it was a captivating sensation against the skin of my palms, especially when combined with the sensory overload emanating from my rod. I moaned softly. I worked my hips into the rhythm of his sucking. I was in complete and utter ecstasy. I got so into the feeling of his bristly hair against my palms that I suddenly had the very strange desire to rub my penis against the same surface. I gently reached down and backed away from him, pulling my dick from Toby's mouth with a string of saliva that hung from his lips. "This is weird," I whispered to him, "but I have to do this." With my other hand I gently pushed his head down so it was level with my crotch. I rubbed my dickhead against the hair on the top his head. It was slightly bristly, but his hair was so silky that it didn't hurt or scratch a bit. It was such an incredibly weird, erotic but yet pleasing sensation--and one totally unlike anything I'd experienced before--that I felt for a moment like I was totally someone else, someWHERE else.
Toby giggled softly. "You like that?" he said. He pulled away from me for a moment and stripped off his shirt. Even in the dim light of the office his smooth chest, his lovely little nipples and his shoulders looked like polished ivory. He took the opportunity to doff his BDU pants as well so he was clad just in his underwear, through which I could see the shape of his own erect penis. He got on his knees again. He kissed my dick and slicked it up with saliva, even licking my balls. Then he bowed his head and used his hand to press my penis against it, rubbing softly. I held my hand on top of his. Our hands together formed the upper part of a makeshift vagina, and his stubbly head was its lower surface. I found a rhythm and he went with it. He kissed my thighs just above my knees. In my life I hadn't been particularly adventurous in the bedroom, and fucking Toby Smythe's head was easily the most unusual form of sex I'd ever engaged in.
The pleasure built quickly and my rhythm grew faster. I was in such ecstasy that there was no way I could have stopped. Finally my balls pulled up close and tight to my body and my penis became a rod of hard, wet, hot steel. I gasped, and then I came harder than any other cum in my life up to that point. The pleasure nearly split my head apart. My rod ejected spurt after spurt of hot white semen onto Toby's head, the back of his neck, and his shoulders. A thick layer of it coated our hands that were now clasped tightly together. I remember watching a thick jet of my sperm erupt from the tip of my dick and fire gracefully down the line connecting the back of Toby's neck and the gentle groove of his spine between his muscular shoulder blades. I can still see it in my mind's eye, as if in slow-motion. When I was finished there was a splatter of cum all the way down his back, even wetting the band of his underwear.
I backed away from him and basically collapsed onto the cot, my belly heaving. I was sweating. It was a dizzying experience. Only as I slackened did I realize there was a scratchy feeling on the underside of my dick; I didn't yet feel it but in the morning I would realize I nearly rubbed myself raw.
Toby giggled again. "I gotta get this shit off," he whispered. "Is there a towel or something in here?" There wasn't one, so he used my underwear, discarded on the floor. But I saw him lick his hand too. Then he joined me on the cot. "Nobody's ever fucked my hair before," he told me. The way he said it, with his bright Southern accent, was strangely funny. We both laughed, though we were careful not to be too loud.
My hands wandered over his chest. I gently brushed his nipples and moved down. I began to feel him through the fabric of his underwear, then I slipped my hands under the band and felt it skin to skin. At last the penis I'd admired was mine to feel to my heart's content, and Toby's. It was as wonderful to touch as it had been to look at. He was probably just shy of seven inches, uncut, and arrow-straight. I reached down and felt his balls. They were much larger than mine. "What do you want?" I whispered to him.
"I never do anal on a first date," he said. "I always play it safe anyway and I don't know where to find a condom." He kissed my head. "But I like oral."
Nothing more needed to be said. I pulled down his underwear, and he clambered up atop me so his crotch was in my face. He was half-on and half-off the cot now, his hands planted on the floor, push-ups style. It took only a gentle nudge with his hand--still wet from my semen and the saliva from when he licked it off--to guide his penis between my lips. I had never sucked a man's dick before, but I did everything I had always told Meredith, and any of my other girlfriends, to do--open wide, no teeth, lots of suction and use the tongue. I barely had to do anything. In his push-up position Toby did most of the work. He just did push-ups on me, like a drill sergeant was counting them back in Basic. Each push upward pulled his penis out of my mouth; each thrust downward pumped it in again. He took no prisoners and expected from me as much as I had received from him, for with each stroke he pushed his dick as far down my throat as possible. His timing was perfect. He never stopped or paused once. He just kept doing push-ups, at a faster and faster pace. With my hands I stroked his back and the smooth skin of his butt. I thought of trying to find his butthole with my finger, but his cheeks were clenched so tightly together and his pace was soon so fast that there wasn't an opportunity. He was soon panting, softly at first, then harder and faster. I wished I could see his face. For some reason I wanted to see what this 18-year-old boy's face looked like at the moment of his orgasm.
