The Box - 18. Chapter 18

It’s been a while since I’ve written in this diary, and there are a couple of good reasons for that. The first is that I’ve been busy, and the second is that it’s hard to find time and privacy to really sit down and write. When I do, I spend my time writing letters. If you write letters, you get letters back, and letters from home, or from Aaron or Nathan, are my lifeline to the real world. But today we’re having an easy day, enough time for me to escape back to my world and jot down some of the shit that’s been happening in my life.

I spend my time mostly drilling. Drill, drill, and more drill. Most of the drills revolve around landing on a beach, so even an idiot could figure out we’re part of the invasion force. I don’t want to write what part of England we’re in, but it’s really great. I love this place. The people are just amazing. They’re like our brothers who talk funny. The only problems seem to come up when our guys fuck their women, and since a lot of their women are able-Grables, it’s no wonder that’s an issue.

I was assigned to a platoon that had lost their Lieutenant in battle in North Africa. It was really strange, to be assigned to a group like that, a group of guys that had already been through the carnage of battle. I get here from the US, all spruce and fresh with no experience, nothing at all but a gold bar on my uniform that says I’m in charge. And that’s not all. This unit, these guys are all from Georgia. So not only is their new Lieutenant a total rookie, he’s also a Yankee.

The first day was really tense. The platoon sergeant, a guy named Eli Prancer, had been in the army for a couple of years already. His personnel file said he was 22 years old, but he was imposing way beyond his years. In addition to his experience, he was huge, probably about 6’3”, tall and massive. His body was kind of like Aaron’s, with a really muscular frame and then a fatty outer layer, only take that and multiply it by ten. His muscles were huge, but he had so much bulk he almost seemed fat. Almost. The first day I got to the camp and introduced myself, he got this sneer of contempt on his face that really snapped my cap.

“Don’t worry, Lieutenant, I’ll take care of things,” he’d said. He was dismissing me, telling me that I was unnecessary and an interloper. I’d been in enough scrapes to know he was challenging me, and if I didn’t back him down now, I’d never be able to command these guys.

“You’ll take care of what I tell you to take care of Sergeant,” I’d said, getting right in his face. The other men had kind of laughed and snickered.

“Excuse me?” he’d asked, not backing down a bit.

“You call me ‘sir’,” I snapped back. “You forget again, I’m hauling you up to the CO for insubordination.” That made him stop and think. The other guys were chuckling now, and that just made me even angrier. I had to be careful that I didn’t embarrass him in front of the men. Just as his disrespect for me would damage my ability to command these men, if I humiliated him it would undermine his ability to control them.

“Yes sir,” he said. “I’m sorry sir.” The other guys chuckled harder until I glared at them.

“Sergeant, these men have so much energy they can just sit around and laugh their asses off? I think we need to go for a run. Full packs, ready to run in fifteen minutes,” I ordered.

That shut the men up. “Yes sir,” he said, grinning. “You heard the Lieutenant, full packs!” They ran, scrambling to get their gear together, and I went back to my hut and got mine.

I found them there waiting for me, right on time. “You think you can keep up with us, sir?” Prancer asked. Only he wasn’t being an asshole, he was just teasing me. They didn’t know that I ran track in high school.

“We’ll see who keeps up with whom,” I said. He rolled his eyes; whether it was at my taunt or at my use of the word “whom”, I’m not sure. “Let’s go!” I’d led them and ran for about five miles, going pretty damn fast. It was an exhausted group that made it back to the base.

“You’re pretty fast, sir,” Prancer said to me.

“You almost kept up,” I’d said with a smile. After that, we got along just fine.

I got this letter from Aaron that was really strange. I don’t know what his deal is, but it’s like he’s planning to die. It really messed me up. If he doesn’t make it, I don’t know what I’ll do. He talked about how much he loved the Pacific, the great weather and the natives that were so happy to see them. And he finished his letter with this strange line: Never Ever Grieve, Only Remember, Steven. I’m wondering if he didn’t find a bunch of opium or something. He’s not making any sense at all.

