Happy Homecomings

Hue Lan must have had the same desire because Amber suddenly felt the tip of a tongue knocking for entrance. She was about to open her lips to let it in when she felt another light touch. This one on the small of her back. From Ray.

Amber didn't yank her head back, but she did straighten up her body and disengage her embrace of the golden-hued beauty. The smile on her face was wide and genuine as she said, "Welcome home and thank you, Pham Lan Hue."

For the ride back to post the ladies sat together in the back, at their mutual insistence. They hit it off so well, that Amber had to keep reminding herself not to spill the beans about the trip to Croatia. And she only did it because on the drive up, Clem had reiterated that it really was Hue's desire to be kept in the dark. She'd apparently even told the boy that she was his to share with whomever he wished.

Amber really wanted to ask Hue about that position; to find out if that was what she really desired or if it was a fevered misunderstanding by Clem. Instead, she managed to keep the conversation on the safe paths of life in Texas versus life in Iraq versus life in Germany, and everyone's future plans in and out of the Army.

Back on base, Clem and Ray carried Hue's bags to her VOQ room, which Amber had to admit was much nicer than she'd expected. After making plans to pick them up later that evening for dinner, the older couple departed to let the youngsters have their own proper reunion.

Chapter 42

Amber and Ray took Hue and Clem to one of their favorite German restaurants, the Südliches Brauhaus or Southern Brewhouse. Not surprisingly, Clem knew the place from the large bar at one end of the building that featured Bavarian craft beers but had never actually eaten in the restaurant. "My Southern Gentleman," mocked Hue.

Never having eaten authentic German cuisine herself, Hue asked what she should order. Amber and Clem both said they were going to have wienerschnitzels or breaded veal cutlets. Clem liked the Jaeger or Hunter's sauce of mushroom gravy, while Amber went with the spicier Zigeuner or Gypsy sauce with sautéed peppers and onions along with Hungarian paprika. Ray said that he liked trying the more localized specialties and was going to have a diced-potato-and-pork fry up topped by two fried eggs. Hue liked his idea, it would be like having German, German food. She opted for the venison stew from the local specialty list.

Everyone ended up being very happy with their food choice and as they ate, they talked. Although, by unspoken consent, the conversation stayed away from the actions that had brought Hue Lan to Germany for a military awards ceremony. The closest they got to the subject of what the three servicemembers had gone through together downrange was to talk about rank.

When they first met in Iraq, Hue was one rank higher than Clem, being a Specialist to his PFC. Now they were both Corporals, but Clem technically outranked her because he had put his extra stripe on two months ahead of Hue after being advanced right over the Specialist rank. For Hue, having a kid who was two years younger, with less time in the Army, suddenly outrank her was irritating just on general principles. But she told Clem, in a voice that communicated her great magnanimity, that she wouldn't hold it against him as long as he continued to follow her lead in their personal lives, especially the bedroom.

After the laughter and teasing of Clem, the rank discussion led to Ray talking about how he'd been a corporal himself at their age and had made it to staff sergeant before being accepted into the Physician's Assistant training program. With the new job had come his commission as an officer. Even more importantly in his mind, however, was that the PA program had sent him to the same university where Amber was working on her master's degree in education. Their wedding license was by far the more important of the two pieces of paper he'd gotten after graduating.

That romantic line earned some "Aws" from the young soldiers and a kiss across the corner of the table from his wife.

When the career discussion moved on to Amber, Hue asked, "You have to have a master's to be a teacher?"

"It depends on what level you want to teach at," said Amber. "We'll accept elementary and secondary level teachers with a bachelor's and certification, but for high school, we generally prefer a master's."

"And what subject do you teach? I don't think Clem's actually ever told me."

"Well, I don't teach. At least not anymore. I was an elementary school teacher right out of college, but when I went back for my master's I branched off into administration. I'm a Vice Principal now. At the high school."

Hue gave Clem a look, but the poor guy could only shrug and grin.

"I just remember hearing high school. I guess I missed the part about being the vice principal. Sorry."

"Probably blocked it out," sneered Hue. "I'm sure you spent plenty of time in the vice principal's office when you were in school."

Clem put on his most angelic expression, and said, "Who, me?"

