I grew up in a rural New England town. It was not so much a farming community though there certainly were a number of farms in our town. Most families had large plots of land that was mostly woods and ours was no different. We had about 60 acres, a little more than average for our town and about three acres were cleared. The nearest neighbor was maybe a quarter mile down the road. The school bus stopped at every house where a kid lived and still was less than half full when we got dropped off at school. The few kids there were all knew each other and hung out with each other regardless of age differences since there just weren't enough kids of any particular age to be age exclusive. So I tended to hang out with a slightly older group of boys when I was 12. I was something of a pervert and sex fiend and was only able to relate to the older boys. The other kids closer to my age were only interested in collecting baseball cards, playing stick ball, street hockey and fishing. I was interested in sex, sex and more sex despite the fact was that the closest I had come to haveing sex was jacking off to photographs in National Geographic.
So after reading that first sentence at the top you are probably wondering if I was lieing when I said this story was not about sex and I am not lying, it is not about sex. I am only telling you why I was hanging out with boys that were older.
We used to hang out mostly at an intersection of two long lonely winding country roads, one dirt the other recently paved for the first time. Pretty much all the teen aged boys in a two mile radius hung out at what we called the four corners and we would talk about girls mostly and I would listent to there exploits not realizing most of it was made up.
Talking about girls was not our sole activity just our most popular one. We were bored to the point of insanity and were frequently into all manner of mischief which brings me to the point of my story. It was the summer of 1960 and most of the time when you saw a movie it was in a movie theater or a drive-in They had movies on TV but not that often and mostly older movies. But there was this movie that had been on recently and it showed a trick that the French underground or somebody used, it was a gorilla war tactic, running a wire accross the road to knock people off motorcycles or bicycles and even occasionally a car with the windshield down (yes in those days some vehicles had windshields that folded down.
So while we were talking about his particular neat trick one of the older boys sugested that just for kicks we try something like that. So we all got on our bikes and rode to his house where we got some fishing line and went back to the four corners and ran a fishing line accross the road to see what happened. Now old country roads in the 60s didn't see much trafic. In fact we had to wait nearly an hour just for a car to come buy and the only people who would be on bicycles were already there. Finally one car came barrelling down the road and simply snapped the line without so much as a notice and we decided that it would not work for cars. But we were hopeful.
We kept trying and still only cars came down the road and of course each time simply snapped the line as it went by. This would happen maybe 3 or 4 times over the course of the long summer afternoon and we did this every day for a few weeks. It became a running joke as we all simply hid in the woods and sat around on an old stone wall hidden from whoever might drive by.
Then one day finally a guy came by on a motorcycle and we thought for sure this was our chance. With blood lust in our desperately bored hearts we watched drooling in anticipation like a pack of whily Coyotes after the road runner only to be disapointed when the guy on his Harely just drove right on through not even noticing the fishing line as he sputtered down the dusty dirt road.
So after some brain storming we thought that perhaps the problem was we were using 10 lb test fishing line that would barely stop a carp let alone a biker. So we got a spool of stronger fishing line and after a few weeks of experementation we had our eureka moment. Our first success was a little girl, about 10 who ran right into the line and sliced into her neck knocking her right off the bike. It didn't kill her but she crawled on the ground for about 20 minutes while we watched and laughed our asses off at her pitiful sight then a car came by finally and the guy got out and picked her up. We recognized the girl as somebody who lived on the road but none of us really knew her. We also recognized the driver who lived in the area as well but likewise we really didn't know him either. We kept in the woods stifling our laughter when he stopped to help her and he drove off. We didn't heare anything about the matter further but after he drove off we thought it wise to retrieve the evidence and move to a different hang out spot.
A couple of weeks went by and we thought about our success with the fishing line and started to get that blood lust again and decided to give it another shot. So near our new location we ran another fishing line, doubled up for strength and this time it only took three days for the right victim to come along.