Nathan was more upbeat. He was on a ship, the USS Yorktown, and it sounded like he was enjoying Navy life. He said he’d made a bunch of friends, and that things weren’t too bad at sea. The ship was only a year old, but then again, since so many of our ships had been sunk, damn near the whole fleet was new.

At home, it didn’t sound like much had changed. I guess in a way I can see where Aaron is coming from. He’s being exposed to all these new places and people, and it makes Claremont seem like the backwater of the world. It’s going to be really hard to go back there and be happy after the war.

May 20, 1944

If I die over here, I know what they’re going to write on my gravestone: He fucked all the people he shouldn’t have. Things have been going really well with my platoon. I like the guys, and we get along fine. They don’t give me shit, because if they do, I make them run. I guess most of the officers don’t do that because they don’t like to run. I do.

I see my friend Tony all the time. He got stuck with a platoon from Alabama, and he’s having a rough time with them. I keep telling him to stand up to his men, but he doesn’t seem to be able to even talk to them. I guess the English they use in New York is pretty different from the English they use in Alabama. I goof around with him in my off hours, but he’s pretty down about things, and he depresses me sometimes. I go out and socialize and drink with all the other officers, but I haven’t made any really good friends, well, at least not until last night.

I was in my tent just writing letters when an MP came in and interrupted me. “You Lieutenant Schluter?” he asked. I noticed that he was a 2nd Lieutenant like me, only he had that superior attitude that all MPs seemed to have.

“That’s me,” I’d said, being all perky.

“Your sergeant got drunk and got into a fight. They’ve got him down at the local jail, locked up. You want to come with me and try to spring him?” Fuck. Just what I needed. Our captain could be a real dick about shit like this.

“Yeah,” I said, and followed him to his Jeep. The guy wasn’t real talkative, but I got it out of him that Prancer was drunk, one of our guys was trying to score with a bird, that’s what the Brits call their dolls, and one of the Brit soldiers got pissed. So there was this big brawl and a bunch of guys got arrested.

We got to the police station and I went into my most charming mode, talking to the cops about how we were all in this together, and how sometimes guys did dumb things, especially when they were drinking. They could have tried to play games with me, but in the end they let him out, releasing him into my custody.

He came out of the jail looking pretty together. I guess he’d gotten himself cleaned up while he was in there. Still, he had a bloody lip, which I gave him shit about. The MP with his Jeep had long since vanished, but since it was only a couple of miles back to the base, we decided to walk.

“Thanks for coming down and bailing me out, sir,” he said.

“You watch out for me, I watch out for you,” I told him simply. “So what did you fight about? You trying to fuck one of their dolls?”

“Not me, one of the other guys,” he said. “But when there’s a fight, and a bunch of their guys jump on one of our guys, we have to stick up for him.”

I just nodded. He was right about that. Any one of us would have done the same thing. After that, I asked him about home, and he talked about the town he grew up in. His father was a mailman, and he had a younger sister who was married to some guy he didn’t like all that much.

We were about halfway back to the base when we heard sirens go off. We were on this road that wound through a forest, so there weren’t any sirens by us, but we could hear them off in the distance. The Germans didn’t bomb us very much. I didn’t know if they avoided us because we were blowing their air force all to hell or because we just weren’t important enough to bomb. We stopped in our tracks and froze.

The next thing we heard was that whining sound you hear when bombs start to fall, followed by an explosion in front of us, close to the base. Then there was another bomb, and another, getting closer. Prancer grabbed me and pulled me into the woods, threw me onto the ground, and landed on top of me. It kind of hurt because he was such a big guy, but it was really nice the way he was watching out for me, using his own body to protect mine.

We lay there on the ground, and even as I heard bombs falling, I was conscious of his warm bulk on top of me. I’d fallen face down with my legs spread and he’d landed right in between them. I swear I could feel the warmth of his groin through my pants. The bombs fell closer, but never really got anywhere near us, and then they stopped. It seemed so sudden, that the bombing just ended, as if it should have kept on going and going, and there was always this residual fear that they’d start again, so we just lay there like we were. I could feel him against me, felt my dick getting hard, and I thought I could feel his getting hard too, growing into the crack of my ass.

