Melodic Redemption
Chapter 1

Copyright© 2012 by oyster50

Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 1 - A long time ago in a land far, far away, a young combat engineer lieutenant had a very bad day. Sometimes not ALL the scars are on the outside. Now he's out, gainfully employed and a friend's sideline project has him working with a university orchestra. Here's this one girl. No reason for a connection, but one happens. she finds out about him. And he finds out about himself.

Caution: This Romantic Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa   Consensual   Romantic   Heterosexual   First   Oral Sex   Petting   Geeks  

It happened again last night. Somewhere around one AM I was sitting up in bed, covers tossed off, sweating. No the room wasn't hot.

I would even be happy that I was worrying about bills or leaky roof or plumbing or that funny noise the car makes. Wasn't, though.

I needed the sleep. I have a job. No, I don't stack jeans at Wal-Mart. Late arrival to the engineering game. I started right out of high school and then Dad's business went belly up. Rather than take out student loans, I did ROTC and out of college went on active duty. Ended up in Iraq.

I thought that a graduate engineer would be one of those 'behind the lines' job, but the title is 'combat engineer' and in Iraq after the big battle, that whole 'line' thing went away. I had the engineering platoon of a tank battalion. It's one of many things I've been wrong about. Tanks. Armor. Combat arms. Hot zones. All that was part of my participation. And when the Iraqi government and army fell, there we were in a makeshift base camp trying to keep the lid on a country that had lost the strong man who kept the lid on various factions.

Factions, groups, each thinking that the country would be better off if two things happened. The first was if THEY were in charge, and the second was if WE were gone. It took no time before we found that every cockeyed group in the country harbored a grudge against us.

Between us and other base camps were roads and just about every supply we needed came in on trucks over those roads. Naturally, it occurred to our 'friends' that if you messed with the roads you messed with EVERYBODY, including rival groups AND the Americans.

A lot of people don't know whose job it is to make sure roads are safe and mine and bomb free. I have two words for you: Combat Engineers.

I suppose that some people would liken it to a game. Every morning we'd run out the gate, me and a couple of my soldiers in a Hummer, a couple of Abrams tanks, another Hummer and three soldiers. A third Hummer with a trailer full of blocks of C-4 explosives and other tools of the trade.

The tanks were our watchdogs. The Iraqi insurgents hated 'em. Nothing they had, RPGs, small arms, would do more than aggravate an Abrams and that 120 mm gun was a very definitive expression of 'don't do THAT again'. We usually had a couple of Apache helicopters up there somewhere, too, but they usually watched US and a few other similar activities in a pretty good sized area.

The drill was simple: Run up the road, looking for the telltales of a new IED. That's Improvised Explosive Device. Think a bomb or artillery shell or two, buried in a hole, with a wire or a cellphone set up to receive the command to blow up. Then our worthy opponent would sit a convenient distance away and wait for something to come by that was worth blowing up.

And we'd go out every morning and find the new bombs and de-activate them. In most cases, this was simple: Locate the bomb. Put a few pounds of C-4 next to it. Blow it up. Simple, on the surface, at least. Remember that 'remote' thing? Our friends got better and better. First few weeks, we just looked for the wire. Then they got wise and we had to start doing some electronic things, jamming cellphone signals.

Finally we got 'Robbie'. Robbie was a robot, a little tracked thing with a camera and a shotgun head. Instead of me sending a real live human (or me. Don't ask your men to do something YOU won't do yourself) to go poke in the vicinity of the bomb, we'd unload Robbie and control him out there, look at what he saw, and decide on the next step.

I won't bore you with the details of how we did what we did, but there were some things that we keyed on. Disturbed dirt. Our main 'road' wouldn't be a good goatpath in the states. It was hardened mud. Hardened. And any time you saw something that wasn't hardened mud, we suspected a bomb. Most of the time we were right.

Another one was the 'dead donkey' trick. Donkeys were common transport in the area. Some of them, sadly, did not fare well in the occasional firefight. Donkeys know little about blast radii of mortar rounds and penetrative capabilities of small arms fire, and the lack of knowledge means, all too often, a dead donkey. A dead donkey where we'd had some vigorous interaction with our 'neighbors' was one thing. The random appearance of a dead donkey on the side of the road was reason for suspicion. You can hide a lot under a dead donkey, or inside a dead donkey. And after a day or two under the Iraqi sun, a dead donkey provides its own olfactory brand of security.

