Before the ink was dry on my enlistment papers, I headed to Fort Leonard Wood. I arrived in mid-October, greeted by a blue sky, a mild breeze, and a loud Drill Sergeant.
His name was Staff Sergeant Michael King—nicknamed The King—and he was a real son of a bitch. Though he stood only five feet and nine inches tall, he was an imposing man. He was barrel-chested and big-armed, carrying it all on thick legs. I guessed him to be around thirty-five years old, give or take a year, but in his time on this earth, he’d learned how to read people. And how to break them. It was his job to tear us down. I knew that. Hell, he flat-out told us that our first day there. But it didn’t make the things he said hurt any less.
“When you ladies leave here, you’ll be killing machines,” he shouted.
We stood at attention in our barracks, staring straight ahead and listening intently to his every word.
“You’ll kill without prejudice, without thought, without so much as batting one of your pretty little eyelashes. You’ll lie down at night covered in the blood of your enemies and you’ll fall asleep like a baby in its mother’s arms. You want to know why? Because you’ll be highly-skilled soldiers, trained to kill without emotion. And you will have learned it all here. From me. The King.”
I couldn’t speak for the other men in the barracks, but I didn’t want to be a killing machine. In fact, I was hoping to get through the whole Army experience without ever having to hurt anyone, much less kill them. But The King seemed pretty damned determined to turn us all into slaughterers.
Up and down the line he went, visually inspecting and verbally berating each of us. When he got to me, it was the same old insults I’d heard throughout school, only they came from the mouth of a grown man with authority and a knack for cursing. And he said them all really loud and crystal clear so everyone else could hear.
“What’s your name, piss ant?” he shouted in my face.
“Drill Sergeant, Private Wine, Drill Sergeant,” I shouted back, trying to stare through him. It wasn’t easy with his face only inches from mine.
“Private Wine? Is this some kind of fucking joke? We already have a Private Wine. We can’t have two Private Wines, now can we?”
“Drill Sergeant, no, Drill Sergeant.”
“Are you two sisters?”
“Drill Sergeant, no, Drill Sergeant.”
“Are you married?”
“Drill Sergeant, no, Drill Sergeant.” It didn’t bother me that he was insulting my manhood, and in the process, insulting that of the other Private Wine, an eighteen year-old boy straight out of high school who looked scared half to death to be there. But it did bother me that he was shouting so loud and so close to my face. Then he attacked my physical appearance.
“You red headed pussy. What are those marks all over your face? Rug burns from your momma’s snatch?”
“Drill Sergeant, no, Drill Sergeant.” I wanted to punch him in the mouth for talking about my mother, but I gritted my teeth instead.
“Did the other Private Wine’s pubic hair chafe your face when he was tickling your tonsils with the head of his dick?”
“Drill Sergeant, no, Drill Sergeant.”
“Does your daddy call you Red or does he just refer to you as the mistake?”
“Drill Sergeant, no, Drill Sergeant.”
“Well listen here, Red Wine. If you give me one ounce of shit, so help me I’ll rip your head off and fuck the bloody hole that sits between your shoulders. You got that, boy?”
“Drill Sergeant, yes, Drill Sergeant.”
On down the line he went, making every guy in the room feel like a piece of shit. And that’s the way it was every day of Basic Training.
When Basic was over, I found myself dressed in jungle fatigues and carrying full battle gear, headed off to Vietnam alongside so many other young men. I looked around me, wondering how many of those guys had signed up to get away from their lives like I had. Uncle Sam hadn’t forced us all to go to war. At least not yet. So I couldn’t have been the only one who had volunteered. I learned pretty early on that questioning a man about his life or his motives for signing up to participate in a war was a mistake. My first month in country I’d fought as many men on my side as I had the Vietnamese. It didn’t seem right to battle my allies so I learned to keep my mouth shut. If a man wanted to talk about his life or his reasons, he would. Otherwise, it was best to remain silent.
