Strawberry Ice Cream Girl

I removed the semi-automatic rifle from my back and placed the muzzle into the mouth of a tube sticking out of a red barrel. I had already cleared my weapon when I entered the base, but since I was about to walk into a mess hall to eat with hundreds of other troops, I had to do it all over again. I removed the magazine and pulled the charging handle back. This theoretically would have removed the round from the chamber of the weapon, if there had been one. I put the clip into the cargo pants of my uniform, flipped the switch to put it into firing mode, and pulled the trigger. There was a soft, mechanical, routine click. I pulled the muzzle of the rifle back out, slung it back over my shoulder, and kept walking in line. Behind me was another metallic click as another soldier did the same exact thing. And another, and another.

I stepped up to a sink alongside other troops wearing the same desert tan camouflage uniform as the sun began to set over the horizon. We had to wash our hands before getting food, as per Army regulations. I looked up into a mirror and saw my face was dusty and dirty, except a line around my eyes where my goggles had been. As I washed my hands, the fine, powdery sand of Iraq swirled down the drain with the water.

"Oh fuck, bro, she's here," I heard a soldier say, as I passed through a white swinging door, drying my hands with a brown paper towel as I eavesdropped on their conversation. "She's over there at the ice cream station. See her? She always gets vanilla ice cream with strawberries."

"Oh hell yeah," another young soldier said excitedly, "she's fine as fuck. That ain't no Desert Queen, that's a solid 9-10-9." This was soldier-speak for "she is not only attractive here in Iraq where there are no other women around and her level of beauty is increased. She is in fact beautiful even in a normal environment back in the United States."

Across the room, a statuesque, young blonde female Army lieutenant was pouring strawberry syrup all over her soft-serve white ice cream in a styrofoam cup. Her hair was wound up neatly in a tight bun, and she stood over six feet tall in combat boots. On a U.S. Army base in Iraq, where any woman was a rare sight, seeing a towering blonde bombshell with a handgun strapped to her left thigh was nothing short of legendary.

I watched her sit down at a table with a bunch of unknown soldiers while I filled my tray with food and took a seat with troops from my unit and ate my meal quietly while they talked. At one point I looked up from my plate and saw her, and my brown eyes met her light blue eyes for a brief second. Another soldier asked me a question and we started having a conversation. The next time I glanced up from my meal, her seat was vacant.

After my meal, I went back to my housing unit, a single room in a white trailer. If I reached out my arms, I could touch both walls of my room with my nearly six-and-a-half foot wingspan. I took off my body armor, uniform and boots, and stripped naked except for a grey towel around my waist and dog tags around my neck. I walked a few yards to the nearby shower trailer to get cleaned up.

I pulled the light blue plastic curtain aside and stepped into the shower stall at the far end, my preferred one since it afforded me a bit of privacy, at least on one side. The shower stall to my right was occupied, I could hear the water running, but all I could see were the thick, muscled legs of a large black man next to me. I turned on the water and sprayed my face, rinsing it clean of the thin sand that American soldiers in Iraq at that time called "moon dust."

As I rinsed myself off in that lukewarm water, my mind turned to her and I imagined her in the shower with me. Her long blonde hair was wet and flat, running down her back, and her eyes closed, with her face canted up towards the trickling shower head as beads of water glided down her beautiful face and down her long, smooth body. I imagined kissing her, pressing my naked body against hers, and I could feel my cock becoming stiff quickly.

I put my right hand up against the wall of the shower and began stroking myself, the water loudly splashing off my hand and against the wall. I hoped that my neighbor simply thought I was washing myself vigorously. I closed my eyes and thought of turning her around, pressing her against the wall as I slid my cock into her pussy from behind in the shower. I imagined her moaning, and her breasts bouncing as I pounded her, until I came silently. I opened my eyes and watched my cum swirl down the drain of the shower, mixed with grime, sweat, and that dark brown sand.

I didn't see her again for weeks. When I did, I was at the gym, an air-conditioned large tent with weights. I was laying back on an inclined bench doing chest presses when I saw her stretching on the other side of the tent, sprawled out onto a blue cushioned pad. She was wearing her physical fitness uniform, but it was the first time I could really appreciate her body. Her legs were long and smooth, but she had curves and a thick, round ass that was stretching the limits of her tight, black, military-issued workout shorts. Likewise, her large breasts were distorting the word "Army" printed on the shirt across her chest.

