Knuckles had no idea what he was fighting for. Someone might have told him, some old man with a southern drawl and an expensive uniform, but if they had the echidna hadn't been listening. If there was an answer to why he had to trudge his boots through rice paddy after rice paddy, watching his platoon shrink with every detonated landmine, it would definitely be half-assed. But that was just fine. He didn't need any other excuse to kill gooks beside the obvious one: it was fun.
The thought made him chuckle under his breath. Knuckles looked over to his left; the squad's medic squinted down at the rectangle pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
Fuck, he's smiling again.
Knuckles knew the routine when it came that smug, spectacled bastard. The red rodent shoved the medic with his shoulder, grabbing the rectangle out of his boney nerd fingers. He fell right onto his geek ass, trying to take stock of what happened.
"Fuck you man. Get you mitten off my personal shit," the medic said as he stood back up.
Knuckles lifted the crinkled mess of wet paper in front of his squinting eyes. A PlayHog magazine: he recognized the magazine instantly from his youth. Many a night were spent soiling his briefs to the sinful pleasures of its pages. He suddenly took notice of the bulge in the medic's pants, and the fluid covering the book's pages which clearly wasn't water. But his moment of platonic heterosexual admiration was ruined by the slender model on the front page.
"Rouge…" Knuckles gasped under his breath. He scrunched his brow down in anger, a manly tear escaping from his masculine cornea. He remembered her: the love they'd shared, the nights of passion behind the Burger King Cashier counter, her betrayal. Her breasts were just as he remembered them, round and tanned like the heads of Latino babies. The photo didn't the rest of her any justice.
"You always were a whore. Now you look the part."
"Oh yeah, I keep forgetting that you had a love thing with her," the medic said with a smirk.
"Fuck off dweeb!"
"Alright bro calm down my dude"
Knuckles crumpled up the magazine in his hands out of anger and looked around the jungle with his angry red eyes. His platoon had stopped in the middle of a rice paddy. Asian women and children stood bent over in the field wearing those cone hats on their head. Knuckles approached a young boy and pulled him up by his shoulders. The echidna shoved the wet paper ball into the kid's hands.
"You take this kid. Get some use out of it but don't rub too hard."
The boy looked down at the wet ball of porn in his palm, and his gaze wandered up to meet the echidna's eyes. Knuckles drew back in disgust as the minor's hand flew down through his waistband to his crotch bulge.
"Jesus, what the fuck do you think you're doing," Knuckles yelled as he shielded his eyes and turned his back to walk away. Unbeknownst to him, what he passed off as an innocently sexual wiener clutch was truly a sinister act, as a grenade sat tucked comfortably below his prepubescent scrotum.
An explosion of pure fire and explosives. The damn kid had pulled the pin and blown himself to smithereens. The women and the children stood up in response to the blast, revealing their AK-47s and M1 carbines. Knuckles threw himself onto his stomach and started crawling through the grass. Bullets whistled overhead and soldiers fell to the ground like raindrops made of men with bullet holes in them. Knuckles pulled out his custom made double-barreled desert eagle and fired blindly into the distance. The Vietnamese hid themselves well amongst the brush, their scrawny bodies serving as perfect camouflage. The women and children ran amuck, disorienting knuckles platoon with a screech similar to the quetzal bird native to the mountains of Central America. They lived in the rainforest and fed on insects and lizards. Big woman pulled out a mortar from behind her farming wagon, firing it right at the echidnas face. Knuckles clenched his eyes and prepared to meet his mama up in heaven but nothing ever happened. He peered out threw his fingers to see a massive blue blur hurtling the missile back at the Vietnamese, roasting them into black skeletons. The remaining hostile Asians began firing at the blue blur but failed to land a single hit. The streak came to a crashing hault, skidding and sending dirt flying towards his attackers which jammed their guns so they could not shoot their guns at him. It was a blue hedgehog wearing a dark green flak jacket, aviator sunglasses, and spotless red sneakers.
"I love the smell of gun smoke in the morning," the hedgehog said with a smirk and a succulent sniff. The hostile crowd sprayed him with thousands of bullets, unloading all of their clips, but the hedgehog moved his fingers at ultra-speed and caught every single one in his hand.
"Sorry fellas all is fair in love and war but mostly war you know what I'm talking about?" the mysterious warrior said with infinite spunk. He proceeded to twirl his arm at maximum speed, hurling the bullets back at his enemies like that one scene from the Matrix. Performing an epic triple backflip, the blue savior snatched the rice hat off a lady's head, throwing it like a Frisbee. It flew across the field, ricocheting off of trees and slices the remaining charlies' heads off.
"Sorry to steal the show big fella," the blue warrior lifted Knuckles by the shoulder, "Just thought you could use some help. Name's Sonic by the way."
"Who the hell let you onto the battlefield you reckless son of bitch! I had it all under control before you started your acrobatics routine!"
"Somebody's in our sour mood. Is this the thanks I get?"
"You could've killed us all with those stupid stunts you just pulled." Sonic scoffed at Knuckles attempt to scold him.
"I think it's a little wait to be worried about your buddies getting killed."
The red echidna looked around him and saw his fellow footman splattered all over the ground. Knuckles brushed teeth and blood vesicles and capillary tubes and such off his chest. Knuckles tracked down the remains of his best friend, Private Joe Conseco, and picked up his severed hand with his wedding ring still on it.
"His family will want this back," Knuckles packed it into his military backpack.
"And you might want to give this one back to the wife," Sonic joked, wiggling the dead man's severed and flaccid member between his fingers. Knuckles was about to shout at the disrespectful boy before he hear gunfire echoing in the jungle canopy. An armada of fully-grown Vietcong commies came running out of the woods at lightning speed. Sonic scooped Knuckles onto his back and ran away. Sonic thought that sometimes it was okay to run away as long as you weren't cowardly about it. Knuckles held on to Sonic's body and back as hard as he could while the hedgehog was running. Knuckles made sure to avoid his friend's inappropriate parts like the groin, thighs, and breasts. The ride was very uncomfortable because Knuckles kept getting stabbed by the big spikes on Sonic's head and back. The two survivors approached a helicopter that was prepared to take off.
"Tails! Start the engines and get us outta here!" Sonic yelled. The Vietnamese jumped were not far behind them as the helicopter began to lift off the ground. Sonic leapt up into the air like a majestic dolphin flipping out of the ocean if the ocean was made out of bullets being fired by guns. Sonic and Knuckles landed in the passenger seat and buckled their seatbelts.
"Hang on," Tails screeched, "I've got a crazy idea!" Tails jerked the wheel to the left, throwing the helicopter onto its side. The big blades sliced all the Vietnamese and vegetation in their way, showering blood all over the place like a dog caught in a lawnmower. The three boys now flew safely in the air. Knuckles, recovering from shock, could not believe what he'd just seen. Sonic had to be the craziest soldier he had ever met, and that was saying something.
"You have got to be the craziest soldier I have ever met, and that is saying something."
"All in a day's work, big boy," Sonic looked down at his sneakers. "Aw shit. I got blood all over these. Remind me to clean them when we get back to the base, okay Tails?"
"Why did you come to this part of the jungle anyway?" Knuckles asked.
"General Atkinson sent me here. He told me about a tough, young Mobian who was stuck leading a bunch of incompetent chumps. Sounded to me like you'd be a perfect recruit for our little project. You see, we're putting together a team…"
