FotoFun: Angle of View Ch. 03: Final

"Fuck yeah," Cindy breathed. She pushed Thalia on her back and swung herself around on top. First, mouth to mouth; then, mouths to breasts; then, mouths to vulvas, tongues flying, bodies writhing, throats groaning. Two matched sets, blondes on top, brunettes underneath, legs thrashing, juices dripping.

Their juices, not mine. I was fucked out. Even this splendid display could not arouse me further. I sat and watched with ineffectual interest; the cock in my hand refused to grow. Damn.

.

--- more intrusion

The doorbell buzzed again, followed by loud pounding. Oh fuck, what now?

A male voice bellowing "CARSON! CARSON! GET YOUR GOAT-SMELLING HONKY ASS OUT HERE! CARSON!" accompanied the frame-rattling door-pounding.

I sighed. I recognized the voice belonging to prime asshole Sergeant Tim Hutton, my nominal section leader and an exemplar of delusions of adequacy.

(There's an old joke about that. Think of Sergeant Hutton as an army ant with a hard-on, floating downstream on a leaf, lying on his back and yelling, "Bridge up! Bridge up!")

Hutton was an "Acting Jack" sergeant - he wore the three stripes of an E5 but did not hold (or get paid for) the NCO rank. The previous section honcho shipped out to Korea and Specialist 4th Hutton 'somehow' got the brevet bump and the section slot. Happenstance, or blackmail, or bribery? His predecessor knew I answered to DivArty command and happily left me alone. Hutton did not like me, did not like my assignment, and did not care for white people in general. He made it his mission to trash my ass.

I pulled my less-than-sanitary uniform boxers back on and staggered to the shaking apartment door. I closed the bedroom door behind me; no need to give the asshole a free show.

"CARSON!" Wham-wham. "CARSON! OPEN UP!" Whomp-whomp. "HONKY COCKSUCKER! I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE! OPEN THE MOTHERFUCKING DOOR!" Thud-thud-thud.

I was no longer groggy. I latched the heavy security chain before opening the front door.

"What are you pissing about-"

"Carson! Don't you ever answer the fucking phone?"

Well, not when it is unplugged, no; but I was not about to mention that.

"Get your pale skanky ass dressed and up to Custer Hill NOW! Brigade called a snap drill, everyone in assembly, NOW!" Hutton pushed with futility at the door, restrained by the chain.

"You're fucking late already and so am I, fuckface. Shit, I shoulda just left you here to get counted AWOL - but that would be points against ME and I ain't gonna let YOU fuck ME over, got that? Now GET DRESSED and GET IN THE FUCKING JEEP!" His wide black nose almost snorted steam.

"Right, right," I said, "gimmee three minutes and I'll be ready."

I pushed the door shut and returned to my bedroom, muttering curses. Damn, just as this was getting fun!

The 69ers had traded places; Keri squirmed atop Cindy while Thalia fed her puss to Sandi's mouth and vice-versa. I watched the wet female oral passion and regretfully scooped-up clean underwear and fatigues from my closet. I threw on enough clothes to leave decently; I could adjust closures and shoelaces on the ride to base.

I casually bumped buttons to activate the other two hidden Bolex stop-action cine cameras. The next couple hours here would be captured on fresh film.

"Hey Keri, close up for me when you go out, okay?"

Keri's wet face rose from Cindy's soggy blonde muff. Her eyes were glazed.

"Uh, yeah, sure thing Ron, I'll lock down, yeah..."

She licked her lips, smiled thinly at me, and returned to her cunt-slurping. Lucky girl! Would she air my place out later? Or would I return (eventually) to a miasma of sweat and sex? I shook my head and left.

Hutton and his toady driver Leon Johnson, a tall, lean corporal, blacker and slicker than the Acting Jack, made acid comments from the motor-pool jeep's front seats. I arranged my fatigue uniform in the back. A final boot-buff, and I was set. We stopped at another apartment to fetch yet another laggard. His leggy, bathrobe-wrapped Okinawan girlfriend waved a tearful goodbye.

Hey, calm down, girl. We're only going to Custer Hill, not Pork Chop Hill.

.

--- circumstances intrude

The "snap drill" was no big thing. We made formation, sounded off, and were dismissed to our stations. I made a perfunctory appearance at the commo section office, shuffled negatives in my mop-closet darkroom, and headed for my quarters upstairs. Forget going home; this drill would last all night.