I focused on my workout, but glanced her way occasionally, and noticed she was doing yoga. Needless to say, it was unusual to see anyone on the base doing yoga. Music from the heavy metal band Slipknot was playing offensively from a large boombox in the corner of the tent, and the only other sounds were of men grunting and metal plates clanging. I lost track of her while doing a bench press, and when I looked back to where she had been, she was gone.

When I finished my workout, I walked past where she had been doing yoga and and saw a Beretta handgun in a thigh holster shoved into the gap between a box and some stacked rubber gym flooring. I immediately recognized it. It was rigged for someone left-handed, and I remembered that this blonde lieutenant was a southpaw at first sight. I picked up the weapon, knowing that she could be in all sorts of trouble for leaving it behind. Losing a weapon in a warzone could result in a bad conduct discharge, or at the very least some type of administrative punishment. I strapped it to my own leg, grabbed my rifle and stepped out into a dust storm, with hot sand blowing into my face.

Thus began my search for the beautiful blonde with the missing firearm. It wasn't hard to find her. Later that night, I walked up to some soldiers smoking beside some burning 55-gallon metal drums near my housing compound while the sound of gunfire crackled in the distance.

"Hey," I interrupted their conversation, and one soldier, upon seeing an officer, stood up, "do you guys know of a really tall, blonde, female lieutenant? Like, which unit she's with?"

The soldiers smiled and turned to each other. "Aw, shit," one said, "this captain wants to get with Strawberry Ice Cream Girl." They all laughed.

"I'm sorry, say what now sergeant?" I asked.

"Strawberry girl," another offered, slightly more professionally. "Everybody knows who she is. She puts strawberries on her ice cream every meal at the DFAC." The Dining Facility, or DFAC, soldiers pronounced as "dee-fac," was the mess hall.

"Yeah, right. Exactly." I said, "That one. What unit is she with?"

Another soldier flicked his cigarette into the burning barrel. "Look, captain, you probably have a better chance with her than we do," he motioned to the other enlisted soldiers hanging around, "but you are going to need to get in line. Every guy on this base wants to fuck her."

"No, no, I'm not looking to fuck her," I argued, "I have something of hers, I'm trying to get it back to her."

"Right, sure, sir," one soldier said sarcastically, "she's an MP. She's with that National Guard unit that's training the Hajjis." By that, he meant that she was a military policewoman assigned to a unit that was training the Iraqi police in law enforcement.

"Oh, okay, great, thanks so much," I said as I walked away into the night.

"No problem captain," a soldier said, "good luck with her."

After asking some of my friends in my unit, I was able to determine which military police unit she was assigned to on our base. While on a rotational assignment, I would be required to sit and communicate on the radio and on a classified version of Internet Relay Chat. I assumed that she would be on our base defense chat room, since practically everybody was. Whenever our base was attacked with mortars or rockets by the Iraqi insurgents, everybody on the base wanted to know where the rounds came from, where they landed, and if anyone got killed or wounded. So I scrolled through the list of chat room members and I was fairly sure I found her: SHAMROCK_S2.

I opened up a private message window. "Hi, by any chance were you at the gym yesterday in the late afternoon?" I started at the blinking cursor, reading it a few times before I hit enter. I hoped she wouldn't interpret it as me coming onto her.

Hours passed before I noticed a blinking window at the bottom of my screen from SHAMROCK_S2. "Yes...what is this about?" It was her.

"By any chance did you accidentally leave your weapon at the gym?" I minimized the window right away so no one would look see our chat over my shoulder.

This time the response was instant. "YES!! OMG, did you find it?!!"

"Yes," I typed, "I have it strapped to my left leg, I'm pretending to be left handed. I'm not sure how long I can keep this up. If we get in a gunfight with Al-Qaeda, I'm not going to be good at drawing with my left hand."

She responded: "LOL." My heart jumped into my throat. She had just laughed at my joke.

