How Not to Lose Your Virginity in Australia (Vol 1?)

Green was laughing when Martinez turned his attention to him. “What about you Green?” the older soldier asked with a smile. “You got a girl?”
Green could feel his cheeks flush. The thought of being caught blushing embarrassed him. He tried to reign it in but just blushed all the harder. The squad could sense his discomfort like piranhas sensing blood.
“He’d have to leave the barracks to even meet a girl.” Roarke announced to laughter from the others.
Green felt like he was shrinking. “I don’t…” He stammered. “I’m not going out with anyone.” He admitted after a moment.
Anderson, knowing what was happening, took a little pity on the new soldier. “Hey. He’s only been here a few weeks and he’s kinda ugly. Give him time.”
The squad laughed. Green laughed with them, thinking the ordeal was over.
“What about back home?” Martinez asked, still smiling, or maybe smirking. Green couldn’t quite tell.
He paused. Just for a second.
“No girl at home?” Tilo asked, with a tone of almost pity.
“Well….” Green stammered. “Not really.”
It wouldn’t end there, he knew. All Green could do was ride the conversation down to it’s inevitable conclusion….

I’m uncomfortable calling myself a “writer” because the only thing I’ve ever been paid to write were police offense reports and you can scratch those out in crayon and be fine. Seems pretentious to call myself an author, like I’m getting above my raising somehow. Calling myself a novelist feels like I should be wearing a tweed coat with elbow patches and gnawing on a pipe I never light. Nah. That ain’t me. If I’ve got to pick a title I think “storyteller” suits me better. All I do is take a dude I knew, or a place I’ve been, or a story I lived through, or witnessed, or stole and I start turning the dials. Crank the “Drama” up to 11, turn the boredom down to three, pass it all off as “fiction.”

Take young Private Green for example. He’s from Rapides Parish, Louisiana. I’m from Caddo Parish. I was raised in the church, but unlike Green I was never the pastors kid and I bailed on youth group lock ins as soon as I found a gas station that didn’t ask for ID to buy beer. Both of us joined the Army because we bought into a level of red, white, and blue bullshit. At least Green could blame September 11. We both arrived at Schofield Barracks in December, me in 1996 and Green in 2002. We were both eighteen when we arrived, sheltered, naive kids, out of our parents house for the first time and as far away from home as we’d ever been.

But what’s important for today’s tale is both of us arrived in the 25th Infantry Division as virgins. Green made it six weeks before his squad discovered his shameful secret. I don’t remember how long it took for the other Infantrymen in Charlie Company 2/5 Infantry to figure me out, but by June of 1997 they knew, and at least some of them made it their personal mission to “fix” that problem.

That’s why I woke up one Friday night with a strange woman sitting on the foot of my bunk.

At the time, my Infantry Company was probably the luckiest group of soldiers in the entire world. As part of a PacBond exercise we were exchanged with D Coy. 6th Royal Australia Regiment. The poor diggers from the 6th RAR flew first to Honolulu, then after a brief respite on Oahu, on to the National Training Center in Fort Irwin California where they would spend a month surrounded by Stetson wearing Cav weirdos in the Mojave desert. We flew to Brisbane, Queensland, Australia and joined the rest of the 6th RAR in garrison.

We’d barely dropped our gear on our first night in country when The Word came down, “They’ve got nothing for us until 1000 tomorrow. Curfew is 0200. First call 0830.” It’d been a fifteen hour flight from Honolulu to Brisbane. Between travel time and hurry up and wait we’d been awake for well over a day, at best catching catnaps in airline seats and airport terminals. Some officer somewhere had fucked up and they forgot to tell us that June was winter in the southern Hemisphere. It was cold and we’d arrived with our summer packing list and one set of civilian clothes that were appropriate for June in Hawaii. We were exhausted and freezing without so much as a hooded sweatshirt between us, still we sprinted to waiting taxis and headed into town.

I bought my first legal beer, a 4X brewed right there in Brisbane, by showing the waitress every coin I had in my pocket and letting her pick the “right” one. We hit three clubs that night. The next morning, at 1000, we sat through a briefing by a bored Australian Captain who explained in detail why two of those clubs were off limits to US Personnel.