“Fucking Germans,” he said. His mouth was right next to my ear, and I could still smell the alcohol on his breath. Yet even that statement seemed sexy, with his warm breath flowing around my ear. It seemed like the raid had stopped, but he hadn’t gotten off of me.

“You think it’s over?” I asked him.

“Dunno. Maybe we should stay here for just a minute and make sure,” he said. I felt his massive body on top of me, felt it adjust slightly, and felt something hard poking me in the ass. My head, the one on my shoulders, told me I should push him off, but my other head was completely hard now, with this big huge guy on top of me, stabbing me in the ass with his dick.

“I think you may be right,” I said, and pushed my hips up just a little bit, pushing my ass into his dick.

“In fact, we might stay here for a bit,” he said. He pushed into me harder and I pushed back into him. “Oh yeah, that’s real nice.”

“You like that?” I asked in my slutty voice.

“Fuck yeah I like that,” he said. Now he was grinding into me, pushing his dick into my cheeks and the only thing that was keeping us from fucking was our uniforms. Suddenly he stopped, got up, and pulled me up. He smiled when he saw how disappointed I was. He led me deeper into the woods and found a sheltered place, and then he pulled me into an embrace that was more like a bear hug.

His mouth was on mine, his tongue forging inside, but he wasn’t a very good kisser. I stopped him, dropped to my knees, and watched while he undid his trousers. He pulled out his dick, a nice dick, kind of short and fat, but thankfully not as fat as Nathan’s. I started blowing him, getting him really into it, but it was kind of nasty because he’d been sweating and drinking, and he had that stale body odor smell. Besides, that wasn’t what I really wanted. I wanted this guy to fuck me senseless, to take me away from this war for just a few minutes. I stood up and dropped my pants and he got the hint. He spun me around, bent me over, and moved up behind me.

I heard him spit on his hands and felt him rub that on my ass, then he spit some more on his dick, then he apparently decided that was enough and pushed in. If I’d had some Vaseline, it would have been easier, but since I didn’t, we just used saliva. It took him a bit to get in, and it hurt at first, but then we got going, got into it, and it was good, real good. He just pounded the shit out of me. I guess it was because he was drunk, I don’t know, but he went for a really long time, and I had to focus on my own body to make sure I didn’t cum too soon. It would be really uncomfortable to get fucked like that after I blew. I knew that he wasn’t going to stop fucking me just because I came, he was big and horny and was going to get off, no matter what I said: He wasn’t going to stop for anything. Luckily, I sensed when he was getting close, and I jerked myself to a huge orgasm, timing it so it hit about the same time he did. It was great, and damn did I cum. We just worked each other; milking our orgasms for as long as we could, then we separated, pulled up our pants, and headed back to the road.

Then it was strange. Neither one of us really knew what to say; we both knew we’d crossed a line that we shouldn’t have. “Probably shouldn’t have done that,” he said as we got closer to the base.

“You’re probably right.” I’d said that and just walked along with him in silence for a bit. “That mean you didn’t like it?” I asked, teasing him, trying to make it not a big deal. He looked at me and I flashed him a smile.

“I didn’t say that,” he said, smiling back.

“You saying that isn’t ever going to happen again?”

“I didn’t say that either,” he said, grinning now.

“Good,” I said.

Today was a little weird, but we pretty much got right back into our routine and the guys probably just figured he was hung over. Then tonight, after lights out, he whispered in my ear and told me to meet him in the equipment shack in an hour. That’s this little shack where they keep a bunch of stuff we use for training. I knew what he wanted, so I slopped a bunch of Vaseline on my ass and wandered over there, ignoring how it felt all gooey and slippery in between my cheeks. I got there and he was waiting for me.

It was quick but good. He pulled his dick out, pulled my pants down just enough to have access to my ass, and slid right in. “You were ready for me,” he’d said. He had the sexiest bedroom voice.

