SAVED FROM THE ABYSS
By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
WWW.TOMMYHAWKFANTASYWORLD.COM
A part of me died in Vietnam. It took sick on the very first day I arrived, and I could feel the heat, the sun, the moisture and the insects all sucking my life away, pouring out of my body in a thin stream like a faucet left barely on. It took a turn for the worse on the day when Vietcong sneaked up and sent a barrage of mortar fire toward my company, and my world exploded in plumes of flying sod, soil, earth, rocks, sticks...bones, blood. My first taste of death in battle, and it was death delivered wholesale. That part of me sickened rapidly when I went on my first mission, and I found that every tree and every rock could hide someone to a rifle that could take my life away, and that did take the lives of the men around me. I was walking along and a cracking sound filled the air and the man next to me dropped dead in his tracks. I dropped to the ground and hugged it for dear life. That could have been me with the sudden red-fringed hole in his forehead, a lazy blob of blood reaching slowly for the thirsty jungle floor. But it hadn't been and yet, in a way, it had been. Another bit of me died with him. And that part of me died for certain when I found the only way to survive was to never trust anyone around me, just my fellow soldiers, and not always them, when the only way to stay alive was to take these innocent-seeming villagers around us and...no, I won't remember that now. Sorry.
When I say a part of me died, I'm talking about the innocent part, the part of me that had been a boy back in the States who played football and went to dances and drove around in a car, the same two streets over and over again, cruising and laughing with the guys and the girls. That part of me was deader than a doornail. Vietnam took it away from me.
But the rest of me was still alive. By then, I was a battle-toughened, emotionally-hardened soldier ready to fight for my country, able to navigate the bush and spot Cong traps almost without thinking about it; I did my job, did what I had to do, and tried not to think about it the rest of the time. That's what the U.S. Army likes to call "a good soldier." That was me in 1967 when I'd been in Vietnam for eight months and it had felt like a lifetime, when my memories of home were paler and smaller than the memories I had of Vietnam, of the jungle, the fighting, the dying and the killing.
Yet, for all that I had lost since coming to Vietnam, there was one more step downwards I hadn't taken yet and didn't want to. That's when the death and the killing and the climate and the brutality all sink into your very soul and you lose yourself entirely. If you're lucky, it happens in battle, and you charge out and die a hero. If you're not lucky, you can do a lot of nasty, horrible things. I don't like to think about them. There was a slower version of this, too. For some guys, the escape was drinking, drugs, or less savory, even sadistic things. It all boiled down to self-destruction, letting the rest of them die because they couldn't bear to keep on living with just the part that was left. So far, as I say, I had avoided that. But I was damned close, I could feel it like you feel a cliff's edge nearby, the emptiness waiting for you to get up next to it so it can suck you down.
On that day, I was a corporal and second in command of our little squad, Larry (the sergeant) and I had been given charge of ten new privates first class, all fresh out of basic training and we had been sent out on reconnaissance to a spot not too far north of Saigon, with orders to teach these men jungle warfare. We had left base three days earlier and now we still had five of them alive. The Cong had gotten lucky with the rest. I found out later (you always find this stuff out later, never while you're in it) that we were in the midst of a big Cong push, with the Cong boiling out of the Ho Chi Minh Trail all along the border with Cambodia. All I knew then was that we were now effectively behind enemy lines, surrounded by Cong soldiers determined to kill us. Either we got out of it by killing as much as we could, or we died ourselves. No further choices, kill or die.
So with our five proteges, we walked into a small village not far from the Cambodian border. It was a friendly village, we knew from its name and from our reports. Only loyal South Vietnamese lived there. Yeah, right. We'd heard that before, and ended up getting shot at. I had a scar on my rib cage where a bullet had creased a rib, and that had been a "friendly" South Vietnamese citizen.
The villagers came out to speak to us. Larry spoke better Vietnamese than the rest of us; he explained that the Cong had taken the roads southeast of us, between us and the base, that we had to make it back to base and we needed a guide to take us over the jungle trails and help us get through the Cong lines. He was authorized to offer payment for the services. His large black face was grim as he talked, he knew we had slim chance of getting anyone to volunteer to help us. These villages near the Cambodian border were just too damned close to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The smart South Vietnamese stayed strictly neutral.