"Hmm, perhaps Mrs. Sempels can come up with an appropriate punishment for an inattentive student," said Hue. "Gee, they don't let you paddle the kids, do they?" she asked hopefully.

Ray laughed and Amber said, "No, no we haven't had corporal punishment in school for a long, long time."

"Well, maybe I should spank him," said Hue in a changed tone of voice. She turned her eyes from Clem to Amber. "And you can watch. In Croatia."

A stunned hush fell over the table and a Cheshire-cat grin spread across the young woman's face as their silence confirmed her deduction.

"How did you know?" Amber finally said.

"The kiss," answered Hue Lan. "Actually, the kiss itself was the penultimate clue. It was the stud's reaction to it that brought it all together."

Ray began surreptitiously scanning to see if anyone sitting close to them was paying undue attention. Meanwhile, Clem and Amber's faces begged for more from Hue.

The raven-haired hottie leaned in closer over the table. "After you left," Hue shared in a conspiratorial purr, "I decided to have a shower and our boy gallantly volunteered to scrub my back. While he was doing that, I mentioned how much I liked your welcome and the next thing I knew, something was nudging up against my rear end. Now, mind you, this happened while he was behind me, soaping up innocent parts of my back and shoulders, so he had no visual prompts to get the rise out of him.

"I asked him, 'You liked that, eh? Liked watching me kiss the beautiful Mrs. Sempels?' And that slight nudge on my bottom suddenly became a very hard pressing."

A visibly blushing Clement picked up his beer mug and took a long swallow.

"Then it hit me," continued Hue. "Yes, it was a good kiss, perhaps even bordering on inappropriate for a first meeting. But certainly not enough to send the flag straight to the top of the pole like it had. Unless..." She drew the word out. "Unless maybe the kiss reminded him of something else he had witnessed. With you."

Now she turned her gaze from Amber to Ray. "And you. I knew the married couple in the men's room were supposed to be something special, and you two are the hottest pair I've seen in a long time."

The table went quiet, with everyone taking slow drinks from their beers.

Chapter 43

Finally, Hue spoke again. "I'm looking forward to talking about it over the weekend, but for now I only have one question. You really didn't go in there with the intention of being watched? You really thought you were alone?"

Amber and Ray looked at each other and both nodded.

"Then why didn't you stop when our little perv here popped up over the rampart?"

The married couple looked at each other again, they'd never really talked about it.

"A mix of things, I suppose," offered Amber. "I was really caught up in the moment and didn't want to stop if we didn't have to. And also, I just knew immediately what he was up to on the other side of the wall and I really wanted him to finish. To have a hot memory to take with him."

Hue Lan smiled. "You knew he was over there pulling on his joint and your first thought was to make it good for him?"

"It just felt like the right thing to do," said Amber. "I mean, I had Ray in there for that very reason, to give him a special send off. So, why not do the same for the guy on the other side of the wall? He was surely going down there too."

"I knew there was a reason I liked you straight off." The Vietnamese beauty raised her beer mug and they all toasted.

The conversation continued fun and lively, while managing to avoid getting completely wrapped up in war or sex. The long day was clearly starting to get to Hue Lan, however, and they broke the party up early to allow her to get some sleep ahead of tomorrow's high-profile events.

Ray dropped Clem off at his barracks first, suggesting strongly that staying in his own room would be better for Hue and her jet lag. Plus, perhaps more importantly, it was probably best not to push things at the VOQ and make the command regret taking care of Hue so well. Hue Lan agreed, but intimated that the next night, after everyone had seen them get their medals, they'd probably be more willing to look the other way if Clem didn't leave after escorting her back to her quarters.

As Amber and Ray continued home after dropping off Hue, they talked about the younger couple.

"She's a real pistol, as my grandfather would say," offered Ray.

"You mean smoking hot?" his wife asked.

"More like you have to keep an eye on where she's pointing or someone could get hurt," laughed Ray, as he switched off the car in their driveway.

"Yeah," agreed Amber as she opened her door. "She's certainly not shy about shooting off her mouth."

Ray looked at her across the roof of the car. "Are you worried about that? About her shooting her mouth off?"