And one fine day, a donkey played a part in the incident that ended my military career.

Lead team was me, my driver, a hulking black guy from South Carolina, and our gunner, a Southern white boy manning our beloved M-2 machinegun in a ring mount on top of the vehicle.

Second Hummer, that was one of my engineering teams.

And the last Hummer, with Robby in a little trailer. No tanks today. Kinder gentler rules of engagement, you know. The appearance of sixty-ton behemoths on their streets was disturbing to the gentle folk therein. I missed my tanks, although I'd never admit that to the tanker that frequented our after-hours gabfests.

A pair of Apache helicopters swooped by noisily, scanning our route before we left, then they disappeared into the distance with other fish to fry.

Out of the compound and up the road and I'm scanning ahead with binoculars. I see it, about the same time that SPC (that's 'specialist', an enlisted rank in the army) Whiteboy said "Dead mule up there, El Tee. "El Tee" is the abbreviation for lieutenant in the Army, "LT", and it's as good as 'Sir' in informal situations.

"I got 'im, Smitty. And that's not a mule, it's a donkey. You know the Quran forbids mules."

"Mule, donkey, whatever. He's fresh from yesterday. You think?"

"I think we send Robby to look." I spoke on the radio and out column halted. The guys in the last Hummer unloaded Robby and one of them came up with the controller in his hands, running the little robot. I stood beside him, looking at the camera's screen. The little tracked 'bot whined and bounced up the road the hundred and fifty yards to the target donkey. The operator panned the camera. Nothing.

They ran Robby around the other side, the four legs of the donkey stiffly protruding. More camera viewing. Nothing. No disturbed earth. NO incision or open gut where the donkey may have been loaded. However...

"Five pounds of C-4 ought to make sure," I said. "Bring Robby back and let him set it."

Whine bounce shuffle and the robot was back. One of my soldiers prepped the charge, including the detonator, set it on the robot, handy for its arm to pick up and place, and then with the charge set, the robot would back up a safe distance and pop the charge. The donkey would mostly disappear, and if there was a nefarious device, it would either explode or its presence would be revealed in the new crater.

BOOM! New crater. Bits of donkey fluttering wetly down, completing the circle of life, and after the dust and smoke cleared, the resulting crater showed no signs of any bomb.

A thought entered my head. Decoy. And from my youth in the marshes hunting ducks, I knew that when you set a decoy, you do it so your quarry comes in where you want them.

"Mount up and MOVE!" I shouted. My shouts coincided with the sounds of the first incoming mortar rounds. And these guys knew what they were doing. That wasn't surprising. We, the coalition forces, had literally torn apart the Iraqi army without killing everyone nor confiscating their weapons. A lot of ordnance had disappeared simply because it was all over out there and we couldn't collect it all. And of all things, a mortar tube looks like a piece of pipe unless you look closely and the whole stinkin' country was an ammo dump.

And right now some of that stuff we missed was raining down. Fortunate thing: They didn't have the road zeroed, so the first rounds were a couple of hundred yards off target. Unfortunate thing: Whoever was calling corrections could both SEE us AND he knew what he as doing. I was in the middle of the makings of a paragraph in a war report.

In the Hummer I was on the radio. "Panther base, this is Shovel Six. We're taking mortar fire."

"Roger, Shovel Six. Guns is on the horn to Divarty right now. We're sending the QRF." 'Guns' was our artillery forward observer. Divarty was the division artillery and they had some technology that would pinpoint the origin of the projectiles fired at us and relay that information to some artillery unit that had a good shot at the target. The QRF was the quick reaction force, a little party of tanks and armored personnel carriers that would show up to overpower any sticky situation.

Trouble was, our situation was degrading faster than any hope of either development helping us. The second and third rounds of the mortar fire hit the road behind us. Spotter rounds. The next one was close enough for mortars. We were screwed. A dozen (I know. I counted) rained down. The trailing Hummer was on its side, burning. The leader Hummer, mine, lifted in the air and slewed sideways at an angle that told me it wasn't going anywhere.

Smitty was slumped down in the gunmount, dark wetness spreading down his side.

"Unass this thing," I told the driver. "Help me get Smitty."

We were wrestling with Smitty, every move we made provoking sharp cries, but I could smell smoke and I figured that pain was a better alternative to roasting in a burning vehicle.