This time it was another biker, a rare sight in our neck of the woods so two in one summer was a lot. Like most Harleys this one had no windshield. I know that a lot of Jap bikes had windshields and still do and police bikes have them but not your typical Harley. We heard that sputtering sound in the distance and ran behind an old stone wall (no not the same one as before, in New England the entire landscape is covered with stone walls going back to the 1700s) and hid and watched in anticipation. If we were lucky we would see him knocked off his bike. Well I supose it was the right amount of line this time because despite the fact he was going at a decent clip he got knocked right off the bike. The bike kept going for a few hundred feet more and ran right into a tree and broke apart with a tire rolling maybe another hundred feet. Bike parts were all over the road. The biker had his throat slashed from the fishing line and was laying there unconcious blood all over. At first we thought it was the coolest thing until we got up close and saw the blood. I vomited right there on the road next to him and then we all just ran like bats out of hell through the woods for nearly two miles till we came back out near my house and we all broke up and went our seperate ways.
My dad read to us an article in the newspaper about a biker who had been hit by a hit and run driver and died at the hospital. So there you have it. We killed him. It was a few days before we got back together, this time at our old hang out at the four corners and we compared notes. None of us had been questioned by the police and nobody had heard from anyone about what happened other than what we read in the paper which was that a motorist came upon the dead biker and drove into town to a pay phone to call an ambulance who found the biker and took him to the hospital where he later died. The police said it looked like he was run off the road by a hit and run driver. In 1960 they were not that sophisticated so nobody ever came a knocking though for a few weeks we were a bit shook up and did not repeat the fishing line stunt again.
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The next summer when I was 13 three of the boys in our little gang had turned 16 and had cars. Even though I was a young hanger-on they considered me cool enough to hang out with them. so between the three that had cars our entire 7 boy gang, me being the youngest started cruising. In rural towns there is not much to cruise. We had one main intersection in the center of town where there was our one and only trafic light. At that corner was the town hall, library, church and a general store. Nearby were the other meager businesses of the town along with an elementary/junior high school (k-8). The older kids attended a high school in the town next door because our town was not big enough for one of our own. That meant they got up early and got home late. But this was summer again and we were looking for fresh mischief to enterain ourselves with.
There was a part of town where there were miles of corn fields and one old dirt road that was damned near straight as an arrow. We simply called it the strip, as in drag strip. Now as I said it was corn fields, not a strip like the one in Vegas. Absolutely nothing but a straight strip of dirt road lined with corn stalks. There was just enough room for two cars side by side and this was where older teens would race their hot rods. Now only one of the cars in our little gang was really decent enough to race. It was an old Ford that could just barely do a buck-ten down hill but we were kids and it was the thrill of racing that got us excited, that and the prospect of watching somebody crash which did occasionally happen.
So one day that summer like many we spent mostly watching other kids in the area drag racing that sport turned to games of chicken. Now I think most people know what that is but I will summarize for thos who don't. Chicken is when two drivers race towards each other as though they were going to crash head on to see which one would turn chicken and pull off to the right and avoid hitting the other. The first person to "chicken-out" lost. Since I was still too young to drive I satisfied myself watching the others secretly, ok not so secretly, hoping to see a really bloody crash.
So the game of chicken went on for maybe two hours and it would be dark in an hour or so and I desperately wanted to see a head on crash like the rest of us did. Nearly every interested party had gone at least once and it was planned that those who won their matches would return the next afternoon to see who was the bravest driver. That last to got that evening were the only two girls. They were all saving what we were hoping would be the most entertaining for last. Now, as I said I was too young to drive. I was 13. But that only meant that I did not have my own driver's license or access to my own car. There were others there, not in our little gang, who were as young as me participating in the game of chicken without benefit of license using borowed or posibly stolen cars. The two girls in question were in this later catagory. One was 13 and and a classmate of mine, the other was 14 and was from the town next door and went to high school. Both were driving "borrowed" cars. So they drove down opposite ends of the road and we all stood there in blood lust drooling anticipation of what we all secretly hoped would be a hideous crash. The two girls sped past each other maybe at 80mph and both missed and nobody could tell who won so they were told to go again.
So the girls both turned around and drove to their respective ends of the road and gunned their engines. They both drove much faster this time. We could see two gigantic clouds of dust trailing behind their respective vehicles. The engines screamed loudly as they headed straight for each other.