Larry finished his spiel and the villagers just looked scared and silent. We were used to that by now. It didn't leave us without options, you understand. We could just grab one who looked like he knew his way around, though how much we could trust one like that was open to question. Or maybe if we took both a guy and his girlfriend/wife, he'd guide us through safe in order to keep her safe. Of course, my squad might not keep their hands off the girl after we made it through the lines, or even until then, and we'd have to kill them both then....
"I will take you." one young man volunteered, in passable English.
Larry looked surprised, then smiled grimly. This villager looked to be in his late teens or maybe early twenties but no more, the sort who was usually either already in the ARVN (the Army of South Vietnam) or who was working with the Viet Cong. "Good to have you aboard." he said with a tone I realized meant that he'd take this kid's help, but the kid would be out in front and if we hit any Cong fire, the first bullet from Larry's gun would take out the kid. "What's your name?"
"Tran Thuc Huong."
"Well, Huong." Larry said (the Vietnamese arrange their names backwards; Larry called him by what to us would be a first name), "we're glad to have you with us."
Huong was a typical Vietnamese man, maybe five feet tall, with his skin that was brown but had a golden tone to it as well. His face was simple, plain but regular, with his dark black eyebrows and a sharpness to his cheekbones. His body was thin like most Vietnamese villagers who had been living for a hell of a long time in the middle of a war zone. He wore a white shirt a little too large for him and dark pants that were maybe too dark, possibly of Cong origin. His clothes hung loose on him, threatening to gap open and fall off from him.
I noted the unhappy murmur among the other villagers, they didn't like Huong's helping us. That was a good sign, it maybe meant Huong was on the up-and-up after all.
We delayed only while Huong went back into his hut and donned a pair of boots easily recognizable as US Army regulation. "Where'd you get those boots?" Larry asked ominously.
"My mother make friends with American soldiers." Huong said ingenuously. "They give her things."
I looked at Larry and winked. It was easy enough to guess what Huong's mother did for a living. With all these lonesome soldiers around, plenty of women found the best way to make a living was by prostitution.
"Is your mother around?" Larry asked.
"She is in Saigon." Huong said. "With the rest of my family. I go with you and then on to Saigon and visit them."
I looked at Harry, who shrugged. "Okay, Huong, why don't you lead the way then?"
I have to admit that Huong knew the trails in the jungle. He took us right through for a time, then stopped suddenly. Our squad all took cover and looked around, a stop usually meant sniper fire was about to rake us.
But Huong squatted down and then motioned to us. Larry and I were the non-coms in our group, which meant that we were a little more jungle-savvy than the five privates we had with us, we went up to see what Huong wanted. I stood guard while Larry squatted down next to Huong.
"Trip-wire." Larry identified.
"You knew it was there?" I asked.
"I see it." Huong said, shrugged. "You learn where they can be." He was right, that particular bit of trail just begged you to string a trip-wire across it. Normally we would stop and deactivate the mine hooked to the tripwire, but we were in a hurry, we just stepped on over it and beyond.
A bit later, Huong stopped again, this time he pointed up into the trees. Shots rang out, and I bit into some bushes on the edge of the trail, a headlong dive, into a trench with some poles lying inside it. An unfinished trap.
I heard screams, American screams, behind me, and knew then we'd fallen for one of the older tricks. Put some snipers up and let them be seen. The actual trap is in the cover you take when they open fire. Sharpened stakes, hand grenades, more snipers hiding in the bushes, you name it, your hiding hole becomes your grave. But I had no time to think about it, I was too busy with the snipers in front of us. They had Huong pinned down and were chopping up the bushes he was hiding behind. His cover was running out fast.
About then, I began to trust Huong. He wouldn't have led us into a trap only to get cut up by his own men.
So I started shooting, and got lucky, taking out one of the snipers who fell in a black blob down to the ground, and another one got silent and still when I fired at him. Dead or faking, I didn't care, I kept on pumping bullets into that form until I was dead sure he was dead, then I looked around. No more fire except ours and no more snipers.
