True Story©... King of my Village

     When I was a younger and slightly more sprightly man--…  Let me stop bullshitting, before I started drinking and fuckin’.  Back before I started drinking and fuckin’, I was drafted to fight for my country in the jungles of Vietnam.

Look, I don’t wanna hear NONE of that “Phlip, you’re only 38” shit.  I was drafted to fight in Vietnam and that is the end of it.

     Anyway…
I was taken through MEPS and given a full once-over and physical, poked and prodded from every angle with no happy ending.  As I was finishing the last part of my evaluation, a loud siren sounded and I was rushed from the office wherein I was conversing with an entrance office and whisked into a van just outside of a door behind the desk we were in front of.

Me: “Uhh…”

Officer: “SHUT UP!”

Me: “But--…”

Officer: “But what?”

Me: “But where the hell y’all taking me?”

Officer: “You’ve been drafted.  You know that right?”

Me: “Well yeah, so--…”

Officer: “So we’ll take you wherever the fuck we need you!”

Me: “Is this guy even being serious right now?”

Driver: “Shut the hell up!”

Me: “Yessir, sorry sir!”

Officer: “Your jokes will help nothing here”

Me: “Neither does the fact that I can’t see out the back of this van.  You could have at LEAST offered me some candy, or a puppy or something!”

Officer: “Too much more out of you and I am shooting your ass.”

I took this as my opportunity to shut the whole fuck up.  I had all the back of the van to myself, the longer we rode, the more of the fact that I had been awake since like 4am began to wear on me and I dozed off.

     When I came to, I was no longer in the van, but in a huge plane with a parachute and gear strapped to my back.  I WANTED to ask questions about where I was, but something about not wearing an asswhooping or getting shot just for wanting to know shit was overriding.  I sat on the bench, flanked now by three other guys who seemed to be similarly con-fucking-fused about just how we had gotten to this point in our lives.  Red rovers flash, sirens sound and some burly motherfucker yells “this is it” and hustles us to a hatch that I would only assume we were to jump out of.  “You have your rifles and ammunition, we will airdrop supplies and more ammunition as necessary!”

Me: “But where are we?”

Officer: “You assignment!”

Me: “Yeah, but exactly where are we and what are we supposed to be do--…”

I was pushed out of the hatch.

     Well fuck me, I am in a war zone.  The one guy who was to my left on the plane came down on his chute about 25 feet to my left. The other guys a bit ahead of us.  We set up camp and I – despite my lack of ANY experience at such shit – was basically assumed to be the leader of this outfit since I am apparently pretty decent at PLANNING my way through a situation I might so happen to already be in.

Me: “FUCK, it’s hot here!”

Guy 1: “Where are we?”

Me: “Weren’t we all just on the same plane?”

Guy 2: “Heh”

Me: “No, seriously…  Can I get a ‘hi, my name is…’ or a ‘fuck that guy’ before we start asking about shit that we KNOW none of us knows?  Jesus!”

Guy 3: “Look, I was raised in a good Christian household and my granddaddy would not approve of this language.”

Me: “Oh, is one of these guys your peepaw?”

Guy 3: “Of course not!”

Me: “Then shut the fuck up then, what the old man don’t know won’t make me kill you.”

Guy 1: “Haha…  So what do we do?”

Me: “We figure out our surroundings, then we get some rest and approach this with clear heads.  Sleep should be in shifts of twos, who wants to watch first?”

Guys: “…”

Me: “Fuck it, I will.  You, you up with me.  Y’all got 4 hours.”

This silly-fuck operation went on for TWO days.  We had figured out how to score some food and the boyscout who was so against the word ‘fuck’ helped us scrounge up some food to eat pretty damned good.  We still didn’t know WHERE in the fuck we were though.
Then we were found and ambushed.  The first guy couldn’t take it.  I will gather he was young and quite probably still a virgin.  He tried to run away and didn’t make it 75 yards before the * plip plip plip plip plip* cut his ass off at the knees.  We stood at our camp, hands raised and not putting up any kind of resistance in hopes that we might be spared long enough to be saved.

One of our comrades cut down already, we went with our captors, still half-expecting that we might be subject to a similar fate ourselves…

It was more or less a game of “who are you, who sent you?” and idle threats, since they were not going to kill us (yet) on the chance we might be of some value of information or otherwise.  We were eventually separated, not to see each other again.
I don’t know what the fate of my comrades was, I still fucking don’t to this day.  Eventually, I would learn that we were in Vietnam and that the war had been over for years.  The problem is that we were imbedded in a place where people were not aware of this and still fighting for no real apparent reason and shit.  Luckily for me, I am likeable even when I don’t try to be.  They decided to show me some of their favorite movies:

-   The Conqueror with John Wayne

-   The Horror of Party Beach

-   Myra Breckenridge with Raquel Welch

-   No Orchids for Miss Blandish

See, to me, my only exposure to these films was Mystery Science Theater 3000 so I was naturally inclined to drop dry-ass jokes to these AWAFUL movies.  As my captors did not understand American humor, they thought I was the best thing ever fucking invented.

     After a couple of months of this, the underlings – the ones apparently tasked with watching MY ass – were tired of their brutal leader and decided to coup.  Basically a mutiny to overthrow him and install me as the king of their little village.  I explained that they were welcomed to do that if they so chose, but that was NOT what I was asking them to do.  Before I could further distance myself from this decision, they were already in action of wrapping him up in his bedclothes while he slept and beating him to death with socks filled with cassava roots.  It was right then and there that I decided not to cross these motherfuckers.

     In all, we were done with the fighting thing and as long as I was not in any real peril, I could give about a mad prison assfuck about what happened to the remaining two guys who came in with me.  I got the king’s quarters, I was fed well and never had to do any real hard work.  I basically forgot that I had been taken captive.  Shit, three years of my life passed and I am not EXACTLY sure I even wanted to go back home.

     …  then one day the government decided to try and extract me…