Beside my apartment, I also had a bunk in the DivArty (Division Artillery) HQ barracks. I slept there as rarely as possible. But just think - a rent-free pied-à-terre right at the office!

I dozed on my bunk in full fatigue uniform, stretched on my back, size 16 combat boots hanging off the end. RATTman (radioteletype tech) Hernandez from the commo section roused me a couple times to make an appearance for inspecting brass. That's all these drills were really about - look busy, so the readiness checklist could be ticked off and brownie points awarded.

The overnight drill dribbled to an end. Non-essential personnel were released. I got the day off and returned to an empty, smelly, disheveled apartment. Keri had not pulled any maintenance. What the hell; I never cleaned her place, either. At least nothing important was missing.

I pulled all the exposed film reels off my Bolex spy cameras and sloshed them in the developing soup. I would review yesterday's captured orgy later.

I met Keri for lunch at the Division HQ mess hall. This was our last get-together; she would head to her next TDY post in a few hours. She was calm.

"You heard what I said, Ron? I'll pay for filing divorce papers."

"What, you still want me? You looked completely satisfied with the girls."

She blushed. "Yeah, well, sometimes I get... hey, forget that. I like sex, even with women, but I love you, and don't forget that."

She said the words. For the very first time. She said she loved me. Oh shit.

I needed to think. I stalled. We were side-by-side at the mess table; nobody else was within earshot. I held Keri's hand.

"Look, I don't know... I don't know where I'm going, what I'm doing. My enlistment is over next autumn. So's yours, right? Unless you re-up. Till then, the Army owns us, or me, anyway, and we're not going to be posted together, not with our specialties. You're on these constant TDYs - where will you be next week, Puerto Rico, right?" She nodded. "And then Arizona, and Panama, and all over, and I'll be right here till they cut me loose."

"Ron, I know all this." Keri's eyes were not totally dry. "I know there's nothing immediate. It's off in the future. But we can go there. You only have to get free. That's the first step. Dump your phony marriage. Do it."

We left it unresolved. Her goodbye kiss was brief and wistful.

Remember how this chapter began? "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." This was the worst of times. I loved my job. I hated my location. Fucking Kansas! I hated having no control over my life. Fucking Army!

And I hated being alone. Yeah, all those girls... it was only sex. I had only really been close to Keri and Darcy, and they were both gone.

I did not bother crying in my 3.2% Kansas beer.

I was busy the next week. I had a new assignment: besides all the usual, I was now a member of the DivArty .45 ACP pistol marksmanship team! I had hardly ever fired a rifle, let alone a pistol, before joining the Army. But the XO, Major Kelly, sensed from my photography that I had good, steady hand-eye coordination. He was right. I easily got into the Zen of target-shooting.

The team coach was an older Sergeant First Class. Les Barclay was DivArty 'armorer', in charge of individual weapons. His first lesson was succinct.

"This is how you don't hold a pistol." SFC Barclay gripped the big black M1911A1 Colt automatic in his left hand, finger on the trigger, thumb up behind the slide.

"This is why you don't hold it that way." He switched the pistol to his right hand, finger on the trigger - and no thumb. No thumb at all.

"How I had it before? That's how I held my .45 the first time I fired it. The slide moves at a velocity of about a thousand feet per second. Fucker took my thumb clean off. I learned. Y'all don't have to learn the same way. Keep your fucking thumbs down, troops!"

I kept my thumbs down. They are still attached to my hands.

I started good. I got better. How good? I bragged that I could do dental work at 50 yards. Need a tooth removed? Just smile.

I learned a great deal about myself, too, about how to hold myself in any situation, how to see and think and breathe, and what could affect my performance. Guess what? Serious pistoleros did not smoke anything, avoided all but the most vital painkillers and other drugs, did not drink alcohol or caffeine, and did not even drink milk the day before a match - the lactic acid in cow's milk disrupts vision just enough.

The wide Kansas sky was overcast the late summer day the First Infantry Division .45 pistol championship match was scheduled. The Main Post target range had the usual side-by-side firing positions. I was next to the left end of the row.

I fired my first clip from the prone position. I lay comfortably in the packed sand and carefully squeezed-off shots at the little bullseye. I felt confident. I knew my rounds made a nice tight group at twenty-five meters.

Firing halted. Weapons were cleared. We two dozen shooters walked forward to inspect our targets. I was shocked - mine was perfectly intact! No bullet holes at all! I looked at the next target to my right. Ten holes were scattered around it; another ten were dead-on in the center. I had fired perfectly - but into the wrong target. Oh shit.