The heavy machinegun on the second Hummer opened up as we dragged Smitty to the roadside. I saw flying mud brick where the fifty-caliber bullets worked over a doorway. There was a dead, VERY dead Iraqi in the door, an RPG thrown into the street in front of him. But there were several others running out of other buildings, all still a hundred meters off, and my soldier in the middle Hummer was the only one in position to do anything about it.

Until the first of three RPG rounds impacted his Hummer.

Davis and I had Smitty behind a bit of roadside debris and between us we had two M-16 rifles against at least a dozen insurgents who were screaming praises to Allah as they rushed forward carrying AK-47's and a couple of RPG's.

"Fuckety fuck fuck fuck," I spat, trying to target the nearest. Davis was doing his best to match me word for word and round for round. He emptied out his rifle before I did and did a fast magazine change, and that's when the RPG hit the pile of debris in front of us. Smitty didn't know it, being unconscious and looking pretty dead. Davis was on his back, blood puddling in the dirt below him. I rolled back over, sighted on the nearest insurgent, and pulled the trigger. Nothing. I rotated the rifle to clear the stoppage and saw where a steel shard had trashed the aluminum receiver of my rifle.

"Fucked. I am TRULY fucked," I said, then I saw Davis' rifle. I tried to crawl and that's the first time I realized that I was hit. Left leg no workee. Right leg. Push. Grab rifle. Sight. Dirty white pajamas and black wool vest. Squeeze. Again. He stopped. Next target. Squeeze. "Shit!" Flip switch to 'burst' and catch the next one. Oh shit! Motherfucker with an RPG. I'm boned. Shoot! He fires at the same time I do and the rocket hits behind me and he's out of the game. His buddy, though ... I'm on my back, blood in my face. Mine. Can't see. Left hand won't get to my face. Right hand. Wipe. Grab rifle. Turbaned, bearded face, with a big-assed knife in his hand. I lift the rifle. One trigger pull. Three rounds, three hits. And I'm out.

The next thing I remember is waking up under bright lights, naked, wrapped in a sheet, IV's in both arms.

"Welcome back, lieutenant," a nurse said. "Doctor, he's back."

"I hope he's ugly," I croaked.

"Who?" the nurse asked. "The doctor?"

"Yeah," I said, "Because you look like an angel." Then I realized I wasn't seeing out of my left eye. Dark.

The doctor walked up, mask dangling off an ear. "Lieutenant Jackson, welcome back."

I breathed. Oxygen cannula was at my nose. "Glad to be ... Where?"

"Twenty-first Evac. But not for long. You're going to Germany on the next flight out."

"How long?"

"Maybe eight hours."

I closed my eyes for a second. "The others..."

"Not sure. I got SPC Smith in here. He'll be on the plane with you. There's a PFC Lemmon. He'll go back to his unit in a week. Same with Sergeant Graves."

Lemmon and Graves were in the last Hummer.

"Your commander is coming in by chopper. He was hoping you'd be conscious. Now rest. They'll bring 'im to you when he gets here."

Despite the pain and the question of my left eye it wasn't difficult to drift back into the mists. I drifted along between sleep and wake until I heard, "Lieutenant Jackson's over here, Captain."

I opened my eye. My company commander. "How're doin', Jackson?" he asked.

"I've had better days. How bad..."

"You?" He looked for a nurse. "How bad?"

"Uh, I'm not supposed to..."

"Dammit, lieutenant," he said to the nurse, "This is MY lieutenant. You're getting ready to send him off. How IS he?"

She sucked in a breath. "Blast broke his left leg. Shrapnel lacerated left leg. Lacerated left side. Lacerations and fracture left arm. Scalp laceration. Abrasions to left eye. He'll..." she looked directly at me. "Sorry, Lieutenant Jackson, YOU'LL recover just fine. You'll have scars."

She was right. I did have scars. Captain Hopkins added a few more. "Your patrol got torn up pretty bad. There were nine of you. Four survived. You. Sergeant Graves. Private Lemmon. Specialist Smith. Davis made it back here but..."

"Dammit. Fuck fuck fuck!"

"You did everything right, Stoney." Stoney. Short for 'Stonewall', as in 'Stonewall Jackson', the Confederate general. Nobody ever called me by my first name, Randall, unless they were strangers or I was in trouble.

"I let my guard down. They're getting smarter and I didn't account for it."