“Yeah, I was,” I said. Then we shut up and fucked, and it was good, a great release. I think part of the thrill is knowing that if we get caught, we’re in deep shit, really deep shit. The danger is like an adrenaline rush. But at the same time, sex with him isn’t even in the same category as sex with Nathan or Aaron.

Speaking of Aaron, I got a couple more letters from him, and he signs them the same way: Never Ever Grieve, Only Remember, Steven. It’s so fucking odd. I wonder what has gotten into him. Or maybe I should wonder who had gotten into him. No, it’s better not to go down that road. It will just piss me off. He did mention one thing that kind of made me curious. I asked him about Sully, but he told me that they aren’t in the same unit anymore. I got the distinct impression that Aaron was pissed at him. I wonder what that was all about. If I didn’t know his letters were being censored, I’d be pissed at him for being so mysterious about all this shit.

June 15, 1944

I’m writing this from France, and I can’t believe I’m fucking alive. Holy shit. None of the training, none of that shit prepared me for that, for battle. Up until now, this war has been unpleasant. It’s upset my life and my routine, taken the two guys I loved away from me, transported me to a different continent, but all that was just annoying or unpleasant. The real part of war, the battles, holy shit: it’s just incomprehensible. The carnage, the death, the screams, the total waste; it’s just insane. And very sad.

Very sad. I look at that word and it looks so trite, but that’s what it is. It’s very fucking sad. Seeing guys with their guts hanging out. Seeing my men, MY FUCKING MEN!, with their heads blown off or their chests removed by the shells, it’s very fucking sad. I can’t talk about that any more. I’ll start crying, and people will think I’m weak. Which is bullshit, because we all cry. We cry all the fucking time.

We landed on June 6, and it was shit weather to go with a shit day. There was a massive bombardment, and lots of bombs were dropped, but then when we started to go ashore, it’s like there were German guns everywhere. I couldn’t figure out how they could do that, have our artillery shells fall all around them, and then just pop right up and shoot at us, but they did.

I wasn’t in the first wave, which is lucky, because not many of those guys made it. Not that it made that much difference. Imagine landing on a beach, where there’s nothing to hide behind except burning tanks, and you’ve got what seemed like a million German machine guns firing at you. There we are, down in the sand, just waiting for a German to shoot us to make sure we’re dead. We worked our way up the beach to the cliffs, and fought our way up a road leading to the top. There were machine gun nests all along the way, positioned to lay fire across every approach to the top, but the guys who got there were taking them out, one at a time. We got up to the high ground and I was pretty surprised, pleasantly surprised, to find that we’d gotten all but five of our 25 guys up there.

There was one machine gun nest that was causing all kinds of problems. I say “nest” but that’s a bad way to describe it. It was this concrete wall with a slit in it that the fucking Germans could shoot through. Damn near a bunker.

“Look at that,” I’d told Prancer. “There’s a small path off to the left.” It was a grassy area, but part of it was worn. “That must be where the door is.”

“If we come up from the lower left of this road, we may be able to get in before they shoot us, sir,” he said.

“Let’s do it,” I told him. We got the guys together, and I looked for an officer to tell him what I was doing, but couldn’t find one. We took half our squad and made for the side, while the rest of the guys kept their attention. We got up to the side and slid around the back until we found the door. We kicked it in, tossed in about five grenades, and then hit the deck. They exploded and we heard screams, but we weren’t waiting. We rushed in and machine gunned all of them. We killed eight Germans in that nest. We got ready to move on to the next one and I found there were three platoons there, including mine, but I was the only officer left. I guess Tony was right when he said 2nd Lieutenants get slaughtered.

Anyway, we kept advancing, stopping when we’d encounter resistance. We managed to take out three more machine gun positions before a Captain came up with another platoon and took over. Only he didn’t do any better than I did. I’m real proud of those guys and how well they fought. I don’t want to give the impression that it was all easy and bloodless. It wasn’t, and we took some pretty heavy casualties along the way. I just don’t want to think about the guys we lost. It’s very fucking sad.

