Dear Vickie Ch. 01

Synopsis: A tale of a soldier wronged and how he copes and goes on living despite the hurt.

Author's Notes: This is my second attempt at a cheating story. My first attempt was not the greatest, but it was something that I felt had to be written. I got a lot of bad reviews on it and I am trying to improve my plot and writing about something I know nothing about. That is usually bad for a writer; he should know something about what he writes. So this time I know a lot about my character. He is a lot like me when I was much younger and involved with another undeclared war in another part of the world, one with jungles instead of sand. I hope this is a much better story.

BR

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My name is Boyd Cummings and right now I am 26 years old and a TSgt in the USAF. I am currently deployed in Afghanistan as a sniper/spotter, along with SSgt Tony Mancini, my spotter/sniper and very good friend.

I guess I should start at the beginning and go from there. I enlisted right out of high school to be the fourth generation USAF member of our family. My dad is now retired in central Texas after 26 years in the service. My grandfather and grandmother are now both retired, him after 30 years in the Air Force, and they are living in a retirement community in Central Texas too. My great-grandfather is now gone, but was in the Army Air Corp during WW II. So military tradition was something I was used to. I met and married my darling wife Victoria Shelling, while going to school in Mississippi. Her parents were both ex-Air Force as well and thinking of retiring somewhere in central Florida.

We were extremely happy when I was transferred to Patrick AFB in Florida as it is near Melbourne and that is where Vickie's parents, Sam and Misty, ended up. Sean, our son was born there about three years ago. This made it very convenient for us to get a great babysitter in her parents that were less than forty minutes away.

I started a small cleaning service to help save some money for our children's future. It started with me cleaning the small church outside the base that we attended. Then we started cleaning houses when people left base housing and needed a final inspection before leaving. We expanded a few times and we now had about ten to twelve people working for us. We rarely did any of the cleaning anymore as we pretty much ran the company now. Vickie did the accounting and scheduling thing and I maintained the sales and monitoring of the company. We ended up with a small strip center of offices and a three story office building as our clients plus a lot of final inspection cleanings of the homes on base. All of our workers were military connected, like wives or male spouses of military personnel. Yeah, we had a couple of guys working for us too for the heavy work.

I had been an Avionics Systems Technician for most of my eight years in the service, but recently they were looking for snipers for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since I had qualified expert on my last three firearms qualifications, I was asked if I wanted to try out for a sniper team. The hazardous duty pay was sweet and I wanted to try it. Vickie agreed. By now Sean was three and growing like a weed. I ended up going up to Fort Benning, Georgia to train with the Marine and Army snipers at their training center there. There I met Toni Mancini from upstate New York. Somehow we were the only USAF members there at the school at the time, so we decided to team up and make a USAF only team. Most of the other service members tended to stay with their own service, but we did have a couple Army-Marine teams. At the end of school Tony and I ended up ranking third and fourth behind an Army-Marine team. Tony had been stationed at McGuire AFB, New Jersey, but was transferred down to Patrick and then we went TDY [Temporary Duty Station for the non-military out there - BR] to Afghanistan.

We had been there about eight months of an eighteen month TDY and had been on numerous missions. I was able to talk to Vickie and Sean and both my parents and in-laws either over the phone or using Skype. It made missing my wife and son a little easier, but was still no substitute for being home.

I was talking to my wife when I saw a shadow of someone in the background of the picture on the computer. I was using Skype on a computer in the communications tent. I asked her if that was Sean I saw in the background and she said that he was at her folk's house for the week. They wanted to have some time with him too. It must have been one of the cleaning people checking in. It was like about 2:00 in the afternoon there so I didn't think anything about it.

The next day I get a phone call from my buddy Don Sterling. He is a very close friend that sometimes he and his wife help out with cleaning and babysitting. He said, "Boyd, my boy, I have some really bad news to tell you. Vickie is cheating on you."

"You have got to be joking, right?"

"No such luck buddy boy, I got proof right here on my phone. I came by yesterday afternoon to check on Vickie and see if she had anything for us this weekend. She didn't answer the door, but I saw her car so I turned the knob and it was open so I strolled in and there in the kitchen I saw her naked and bent over the table getting it from behind from Dick Smothers. I think I know why she was with him. That southern boy is hung like a mule. I hated to be the bearer of such bad news buddy, but I thought you should know about this right away."

That statement hit me like a ton of bricks. I almost passed out from the shock.

"Don, I don't know what to think. I mean I know it has been a long eight months, but she's already replacing me."

"Yeah, it looks that way buddy. What do you want me to do?"

"Don, keep an eye on her and make sure he is the only one. If she has others, then I can get Sean away from her as an unfit mother. She said that Sean was at grandma's house over in Melbourne for the week, so keep checking and make sure you get pictures. I want proof positive that she is fucking me over. Wait, remember that office building we do, isn't there an attorney that we clean for there?"

"Yeah, Boyd, it's Stein and Green something. You want me to see them and see what can be done from here? You should talk to the legal beagles there too and see if they can suggest something."

"Yeah, Don. You check with them and make sure you give them everything you can get on her."