Usually Reg hated the Army, but sometimes things he thought he would hate turned out to be okay, like the drills. Even in regular life he had liked to stay in shape, and it took him about two days to get used to doing it the Army way.
What did start getting to him was that it was so fucking boring. One day he even caught himself studying the label on a ketchup bottle. The base's scrubbed spotlessness had been amazing after the grunge of the city, but after a while he began to miss litter, noise, traffic, winos, anything.
It helped to try to keep track of the ways the Army fucked up everything. The simplest jobs always had pounds of instructions, boring as batshit until you got to the only part that mattered, and then the typing would start to get faint and smudged. Most of the other guys were on to the Army's dumb fuckups, and some of them were born comedians.
Reg went with the flow when they talked about pussy and titty and how bad they wanted to suck and fuck. He knew that when he joined in he was hot to suck tight "pussies" that had balls and cocks on the other side, and that the cream he wanted in his mouth squirted out of a nice stiff "titty" that had hairy balls swinging below it. He got so hot over his scenes he could see they figured he must be one scary stud. When they got passes Reg would let out that he had gotten so wiped who knew what he did, least of all him. Probably nobody gave much of a shit one way or the other, but he knew he had to be careful just the same, especially in the early morning drills when he was still half asleep with afterdreams of a clogged latrine somehow right there in the middle of the barracks, piled high with gold and brown and cinnamon and tan and chestnut turds while guys orgied on madly squeaking bunks.
He would glance around on the field at hot young butts in every direction. Sometimes a few inches in front of his dick he would see a pair of big, tight buns stretching the seat of a guy's fatigues to a shine, and when he forced himself to look away he'd get a side angle of another set, a silky pinch puckered up for a suck. He couldn't help it. He was a lighting engineer by trade, so he looked automatically. Also a born shithole sucker and fart sniffer. Reg worried sometimes Mr. Dick would just ready-aim-fire faster than he could picture old nuns with bad breath yelling at him.
The way he finally figured out how to deal with it and get some relief took a little planning. If taking a chance on somebody else was out, there was always himself. He could still have shit-and-piss sex with "yours truly." He found a plastic bottle and rinsed it out, and after taps would work it down in his bunk to where he could quietly piss into it, and then slowly move it up and position it under his pillow so he could sip little mouthfuls of his burnt-tasting, chalky piss until the inside of his mouth tasted like a busy urinal smells.
He would bring a hanky to the latrine and nonchalantly wipe with it and fold it back up after he checked nobody was looking. One time he thought this cute kid from Oklahoma, Lonnie, had caught him. Lonnie was waiting to slide out the previous night's spicy Mexican dinner a few bowls over, but Reg could sense him checking him out and could tell Lonnie was working up nerve to ask something. As Reg waited, Lonnie suddenly caught his breath and leaned forward, squinting in concentration. "Uh...Oooh.....Aaahhh...." Reg pictured the stacks of tacos Lonnie had downed the night before. Lonnie finally sat back, panting, and said "Hey, man, I....I...Oh!...Ah! Ah!...." Reg could tell he must have had extra helpings of the canned apricots they had had for dessert. Reg waited as Lonnie let the last of it ball up and fall, his raw pink bulge sticking out in the cool air as his ass pulsed its last few strains. Reg wondered what it was going to be about and tried to think of a way to explain the hanky, some medical bullshit or something.
Lonnie finallly started to get to it. As usual, it wasn't about Reg at all. After Lonnie got reassurances that, no, Reg wouldn't think he was weird (he already did) and, no, he wouldn't tell anybody else (who?) out it comes that he's scared shitless that the Army doctors could tell that back in New Muleshoe he had let Bob the town queer suck him off for a dollar one afternoon in the gas station. ...In the bathroom... The men's bathroom... Reg assured him there's no way they could tell, wondering what Lonnie felt worse about, the blow job or the buck. It was just what Lonnie needed to hear, but then he couldn't let this little heart-to-heart with a certified stud pass without getting to his other 'guy' question: "Why the hell do the fuck movies always show the naked guys?"