Toby's push-ups and the quick panting sounds of his breaths reached a climax. Finally he stopped, holding himself up in push-up position, his biceps quivering, and he said, suprisingly softly, "Jimmy!" His orgasm was like a warm, wet grenade going off in my mouth. The amount of cum he shot down my throat was incredible. It seemed to go on forever. For a few moments I felt like I was choking. The head of Toby's dick was quaking at the back of my throat and his tip was ejecting spasm after spasm of hot sperm and I couldn't breathe. He finished coming and pulled himself off me. I coughed and it felt like there was a phlegm wad at the back of my throat. I got up off the cot and snatched from the desk the coffee cup, now empty, I'd been drinking from earlier. Into it I spat a mammoth bolt of pearly white semen. Just seeing the size of the wad I coughed up was almost frightening, because I'd swallowed most of what Toby had given me--these were the leftovers I couldn't force down. But we had worse problems. My involuntary coughing fit was loud enough to attract attention. From outside the office I heard voices, and footsteps approaching.
"Quick!" I whispered to Toby. "Grab your clothes--under the desk, quickly!"
He scrambled. Luckily he was a fast-thinker, for as he dove under the desk he tossed me his underwear which was still clean; mine, in Toby's hand, was wet and stained with a mixture of his saliva and my cum. Throughout our strange tryst I had never removed my tank-top shirt. I quickly pulled on Toby's boxer briefs, which were uncomfortably small for me, and sat back down on the cot. I continued coughing and holding the coffee cup close to my face. There came a pounding on the door. "Who's there?" Then I heard the slides of two automatic pistols being pulled back and the gruff call of "Rainbow! Rainbow!"
The code words. When someone called "Rainbow," you had to answer "X-Ray," or you'd get shot. In World War II it had been "Thunder" and "Flash" because it was thought Germans couldn't pronounce them properly; in Iraq, though, it didn't make much sense, because I'd heard native speakers of Arabic say "Rainbow" and "X-Ray" with no problem at all. Nevertheless I coughed again and said, "X-Ray, X-Ray, it's all right." I clicked on the light. With a start I realized there was still a fair amount of Toby's semen in the bottom of the coffee cup. I had no choice; I fired it down like a shot of whisky. Didn't even taste it, though I wished I could have had time to savor it. I opened the office door. Two soldiers stood there, sidearms at the ready. "It's all right. It's just me."
"I'm sorry, sir," said one of the soldiers, Kominski. "We didn't know anyone was in here this late."
"It's all right. I was finishing some paperwork and fell asleep." I tried to mimic a sleepy, bewildered look. "What time is it?"
"Almost 0300, sir. We've got dawn patrol at 0430."
"I'm aware of that, private. Thank you." I closed the door. It had been a narrow escape. I went back to the desk. Toby was curled under it, clutching his clothes. He smiled.
"Leave ten minutes after me," I said. "Make sure no one sees you. And you had better be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for patrols in the morning."
"Yes, sir." He was still smiling. There was a bond between us now. Somehow I knew that this would not be the last time we'd have sex. He started to climb out from under the desk, and he whispered, "Jim, what about your shorts?"
"Keep 'em," I told him, reaching for my own BDU pants on the chair. "Wear 'em on patrol. Just don't piss in them if we get shot at. You can bring them back to me the next time--you know, if we get a chance to--well, you know."
I crept out, shut off the lights in the office and returned to my sleeping quarters. There were still a few men up. I hoped they couldn't tell I was flushed. Back at my own quarters I collapsed on my cot. In the stifling cubicle I inhabited I smoked a cigarette in the darkness and thought about what had happened. I had been unfaithful to Meredith. I had very probably put my command, and Toby's future in the military, at risk. I had certainly committed more violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice than I cared to think about. But something about it was wonderful and liberating. Would I be with Toby again? Absolutely. Every chance I got. They could throw the book at me, drum me out of the service, send me back to Ft. Benning in the brig. But during the wonderful time Toby and I had been together, I did not think once about the war, about danger, or about death. The time we had sex that evening was the first stretch of waking time in the entirety of the six months I'd been in Iraq that I had felt human--and normal.
*** TO BE CONTINUED ***
THIS STORY IS DEDICATED TO THE BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN WHO DAILY RISK THEIR LIVES FOR THEIR COUNTRY, AND TO THE SACRIFICES MADE BY THEM AND THEIR LOVED ONES AT HOME.