Author's Note: This story is autobiographical. The names have been changed in order to prevent any embarrassment to those concerned.
The Sergeant-Major came bouncing into our area looking for volunteers. That sort of thing was usually greeted by all manner of people scattering to the four winds to get out of his line of sight. "Volunteering" usually meant getting sent to some hot third world shit hole with no booze, no pussy, and not much else in the way of creature comforts. Take the Sinai desert, for instance.
This time, however, he needed volunteers to go on a weekend thing for a charity event. It was a breast cancer fund raising deal, and he needed volunteers with medical skills to help treat sore feet, sprained ankles and dehydration. Even though I was a Combat Engineer, I had cross trained as a medic and had a reputation in the Battalion for knowing the best methods for treating blistered feet. For the Army, it was a chance to show off the uniform, help out the recruiting slugs, and do some community service. The "good deal" in this gig was the following weekend was a four day pass, which meant a trip to the beach to work on my tan and peruse the nubile young college girl flesh. Word had gotten around with the sweet young things that us paratrooper types ate pussy with a great deal of enthusiasm and no small amount of skill. It was a reputation each of us did our best to uphold.
We piled out of an Army bus at the appointed time and place and secured our gear. One bunch of guys were dressed in PT gear and were going to run the entire thirty mile course. The rest of us grabbed our rucksacks and got a final brief from the communications guys and the medics. We were paired up, one of us humping a radio and the other an aid bag, or very large first aid kit. We were cautioned to do our evaluations of the sick or injured carefully, as they were civilians and somewhat outside of our experience. We were instructed to use the radio and one of the local rescue squads would show up to handle transport to a hospital if that was necessary. Rescue squad guys liked riding around in pretty red trucks and did not care all that much for walking.
It was apparent that this was a very large women-going-schmoozing thing, and we were straphangers for the event. A straphanger is somebody that tags along and serves no useful purpose. There were a few interested looks as we gathered behind the group. Here was a large group of women of all ages and sizes, and behind them was a very small group of very handsome, swaggering and cocky Army Special Forces types. We looked pretty spiffy in our camouflage uniforms, polished jump boots, and nifty green berets.
There were speeches and applause and we sat down on our rucksacks and looked at each other as if to ask, "What on earth possessed us to volunteer for this gig on our weekend off?" But being the stalwarts that we were, we honored the women, the Army, and our word by being stoic and waiting patiently for things to get going.
None of us moved as somebody fired a gun and there was a big cheer and the crowd moved out of the parking lot and out into the street, led by a police car with lights and siren. We knew that their pace was going to be far slower than ours, and nobody moved when the crowd flowed into the street.
Finally, I stood up, shouldered my rucksack, looked at my colleagues and said, "I think I spotted a Dunkin' Donuts down the street. Anybody up for coffee and a donut?"
There was a series of grunts and sighs as they straggled to their feet, heaved the rucksacks onto their backs and followed me out to the street.
We stopped for coffee and a donut, free of charge as it turned out, as they knew we were supporting the march. We spent the rest of the day, ambling along, waving at the crowds that gathered on street corners, and generally behaving ourselves. There weren't any real injuries or much for us to do in the morning. We ate lunch at a big picnic setup in a city park. The local church ladies really knew how to put on a spread. We ate fried chicken, potato salad, corn on the cob and any kind of pie we wanted. I needed a nap afterwards.
The sun came up hotter in the afternoon. The soldier with me with the radio listened to a couple of calls for pickup for dehydration cases. We ambled along at a slow pace, figuring we would start to see the stragglers pretty soon.
It started about five miles from the finish line for the day. We saw them in groups of two or three, sitting by the side of the road or on a curb, rubbing sore feet and lamenting the long walk. We split up and started to work. I knelt next to my first one, and knew her day was over. She was in her sixties and wearing cheap but very cute pink running shoes. She had been talking to a friend and did not see a small hole in the road. She already had her shoe off, and it did not take long to discover that her ankle was purple and swollen. I extracted an instant ice pack from my bag and an ace wrap. I smacked the bag to break the inner bag and shook it to get it cold. I handed it to her and asked her to put it on her sore ankle. She smiled at me as the icy coolness on her ankle started to soothe the pain. I eyed my companion with the radio and shook my head and he moved off to call for transport. The lady was going to be disappointed that I could not fix her up so she could finish the walk. I sat down in front of her and lifted her leg into my lap. Grabbing the ace wrap, I started to wrap the ice bag around her ankle to secure it in place. While I worked on her ankle, I asked her some polite but leading questions about her medical history so that the paramedics wouldn't get any surprises when they showed up. She tolerated my probing questions, then smiled at me and thanked me for my help as I secured the end of the ace wrap with a length of adhesive tape.