I found myself in a jungle 10,000 miles from home, surrounded by a sea of strange faces. I was a proud member of the United States Army 19th Engineer Battalion, Delta Company. We were a badass group of men, for sure. Our official motto was Acutus Acumen, which meant Sharp Ingenuity. But the unofficial motto among many of the soldiers was you don’t have to be crazy to be a combat engineer, but it helps.
A couple of the guys I went through Basic Training with accompanied me to Vietnam, so the nickname The King had placed on me came too. I was all the way across the globe and they were still calling me Red Wine. Though I didn’t like it, I really didn’t hate it either so I never said anything about it.
Like all good soldiers, I obeyed orders and watched my ass while also covering the asses of my fellow soldiers, even the ones I couldn’t stand.
It seemed that no matter where in the world I was or what I was doing, there were always going to be some assholes that picked on me for my red hair and my freckles. Mostly, it was name-calling and mean teasing, but there were times when it escalated to pushing and fist fights. My own men, fighting me over the color of my hair. It was ridiculous for such a thing to occur among grown men, but it was absolutely absurd for it to happen in the middle of a war.
There was this one guy named Freeman. He was the type of guy who pumped iron all the time, just trying to see how big he could get. His neck was as thick as his head and his arms were so big, I often passed time just wondering how he wiped his own ass. He was the one who gave me the most shit, swearing that my hair would be the death of our platoon.
“The gooks can see that shit from a mile away,” he claimed. “They’ll fuckin’ kill us all because of this pussy’s red hair.”
“No one can see his hair,” said Epstein, a quiet guy from Illinois I’d become friends with. “Not under his helmet.”
“Well that’s just great, four eyes,” Freeman spat. “We’re all safe as long as he doesn’t take off his fuckin’ helmet.”
After Freeman stormed off, Epstein said, “Don’t worry about him. He’s just mad because his pubes are longer than his dick.” We laughed and tried to forget the whole issue, but that was hard to do when it happened every day.
Eventually, I learned to tune out Freeman and his hatefulness. He hated me for my red hair. He hated Epstein because he was Jewish. He hated Wallace because he was black. He hated Smith because he was tall and Jones because he was short. He simply hated everybody, and as soon as I figured out that it was because he hated himself, it was easy to let it go.
No one in the platoon knew I was a virgin. It wasn’t something that came up, and when the rest of the guys were talking about women and sex, which was almost always, I kept silent unless I was dragged into the conversation. Even then I said as little as possible, playing it off as though I’d had plenty of sex with plenty of women. As far as I could tell, no one knew I was lying.
In April of 1968, my orders came down for me to take R&R. I was pulled from the field and sent back to base where I turned in my weapons and gear. I showered, got some sleep, and flew to Cam Rahn Bay. There, I changed into khakis and boarded a freedom bird bound for Tokyo. In my mind, it was going to be great. The customs, the history, and the magic of being in such an exotic place intrigued me, made me want to go. But it was terribly expensive, and for someone who was using his money to provide for his mother back home, the hefty price tags put a damper on my excitement. I ended up spending my R&R time walking around and looking at things I couldn’t afford.
When I returned to Vietnam, I fell back into the day-to-day easily enough. By that time, the war was second
nature to me. Not that we saw much war action as combat engineers, but we saw enough. There were times we took enemy fire—even lost a few of our men—and times we captured suspicious Vietnamese, which we turned over to the local infantry units. Some of those we captured were confirmed Viet Cong, so it wasn’t like we just sat on our hands.
It was July when the orders came down for my second R&R. Having learned my lesson the first time, I ruled out Tokyo. Epstein had put in for R&R at the same time I did, and he insisted I join him in Bangkok. The deciding factor for both of us was that it was cheap.
The first two days there, we shopped and took in the local scenery and customs. Real touristy shit. But the third day, Epstein wanted something more.
“It’s been so damn long,” he said as we sat at the bar. He’d been eyeing the same girl for half an hour as she made lewd gestures at him from across the crowded room. The bar was filled with people, mostly other GIs and scantily-clad women.
“Don’t you have a girlfriend?”