"Huh, what? Oh, no, I said that wrong. I mean, yeah, she likes speaking her mind and maybe even going for the shock value, but on the other hand, she doesn't seem the type to speak without thinking. I think as far as keeping things between us that we've gotten really lucky with these two."

Chapter 44

After brushing teeth, they were in bed, cuddling up and stroking each other.

"A real pistol, eh?" chuckled Amber.

"You know what was smoking hot?" said her husband. "Your kiss in the airport." He slid a hand across her mons and between her legs. "How wet were you after that kiss?"

Amber spread her legs to increase his access. "You think that made me wet?"

He slid down her body until he was speaking into her vagina.

"I think it did. I think if I hadn't interfered, you two would have started making out right there in the middle of the terminal."

"Hmm," was his wife's only response, although she did stroke the back of his head.

Ray gently opened the petals of her flower and ran his tongue along their insides.

"Hmmm," she said again, only lower and longer this time. She didn't think she'd actually had time to get wet in the airport, but she definitely was now.

He ran his fingertip through her gathering dew and used it to begin easing his finger into her.

The 'hmm' became an 'ahh'.

As his finger pressed deeper, he laid the bottom of his tongue on her emerging clit and pressed down. Still doing everything very slow and gentle.

"Should I not interfere next time?" he asked her clitoris.

Her shuddering exhalation of breath didn't really provide a clear answer to his question. So, he asked another. A bigger one.

"Do you want to cancel the Look, Don't Touch rule?"

"You're asking me that now?" she groaned. "While you're doing that?"

"In vino veritas" he said with a low chuckle.

"In vino...but I'm not drunk," his wife said in confusion.

"No. At least not on wine. Okay, let's say, in vulva veritas. We made that rule while sober. Will we be able to follow it when we're drunk on excitement and passion?"

He returned his oral attentions to her sex while she thought it over. As if she could really think about anything else than his lips and tongue. Oh, and that thrusting, wiggling finger.

"Noo," she whimpered.

Ray removed his finger and tongue, had he snagged her with a fingernail or something?

"No!" she snapped. "I didn't mean stop. I meant, no, we won't cancel the LDT rule. I won't kiss Hue anymore. And you won't either." She pressed firmly on the back of his head. "But you'd sure as hell better get back to kissing me again."

So he did, with great relish.

Chapter 45

The next morning over breakfast, Amber gave Ray a good teasing about how much he'd liked her kissing Hue.

"That's the second time you tried to put me in a lezzie scene with her," she said, harkening back to the fantasy pussy eating scene he'd described between her, Hue and Corinne. "Are you trying to tell me something? Like maybe I can't touch Clem, but you wouldn't object to some girl-girl action?" She shook her head disappointedly. "I didn't realize my husband was such a typical male."

Above the table, Ray held his hands up in protest. Below the table he was glad she couldn't see the rise in his crotch.

But as they continued talking and laughing over yogurt, fruit and coffee, they still agreed that LDT was the way to go. Doing something more with the hot young couple played well in fantasy, but it was a real-life line that couldn't be uncrossed. And oh, by the way, what they were planning on doing was already well over the yellow line, so let's not risk the red line as well.

As they walked out of their house into a grey, wet day, they first looked up into the sky and then into each other's eyes and smiled. The local forecast said rain throughout the weekend ahead, with some thunderstorms likely. But the forecast for their stretch of beach on the Adriatic said sunny and around eighty degrees. After one more kiss, Amber headed off to the high school and Ray went to the clinic.

At 2:00, Ray was back home, showering and changing. There'd been talk about doing the awards in their ACU's, Army Combat Uniforms, the same cammies they'd worn downrange, which would have been fine with most of the soldiers. But in the end, it had been decided to go with their Class A's or dress uniforms.

Once he was all spiffed up, he headed over to the post gym, the same place where everything had started. The main floor, which had room for two full basketball courts, was where the ceremony would be held. Doing the whole brigade at once, some 3,500 soldiers, would have been too much, so each of the three battalions that formed the core of the brigade was using the gym on a different day. Ray and the other award recipients from his battalion were there early for a walk through so everyone knew where to wait, where to walk up on stage, who and when to salute, and then where to walk down again for more waiting. Of course, waiting was one of the core military skills, so that was no big deal.