"When I get off shift," I typed frantically, "let's meet up at the Green Bean and I'll give it back to you." The Green Bean was an espresso coffee stand located on the base, like a low-budget Starbucks in a tent for the military. Since alcohol, like sex, was forbidden under something called "General Order Number One," the Green Bean functioned as a kind of bar for troops if they ever had any leisure time.

"Fuck yes! I will buy you a coffee," she promised.

Six hours later, I was sitting in a dusty plastic chair sipping a bottle of water when I saw her walking from what seemed like a mile away. She had an extremely feminine gait, even in combat boots, and slid across the gravel that seemed to cover most of the base that we lived on. I stood up as she approached, and handed her the weapon.

"I think this belongs to you," I said, as she flipped the sidearm to its side to examine the serial number.

"Yes! Oh my god, thank you so much, this is it," she said, throwing her arms around me. "You are a fucking lifesaver."

"Hey, don't mention it," I shrugged, "It was an accident. I didn't want to see you get in any kind of trouble."

We drank lattes from paper cups and ate dry, stale chocolate-chip cookies under the desert sky, talking about our lives back home and how we ended up in Iraq, fighting a war that neither of us believed in. After hours, I excused myself because I had to wake up for a dangerous early morning mission the next day, and wanted to be well-rested. We hugged and I walked back to my trailer alone.

That night, I masturbated silently under the covers, my breathing short and quick, thinking of her riding me cowgirl-style in my tiny room.

After several days of excursions off-base with fortunately little enemy activity, a few days later I went back to rotational duty on the computer and radio. A blinking window appeared on my computer screen from SHAMROCK_S2.

"Hey there," it said when I clicked and expanded the window, "are you busy?" We chatted for a while, interrupted by air strikes, troops in contact with the enemy, soldiers in combat screaming on the radio.

We exchanged personal email addresses and would write to each other on our personal accounts that we could check at a cyber cafe that had access to the Internet. Most soldiers used it to communicate with loved ones back in America, but I was using it to talk to a woman only a few hundred yards away.

She was in the National Guard, and had just started working as a teacher after graduating college when her unit was called up to deploy to Iraq for the police mission. Our e-mail messages back and forth were strictly about our personal lives. So occasionally we would arrange to share a meal together at the dining facility to share our work experiences. Inevitably, serving in Iraq at the height of the conflict, we both had shockingly unbelievable stories each time we met for a late dinner. She did eat vanilla ice cream with strawberry topping after every single meal.

Once, after a few weeks of meeting up for meals, we walked out of the dining facility together and she waved goodbye to me as I saw my boss, a pilot in his flight suit, standing there with his hands on his hips and staring me down.

"You motherfucking son of a bitch," he said smiling, "I can't believe you're fucking the Strawberry Ice Cream Girl. You're my hero. You're a hero to all of us. In fact, you're a motherfucking American hero." He smartly snapped to attention and saluted. This was unusual since he was a lieutenant colonel and I was a captain, so he outranked me and this display made no sense. I should have been saluting him, if we had been following protocol. We weren't, as we were in a war zone, so he was clearly teasing me. I liked him immensely.

I laughed. "No sir," I said dismissively, "we're not fucking. We're friends. We just like hanging out and talking to each other. That's it."

"I know," he said smiling, "the thing is that everybody thinks that you are. You've impressed people you don't even know, they think you attained the ultra-unattainable Strawberry Ice Cream Girl."

"Um, I don't really look at women as something to be attained, sir," I protested. "And she isn't 'Strawberry Ice Cream Girl.' Her name is Lieutenant White. And, for the record, everybody has it totally wrong. If they don't want to refer to her by her name, they should at least call her 'Vanilla Ice Cream Girl with Strawberry Topping."

My boss just shook his head, smiling. "This is why she is hanging out with you. I'm going to grab a bite to eat. Take it easy, captain." We shook hands before walking past each other and he slapped me on the back.

A few more weeks went by in my Iraq deployment, before I received another private chat message from SHAMROCK_S2. "Hi, they are playing episodes of Alias on the big screen at the community center on AFN, do you want to come?" AFN was Armed Forces Network, a military satellite network version of cable with public service announcements instead of commercials. Alias was a popular TV show at the time featuring Jennifer Garner as a double agent for the CIA uttering totally forgettable trash lines like "Wait, they're coming!!" and "I'm at my best under pressure."