My XO stood behind me. He growled. Oh shit, I was in for it!

And then, salvation from above.

A warning klaxon sounded. A voice shouted on the loudspeaker: "TORNADO! TAKE COVER IMMEDIATELY! TORNADO!"

Everyone dove for the nearby sheltering trenches. The sky blackened; the wind howled; debris flew past.

And all the targets blew away. The evidence of my fuckup vanished. Whew.

The championship match was re-shot the following week. No tornadoes and no fuckups, either; I won second prize. I have the plaque stowed somewhere.

My next close encounter of the tornado kind was only a week later - another overcast day, the middle of a Kansas summer afternoon. My olive-drab uniform was freshly starched but wilting in the swampy humidity. I drove a motor pool jeep on the expressway angling past the base. Low green wooded hills rose on my right, across from brushy fields stretching forever to the prairies.

Like the pistol match, it was deja vu all over again. The sky blackened. The wind howled. Debris flew past. No cows blew by, but a big fucking oak tree crossed the freeway a couple hundred feet ahead. I felt it prudent to stop and await clarity. The landscape churned before me. I dived into a roadside ditch. I survived. Damn, my uniform needed pressing and starching again!

Tornadoes are the worst possible blowjobs.

.

--- back to the action

I was busy. The usual official and unofficial shoots or portraits, events, and whatever, and the few 'intimate' shoots, and then processing, printing and presenting all those, and collecting payment - all this occupied and monopolized me. I unofficially ran a small business from DivArty HQ.

The intimates were the most fun, of course, Sarge Mackie and Dia replayed, and Loots (lieutenants) MacGuire and MacKay, and Mule Mueller with a few new girls, shared.

An aside: I originally intended to write a section here on The Girls Of Aggieville. (Why Aggieville? Because KSU was originally an agricultural college. Students at such are often called Aggies. Q.E.D.)

Ah, the lovelies strolling around the uni district of Manhattan, Kansas! Especially on hot, muggy, clothing-hostile autumn prairie days. Free-spirited girls deigned to wear brassieres or knickers. (Did I mention that Keri was educated in the U.K? She taught me various British terms like cunny and knickers.) Country girls dressed (or undressed) to look urban. Urban girls dressed down to look country. And out-of-state girls wondered at the hidden loose campus culture in this uptight, fundamentalist, blue-law, booze-dry Kansas county.

Yes, I could write about The Girls Of Aggieville. Another time, maybe. Yes, this is a tease for another episode, heh heh. But I digress.

---

Other work absorbed my time. Colonel Hayes, the DivArty commander, wanted a state-of-the-art data acquisition system for post-mission analysis. He especially wanted to SEE mission results NOW, not just read damage reports some hours after-the-fact. Remember, this was back before digital printers.

How to speed the turnaround? The simple, cheap way was to send me up in a chopper to shoot images of targets and shell impacts, then drop me at my field lab to work my magic. I set up a tent with a dark section for my most portable enlarger and a table for my Spiratone stabilization processor, an inexpensive device that produced damp but usable black-and-white prints in thirty seconds, rather than the ten minutes each (and more space and gear) needed in regular photo printing.

A typical job:

Howitzers fired. A Huey flew me to where the tactical officers said would have been a fairly safe distance if this had been for real. I burned off a roll of Tri-X film in my motor-drive Nikon F1 and 500mm telephoto lens. As the chopper flew back to the command cluster, I loaded the film into its little developing tank inside a changing bag and squirted in shots of chemical soups, keeping a close eye on my Timex wrist watch's sweep second hand. I was ready to run into my tent and hit the developed film with a portable hair dryer as soon as we landed. Enlarge and print the images, run each sheet of paper through the stabilization processor, hit those with the hair dryer, and run them to the operations APC for the G3 ops staff to evaluate.

Time from the big guns' firing to my delivering action images: ten minutes. That was the fucking speed of light for the mid-1970's. And I set it up!

That was the exciting part. Most of my official work was more mundane: shoot new-troops photos for hometown newspapers; shoot assemblies and ceremonies, flags waving; shoot parades in towns where DivArty units were parading. Anything for publicity. Colonel Hayes was a hound for publicity.

Some was grittier: shoot the troops playing wargames in the field in simulated combat. This allowed me some creativity. With the right techniques, gear, glass, film, and processing, I could make pictures look like almost any time frame from the US Civil War to the next century. One brigade commander here on Custer Hill took to dressing like General Custer. What a ham!

