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Desdmona's Erotic Story Contests
2007 Sixties Erotica Contest
Honorable Mention

Rules of Engagement

I couldn’t sleep.

I sat on my cot and listened to the waterfall of sound surrounding me, snores from other men in the tent, coughing, crying out, whispers, the slap of flesh, and I saw shifting shapes and the wink of cigarettes, and I heard noises past the tent walls, the rustle of leaves and the shimmer of breezes, the murmur of the unknown and the unfathomable, and the smells drifted deep into my nostrils, sweat and gunpowder and shit and fear and the perfidious perfume of the country enclosing us.

I got up and walked out into the night. This wasn’t wise. The enemy could be silently waiting for some foolish soldier to abandon caution and virtually invite the invading bayonet, the annihilating garrote. Each of these might be a relief, an escape from the oppressive foreignness in which I was lost, not merely the seemingly interminable jungle with endless dangers, but as well a suffocating environment of men trying desperately to not lose their sanity or their lives, of whom I was one.

Waking or sleeping, in this country of the masked and the treacherous, I was beleaguered by nightmares of guns and fires and explosions and featureless forces storming toward me.

Like some drug-induced fever dream, Viet Nam existed in its own reality, which mutated each minute, each second, into something different.

Was this indeed 1968, or had I slipped through a break in time into some sweltering eternity? And had I been here ten months, or had I been here forever? Would I be here forever?

I lighted a cigarette, compounding my error in possibly putting myself directly in harm’s way, and I walked around the tent to where the three prisoners of war were.

We had incarcerated the three men in a makeshift cell built from fallen trees. If they had combined their strength, they probably could have broken free. Did we want them to escape, so that we would no longer have any responsibility for them? And did they not attempt escape because they welcomed the opportunity to not fight, to rest?

One of the three men was awake and leaning against the wooden bars. I stopped, and we looked at each other, and he made a gesture asking for a cigarette.

I gave him one and struck a match, and as I offered it, he put his hand over mine and stared at me.

In the flame, I saw that he was probably a few years younger than my twenty-four, he was young and handsome, and his eyes were soft, and he was gently smiling.

When the cigarette was lighted, he blew out the match, but he did not remove his hand, and in a darkness illuminated only by the glow of our cigarettes, we regarded each other.

We smoked unspeaking, still touching, and then, as if at some silent signal, we stubbed out our cigarettes and dropped them into pockets, saving their remainders for the future, as if by saving them, we ensured that we would have a future.

Not letting go of my hand, he kneeled, and his shadow looked up, and my shadow looked down, and he unbuttoned my fatigues. From my shorts, he extracted, slowly and gently, my cock.

I gasped when his mouth took me in – so moist, so warm, so enticing. I was immediately hard. I was filled with yearning – how long had it been since I was with anyone?

My cock was elevated – my desire was elevated. I had little comparative experience, but the young man’s technique seemed somewhat unsure. Perhaps, like me, he had no previous encounters with another man – or with someone on the opposite side of an armed conflict that had gone on for a very long time. But at this moment, in this place, for this particular conjunction of bodies and spirits, familiarity wasn’t an issue – or perhaps there was the specific intimacy between two supposed enemies in a situation outside of their understanding who sought something other than their own solitudes.

Of course, these thoughts, if indeed I had them, if they are not entirely retrospect, were fleeting. I was immersed in sensation. The blood flowed to my extended cock, laved in the damp hotness of his mouth and the explorations of his tongue and the rise and fall of his lips along my prick.

A whirlpool of feeling centered in my groin, and I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to his ministrations and wanted him not ever to stop.

But he did.

He let go of my cock, and I opened my eyes and saw that he was gazing up at me, and after a pause, he stood –

– still entwining my hand through the cage –

– and with the free hand undid his Oriental pajamas, and they rustled to the ground, and his cock jutted out from his uncovered crotch, and I thought that he wanted me to return his favors, but he unlaced his fingers from mine and removed his blouse and turned his back to me and bent over –

– and I unfastened my fatigues and pushed them and my shorts down my legs –

– and I reached my hands through the bars and spread his buttocks and slid my cock into the welcoming darkness.

There was a momentary resistance. Then there was a yielding. As I continued into him, we sighed in concert.

I slipped the length of my cock inside him, then partially retreated, and I was – I was – I was not fucking him, we were not merely two rutting animals – I was not making love to him, we did not know each other well enough for that – we were locked together in a ligature of lust, beyond lust, mysteriously, an elemental joining, a rudimentary need answered.

In the darkness, I leaned toward, then away, and I trembled with an intensity I had never before experienced, and I tried to hold back, to prolong our delirious union, but he moaned, impelling me into, out of him with increasing speed and power, the sweet madness evolving, revolving into a fury and a pounding and a throbbing, and my cock flamed in its insistence, and I was fucking him, and he groaned each time my prick shoved into him, and each sound from him drove me faster and harder, my cock, his ass, his vocal explosions as my weapon struck its target, and I could barely breathe, bruising myself against the slats of the cell, rocking, creaking, the heavy air, the burning stars, my hands around his waist as I impelled him onto me, as I hit again and again –

– oh –

– no, I –

– yes, yes –

– not yet –

– I couldn’t –

– spinning sparkling –

– unbearable –

– now now –

– and I erupted into him, pulling him upright and stifling my cries against his back, tasting the salt of his sweat, he quivered beneath me, I shook in the force of my orgasm, in the climax of what had brought us together and in the continuation of what still fused us together, not just my cock bucking and bursting within him but the need, the recognition, the declaration, the relief.

We hung for a time against the bars of the cell, so close that we might have been one being. At last, I withdrew from his body, my wet cock drying in the chill breeze. Both of us stepped away from the wall of the jail, and he dressed, and I raised my shorts and pants.

He lifted his hand as he had when I lighted the cigarette, and I joined my hand to his again and felt the stickiness of his own fulfillment.

Then he moved away and joined the two prisoners on the ground. I went back into the tent and lay on my cot and immediately fell into an exhausted sleep.

In the morning, my unit broke camp. We dismantled the jail, tied together the three prisoners, and set off into the thick tangle of vegetation.

My companion of the night did not acknowledge me, nor did I acknowledge him. None of my fellow soldiers spoke of what some of them must surely have overhead.

At the end of the day’s march, we left our prisoners with another unit transporting its own captives to headquarters.

He didn’t look back, and I watched him walk away into a swirling jungle that seemed to erase him.

No, not erase, for his image has stayed with me, not because he aroused something latent, for I haven’t had, do not want to have, further experiences with men. Nor do the recollections provide sexual fantasy and satisfaction.

In the often terrible memories and dreams that remain even after so many years, the remembrance of my merging with him is a light – strange, I know, or maybe not strange – pleasure and pain and happiness and sadness and kindness and violence commingled in a sort of healing.


Rules of Engagement is Shane Saint John’s first published story. However, two of his alternative personalities have published extensively in adult books and magazines. Shane and his various libidos currently reside in one of the Rocky Mountain states.


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Desdmona's Erotic Story Contests
2007 Sixties Erotica Contest
Honorable Mention