The paramedics showed up soon after, looked over the situation, took my report and gently helped the old lady into the back of the ambulance. She made them promise that they would take her to the finish line before they took her to the hospital. I packed up my aid bag and secured it on my back and continued the march.
The next lady I treated turned out to be a real surprise. She was sitting on a curb, one shoe and sock off, and examining what turned out to be a very large blister. She was blonde and had a pony tail tied up and hooked out the back of a baseball cap. She had a sunburned nose and had been my high school English teacher.
Bear in mind that I hadn't seen her since I was eighteen, and I was twenty five now. She had been twenty four and a recent college graduate the last time I had seen her. Her name was Kathy Stockard, and every boy in school was madly in lust with her. She was drop dead gorgeous, and looked like Cheryl Ladd from the Charlie's Angels TV show. She taught an English literature class with twenty four students, twelve of them boys, and that meant that she was standing up in front of roughly six feet of hard cock. One hell of a statistic. But she withstood all of it with good humor and introduced us Neanderthal types to Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare and Keats and Shelley. Those of us with the ability to perceive the reactions of some of our female classmates noted the flushing of skin, the deepening of breathing and the tendency to hunch their shoulders and push their hands into their crotches during some of the poetry readings. In my case, this was filed away for future reference, and put to very good use later on. Although I did find it difficult to focus on reading Emily Dickinson whilst getting a blowjob.
I choked down my surprise and set to work. I washed her foot with water from my canteen and some antiseptic soap. I dried her foot with a towel, and examined her blister closely. It was a lulu, one of the biggest I had ever seen, and it looked pretty painful. All the while, Kathy was chatting away with two of her buddies and completely ignored me. I prodded the blister once, gently, and she winced and turned to look at me, ready to give me a hard time. Her eyes widened as she looked at me and recognition set in.
"Tommy?", she asked.
I peered under the brim of her baseball cap and said, "Hello, Ms. Stockard. It has been a long time."
Her face was sweaty and her eyes looked tired, but she smiled at me and I thought back to those days in high school and thought she was still a very beautiful woman.
I asked her, "What do you want to do, catch a ride in an ambulance and let a doctor take care of it or finish the walk?"
She eyed me closely, focused on her current problem, and replied, "I need to finish this walk. Do what you can and it will be fine."
I nodded and set to work. I punctured the edge of the blister with a needle and gently expressed all of the fluid into a piece of gauze. That immediately felt better to her. I then applied two coats of tincture of benzoin, which stung a little, and applied a plaster of mole skin. I gave her my spare pair of clean athletic socks and she put them and her shoes back on and jumped to her feet.
A crowd had gathered at this point and she exclaimed to one and all, "See, good as new, last one to the finish line is a rotten egg."
It took me a few minutes to reassemble all of my gear and get my rucksack back on my back. Kathy had left with her friends and I was disappointed that she was not inclined to catch up on old times. It was roughly a mile to the finish and I was glad the day was almost over.
A few minutes later, I saw the tall blonde woman with the long stride, the baseball cap and the bobbing pony tail coming toward me. She walked up to me and smiled and turned to walk with me.
"I had to finish with my friends, but I wanted to come back and thank you for helping me with my sore foot. And, it appears that you have found a home in the Army. How are you doing?" she asked.
And with that, she put her hand under my arm, grabbed the shoulder strap on my rucksack and finished the last half mile of the course with me. We caught up on old times, and laughed about being a high school teacher and the Army.
We got to the finish line, and I spotted the Army bus waiting to take us back to the post.
An older woman with a little boy walked up to her and she squealed, "Noah! How's my man?" and she picked him up and swept him into her arms and kissed him.
"Mom!" he protested, obviously embarrassed at being bussed by his mother in front of so many people.
He was tall for his age and blonde and good looking like his mother. Introductions were made all around and I was swept up into the world of Kathy Stockard.
There was more women schmoozing, more speeches, and an impatient bus driver waiting for me.
Kathy finally noticed my predicament, and asked, "Can you stay with us this evening, I really would like to talk to you. You were one of my favorite students."
My rucksack held clean socks and a t-shirt and I was a highly adaptable Special Forces Sergeant. I walked over to the bus and told them to go on without me. He nodded and grinned, as apparently I was not the only one of us that had "gotten lucky."
