Well, Crap! Our chartered airline jet took off on December 24th from Hickam AFB/Honolulu International Airport in the late afternoon. We were flying west back to Vietnam so we crossed the International Date Line about 9:30 at night in pitch black skies. At the Date Line, there is a "time warp" straight out of Sci-Fi! Suddenly, it was 9:30 PM on December 25! That's how it works the moment you cross the Date Line going west... Instantaneously, we were teleported ahead 24 hours in time!! Not only sad at leaving sweethearts in Hawaii, it seemed like we were cheated out of Christmas Eve, too. I guess it actually allowed us not to dwell on being alone Christmas Eve for quite so long. It just seemed ironic to be going back to the War and having Christmas Eve taken from us as some great cosmic joke.
The Hawaiian sex with wifey had been good (now, I'll kiss & tell a little), having had none for 10 months! (Not counting the surprise end to a relaxing Vietnamese massage with the concessionairess' abortive attempt at a Vaseline handjob when I first got in-country as an "apparent" bachelor.) But back to the Ilikai and R&R, the first night included nine lengthy, completed couplings! I believe that is MY lifetime record! For 10 months, I had been stockpiling my deposits for her bank -- maybe it would have been no surprise if I hadn't been such a newlywed. For that matter, I was a virtual newbie as a "near-virgin," anyway. What would I know about frequency of intercourse, let alone MARRIED intercourse?
I took a few vacation photos of my bride to last me but none were racy -- you have to remember this was still the era of 35 mm. film developed in commercial photo processors. I even had to send mine out from Vietnam via snail-mail to be developed in Japan! I would have liked a few intimate pics of my bride to look at in-country but, between our old-fashioned modesty and a concern that military or Japanese censors would destroy the film or worse, we just took fairly-regular clothed pics. Wouldn't it be different today? Today's privately-processed digital cameras and computer electronics would have made the rest of the Vietnam tour much more bearable (for BOTH of us)! Even then, I probably could have bought a Polaroid camera in Hawaii, but after 3 days in the bedroom, we wanted to see a little of Hawaii before R&R Week was totally gone! (She had found me at the Honolulu airport's Military R&R Center on the 18th and I had to head back on the 24th.) Together-Time was running out the moment I stepped off the airliner!
From Vietnam, I had also reserved a bungalow at Bellows AFB on the northeast side of Oahu where I had vacationed and camped with the Scouts as a kid. (This was my only chance ever to share MY roots with my bride -- this was MY childhood family setting and the only chance I would ever have to share that important history with anyone.) But it was also our belated honeymoon. I thought I had reserved a nice, new air-conditioned base hotel room near the beach, but something had changed and they gave us an old wood-frame building with screened windows for our fresh-air conditioning. This could be viewed as a romantic, idyllic setting but Raquel was shocked and in tears when she first saw it from our rental car! This large bungalow was right on the beach and one of the older buildings that my boyhood family had probably used to stay in on a holiday weekend. But Raquel never went camping or roughing it when her mom had a Girl Scout troop. And her parents had always "holidayed" at nice resort hotels since her mum got a great discount as an employee of La Posada Motor Hotel, a fancy, resort hotel on the Rio Grande, itself.
We had to take that bungalow -- there was nothing else left (like the story in the ORIGINAL "posada of Joseph and Mary", a wonderful Mexican Christmas social tradition). Raquel made do -- and even enjoyed it after we settled in and had a little recreational sex in the honeymoon sack and finally spent the next day out on the beach there at Bellows. A nice beach and not packed with people like Waikiki (Bellows Beach WAS on an AF base, after all). I was amazed by our bodies' reactions to Bellows' Oahu sunshine -- stripped naked back in the bungalow, I was lobster-red and Raquel's half-Tex-Mex skin was already instant tan (no burn whatsoever)! My mind's eye can still picture her standing there after removing her 2-piece swimsuit -- little, white butt and titties contrasting with a noticeably-darker shade of tan everywhere else. Like many young Mexican women trying to stay as white as they can, Raquel usually avoided sun exposure and the outdoors. I imagine she'd say it was to avoid skin cancer, but I suspect it was vanity as much, and to look more like her Spanish ancestors instead of Native American or African ones.
posted by Richard A @ 10:16 AM
1 Comments:
yes, many of us were taught to do that ...stay pale ;)
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