But our five privates had become two. Hendler, Schmidt and Ogilvie had landed in pits filled with sharpened stakes. When a soldier dives for cover, he's only going to land in certain places that offer cover, and the pits were in those places. Whether our boys had been stupid or fooled by good camouflage, it didn't matter.
We pulled them out of the pits and arranged their bodies in neat lines, their arms and legs straight, their dogtag shoved by the notch on the bottom into the gap between their two front teeth, marked in our logs where the bodies could be found. They'd be picked up later...we hoped...and taken back home.
Now it was just me, Larry, the two privates Arroyo and Van Vleek, and Huong, and night was falling. We chose to make camp where we were, surrounded by dead Cong bodies. Hell, that was safer than striking on into new territory which may have live Cong in it.
"You still know where you're going?" Larry asked Huong as we rested after the fight. Huong was sitting with us. We all pretty much trusted him now. Van Vleek had taken a bullet in his shoulder and it was Huong who had managed to drag him to cover and give him first aid. Van Vleek wasn't going to be fighting for us the rest of the way, he was baggage on feet, but we wouldn't have to carry him. Just go a little slower.
"It's not too far, now." Huong said. "Tomorrow or the next day, we'll be at Buon Me Thuot." That was a fair-sized town.
I was curious. The Cong were merciless to Vietnamese caught actively helping American G.I.'s. I said, "Huong, tell me something. Why are you helping us?"
Huong shrugged. "My family is in Saigon. To keep them safe, the Viet-nam Cong-san (the "Cong" as we called them) must be stopped. You are stopping them. So I help you."
"Simple enough." Larry chuckled.
"Yeah, but the Cong control more of this jungle than the AVRN." I pointed out. "You'd be safer cooperating with them."
I saw then a flash of anger in his eyes. "This is my land, my family's. The Viet-nam Cong-San would take away our land, make us work on their farms. My government is not so good, but they are better than the Cong." I don't think I'd ever heard a G.I. use the word "Cong" with as much venom as Huong gave it.
"So why aren't you in the Army?" Larry asked.
Huong gave a grin. "It doesn't cost so much, if you know the right officer to pay."
Larry grinned back at him, and so did I. I was beginning to like Huong. Be a damned shame if we lost him on this trip.
The night was silent, which should have alerted us something was up. The night is never safe in Vietnam, we kept a guard up, and I tried to sleep with one eye open. Only four of us, two raw recruits, we were prime targets for a Cong night raid.
Which was what we got. Only reason I'm still alive is there were only two of them, that and Arroyo got off a shot before they got him. Then it was a struggle in the darkness that only a jungle can give you. Soon, we had two more Cong bodies keeping us company.
But Arroyo was hurt bad, really bad. He wasn't going anywhere.
Larry looked at him, at Van Vleek who had been getting weaker (he had lost a lot of blood, and this struggle had started him bleeding again) and made a decision. "Bryce," he said. That was me.
"Yeah, Larry."
"I'll babysit our two boys. You and Huong haul your asses out and get to base, send back some help."
I didn't argue. "I got it." I said.
No reason to stick around. Where two Cong had been, more would be coming. I just had to hope Larry would be able to hold them off, hide with our wounded until I could send help.
With just the two of us, Huong knowing the jungle and me as used to it as any G.I., we made better time.
But the Cong controlled the roads, and we had to stick to the jungle. It was slow going and by early dawn of the next day, we were still some four miles out of Buon Me Thuot. And still surrounded by Cong, and still didn't dare poke our heads out of the jungle cover any more than we had to.
"Huong." I said as we got ready to head out again. "I think the Cong may have taken Buon Me Thuot."
He shook his head. "I think not. But we should still be careful. Farmlands soon." I grimaced; open land. Dangerous as hell with the Cong on the prowl.
We hadn't been on the trail for ten minutes when we happened upon a group of Cong taking their breakfast. Five of them, I didn't shout a warning or anything, just opened up with my gun and cut them down. By now, I don't think knowing that will shock you any.