"Sure," I agreed. I didn't really like the show, but would take any opportunity to spend time with her.

Later we sat side by side in semi-darkness, sipping Diet Cokes and watching Jennifer Garner do her best acting with poorly written dialogue. When the show ended, she turned to me. "Do you want to go for a ride?" She asked. I nodded.

We suited up in kevlar and helmets and climbed into her armored vehicle. We drove to a secluded, abandoned area along the Euphrates River, got out of the truck and walked into a building destroyed by American air strikes. "This was one of the Hussein regime palaces," I said, directing her to the marble staircase, "we bombed it a few years ago at the onset of the war." We walked up an Italian marble staircase with engraved Arabic calligraphy, while the moon and stars beamed through a hole in the ceiling where an American bomb had years ago cut a gaping hole.

I climbed onto the roof first and then pulled her up. We sat there talking for a while and I revealed that I enjoyed salsa dancing. She said that she liked to dance as well, and I took out an early model iPod and found some Latin music. There was no speaker, so I gave her one headphone and I took the other, which made a lot of my better moves too difficult to pull off. But we danced on the top of a burned-out palace under a starry sky. After a while, we walked back down the spiral staircase and climbed back into the vehicle, strapping on the velcro of our body armor and tightening the chin straps of our kevlar helmets.

She drove to the edge of a lake surrounded by reeds. She shut off the engine and we both sat there in silence for a while, gazing out at the water shimmering in the moonlight.

"Ok," I exhaled, "I have a confession to make."

She turned toward me from the driver's seat. "Really?"

"Yeah." I waited for several seconds, building the anticipation. "I hate Alias."

She let out a deep laugh. "Oh my god, I thought you were never going to just fucking say it. I don't really like it either, I just wanted to hang out with you."

"Well we can hang out anytime you want. But we don't have to watch Alias," I offered,. "I figured that you were a fan."

"No,," she smiled at me, taking off her helmet and putting it on the large console between us. "I just really enjoy our conversations."

"Then why did you invite me to come watch it with you?"

She paused for a minute and gazed out the windshield of the armored vehicle. "Honestly, I just wanted an excuse to spend time with you I guess. I really enjoy our conversations."

It felt like the right time to make my move. I leaned closer to her and whispered. "Do you know how many guys are envying me right now? That I'm hanging out alone with Strawberry Ice Cream Girl?"

"Wait, what?" I suddenly realized she didn't know she had a nickname on the base.

"Oh, man, you don't know? A lot of guys fantasize about you, but they don't know you, so they just refer to you as the Strawberry Ice Cream Girl."

"But why strawberry ice cream? I don't even get strawberry ice cream? I get vanilla."

"Exactly, I have no idea. I don't think they're focusing that much on your dessert selection."

"Yeah," she said, "it's just fucking relentless. And sometimes scary. I had this one guy that just wouldn't leave me alone. But that's one of the reasons I like hanging out with you, because I have absolutely nothing to worry about. You're not like most of these other guys."

I felt that I was being pushed into the friend zone. "What do you mean?"

"Well, honestly," she shrugged, "I thought you were gay."

I was stunned, and my heart sank, I thought my chances with her were over. I was bisexual and I had been with men before, but I was very careful to keep my professional life separate from my personal life, and at that point I had no sexual activity in Iraq whatsoever, aside from masterbating in the shower to thoughts of her.

"Wait, what? I'm not gay," I protested, "Why do you think that?"

"A few minutes ago when you said you had a confession to make," she said reluctantly, "I was sure you were going to tell me you were gay. We just had this amazingly romantic night, dancing under the stars, and I was just waiting for the shoe to drop."

"Sarah," I asked softly, "what made you think I wasn't attracted to you?"

"Nothing, I guess, I was just confused. You speak French and you drink vanilla lattes. You know how to salsa dance. In fact, you're a ridiculously good salsa dancer, you're way better than I am. You haven't tried anything with me, and we've been talking to each other for weeks. If you're straight, I just don't know why nothing has happened between us..."

I kissed her and I could feel electricity surge through my body. My hands slid under her camouflage blouse and massaged her breasts through her brown cotton T-shirt. After a few moments, she pulled her head back and touched my lips with her fingertip. She smiled. "Let's get in the back."