Now I think at least some who read this will have had at least one experience in their life when something horrific happened and time seemed to slow down when it die. This was such an occasion. It was almost like slow motion in my mind as I watched, as we all watched the two cars slam into each other, probably about 100 miles per hour each with a combined speed of somewhere near 200 miles an hour. Neither girl was wearing their seat belts. Both girls flew threw their windshields, their heads shattering the glass. Both cars were accordianed together so baddly you could not tell where one car ended and the other began. There were body parts all over the road. A tire flew off one fo the cars and rolled down the road killing one 11 year old younger sister of one of the other contestants. I think maybe half a dozen kids got hit by car parts and ended up injured to one degree or another. I just stood transfixed watching that one 13 year old girl go through her windshield and fly into through that of the other car and out its back window in three pieces her head rolling to a stop a few hundred feet down the road. her torso landed on a boy a little older than me knocking him to the ground and her leg ended up in the corn field. I didn't see the other girl's body parts until a short while later. I had never heard so much screaming before and mostly from teenaged boys.
Well that pretty much ended the sport of chicken in our town. It was inevitable that something like this would happen. I confess that I was excited seeing such carnage up close. This despite the fact that I vomited while staring at a dead torso resting on an unconcious boy. Naturally there was a big investigation. The police questioned every kid at the high school since nearly everyone there went to the high school. They also questioned most of the kids who lived within a couple of miles of where this happened including me. I just told them the truth which was I just hung out there to watch and was too young to participate. They interegated me some more but eventually figured I was telling them the truth. Some of the kids ended up going to reform school for a while but the rest just got off with a warning.
Well even though nobody in our little gang got hurt we decided not to play such games again. The summer before was thrilling but we all felt a little guilty about killing that biker. This time we realized that we could be killed, not me specifically since I was not in any of the cars during the games but I was there and part of the gang and I agreed, it was fun to watch but not to participate. Even if they could get away with reprising the chicken games which they did not, we could not show without participating lest we be labeled chickens so no more chicken games.
The older boys all graduated from high school, a couple going off to college and the rest getting jobs, only one moved away from town and I never heard from him again. Then I became one of the older boys in our little gang which had dwindled down to five and had recruited younger members. We never officially named our gang though sometimes we called ourselves the four corners boys.
Then came Vietnam. Those of us who went off to college were drafted and became officers. Those of us who didn't were drafted and became enlisted. We all ended up in the army.
I got hooked up with a pretty nasty bunch of grunts as the new meat replacement for one who was killed the week before. I was scared shitless and married to my weapon and on the verge of shooting at everything that moved. It was still kind of early in the war and protests were only just begining. Our little patrol, which I thought of as sort of a replacement for the four corners boys, would patrol around from one villege to another looking for VC to root out with nearly no success. We didn't know about the tunnels back then. We just couldn't figure out how they would simply pop up out of no where all of a sudden and fire on us. I was real lucky as the only surviver out of our squad after only three weeks. We kept getting replacements and now as the senior guy, less than two months out of boot camp I was acting corporal ansering to a sergeant with only a little more experience than me. In another month I was acting sergeant leading a squad of fresh meat to a village where we were ambushed. All but one of us survived the ambush which is actually pretty amazing since there had to be thirty VC who attacked us and there were only 12 of us, now 11 but we got every last one of them. We figured the village was in on it and we were so amped up over the ambush that we went berserk and massacred the villege saving the little rug rats for last. Then my corporal got an idea and asked me when was the last time I had some nookie and I said never and he said same for him and we had ourselves a little kid raping party. I don't think there was one over 12 and we did them all, about 20 of them right down to a baby in the arms of it's dead teenaged mother.
Now I promised this was not a sex story and it isnt really except this one part but it isnt really about the sex it was about letting off steam and killing the enemy and satisfying our blood lust.
We spend three days using up those little brats kiling them one by one using different methods. Some strangled, some we hung. some we shot. Some we hacked to pieces and and the baby got raped to death by this 250 lb black guy with a cock big as my arm.
I hung a little boy of about 4 by his balls until he ripped free of his scrotum and then kicked him in the face until he died. We were so pissed off at the entire village for helping the VC ambush us.
Anyway we decided not to tell anyone about any of this not that it mattered. My CO back at base had joked to me that our job was to kill as many VC as possible and by any means possible and there were no exceptions. He had even told me when he pinned the sergeants chevron on me that it was up to me to lead the squad into as much killing as possible. Our job was to put the terro of Satan into their VC hearts by all means necessery. I took him literally. It was unspoken that we had carte blanc to do this the way we wanted.
When I got back from Nam I learned that our entire four corners boys gang had been killed in Nam excluding me and those too young to have yet been drafted. Several more would die in the comming years.
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