True Story©... King of my Village part 2

     So when I left you, I was king of a small village, if only because the people who lived there were enamored with my Americanized sense of humor.  It is worth mentioning that Muhammad Ali was dead right when he said “ain’t no Viet Cong ever called me n**ger!”

     At home in America, I was a threat.  Too smart and too vocal for “them,” and too weird, too “them” for my own.  And best believe there weren’t enough Viet Congs to not call me that word back home.  Outside of the fact that most--…  fuck it, ALL of these guys had never even seen a black dude in their lives, they basically treated me like another dude.  Until, as I mentioned, they took my weirdness as commendable and made me their leader.

     With all of that said, I didn’t wanna fuckin’ LEAVE the place!  They fed me first and best as their king.  As king, I didn’t have it in me to mistreat or even handle them unfairly at all and life inside of the village was never really that difficult.  The rest of the world basically acted as if it didn’t exist; I guess figuring letting these ignorant motherfuckers think that the war was still going on would eventually see them wiped off the map.  Little did they know that when the fighting DE intensified, these cats adjusted to easier life.
And did I mention that the women were BEAUTIFUL?!!?  They would come to my quarters two and three at a time just to say they took their chance with the king.

     Then, like with literally everything they have ever touched, the US Government came in and fucked it all up.
With pressure from my family and apparently the two guys whose lives I managed to inadvertently save by cooling things off in part 1 of this story, they FINALLY decided to concede that I was done filthy by even being placed in Vietnam and even filthier by being left in Vietnam.

     So I’m chilling one afternoon.  Drink in my hand, just kinda hanging out really.  Watching yet another shitty movie, rapid-firing jokes to convey just how shitty it was back at the screen to the amusement of those around me.  By this point it was basically a reflex but seriously, who watches Tarzan the Ape Man or An American Hippie in Israel on purpose?  Now that I think back on it, I may have been lightly drunken for most of the years I was there.
Anyway…  We hear the sound of helicopter blades beating the air and the guys all jump to action.  Rifles up, and most everyone rushes outside to the defense position and the ones they installed as my King’s Guard watching me intently.  A SWAT team comes down from the choppers and rushes the compound.  Shots being fired from every fucking direction, I hit the floor so as to not be caught in the crossfire.  Dumbass me, living fat dumb and happy, hadn’t even considered that they might be coming to “save” me…  Shit, I didn’t need saving!  These were my peoples now!  One might describe this as Stockholm Syndrome, but one must remember that for that to be the thing, the captive person must have started in a place of poor treatment of some sort.  Shit, the Stockholm Syndrome would have been better applicable to the people sent to take me back to America.

     Needless to say, a few guerilla fighters in the jungle using old-tech weapons were basically powerless to defend themselves from the superior western firepower and my quarters were found.  I talked the folks sent to extract me to leave my guards be, negotiating a “guns down” from both sides.  Once the guns were down, I tried to run the fuck away and hide.  I REALLY didn’t want to return to America, not after having experienced a life without real worry.

Real shit, I had a full-on temper tantrum trying to get them to leave me there instead of returning me to the US!

     Hauled out of the room, out of the compound and onto one of the helicopters, kicking and motherfucking screaming the whole time…  They were unbothered, they were sent into that damn jungle with a very specific set of instructions.  They were the best in the world at what they were tasked with doing and being led by the two surviving guys who came in with me at first.  Apparently, my softening the hearts of our captors with my fucked up sense of humor softened their handling of them and no one seemed to much care when they snuck the fuck out and ran away in the night.
I personally would have thought it more entertaining for them to try some stupid shit against an otherwise docile group and get smoked by someone who really wouldn’t have cared to do so otherwise.  But hey, I am writing ABOUT this, not making the shit up and we can’t always have what we want.

     The dearth of support from the government that “fixed” the ruining of my life by ruining it again is less than surprising.  If I could get VA benefits from my service, I totally would.  I could go for one of those PTSD checks every month!
Alas, it is not to be.  I am having to get by on schemes like robbing Santa and selling coal and shit.