But the most challenging project lay ahead: the DivArty CSM's (Command Sergeant-Major) daughter's wedding.

I will get to that in a moment. First, rattlesnakes.

I loved playing with photo gear. I loved shooting macro - that means real close-up, getting 1:1 or at least 1:2-size images on film. Shooting through a microscope for 10:1 or larger images is a different can of spiders.

There are several ways to shoot macro. One could buy a special lens. One could reverse an ordinary lens. Or one could put an ordinary or reversed lens on extension rings or bellows - moving the lens away from the film increases magnification.

My favorite outdoors macro rig employed the last technique, and more. I had a 2x telextender that effectively doubled a lens' focal length - put it behind a 400mm lens and it thinks it is 800mm. I put those on extension tubes AND a bellows for maximum extension of 400mm. That gave me 1:2 magnification, the edge of macrophotography.

Even with fast film pushed even faster, such a rig needed stabilization. A tripod is fine for studio work. Outdoors is something else. I just happened (heh heh) to have a shoulder-mount for the rig. Assembled, it looked rather like a bazooka launcher. I had to be careful where I used the thing - don't want to worry gun-toting cops and citizens, eh?

But it let me shoot close-ups of rattlesnakes from a safe distance like ten feet.

Maybe I should have used the rig at the CSM's daughter's wedding. Yes, keeping a safe distance would have been smart. Avoiding that clusterfuck completely would have been even smarter. But one does not say no to a CSM.

---

The top DivArty NCO was Command Sergeant-Major David Davison. He stood sky-high, rail-thin, with bright blue eyes under a shaved scalp tanned like leather, and was usually cheerful and easy-going - but tough as steel nails. As a battalion Sergeant-Major in VietNam, his unit was overrun by Viet Cong. He and those in his mobile command post were the only survivors and only because of his wiles and determination. He made a very good friend and a very bad enemy.

"Relax, Specialist Carson. I have a personal request. Nothing to worry about. Nothing too dangerous."

Uh-oh. I moved from at-ease to fall-out but stayed wary.

"What kind of personal request, Top?" Surely he did not want sex shots!

"It's my daughter Danya. She's going to marry a civilian," - his mouth turned down with those words - "and we need a wedding photographer. Are you up to that? You'll be paid fairly, of course."

I had never shot a wedding. I knew fuck-all about shooting weddings. Those are a niche specialty, like cute animals and stroboscopic shots of exploding balloons. Real wedding toggers knew all the stock poses. I knew diddly.

But one does not refuse a CSM. I sucked in my gut and soldiered on.

"No problem, Top. How big a wedding?"

"There shouldn't be more than four or five hundred attending. The wedding will be down at the Main Post chapel and the reception is at the auditorium next door. My wife is handling arrangements. Check with her for everything, okay? Here is her phone number." He handed me a handwritten note.

Four or five hundred? Military and civilian, sober and drunk, all in uncontrollable space? Oh fuck. "Sure thing, Top. I'm right on it. Anything else?" I tried not to sweat too obviously.

"Just an enticement, Specialist. With your scores and schooling, you're a shoe-in for OCS (Officer Candidate School). How would you like to ditch those stripes and wear some metal bars? Do this right and I'll push the Colonel to recommend you."

Leave my sweet setup here? Hang with barely-educated state-college guys? Make a six-year commitment to uniformed service? Be a commissioned tool of the insane state? Why not merely roast my testicles over open flames?

"I always do my best, Top. I appreciate anything you can do for me." Too bad he could not get me an early discharge. I love my job but I hate the Army.

"Well, then. Contact the missus. Carry on, Specialist."

I snapped to attention and turned to leave his office. No, I did not salute. An enlistee like me only salutes officers and ranking civilians. We do not treat an NCO such as a sergeant as if they were commissioned. "Don't call me 'sir'; I work for a living," is their mantra.

I sweated profusely when I reached the HQ hallway. A fucking wedding!

I knew a couple of wedding toggers in the area. I would have to hire them, act like a general contractor. I did not know the CSM's wife's budget here; I might even lose money on the deal. But if I did not pull this off I could expect to spend the rest of my enlistment in the motor pool scrubbing mud and cow shit off half-tracks. I knew how the CSM operated. Do NOT cross him!

I called the missus.

"Hello Missus Davison, this is Specialist Ron Carson. Your husband told me to call you about arranging wedding photography and-"