“Yeah, I do. But she ain’t here and I’m horny.”
I was uncomfortable with the whole situation. I didn’t feel it was right for him to cheat on his girlfriend, but I knew what he meant about being horny. And who knew whether or not his girlfriend was being faithful to him? We’d watched as soldier after soldier in our platoon received letters telling them the bad news about their girls back home. Plus, there was something about the constant threat of death that made a man want to do things he normally wouldn’t do.
“I’m tellin’ ya, Red Wine. My dick’s so hard I couldn’t cut through it with a chainsaw. And look at her, man. She wants it.”
Not wanting to encourage him, I sipped my drink and said nothing.
Fifteen minutes later, I was waiting outside a small, run-down building while he had sex with the hooker inside. I’d be a damn liar if I said I didn’t want to go in there and knock him out of the way so I could have a run at her too. I was horny. Of course I was almost always horny. Hell, we all were. But by this time, I’d learned to ignore it and just beat off in the bushes whenever I got a chance. Twenty-five years of jacking off was enough though. I wanted the real thing.
Epstein finally came out with a grin on his face and a pep in his step.
“Was it good?”
“It wasn’t bad, I’ll say that.” He tucked his shirt into his pants. “Man, I feel better.”
“What was it like?”
“What do you mean?” He looked at me with a strange look on his face and suddenly I wished I’d never asked. “Wait. Hold up, Red Wine. Are you saying you’ve never had sex before?”
“No, that’s not what I’m—”
“Are you a virgin?”
“Jesus, Epstein. Could you say it a little louder? I don’t think that guys back in ‘Nam heard you.”
He lowered his voice. “Is that what you’re saying?” I could hear the mockery in his tone. Or maybe it wasn’t mockery. Maybe it was genuine shock at a man in his mid-twenties who’d never had sex.
“No. I’m asking what it was like to be with a prostitute,” I lied.
“Oh. Oh that.” He chuckled. “For a second there, I thought you were a virgin.”
“Yeah. I can tell.”
“It was weird. I mean, there’s no telling how many other guys she’s been with today, but still, pussy is pussy, right? It beats nothing. Besides, you can do anything you want to them and they don’t mind.”
Confused, I looked at him and asked, “What do you mean?”
“My girlfriend back home won’t let me in the back door, if you know what I mean. This chick did. Man, it was good stuff.” He sighed deeply, his sexual frustration gone for now.
He left me with more on my mind than before. You could do anything you wanted to a prostitute. Anything at all. This weighed on me long after I’d returned to the war. It was something I thought about until I took my next R&R.
Epstein and I both put in for Hong Kong. We’d had such a great time in Bangkok, we decided to take our next R&R together somewhere else. It wouldn’t be as long, only a few days instead of a week, but any time away from Vietnam was time well spent and greatly appreciated.
“Hong Kong,” Epstein explained one night, “Is like Bangkok with shopping. You can buy all kinds of expensive shit like watches and cameras for about a third of the stateside price.”
His excitement was contagious and before I knew it, I’d signed up for Hong Kong. Until our orders came down, it’s all we could talk about. The things we could buy, and of course the hookers we could get.
We were widening the QL-1 from Phu Cat to Bong Son in August. Epstein and I were sitting in the shade of a dozer, eating and talking about what we were going to do in Hong Kong. As it so often did, the conversation steered toward sex, and I quickly realized that Epstein hadn’t been fooled by my act back in Bangkok.
“Listen,” he said between bites. “I want you to get a hooker as soon as we get there.”
“What?” I tried to act casual, like the idea didn’t repulse me. It did. A little. At the same time though, the thought excited me.
“Yeah, man.” He leaned closer to me. “I know you’ve never been with a woman.”
My mouth opened to say something, most likely some sort of weak denial, but the words never came. What could I say? It was true. He knew it was true. If I kept denying it knowing that he knew the truth, I might make him mad. No one likes to be lied to. Besides, I didn’t like to lie.
“It’s okay,” he smiled. “Don’t look so worried. I’m not gonna tell any of these other guys. I don’t think any of them know. They’re too stupid to figure it out.”