We had run out of provisions, so my next step was just as practical, I went up to see if I could salvage any of the food they'd been eating.
They had trophies. Some of the Cong do that; taking body parts. This guy was into fingers. He had six of them, most with rings still on the finger. One of those fingers was black and had on it a ring I recognized.
"Larry." I said, picking up the string of dead men's fingers. Larry's was cold but still moist, dead for less than twelve hours. But then, I had known that. "Oh, Larry, shit! Damn them. Damn all of them! Motherfucking bastards, oh, hell!" And I was on the verge of that final step, teetering on the brink.
I looked at Huong, and I think he recognized the look in my eyes. He had only his own culture's answer for this to give me. "My sincerest sympathy for the loss of your friend." he said.
"Let's get the hell out of here." I growled.
Huong led the way, me not bothering to keep any distance any longer.
Like I'd said before, there was a step I hadn't taken yet. I was on the edge, I was reeling. Whether I went into madness, or rage, or what, I was heading there. I was going and I couldn't stop myself.
For me, it started with tears. We were still in the jungle, the surroundings were quiet and still, the jungle shrouded in morning mist. I walked with tears stinging my eyes until I couldn't see, then I said, in broken syllables, "Huong, let's...let's take a break."
There was a tree trunk there, the tree long ago cut down and hauled away. Long dead and dried out. I sat down on it and I just let myself cry. Blubbering like a baby.
I felt Huong's hand on my shoulder. It felt good there, so good. I turned and I clutched his arm like it was my mother's, and I cried onto it, onto the golden-colored skin, clinging to it like a man shipwrecked will cling to a bit of flotsam. Clinging to life.
"God damn it!" I snuffled after the worst of it was over. "Larry. God, Larry wasn't supposed to get it. He was good, man, good!" Better than me. If he could die here, I could die.
I shivered then, with the knowledge of death, this time not the realization I could die, but the certainty that I would die soon.
Huong felt the shivering, and he took me in his arms, clutched me to him tightly, my chest touching his, bare skin against bare skin for we both had our shirts open. My nose was buried on his shoulder, his bare shoulder, for I had touched first his neck and then slid my face down, pushing his shirt back. That contact, human flesh to human flesh...it saved me.
I raised my head back and looked into Huong's deep black eyes. Solid, yet sympathetic.
"I have lost friends." Huong said to me. "I have lost my brother and my two uncles."
Then it was like he felt what I needed right then. His eyes registered comprehension, and then his lips reached out and met mine.
I'd never felt a kiss like this, a touch like this. It was more than lust, more than the simple human need for sex. It was...redemption.
My body flared suddenly now, the sort of flare I'd always feared, the one that could be battle rage, or mania, that you would have to let out somehow, anyhow. But this was lust. This, my body knew how to handle.
I clenched Huong tight, damned tight. I felt his body, thin and light, I felt the ribs in his chest compress as I pulled him to me. It was like I was trying to press his body totally into mine. I grabbed the back of his head and I tried to force our lips into each other and when I felt his tongue tentatively reach out and touch my teeth, I grabbed and sucked it into me. It tasted of simple living, of human life, and it was sweet, sweet, God yes! I've never tasted anything better than Huong's tongue, no American lover of mine has ever given me that flavor, nor any of the Asian lovers I have taken. It was Huong's own taste, it was him giving himself to me.
With me holding him so tight, he gave in and sat himself on my lap, straddling me, and I reached my other hand down and I grabbed his ass and I pulled him in tight to me, and his cock was a hard warm stick in his pants that jabbed me in the stomach, and my own tried to leap out of my fly and bury itself between his buttocks.
I had to let him go after a time, I had sucked all the essential flavor from his tongue and mouth, I was hungry and I needed more of him than he could feed me through there. I lifted my lips away from him and I breathed, "Oh, God, Huong!" and I kissed his cheek, his ear, tasting and sucking his essence into myself, siphoning it directly off from his skin. I would suckle the sweat and the bit of his flesh from off his body, until I had cleaned it like a child licking his plate, and then I would move on and repeat it on another part of his body, and so I kissed my way from his ear down his neck and onto his shoulder.
