I castrated a kid when I was seventeen, and as a result graduated from a prison high school. The judge mandated that I be incarcerated until my eighteenth birthday, at which time my situation would be evaluated and I would be turned over to an adult court. The shrinks at the high school figured out that the kid I had nutted had subjected me to years of real or imagined mental abuse, and that I wasn’t by nature a violent person and was unlikely to re-offend, and as a result of their recommendations the same judge that sent me to reform school agreed to turn me loose. All I had to do was enlist in the Army or Marine Corp, serve two hitches, and be released with an Honorable Discharge and I would be free forever. Little did he, I, or anyone else suspect that I would soon hold yet another set of balls in my sweaty hand and take a knife to them.

Dad convinced me to go with the Army, and I found out that I could volunteer for the draft, which would be for two years, and then re-enlist for an additional three year hitch and be out in five years or less, so two weeks after I turned eighteen I was on my way to Fort Lewis for Basic Training, aka Boot Camp.

There were a lot of scare stories back then about boot camp. The drill instructors were all rumored to be sadists, the food terrible, and the total lack of privacy was reputed to be enough to make most draftees want to commit suicide or make a break for Canada. That may have been true for the typical grain fed, lazy draftees or enlistees, but I had just spent a year in a prison high school and boot camp was a hell of a lot better than what I had endured. The food was not only much better than that of the reform school, but also more plentiful, and the barracks, showers, and latrines were a lot cleaner. There were the same privacy issues: Midnight strip searches for drugs, open toilets with no stall dividers or doors, common showers dispensing water that was too cold for comfort, and large dormitory barracks that afforded no privacy whatsoever for any purpose.

The Drill Instructor sergeants were always in your face, but no worse than the guards, teachers, and so-called counselors that been hassling me. At least these guys were genuinely trying to teach something even if they were going about it rather harshly, and unlike some of the other sergeants all of the ones tormenting us had seen combat in Southeast Asia and were trying their damnedest to keep us alive. The managers at the school had long since give up on all efforts to actually dispense education and were content with keeping us off of the streets while we were waiting to be either released or forwarded to an adult facility.

Even the physical regimen wasn’t very tough, for me anyway. Running laps on the field had been the favorite form of punishment given to transgressors of at the school, and I had certainly done my share. Actually, once it got to be good weather I preferred being outside running to being inside listening to their bullshit, so I made sure to give them ample reason to keep me outside in the fresh air. Here, most of the activities were outdoors, and we learned how to shoot, throw grenades, scale walls, and a lot of other stuff outside the classrooms in the rainy Northwest weather. There was plenty of classroom stuff too, and whenever the weather was good we were usually stuck in the classrooms learning military protocol or taking aptitude tests.

The hardest part of the whole experience for me was the total lack of sexual relief. Except for a quick blowjob by an old woman kitchen worker the week after I had arrived at the high school, I hadn’t gotten laid since my seventeenth birthday. There were opportunities with a few of the other guys but I wasn’t wired that way. Masturbation was forbidden in the dorms and restrooms but there were a few secluded places where a guy could take a few minutes now and then and jerk off, but that wasn’t even possible in boot camp. There were simply too many people around all of the time and no available private places. The best a guy could do was to take a sock to bed with him and try and wait until everyone else was asleep, and then silently whack away. The problem was that everyone else seemed to have the same idea, so the nights got a little interesting. One guy got caught beating his meat late one night and the sergeants came down on him really hard, humiliating him in ways that were harsh even for boot camp, so after that I just held it all in and by the end of the eight week program I had a record book case of blue balls.

Along with our first stripes and promotion to Private, we also got four-day passes and a stern lecture about the type of girls waiting for us outside the gate. I didn’t care. We weren’t supposed to leave the area, but Spokane was only five hours away so I took the chance and hitched a ride back home. It felt great to eat Mom’s cooking, jack off unmolested in the shower, and rid my body of excess sperm with a chick I used to know from high school that couldn’t resist a uniform.

Some of the tests that I took indicated that I had some kind of ability with radios and the like, so after advanced infantry training came two months of communications school, where I learned all about radio procedures, how to string telephone wire, and even a session on Morse code. The was also some stuff that I pretty much ignored about field communication equipment, since I would no doubt be somewhere in the rear.

Six months after joining the Army I was on a chartered 707 headed for Viet Nam, now sporting the insignia of a Private First Class. The first couple of weeks in-country were hectic, to say the least. Long lectures on how to keep our heads out of our asses, more inoculations, and more practice on the rifle range before we were assigned to existing units as replacements. I was tired of all this fucking around and I was also tired of the heat and anxious to get my assignment, which in accordance to my MOS, or specialty, would no doubt be in an air-conditioned radio room somewhere. Maybe I’d even get lucky and have a real bed in an air-conditioned barracks as well instead of a fucking cot in a wooden sided tent.

“Which one of you ladies is Miller?” The sergeant asked, striding purposely into the room. Shit! I probably did something to piss him off, and now he had some chickenshit chore for me like dumping out the shitters or patrolling the area for cigarette butts or something equally distasteful.

“Here, Sergeant,” I answered meekly.

“You got your orders, Miller,” he said, picking his nose. “The 333rd needs a prick packer, and that’d be you. Pack your shit and get over to maintenance. They’ve got a Huey there that’ll give you a lift up to Bong Son.”

Shit. I was hoping for a spot in headquarters somewhere, not humping the infamous PRC-25 combat radio, aptly nicknamed the Prick, out through the boonies with an infantry squad while living in the mud and getting shot at. “Okay, Sarge,” was about all I could say.