“How’d you know?”
“I wasn’t sure for a while. You’re real good at saying things a certain way to make people believe what you want them to believe. Hell, you even had me fooled. Every time we all talked about screwing chicks, you seemed like you knew. Like you’d done it.
“Seeing you in Bangkok did it for me. The way you acted in the bar made me wonder. I mean Jesus, Red Wine. You looked downright uncomfortable in there around all those hookers. But the look on your face when I came out of that hut was the clincher. And when you asked me what it was like, well I knew for sure then. But it’s no big deal, man. Hell, you’re probably not the only one over here that’s never got his dick wet. Relax.”
He filled his mouth with tasteless food, a mixture of rice and bland vegetables. Then he said, “Besides, we’re about to change all that. As soon as we get to Hong Kong, you’re getting laid. On me.”
“On you?”
“Yeah. My treat. My gift to you. You only live once, Red Wine.” He smiled, a piece of rice clinging to his lower lip. I looked at his face, memorizing everything about it, from the deep blue of his eyes to the small gap between his front teeth to the smear of dirt on his left cheek. It was a friendly face, one that I would never forget. He was the only real friend I’d made in Vietnam.
Three days later, just one week before our orders came down for R&R, Epstein was killed during a mine sweep.
I kept to myself after that, not indulging in conversations with the other soldiers or partaking in any card games or other activities. I did my job, answered my commanders, and that was it. I missed my friend.
A week after Epstein’s death, I found myself in Hong Kong. It was bittersweet. I was glad to be away from the war, though none of us would ever really be away from it. Not completely. But I had to admit it was nice to be somewhere else, somewhere different. A place where I wasn’t reminded of Epstein and how much I missed him.
When I first arrived, I wasn’t sure what to do. Having fun was the farthest thing from my mind. Sitting around moping didn’t seem like something I wanted to do either, so I shopped. Epstein had been right about buying things on the cheap. I bought a few pieces of jewelry for my mother and a camera for myself. After taking the items back to my room, I went out for dinner. It was there that Epstein’s words began running through my mind.
“You onl
y live once,” he’d said. And he was right. His death had driven that point home for me. It could’ve been me that was blown apart by that mine. It could easily be me the next time or the time after that. I could die any second of any day. It was that thought that made me smile at the girl across the room batting her eyelashes at me.
She was cheap and it was easy. I gave her the money and she led me to her house, a small building in a row of a dozen other small buildings. Calling her place ramshackle would’ve been a compliment. But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t moving in with her. The plan was to lose my virginity and never see her again.
It was clear this was not her first day. She’d done this so many times she seemed bored with the experience, like she was tired of doing the same thing day after day. And I imagined that she was. I wondered just how many men there had been before me that week—hell, that day—and I almost changed my mind about the whole thing. The only reason I didn’t, the only thing that kept me from turning around and going back to my room and forgetting the whole thing was Epstein’s words. It was his gift to me. If he was there, standing beside me like he would’ve been had he not been killed, he would’ve urged me on, reminding me that you only live once. So I continued following the bored whore into her tiny shack of a home so I could defile her like so many other men had done before me.
Her ill-fitting black high heels were scuffed and worn, her short jean skirt faded. The tank top she wore had thin straps that took turns falling off of her bony shoulders. The nipples on her small breasts threatened to poke completely through the thread-bare fabric.
She crossed the little room, tossing her purse onto the floor as she went. I kept my eyes on her as I closed the door behind me. There were little purple bruises here and there on her arms and legs, probably from the fingers of other men who dug into her flesh as they climaxed. Either that or she was one clumsy woman.
Looking at her now, bruised and bored and pathetic, I saw no way I would be able to have sex with her. How could I become aroused with the thought of other men atop her running through my mind?
But then she fell back on the bed, pulled her skirt up over her narrow hips, and spread her legs wide, revealing her naked crotch, and all the blood rushed to the lower half of my body, taking with it the ability for me to think about anything else.
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