Reg could live with that. Shitting and pissing he was good at. Loved in fact. What finally made the difference for him was that they stipulated that if participants had "unanticipated responses" it was no big deal. Hey. Did the Army finally make sense or what? Sign me up, Jack.
The other volunteers' tapes were not a disappointment. Every afternoon for three hours Reg defended the free world by watching naked guys whack off for the camera. It beat KP. Most of the faces were forgettable, but the bodies usually looked good, and fucking is fucking.
His tastes sharpened as time went by. Once in a while a tape would have him like steel and hot to shoot in ten seconds and he couldn't figure out why at first. Finally he realized that looks mattered, but what got him to the edge fast was the way guys would get into their own ass: guys who turned around and stuck it out toward the camera, spreading it with their hands and leering back over their shoulder, or guys who got a slick brown smear on their finger, rubbed it into their mustache, and rolled the mustache upward and took heavy whiffs, or guys who lay on their backs and dildoed and then smirked up at you as they tamped the dildo into their own mouths. He re-shot his own tape, doing some fancy cock-to-mouth pissdrinking along with scatty scenes of him and his butt with a big shit-eating grin on his face. If they didn't like it fuck them; he was along for the ride now for as long as it would last.
So two months later he found himself on this fucking frostbitten pier in Norfolk as some old Army fart with a p.a. system screeched and echoed at him and ninety-nine other guys how brave they were. Whatever. All Reg knew was that as he looked around and shivered it was like the complete casts of every male orgy video he had ever seen. How in the hell did their recruiting offices find them all? How did they find their recruiting offices? Some of the guys were cursing under their breath about the stupid crappiness of the mission, glaring around to show how shitty it was that they were going be out in the middle of nowhere with only about a hundred other guys, making supposedly brilliant puns on "Norfolk" and "fuck."
Eventually the ceremonials came to an end and they filed on to the Army's luxury cruise liner. A guy named Randy bitched to the guys near him about how the cameras the Army was loading on were out of date, and informed them of the features of really good ones. An athletic young Italian ship's officer pointed out each one's stateroom suite once they were on board and out of the public eye. Might as well settle in.
Wouldn't you know but the upcoming week's videotaping schedules were already on Reg's desk: they were supposed to start right in with a high-production of four of the guys bending over naked, side by side, to compare exactly how far each one's hole puckers out as he farts, then shits, then blasts out piss that has been loaded into his rectum. Shee-yit. As the lighting engineer, Reg had to be right there all of the time. No turning back now. Norfolk was a smudge on the horizon, the crew of a luxury liner bound for the Carribbean was at their disposal for the next three months, and they had orders from the Army and NASA to piss and shit together as much as they could.
When routines got underway he noticed that the other guys, unlike the loose collection back at the base, always stepped along smartly, no nonsense, and that when they spoke to each other it was mainly just to relay the orders of the day in cut-and-dried manly voices with their eyes focused straight on the horizon--as if the only thing on anybody's mind was a math formula or the gross national product or something.
Funny how it doesn't take long to tell ninety-nine guys apart even when you don't know all their names, and even though they all pretty much had this board-up-the-ass attitude. But Shorty (6'4") O'Brien's green eyes couldn't hide a funny glint, even though his eyes would never be the first thing anybody noticed. Whenever Shorty sat down, he sat down on two huge, tight mounds. Reg bet even dogs and cats wanted to nose in and sniff for the ripe, tangy turd traces buried somewhere deep between those buns, maybe because the pale furry sheen over O'Brien's tan would make him seem like one of them. That golden down probably covered his whole ass, with the longer hairs making a weave to hold in and ripen the stink of his hole. But underneath O'Brien's all-military-business you could sense he was a polite, maybe even shy, guy. The there was Rodriguez, a compact, bronze-colored Greek god with a self-activating ten-inch cock, who Reg could see sometimes succeeded in not looking too disgusted that nobody on board came near his tennis game. But they were military. Baby were they military. He bet even their shit smelled military.
Things first started to change, oddly enough, or when Reg thought about it maybe not so oddly after all, because of an Army fuckup, one for the books: they had remembered to outfit the liner with so many luxuries that some idiot had managed to forget toilet paper altogether. Not so much as a single sheet of it anywhere on board.
The crew of the liner had quickly improvised a solution: each guy was issued his own personal small towel, which he was to use discreetly for a week and then toss into a bin on Saturday mornings. The bin was on a small open deck a few feet below a larger, off-the-beaten-track deck. The crew was practical and down-to-earth in fact, right from the start. The first night after dinner they urged the guys to help themselves to all they wanted from several stalks of bananas some genius had ordered, and Reg saw everybody took at least a couple of them; a guy commented that they were a good source of potassium as well as a tasty bedtime snack, and everybody seemed to agree that made sense.
That first Saturday the Caribbean sun was hot and the ocean was like glass. In his bathroom that morning Reg slid out a few feet of shiny brown that looped and crossed in the porcelain pool like letters in a secret alphabet, wiped the leftover soft crap from his hole, and wadded the towel up and took a final whiff of his week's stinks. At the bin he got a fresh wipe-towel and tossed his used one in with the other guys'.
As Saturday wore on more and more guys drifted casually back, as he had, to that secluded deck above the bin. Just hanging out, what the hell, as good a place as any to relax and have a few cold ones. The mess crew--no, the dining salon chefs, please--set out pickup meals on Saturdays, so you could wander in and eat whenever you wanted, or just skip meals if you wanted.
Everybody seemed to tolerate the fumes as the bin cooked in the sun, as well as the throbbing salsa from a tape deck one of the guys had brought along. Some were even starting to move their hips a little to the beat; did even these eagle scouts know how to get down on a slow afternoon--or were they just trying to jostle some slack space in the front of their shorts?
Guys had peeled down to their shorts. Common sense had won out over hard guy this one time at least. Reg noticed they were starting to glance around at each other with quick looks, but then just as quickly flash away to resume concentration on the horizon.