"Uh, you accounted for a number of them. There were seven there when we got there. Blood trails where they hauled three more off, at least. Sergeant Graves says he can write up the report."

"Sir, we need to get him ready for the flight," the nurse said. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Captain Hopkins said. "Jackson, I don't know if I'll get you back, but look, we'll send your personal effects along after you."

"Thanks," I said. "And Cap?"

"Yes?"

"You're gonna write the letters for those guys?"

"Yes. I guess I have that to do."

"Please say that they were a good, brave, bunch. Every one of 'em."

Two months later I was walking well. The hair was growing back where my head had been shaved, but there was a scar where a flap of my scalp had been blown loose and re-attached and it extended downward across my left eyebrow, ending on my cheek. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that some serious shit had happened to my head. That showed.

What didn't show was the pink tracks on my torso, or the suture lines down my thigh. The scars on my left arm showed. But it all worked.

Headaches. When somebody goes after you with multiple explosive devices at close proximity, it shakes your brain in your skull. For a month the headaches were severe. They slowly tapered off as physical therapy brought use back to leg and arm.

And during this time, the Army decided that unless I wanted to make a big case out of it, they'd just as soon call it quits between me and them and would I be happy to take a VA disability check and a Silver Star and thankyouverymuch.

Silver Star. About that. I didn't feel like any kind of hero, but Sergeant Graves' after-action report had me sounding like one if you knew how to read between the lines of the stilted Army phraseology. "Took charge of a rapidly deteriorating situation and delayed enemy action by individual fire, protecting a wounded soldier until he himself was rendered unconscious." Stuff like that.

I didn't feel like a hero. I felt like a guy who should've pulled his head out of his ass and seen what was going on. Five good men. Good men. How cliché'. I don't know about 'good'. How 'good' is ANY random bunch of young adult males. They were profane, loud, subject to fucking off, shirking, all the rest of the expected activities. But when you said 'Mount up!' they did. And they were MY men. My responsibility. And they were dead.

Also got a letter from Sergeant Graves:

LT-

I'm dictating this letter because I broke both arms when that first mortar round flipped our Hummer. I'm glad I got out. I'll be okay but it's going to be a while.

We caught hell, sir. If you hadn't seen what was happening when you did, we would have lost the whole unit. I wrote you up in the after action report and told them what you did. That one motherfucker with the knife, you blew him away before he started hacking on you.

You got seven or eight of them before you quit. I thought you were dead, but when the QRF and the medics got there, you were still alive. I think that when you stopped moving though, the ragheads thought you were dead, so they were coming after me when the Apaches showed back up.

I heard you were headed to Germany. I suppose you won't be back. I will look you up sometime.

And just so you know, lieutenant, you did good. And I don't give that compliment easy. You know we've had our moments, you and I.

Anyway, best wishes.

Harland P. Graves
Sergeant First Class
Combat Engineers

Graves was right. He had eighteen years in the army when he got saddled with me, a second lieutenant fresh out of the Engineer Officer Basic Course, and the battalion commander told me that I would be wise to filter any bright ideas I might have through eighteen years of experience that Sergeant Graves brought to our party.

But here I was. When I was very tired, I did still limp a little. And forever when I look in a mirror I will see the pink scars to remind me of that day.

Engineering degree. Military experience. Even a medal. I went home, lived at Mom and Dad's for a few wonderful weeks while I searched for jobs. Wasn't much of a search. Applications don't have to be mailed these days. Nor do electrical engineers wait by phones for long. I knew what I wanted, though. Biggish city. Engineering house.

A week after the application went in, the call for interview came. I went. Came home. Informed Mom and Dad of my new job and the fact that I would be a hundred and fifty miles away and yes, I'd come home often because I know how Dad hates the traffic there.

Apartment. Okay. Something that didn't pop up on the radar: Forty-foot, thirty year old sailboat, tied up in a marina off a little bayou an hour's drive from the center of the city. Refuge. Powerboaters get on a boat to go someplace. When a sailboater gets on his boat, he's already there. My refuge: forty feet of old fiberglass, wood and aluminum.

Engineering work for entry-level engineers is drudgery. I drudged. I was serious about it, though, and before long I was getting out to look at things and make some judgment calls and recommendations. Fearless, somebody said. I can do 'fearless'. The worst boss can't compare with some Third-World whack-job with a sword in his hand bent on having you star in a YouTube beheading video.