Thus it was I went to war. It kind of boiled down to the old saying ‘hours of boredom interrupted by moments of terror.’ It wasn’t all bad though. There were rest periods in beautiful places that were spent fucking some of the most exotic and lovely women on Earth, all of whom would normally be far beyond the reach of an ordinary looking guy like me.

Somewhere in the process I also became a man, and that although I’d almost shit my pants the first time I took fire, I hadn’t panicked. I also liked the fact that I was now treated as an equal, and even though I still looked like a fresh faced high school kid nobody flicked me shit about it. War was like that. There have been hundreds of thousand of pages written on the Viet Nam experience, most all by far better writers than me, and I’m not going to rehash all of that. Instead, I’ll fast forward to one particular event, which is really the basis for this story.

I was lucky. Both the Lieutenant and the Sergeant had been there previously, and both were sharper than hell and knew how to keep us alive, and as a result our casualties had been unusually light. Our next mission was an armed reconnaissance into a valley. We were supposed to take a look around, shoot the shit out of whatever enemy was there, then get the hell out and let the whizzes figure out if it was worth sending in a full strength complement.

The Hueys dropped us off and immediately we were in the shit, with fire coming from all directions. We made it into the brush and took up a defensive position, but we kept hearing this one guy with a really low voice admonishing his troops. The Lieutenant asked Marvin, the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam guy with us, what the guy with the low voice was saying. “Shoot low,” Marvin said. “He is reminding his troops to aim low, so as to wound and not to kill.

This was a favorite tactic of some of the assholes. We shot to kill because the brass wanted a high body count, but they would rather wound us instead of killing us. Also, they knew the psychological effect that a belly wound, or a severed spine, or a wound to the genitals had on us. We didn’t want to die, of course, but we sure as hell didn’t want to have our dicks blown off or wind up crippled or in a wheelchair for the rest of our lives.

The Lieutenant called in artillery fire, and then he got hit. There were two other guys down so the Sergeant told me to call for a dust off, which I did, and then the artillery started landing and blew the shit out of Charley. The Hueys that had dropped us were too low on fuel to evac us, so we mopped up what remained of the enemy while we waited for our pick-up, and in the process came across a NVA Colonel. He wasn’t really hurt, but he’d gotten his bell rung pretty hard by the artillery.

We stripped him down to his underwear, which is SOP, and placed him under guard. We’d had some bad experiences with enemy officers before. Although our orders were to take them to HQ for interrogation, it always seemed like the fix was on or something, and we figured that they were back on duty with their troops before we even got our gear cleaned up.

In addition, this guy was haughty as hell and had an attitude. “Are the capitalist warmongers so desperate that they now have to send children to fight their wars?” He asked, in his unusually deep, resonant voice while looking right at me. “I demand my rights under the Geneva Convention,” he admonished the Sergeant, “Please return my clothes immediately.”

“I know what should happen to this bastard,” the Sergeant said, “but I ain’t got balls enough to do that to a guy, even a gook.”

I thought all of my hatred that had gotten me into trouble before was behind me now, but looking at the Lieutenant, who was now unconscious and bleeding heavily from a wound in his stomach, I felt an old familiar anger rise in my guts. “You got enough balls to hold him down while someone does it?” I asked.

The Sergeant’s answer came when we locked eyes and he took the KaBar knife he’d won from a Green Beanie in a poker game from his belt and handed it to me. The Sergeant grabbed the Colonels arms, and two of the other guys grabbed his legs and spread him out on the dusty ground of the LZ. I knelt between his legs, grabbed his underwear by the waistband, noting that it was GI issue, and sliced it free. His slender uncircumcised cock lay flopped over one bony thigh and his balls, although rather small, sagged low between his legs.

All pretenses of haughtiness left his face as I took them in my hand and tightened down my grip. They were much smaller than my own, perhaps the size of a young adolescent’s, but they obviously weren’t numb and he immediately cried out in pain. He hadn’t heard us talking but fear filled his face as he saw the knife and realized his fate. I slipped the point of the knife between my hand and the base of his cock and made a quick slice, then placed the bloody credentials of his manhood on his heaving chest. The look on his face was that of utter, complete, desolation. All men are naturally protective of their genitals, but Asians are even more so and they spend great sums of money on substances to enhance their potency. I stood up to leave, and it was only then that I realized that I had an erection.

“We taking him back with us, Sarge?” The corporal asked as the Hueys approached.

“Fuck no! Throw his ass in the brush and let’s get the fuck out of here!” the Sergeant answered.

That was my last combat mission. I had been in-country for eleven months by then, and it was time for my mandatory appointment with a re-enlistment officer. Every GI had to listen to the same line of shit about how they could re-up and get all kinds of valuable training, and everyone typically ignored it. The asshole didn’t know that I didn’t have any choice, and he was surprised as hell when I told him that I would re-enlist, provided I could leave the Infantry and get into Armor. There were lots of Infantry and Artillery in Nam, but not much in the way of Armor. Most all of the Armored units were in Germany waiting for the Russians to invade, and that’s where I wanted to be.

A week later I was on the Freedom Bird for home, and after a thirty-day leave I went to Fort Knox to learn all about tank warfare. After that was two years in Germany, where I met my future wife, fathered a daughter, and finished my military commitment in relative safety. A lot of guys I know have nightmares about Nam, but not me. I wake up in the night with a throbbing erection, and my hand is always clenching a wadded up ball of the sheet or pillowcase.