Chapter 7

"Where the hell have you been?" growled First Sergeant Williams. "We've had men out looking for you all night!"

"I think I had a rough landing," said Bob, who was still confused. It was as if the North Pole had never happened. When he had found himself in the dayroom, there was nobody there. Jeff Disston, one of the other squad leaders in his platoon had walked in only seconds later, before Bob could get his wits about him.

To say there had been an uproar would be like saying jumping without a parachute might hurt you.

Things had happened too fast for Bob to have time to think about a plausible explanation, and the only thing he could come up with was saying he must have hit his head when he landed, which was why he couldn't remember what had happened.

There was no way he was going to claim he'd been abducted by an automated sleigh to the North Pole, whereupon he had assumed duties as Santa Claus and delivered a quarter billion Christmas presents, including a puzzle with five missing pieces to Timothy Kendall who was firmly on the naughty list.

"Where is your harness?" asked 1SG Williams. "Where are your chutes?"

"I had to deploy my reserve," said Bob. "I remember that."

"Why? Did your main fail to open? Did it foul? There was no broken static cord found on the wire."

"Look, Top. I don't remember. I'm sorry. The whole night is a big, fuzzy blank in my mind."

"All right. Get over to the infirmary and get checked out. We'll talk about this later. The commander is going to eat my ass for this, but you're too good a soldier for me to doubt you now. If you remember anything, write it down."

"Thanks, Top," said Bob.

They found nothing wrong with him, of course. There were no bumps on his head, or bruises. His gear was examined, but there was nothing remarkable about it. His harness, which would have been dangling severed shroud lines that would have raised all kinds of other questions, was missing, the only thing the elves seemed to have kept when they magicked him out of the pole.

He put a hand to his head when he thought about that. There was no North Pole. He really had landed bad, and he really had struck his head hard enough to have hallucinations. Bumps or no bumps, it had been hallucinations. It had to have been.

Except there was his letter of commendation.

The one from the North Pole.

In the end, Bob ended up being treated for PTSD, because those were the symptoms he exhibited.

It wasn't the same as it had been before that Christmas Eve.

"Of course!" you might say, considering all that had happened to the young man.

But his familiar routine was back in place. He was up at four every day for PT. After that it was shit, shower and shave, followed by breakfast. Then there was other training. It was the same thing soldiers have done for generations. People who have never been there try to come up with ways to train you for what other people think will happen. It never does, of course. Actual deployment into battle resembles your training only until the point where actual bullets are fired. Then there is a special kind of chaos where, hopefully, the training you got keeps you from getting dead before the other guy either gets dead or runs away. The key is adapting, improvising, and overcoming the problems that will get you killed. But you're not trained that way. Instead, you're trained to do A, B and C, in the hopes that it's the best plan, when the time comes.

So Bob's days were very structured, and he had plenty of familiar things to do.

Except it just wasn't the same.

To his chagrin, every time he saw a pretty teenage girl of the roughly thirteen year old variety, he imagined her naked, in the sleeper of Santa's sleigh. Whoever the girl was, she wore Gwyneth's face in his imagination, so it wasn't like he was lusting after barely pubescent teenage girls. But he couldn't keep her out of his mind.

To be fair, he also thought of other elves he'd met on his brief sojourn to the North Pole. Gobelon's frowning face was there, in his brain. Behind it was that pretty statistician's face, staring over the HMFIC's shoulder, saying "Hi, Santa." And the faces of the elves who had pulled him off the sleigh while he was dressed as a paratrooper, and then shoved him back on when he was dressed like Santa. Those faces were clear in his head too. He didn't know their names, but they all stared at him with eyes filled with vivid interest.

Nobody in his real life stared at him that way.

But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that as he passed children on the streets, when he wasn't on post, he knew things about them he shouldn't know.

Such as how little Pietre, an eight year old German boy, had been mean to his sister that very morning, knocking her breakfast off the table and then claiming she had done it herself.

He shouldn't have known Pietre's name.

He shouldn't have known about breakfast.

And he certainly shouldn't have said, "Pietre! Seist Du nett zu deine Schwester, oder du wird auf der Santa Claus die Liste der unartigen Kindern!", which is German for "Pietre! Don't be mean to your sister, or you'll end up on Santa Claus's list of naughty children." He shouldn't have said that ... because Bob didn't speak German.

Or he hadn't before he'd made his Christmas Eve jump.

It wasn't that he couldn't think of anything else. It wasn't that at all. It was just that things Santa kept intruding into his normal life.

It was six months later that the final straw fell on the camel's back, the straw that would eventually break Bob.

It started when he asked a girl named Melanie out on a date. She was a sergeant who worked at the Army Post Office. He had tried, one night, to blot out Gwyneth's image from his mind while he masturbated, and think of someone else. It hadn't worked. He'd gone soft. Instead of emptying his balls that night, he filled his stomach. With peppermint schnapps. And he'd been late to formation the next morning.

When a squad leader is late to formation, things don't go well. True, he was only thirty seconds late, but when the first sergeant bellows, "Fall in," then approximately thirty seconds later, there should be no movement of any kind in the ranks. And Bob arrived thirty seconds after that. His assistant squad leader had taken his place in the formation, of course, so all he had to do was step into the last position in the line of men that was his squad. If you've never been in the Army that might not sound all that terrible.

The Army would disagree with you.

In any event, as punishment, Bob was temporarily reassigned from being the Echo Company, Third Platoon, Second Squad leader ... to mail boy for a week.

That's how he met Melanie.

And when they went on their date, and she decided she liked Staff Sergeant Robert Collins quite a bit, she also decided to grace him with a blow job. Melanie liked giving blow jobs. You couldn't get pregnant from a blow job. And she knew how to give herself an orgasm much better than anyone else, so self-induced orgasms were just fine with her.

That last straw drifted down onto the camel's back when she pulled off of Bob's softening cock, sighed happily and spoke.

"Wow! I've never had anybody's cum taste like eggnog before."

What would you do?

What could you do?

It's not like you can request leave and hop on a flight to the North Pole.

And even if you could, what would you do when you got there? After you found Gwyneth, of course.

Would you go to Gobelon and beg him to do something?

Was there already a new Santa who might be approached and asked to do some kind of magic to take it all out of Bob's mind?

Could Santa do that?

Could anybody?

In any case, the only person Bob could approach about all this was an Army psychiatrist. It was easy to get a mental health appointment. All you had to do was use the magic word "depressed" and people sent you on sick call immediately. If you used the other even more magic word "suicide" then they went with you on sick call immediately.

But Bob was pretty sure how things would turn out if he told the Army psychiatrist - any psychiatrist, for that matter - what was bothering him. He'd lose more than just his squad. His career would go in the toilet. He might even get kicked out of the Army.

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The Bob Claus

Lubrican

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