Almost everyone in the battalion would be getting some kind of medal, but only the Army Commendation Medals with V's for Valor and Bronze Medals would be handed out individually on stage. Usually, the citations for each medal would be read out, but with so many to be awarded, some clever XO (Executive Officer) had come up with the idea of having medals earned in the same action awarded to all members of the group at once, with a single citation covering everybody.

When it was time, the troops were formed up on the gym floor, while spectators stood up in the bleachers. Commanders from battalion down to company level then marched up and down the ranks with their senior non-coms, pinning on Combat Action, Combat Infantry, and Combat Medic Badges along with a host of Army Commendation Medals. Most of these had already been awarded to the soldiers in more intimate settings within their own units, but today was for everyone to be recognized and cheered.

When it was time for the higher-level awards, the Battalion Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Fitzgerald, mounted the stage to join the Brigade Commander, Colonel McCormick. Ray always got a kick out of seeing the two men together. Anyone reading the two Anglo names in a program would be expecting to see members of the old guard Irish backbone of the Army. But instead, they got a six-foot three-inch, 220-pound, shave-headed Black man wearing full eagles on his shoulders and a five-foot seven-inch 150-pound Jewish White man with silver oak leaves. What vagaries of slave ownership and interfaith marriage had led to these two being McCormick and Fitzgerald, Ray didn't know, but he was glad they were up there, because they were both damned good officers.

Fitzgerald took to the microphone and said how proud he was to serve with such excellent soldiers and how glad he was that all were home safe and mostly sound. Here he gave a nod to Staff Sergeant Joya and two other soldiers who'd also taken serious wounds. "Unfortunately," he said as he continued, "our two sister battalions had not been as fortunate," and he led everyone in a moment of silence to think about and pray for the seven soldiers who had been lost between the other two battalions of the brigade.

Chapter 46

Then it was time to recognize the major awards for 2d Battalion. First up were the Bronze Stars without Valor devices. This is where Ray would have been if his humanitarian medical outreach mission hadn't run across some pissed off Iraqis from the other side of the national argument. Ray was glad he wasn't up there now. Not because he wanted the extra glory of having the 'V', but because he disagreed with the evolution over time that gave a Bronze Star to an officer just because he'd done his job during a long deployment. To get a Bronze Star without combat action was certainly something his grandfather, who'd served in Vietnam, wouldn't understand, and probably had his great-grandfather, who had piloted a D-Day landing craft at age 19, turning in his grave.

When those were done, the seven major actions of the battalion's deployment were played out on the stage. The recipients ranged from a Master Sergeant who'd gone all-out Rambo to lead his squad to victory in an urban battle where they'd ended up terribly outnumbered, to a platoon of Iraqi Army trainers who'd marshalled their trainees to withstand and throw back a company-sized insurgent attack on their Iraqi outpost. The Master Sergeant received the Silver Star. Two other members of his squad were awarded Bronze Stars and the rest received Commendation Medals with V-devices. The training platoon's commanding lieutenant and leading sergeant had been awarded Bronze Stars, while the rest of the platoon also received Commendations with V's.

Captain Sempels's group of medics and security escorts was in the middle of the pack, size and action-wise. Ray, Staff Sergeant Joya, then-Specialist Pham, then-PFC Evans and then-PFC Tompkins were all receiving Bronze Stars with V-device. Joya and Sempels were also awarded Purple Hearts, although Ray felt embarrassed having his 'scratch' compared to the pain Khaled was still dealing with. All the other military members of the mission were receiving Army Commendation Medals with V-device. Mr. Saleh had been presented a civilian commendation before the unit left Iraq.

The reading of the joint citations was in many ways surreal; everyone heard and reacted to them so differently. For much of the audience, it triggered strong feelings of pride, with the soldiers hoping they could match their brethren's response if their time ever came. The people more closely tied to the recipients, especially by blood and marriage, felt that pride an extra degree, but it was well-tempered by the terror of knowing how close they had come to losing their loved one. For the recipients themselves it was the full range of emotions, almost to the point of being overwhelming for some of them. Hearing their actions read out as if from a history book was unreal and embarrassing and close to triggering for those who'd been through the most intense combat.