biphobia

[pinboy3niner]

52. I love you too, Aerows

For me, PB&J sandwiches were always good to have while reading a book. After I lost my mom, I'd cut them the way she did when I was a kid. Sort of my way of remembering and feeling close to her, I think.

My username comes from a different connection--it was my last radio callsign in Vietnam. Mom figured there, too, in the letters and packages she sent, with things like chocolate chip cookies and Swiss Miss cocoa--all packed in popcorn, since we didn't have styrofoam peanuts then.

That Swiss Miss cocoa from home was a godsend on the night I turned 21 in Vietnam. We'd been sent out to the A Shau Valley to secure an artillery battery that had been flown there for a quick fire mission, but we got socked in by fog and couldn't be extracted for three days.

Once the artillery fired, everybody in the valley knew exactly where we were, and we spent the next days and nights expecting to be overrun. I was convinced I was going to die on my 21st birthday.

That night, I pulled out the Swiss Miss packages mom had sent me. We'd run out of water and I wasn't about to send a detail down on a suicidal mission to get more, so I used the water from the bomb craters everybody had been pissing in since we got there. I boiled it a little longer than usual.

We somehow didn't get hit, and we enjoyed the best cocoa--and the best birthday--I ever had in my life. Thanks to mom.