He let me kiss him, gave himself to me totally. I could feel that, feel how much he was giving himself to me. I kissed that flimsy shirt of his off from his shoulder, tasting the nectar of his skin at every step, until it slipped from his arm that he let hang to his side, down his arm I licked and lapped at him. I'm only surprised I didn't try to literally eat the guy, I felt very much like I was consuming him, taking him into me, with every movement, every kiss, every circle of my tongue over his sweet, brown flesh.
Huong gave out a croon, then, a low, soft sound, and I felt his cock again as he began to slowly work his hips back and forth, and my cock surged with joy at the feel of his body sliding on top of me.
I pulled Huong's shirt from him and he arose from my lap (but not from my embrace, I still held him tight, not daring to let him go for fear he'd vanish into the mist on me, and I needed him, I needed him!) long enough to pull the button at the top of his pants and jerk them down his slim hips, so that they fell from his slender legs and he stepped out of them, and now, totally bare (his shoes had gone sometime while we had been kissing, though I hadn't seen or felt him remove them at all), he straddled me again and his height made this comfortable enough, his chin touched the top of my head and I satiated my need by kissing his thinly-muscled chest and those barely existent mounds at his breasts, and his arms were tugging at the buttons of my fly.
I let him perform this service for me, he got my trousers open and with my boxers slid both down my hips together. I stayed raised up partially to let him clear the trunk I was sitting on and then I sat back down and yanked him back onto me, his inner thighs were warm sliding down the outside of my hips and then he landed on my cock and I felt it nestle into the hot crevice of his buttocks once again.
As he sat in this tight clench with me, me holding him tight and refusing to let him go, somehow he managed to snatch and pull up his pants, me hearing the wiffle of the cloth as he fought one-handed to reach into one of the pockets. I wasn't too surprised to see him pull out a tube of some lubricant. I guess he always carried it with him; what with his mother being what she was and all, maybe he made a living selling his ass to G.I.'s who wanted to fuck young Asian ass, I don't know. I just know he had the lube and he applied it well despite the confinement of my muscled arms holding him tight to me. It wasn't like I was forcing him to love me, he was doing that willingly, just that I didn't dare let go. Or I'd fall into the darkness, and he was my beacon and sole life-line into the light.
So he was on his own to get my cock prepared for his ass, he managed to squinch that tube and get a blob of peppermint-tingly, cool, slick glob of the contents onto my cockhead, and then his hand busily plied itself in a massaging sort of motion, working that greasy, minty coolness all over my cockhead and upper shaft.
The instant his hand let go of my cock, I reached down myself and I grabbed my dick and I shoved it at his asshole. I could feel that tender little pucker riding on top of my cockhead, a softer portion of him than the rest, and I just bent my cockhead upwards and it found that little indentation and it rode into him.
I didn't have any trouble at all, getting my cock into him. His body took me easily. Like I say, maybe he did this a lot. But it was my first time, fucking another guy. I had done a few girls back in Saigon while on leave, mostly because it was expected of me, finding the more slender girls more enticing, and feeling vaguely unsatisfied when my cock went into their slippery slits. I figured it was the climate, the situation, the fact these girls were all heavily used by the time I got hold of one of them.
But when my cock dove into Huong's ass, it felt...right. This was what I'd been seeking all along, the chance to shove my dong into a tight man's butt.
That, combined with my need for Huong to keep my very sanity, drove me like a madman. I was on my rampage now, but it was confined only to fucking Huong's butt as well and as thoroughly as I could.
He didn't fight me, he let me pick him up by his buttocks one in each hand, let his legs fly freely on either side of me, held only by my hands that slid to the tops of his buttocks and the pressure of his body leaning back against my hands, and the stickiness of our exertion-sweated bodies clinging to each other like we'd been glued together.