The timeline get’s fuzzy…fuzzier…from there. We toured the town. The Aussies took us to the 4X brewery and dropped us off at the pub. For two hours we drank for free, but the buses were gone when the pub kicked us out. Being Infantrymen, we walked across the city of Brisbane, stopping at every pub on the way to take a leak and refuel. We took a class on the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle. We discovered the pleasure of baked beans for breakfast and fried egg on hamburgers. On Thursday we beat the shit out the Aussies at softball. On Friday they kicked our teeth in at rugby, in some cases literally. There was a pub attached to the enlisted mess run by retired corporals who’d fought in Vietnam. They had cheap beer every night after close of business. On Friday night they had a BBQ and strippers. The beer was cold. Kangaroo sausage is pretty tasty. Don’t ever play “spoons” with an Australian. And it’s humiliating when your “comrades” tell the strippers that you’re a virgin.

The next week we went to the “field” somewhere north of Brisbane. It was far from strenuous. We worked daylight hours and slept on cots in quonset huts, a rare luxury for light infantrymen. Most days were spent on various rifle ranges “familiarizing” ourselves with the Aussie’s Steyer AUG and marveling at the magnified optics they had mounted on their MINIMI version of our M249 SAW. We saw a whole bunch of kangaroos and wallabies. We did a simple, squad level live fire exercise, then spent the rest of the day fighting the brush fire we’d accidentally started with our tracers. On Friday we drove back to the barracks, looking forward to hitting the town again as soon as we were released for the weekend.

I had a headache. It’d lingered the entire week we were in the field. I tried drinking more water but it wouldn’t go away. My neck hurt. There was a growing lump on the back right, near my shoulder and I was a little freaked out that I might’ve been bit by some wild ass outback spider. By Thursday the headache and the neck pain got so bad I finally went and talked to our medic. A good medic is an asset, given the honorific “doc” and protected at all cost. A bad medic is a liability to be tormented until they flee back to the aide station or some POG ass hospital where they belong. You’ll notice I didn’t call this medic “doc.” He took a look at the lump on my neck and shrugged. “Change in the weather.” He said. He gave me a Motrin and a Benadryl and told me to “drink water.”

Motrin and water didn’t do anything for the headache, or the swelling in my neck, but I was eighteen and I was in Australia. The weekend was coming up, the medic said I was fine, and I wanted to fucking party, so I figured I could skip chow, grab a quick nap, shake off my headache and be good to go when the guys headed into town. Instead I fell asleep before the sun went down.

I woke well after dark, soaked in sweat but shivering, with a strange woman sitting on the foot of my bunk.

The other guys must have picked her and her group of friends up and brought them back to the barracks. Outside there was the sound of a party. Music. Women’s voices. Laughter. Beer bottles clinking together. Friday night Barracks sounds.

I don’t know how old she was. Anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five. I can’t remember what she looked like. I remember straight, sandy colored hair that hung below her shoulders. She was wearing winter clothes. She smiled. I don’t remember if she said anything. If she asked my name or offered hers, but I knew, almost instinctively what she was there for. Why else was she in my room? Why else was she sitting on my bed? Why was she smiling?

It’s the smile I remember the most. That smile was sexier than anything the strippers had done the week before. Like young Private Green I was raised in the southern Baptist church. I learned about puberty from Louisiana Public Schools and sexuality from a book written by Doctor James Dobson of Focus on the Family. I was taught that masturbation was a sin. Premarital sex was worse. I was eighteen and not just a virgin but I’d never kissed a girl. It would’ve been awkward and bad. I would’ve been ashamed. My buddies were gonna rag my ass for weeks no matter what happened. My mama was going to be so disappointed. But I would’ve and if I had it would've been because of that smile.

It was a non-issue though. I couldn’t speak. I was shivering so hard that when I opened my mouth you could hear my teeth chattering together.

Her smile faded and I could watch as her expression changed from amusement, to confusion, and slowly, genuine fear. “You okay?” She asked. “Do you want me to get your mates?”

I don’t know if I answered.

Imagine, walking into a room thinking you’re going to take a foreign strangers virginity only to back out a minute later, fleeing like you’d stumbled on a zombie bit survivor of some fucked up apocalypse.