So we fought our asses off and cleared the Germans off the cliffs, then we fought them into the countryside, and we keep trying to push them back. If they fight this hard all the way to Berlin, we’ll be fighting for another ten years. It was constant, we were going forward, and barely got a break to eat or sleep. I was completely exhausted when our Colonel comes rolling up in his Jeep, pulls us off the line, and tells me I’m a First Lieutenant now. The Captain had told him what I did, and he said he was giving me a field promotion. So how about that, eh? I’m in battle for two days and I get a promotion. The bad news is that 1st Lieutenants are just as vulnerable as 2nd Lieutenants, so it’s no big deal. I get some extra money, and the guys in the platoon are all proud of me. They think it’s an honor for them too, which makes me feel real good. Anyway, we got pulled off the line to get a little break, so we’re all sitting here writing letters. Then it’s back to the front.

I got a letter from Aaron right before we left England for the invasion, and he sounded pretty depressed. He talked about the tough battles they’d been fighting, but it sounded pretty, I don’t know, normal. I don’t think that’s because he’s fighting any less hard than I am, I think it’s because I’ve been through it now, so none of the shit he made me visualize with his letters shocks me anymore. I just want this war to be over so I can go back home and go away to college with Aaron. Or Nathan. Fuck. Aaron keeps talking about how amazing the Pacific is, and what a great place it would be to run off and live. He’s got this Robinson Crusoe thing going on. I’m not sure I’d like that, being cut off from civilization, having to eat what I killed. The idea seems to appeal to him though. I could deal with this infatuation he has for survival living, but he keeps ending his letters with that strange ass limerick or whatever the fuck it is. Never Ever Grieve, Only Remember, Steven. He’s driving me bats with that thing.

I have to take a break from this and write a few letters home. I need to let everyone know that I lived through this without scaring the shit out of them. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to pull that off.

July 4, 1944

Happy fucking Fourth of July. Holy shit, I can’t believe the shit we’re dealing with. Apparently no one in our fucking army knows what a fucking hedge is. We know, we all know. We’ve been fighting our way through Normandy, and all the land is divided up by these big hedges called bocages, or something like that. Only these aren’t normal hedges, they’re like big walls made of plants.

Yesterday we were on patrol and we came around the corner of this hedge, thinking the area was secure, and found ourselves face to face with a fucking Tiger tank. One of the guys peed his pants; the rest of us just about did. We sprayed the thing with machine gun fire and then ran like hell, calling in for some kind of help to take the damn thing out.

A Sherman tank rolled up and we thought we were saved, only the Tiger took a hit dead on from the Sherman and just shrugged it off, then blew our tank to hell. I’m so glad I didn’t go for Armor. Those damn Shermans are fucking death traps. So we let the thing back us up until some guy with a bazooka hit it from the back side and took it out. Apparently the only way to kill those damn things is to shoot a rocket right up its ass. How come we don’t have tanks like that?

We lost another guy in that battle, but I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want to remember it. It’s just too damn hard. I got a letter from Nathan and he’s all ginned up. I guess last month there was some big battle in the Philippine Sea that they called “the Marianas Turkey Shoot” because they shot down so many Jap planes it was like shooting turkeys. I wish we had it that easy.

They’re saying we’ve got some big strategy to get out of this nightmare, but I think it’s bullshit. I think we’re going to spend the whole war in these hedges. It’s like a big fucking maze, and all we do is chase the Germans around and kill some of them, and then they chase us around and kill some of us. All we have is a toe-hold on the French coast. I’d feel a whole lot better about this thing if we were moving ahead, pushing on. Instead, we’re stymied here. Fucking depressing as hell. Why didn’t I join the fucking Navy?

I got another letter from Aaron. He told me that they’d been getting some R and R, which made him nervous. He said they usually only do that, let them rest and recover, before a big battle, so it was hard to enjoy his time off. I don’t give a shit. I’ll take some rest and relaxation even if it means I’m going back into this hell. It’s better than being here all the time. God, I hate this war. And he ended his letter with that same strange ass line: Never Ever Grieve, Only Remember, Steven. Christ!