I loved her so fucking much. She was very beautiful, twenty-two and older than me, darkly tan except where the bikini had protected skin so shockingly white that the dark curls of her pubic triangle screamed for attention. She would lay on her back and those long slender legs would part and glistening pink would beckon and I’d be balls deep before she could finish her initial gasp. Her long legs would pump, like both our hearts, and her head would roll back and her eyes go half-lidded, and almost cross, and each time I’d thrust, her small pert breasts would thrust, too, their long erect points like little scolding fingers, naughty, naughty…

“Marry me,” I said, when we’d finished, but still inside her.

“Oh yes,” she said breathlessly. “Oh, Jack- yes. ”

So I’d married her.

From Vietnam, I wrote her love letters on a daily basis for a while, and she did the same with me, until my world got darker and it was all I could do to maybe write once a week and then once a month crawl out of that hole into temporary sunshine to say something to the girl waiting for me, the girl who was the only reason not to give in to despair and either walk into a bullet or go AWOL and maybe get sent stateside to the brig or better yet frag a moronic officer and get sent home to a firing squad or just stick around and maybe join the hardcore Corps who were slamming heroin to escape for now or maybe for good. Me, who didn’t even accept a toke when a doobie was passed, suddenly I was thinking heroin was an option.

Finally I had stopped feeling, which when they made me a sniper was a necessity. If you viewed your target as a flesh-and-blood human, you might upset your balance. You had to understand, in war, that if you weren’t manning the gun shooting this poor bastard, somebody else would be there with a finger on the trigger. So what was the difference? In war, all soldiers are dead men. Sooner you get that, the better off you are. Thinking of yourself as alive only put you at risk-you could get killed that way.