I hunched up into him as well as I could, and then his legs came down and found a purchase on the tree trunk's base and he began to ride himself on me, bounding up and down, wringing my pleasure out of me, and I gave it to him gladly. My very madness was pouring out of me with the pleasure that he wrenched from me, so I was happy to pay that price to him. He was gasping, grunting with the effort and I lifted us both up and I tumbled us onto the jungle floor. My cock bounced out of his ass, but when we settled down, I found it again easy enough.
Now I was fucking him and his forehead was at my lips due to the difference in our heights, and I kissed tenderly that wide, plain expanse of skin-covered bone, housing this wonderful man who had guided me safely through enemy lines and was now saving me from the worst enemy of all, myself.
I felt alive then, so very alive. I was human, I was a man, I was fucking another man, and it was all real, very real, and the pleasure and the joy of life was there inside of me, right along with all the death and the horrors I had experienced, and it was all part of the human existence, neither greater than it nor subordinate to it, but like the other side of a coin. If you accepted that human life could be bloody and cruel, you also had to accept this part, that it could be filled with joy, with kindness, with decency and love. To see only the pain and terror was to view only the one side of life, the other side was there, it would never go away no matter what happened.
And with that realization, with that reclamation of my soul, I was able to turn down the sheer rut of my assault into Huong's gently clenching buttocks, I began now to move not just in my own need, but to bring him pleasure as well, and I was rewarded by hearing his grunts take on a more compelling tone, the gentle urging of lust for more, more!
Our groans of desire mingled in the still jungle air, clung to the mist of the jungle steam, surrounded and wrapped us up tightly. I felt now that he was a part of me, I had succeeded in pulling him into me, he had made it inside of me and now I was whole once again.
My cock burned with the need to erupt, but I strangled it off, not willing now to climax until Huong could join me. I timed my lust to his grunts as they rose in tempo and ardor, feeling my balls boiling but keeping it away, holding it back, though I felt his own dong which he was pumping frenetically as the cockhead slapped my navel and singed it from the hot heat of his blood-reddened glans, the burn of the pre-come that bubbled out of his prong. My own cock was now one single pillar of burning flame that plunged in and out of him, it was alight with the surge of climax, and when Huong's groans began to mesh into a single groan, I let my cock go and it responded by immediately plunging me into orgasm.
I climbed the heights of my pleasure and exploded into him, him groaning and clutching at my back, his fingernails scraping my flesh and leaving crescents of bright pain behind them, and as my mind reeled with my ejaculation, I felt dimly that his own bursts of come were splattering my chest and stomach, clinging there with hot seething teeth, and then falling away, leaving a cool wetness behind.
I fucked Huong's ass even after I finished spurting, humping his butt until every last dreg of pleasure was wrenched out of my cock and deposited into his ass, and then, only then, did I relax and bring myself down onto my elbows, letting our bodies touch each other, letting my cock slide out of his ass, and bringing my face down to meet his, seeing his smile of relaxation and satiation and feeling an almost-goofy grin on my own, as I reached down to pay him with more kisses.
I heard jets flying overhead and then the far-off rum-bum-bum-bum of bombardment.
"I think the Cong are retreating." I said to him. That would explain our time of peace in this war-torn land, the serenity of no-man's-land, the gap between the fleeing Cong and the pursuing American forces.
"We should move again." he said. I smiled and stroked his hair with my hand and deposited one final kiss on him, before I rose and let him get up. I stood up and pulled up my pants in that awkward way you do when they're down around your ankles and you have to fight them back into shape to get them up your hips.
"Let's go try the roads." I suggested, hearing a rumble of trucks. They sounded like American trucks.
I turned back to look at Huong, but he had vanished back into the jungle. He had seen me to safety as promised, and now he was going back to his village, to his land, not even waiting to collect his payment. I decided to make damned sure the Army knew to send it to him.
I flagged down a truck that was heading back toward base, carrying a load of lightly wounded G.I.'s. I had to report in.
I looked at my fellow travelers, and I listened to their stories of the battle and fighting, all the tough, cruel talk of men who have to kill in order to survive. But it was all right. No matter what happened from here on out, I'd never fall into that dark rage that had loomed waiting for me for so long like a deep pit of despair.
For Huong had saved me from the abyss.
THE END
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