She got my buddies and they found a sergeant. Someone took the women home, or at lest ushered them out of the barracks. I don’t know if they called an ambulance, or found a car, or carried me across post. Somehow they got me to an Australian Army hospital ER. I remember cold, bright, light. I remember doctors and nurses. I remember trying to figure out what was going on and struggling, either because of the accent or the metric system. Someone said “He’s got a temp of 40.” Their voice sounded serious, like forty degrees was bad. I laughed and asked if I was freezing to death. Or I think I did, it could’ve just been in my brain.

I’d be tempted to think that girl was a fever dream, the product of a sick but still horny, juvenile imagination, but she had to be real. My squad mates gave me a ration of shit about it when they visited me in the hospital a few days later. “What’s wrong Hammett? You allergic to pussy?”

I spent a week in the Australian Army hospital. The swelling in my neck was a lymph gland. They did a biopsy, and found more questions than answers. Eventually I was transported to a civilian hospital by ambulance. There they did a CT scan and a spinal tap and I discovered that Australian network television isn’t edited for content after 9pm. Eventually the fever broke. The swelling in my lymph nodes subsided. I recovered but the doctors had no idea why. Their best guess was Kikuchi-Fujimoto Disease, a rare disorder usually found in Asian women. It presents almost like Lymphoma, usually with flu like symptoms. Then it just…goes away…and that’s what happened to me.

As an aside, I can’t blame that medic for misdiagnosing something doctors couldn’t figure out with a CT scan, a biopsy and a fucking spinal tap, but I’ll never forgive him for “drink water and take motrin.”

By the time I was released from the hospital my Company had moved North to the Australian Jungle Warfare School in Townsville and I found myself alone. I spent a week and a half sitting behind a desk, waiting to answer a phone that never rang and playing Risk on an old desktop computer. I got off everyday at four and every day I headed into town, sometimes alone, sometimes with a medic I met in the hospital. We were supposed to go to an Australian Rules Football game but it got all fucked up. I don’t remember how.

I was lucky, if a 104 fever, a biopsy, a spinal tap and two weeks in the hospital counts as “lucky.” I didn’t spend another day doing Army shit the entire time we were in Australia. When my company returned from Townsville we got a week off to be tourists. Then the Air Force flight home kept getting delayed and we spent another week in Brisbane with nothing to do. Every night we went out on the town. I hit $200 on a slot machine on dollar beer night at our favorite bar and for at least that evening I was a king, buying dollar Toohey’s drafts for anyone who asked.

Never saw that sandy haired girl though. Didn’t even find out her name which is a shame. Not because we didn’t fuck. I left Australia like I arrived, a virgin who’d never been kissed but I’m kinda okay with that. Pretty as her smile was, I’m glad I didn’t lose my virginity that night, in that way, though I would’ve preferred to avoid the biopsy and spinal tap. I know myself well enough now to know that I would’ve regretted a one night stand. Especially one essentially forced on me. No, what I regret is I never got to hear the story from her perspective.

I’d love to know what she was thinking. I mean from beginning to end I want to know what was going through her mind. Why did she come into that room? What was she really doing, sitting on the foot of my bed? What did she expect? What must have been going through her mind when she actually saw me, a scared, skinny, sweat soaked kid, shivering despite being wrapped in an Australian Army blanket and a US Army poncho liner? Honestly, her version of that night has to be better than mine. It’s one hell of a story, and I wish I’d gotten a chance to hear it.

There’s another story from my time in the Australian Army Hospital, one that is, in some ways, worse than this one. Unfortunately we’ve hit our word limit and y’all are gonna have to wait for that one.

In the meantime, I like to add music to these posts when I can, something that fits the mood. I didn't learn much about Australian Country Music when I was there, which is, in retrospect, a real shame. Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road" was on the Australian Top 500 Rock songs while I was there but I might have another, better, use for that track later. I considered Men at Work's "Down Under" but that seemed too on the nose. We spent most of our nights in dance clubs and discos, and in 1997 that meant hearing The Spice Girls "Wannabe" three times a night. I thought that might be funny, especially considering that, to my great shame, I bought a copy of that album. In the end I landed on something different, something that I'm sure is more somber than necessary, but an Australian song that honors the sacrifices of the 6th Royal Australian Regiment.