"Oh-oh, this is it," Reg thought, but then he remembered that old Lon had already tipped his hand, so he laughed and said "You dumb shitkicker! They do that so the chicks will get hot!" Awed to silence at last, Lonnie reached back and wiped, swung up off the throne, shook Reg's hand, and left. Reg wouldn't have minded adding the wipe to his own little package, but no luck--Lonnie had pitched it properly. Anyway, he had his own brown sniff-rag to enjoy later while he sipped his warm piss.
His technique was to lie face down on the mattress, ease a big greased carrot into his hole, sniff his ripe hanky, sip from the plastic bottle, and squeeze-fuck the carrot while staging shit and piss scenes in his mind from memories plus combination scenes from orgy movies in fast-forward, fucking faster and faster faster until his ass squeezes tight and he's gonna shoot, his jizz is gonna squirt, his hot hot stuff's gonna shoot out of his dick , gotta shoot, gotta fuck, can't stop, can't stop, gotta fuck, gotta fuck, fuck fuck fuckfuckfuckfuck, his nine inches raping the mattress in vicious stabs, eyes closed tight as he shits the carrot and white-knuckles the bunk and, as quietly as he can manage, shudders and lurches side-to-side, drooling into the pillow and in his mind dives mouth-wide-open into a huge stack of fresh porn-star turd.
When they told him the captain wanted to see him in his office who knew what to expect. But the Army owned Reg's ass, so in he went.
Now McPherson was a piece of work; did he shit Army, or was he smart enough to outshit the best of them? Reg was never sure. Whichever, McPherson went on and on, and on, about The Needs Of Our Country and The Future Of Civilization and Fighting Spirit and The Enemy while Reg stood there going back and forth from ketchup bottle to looking like it mattered. Actually it was starting to be a blip on his screen, so Reg went with it. What the hell.
Seems the Army and NASA had suddenly become lovers, and it was "Guys! Bush is our best chance, let's make it good!" so they were sucking together on the national tit, on "Studies." Studies. Studies up the fucking wazoo as a matter of fact. You name it, Uncle Sam studied the mother; a billion here, a kajillion there, who gave a shit. This time his country was calling on him, in consideration of his good record and his civilian occupation, to volunteer for "Terminal Metabolic Propulsion As A Highly Classified Strategic Test Of Personnel Intercommunication Study" or TMPSTPI for short. OK--got it, Reg thought. Sort of.
McPherson highlighted some of the incentives they were offering the guys who stepped forward for the mission: it would be completed in three months, entirely on board a luxury liner cruising in the Caribbean. Several thousand guys who had scored similarly to each other, and to Reg, on Army tests of Sensitivity Levels and VCS (violence-to-cooperation scales) as well as on being in top medical condition, were being confidentially notified--as Reg was being notified at that very moment--of the Study. The Army and NASA had decided to narrow it down to one hundred actual participants by a "Procedure #6699:" each volunteer would be videotaped doing four minutes of auto-sexual stimulation of his own choosing, completely unclothed. The actual participants, which had to include cameramen and a lighting engineer, would be made up of the one hundred guys who registered the most positive responses--both when viewing the other volunteers' videos as well as when being viewed by the other volunteers. In the next two months each one could check out the videos as often as he needed, and each of them had two chances to re-shoot his own tape after checking out the others.
The main requirement, McPherson finally broke it down in his bluntly fatherly way, was: "Can you stand being around other guys' fresh shit and piss--and can the same guys stand being around yours?" and he laughed: "Don't see why not. Nobody's ever fainted in the latrine I know of! Well anyway, kid, that's the gist of it. Let me know tomorrow. Dis-missed!"
Well, what would it be like to be in some el weirdo study for three months on a luxury liner in the Caribbean? Reg looked at several more pages of the classified notice and found some sweeteners McPherson had missed, like, to compensate for the difficulties of the mission, personnel would get to have the same treatment as regular first-class paying customers. They had even approved generous rations of "mood-enhancing pharmaceuticals" to "help the personnel perform with optimum functionality." The more Reg thought about it the better it sounded. It looked like they wanted to know once and for all everything they could about a lot of hot guys taking a shit and pissing in close quarters.