And friends. One of my fellow engineers was an absolute sound-recording nut. He had concepts of digital record systems that he thought would be marketable. I was doing some interesting things with fast data collection for controlling complex industrial processes. Together over cups of bad coffee we came up with some schemes that involved repurposing some of my remote data concentrators with his core computer storage. A professor at his alma mater tied him into a couple of really good computer science majors who could put together the big blocks of the software. We were off to the races.

A couple of weekends in his apartment, setting up my microphones and data hubs with his monster of a computer and we were determined to test things out. A conveniently willing garage band gave us a run with six microphones. That was ONE of my hubs. We needed a bigger field to play with before my buddy would be happy with his testing.

"Dude," the lead guitarist for the garage band said, "I have connections with the university orchestra. Want me to ask?"

"Orchestra?" Eddie said.

"Yeah, you know, violins, oboes, bassoons 'n' shit. Orchestra." He grinned. "I used to be second violinist. But you could set up, like, the ULTIMATE recording setup for an orchestra. Like a mike for each section. One for the violins by section. Violas. Clarinets. Flutes. You get the picture."

"Can we try that?" I asked Eddie.

"How many of those hubs? Mikes?"

"I have six more hubs. Gives us forty-two mikes. Can your computer handle that?"

"Piece a'cake," he said. "Reconcile yourself to the nanosecond, bud! And parallel processing."

We turned to Jimmo. "Get us a chance to talk to somebody."

Eddie did indeed go meet with people with the university's music department. Came back to the office. We were in the lunchroom. "It's perfect," he said. "They have a chamber orchestra. Just the right size to put a mike in front of EVERY instrument. Those things you have, they're ultra-directional. We gather everything. Stuff it onto the hard drives. Sort it out, mix it after the fact"

"I know how it's supposed to work."

"Yeah, but they asked for something, dude," he said.

"What would that be?"

"If we work things out and they get saleable copy, they retain copyright."

"Makes good sense to me," I said. "Are they any good?"

"You're picky, buddy. I know what's on your iPod. I don't know if they're the Israel Philharmonic, if that's what you mean. But they have some brilliance."

"Brilliance?"

"Yeah, they have this curly-headed blonde kid that plays trumpet. He's GOOD. And a flute-player."

"Flautist," I corrected.

"Okay, flautist. Whatever. She's good, too. We can get something that will give my equipment and your equipment a workout, and we can show them how to get good product out of what they play."

"When?"

"They're prepping for the first fall concert. We can do tomorrow evening. Go straight there after work. Is that okay?"

"Yeah. Let me check my social calendar."

"You don't HAVE a social calendar, buddy."

Yeah. About that. He's right. I was the good guy you could call to take your cousin out when she was in town. Or your sister. Anything past the kiss good night. Nope. I wasn't THAT innocent. But It just wasn't me. And I was more or less happy. Actually, since the Day, the scar was a pretty scary thing. The Army had offered some plastic surgery to lessen the impact of the scarring.

Still, I got stares. One history major from the university sat with me for coffee and told me about Prussian saber scars. I thought that just maybe we were getting somewhere. I mean, if a girl thinks of your disfigurement as a sort of historic artifact, you're getting somewhere, right? Wrong.

So Monday night I loaded up half the equipment into my SUV and Eddie loaded up the other half. When four o'clock found us, we were slipping out ahead of the crowd, headed for the university music department.

We backed up to a door near a practice hall and slipped inside.

Eddie led the way. We found the harried professor of music in his office.

"Doctor Greenlee, this is Randall Jackson. We call 'im Stonewall. Or Stoney. Uh, Stoney, this is Doctor Robert Greenlee." I shook the offered hand.

"Doctor Greenlee..."

"Bob," he said.

"Bob, thanks for giving us a chance to use you as a guinea pig."

"Oh, it's not me," he said. "You have my whole chamber orchestra."

"I hope we can give your orchestra to the world," I said. "Music should be shared."

"I like that. Let me unlock the door so you guys can set up."

We hauled in cases of equipment and worked together stringing cables and setting up stands with little microphones tied to little processor units. At the computer, Eddie started tracking and porting my field devices.

"We'll need to 'range' them when we get the musicians," he said. "A chamber orchestra has a different dynamic than a garage band."

"Gotcha," I said.

"Let's see the musicians."

Chapter 2 »

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