(AN:
Wow.
Thank you all so much for the reviews for the last chapter. I swear I didn't say that I thought the chapter was crap just so I could get showered with praises; I honestly and truly thought it was crap. And then I get a wave of reviews saying that I'm insane for thinking so. You people must see something in my writing that I don't.
Heck, I'm so grateful I'll name you all again—Skyhiatrist, Shizzle, WLiiAfanatic, Fairy1234, Trixie21, Band Geek 727, yakko's gal, Live2Write4Ever, Faye Lunacorn, that person with no name (ha!), Lilylynn, almostinsane, SashaJay, dArkliTe-sPirit, Aerinsoul, and EvilspyAchacial. Sixteen different reviewers already. I'm really honored. And I thank ALL of you for your kind words. I can't tell you how much they mean to me.
So again, thank you very much. I'm touched. (sniff)
Okay, on with the actual author's note. I'm sorry this chapter is a little late—I've been pretty good about getting a chapter up in one of my stories weekly, but this past weekend I went home and spent quality time with my family, which, of course, takes a little precedence. Ha ha. But I'm back in my dorm now, and I shall bring you chapter five, a la mode! Enjoy!)
O.o.O
"Now, everyone told me that Vietnam was going to be completely different from home, and besides all the beer and barbeques and sweaty guys, IT WAS! There wasn't even any cheese there!" cried Cosmo, sounding horrified, recalling the strange new country.
Cosmo and Timmy, in their army camouflage, jumped out of the helicopter and landed on the strange ground of Vietnam.
"I hear there's really good shrimping here," said Timmy. "Although, not that I would know… I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT SHRIMPING!" And the fully-grown army private broke down and sobbed.
Cosmo blinked. "Timmy, you know way more about shrimp than I do! Then again, you know way more about almost everything than I do!"
"If I can't win my one true love with shrimp, how else will I be able to?" cried Timmy, huge tears leaking out of his eyes.
"Uh… win her with pudding? That's what I always tried!" Cosmo added cheerfully.
"The best way to a woman's heart is through her stomach," said Timmy thoughtfully. "Maybe I can learn how to make a tuna noodle casserole…"
Cosmo suddenly grabbed Timmy by the arm and pulled him off the ground. "Weren't we supposed to… do something important right when we landed."
Timmy's eyes bulged. "Check in with the lieutenant! I forgot! Come on, we'd better hurry!"
It was now Timmy's turn to grab Cosmo by the wrist. Timmy shot off to a small hut, with Cosmo following, half running, half stumbling.
The man who was obviously the lieutenant gave a sneer at the two imbeciles tripping over themselves to go get to him. He was a rather tall, skinny man with thick-framed glasses and thin black hair. "Are you two morons my new recruits?" he asked, almost mockingly.
Timmy and Cosmo immediately straightened up and saluted professionally. "YES, SIR!" they hollered.
"DON'T salute me!" snapped the lieutenant. "Do you know how many snipers there are out there who'd just love to have just one chance to take out a lieutenant like me? Then again, they might have KNOWLEDGE that I am a lieutenant… thanks to the Viet Kong's practice of employing… FAIRY GOD PARENTS!" On the last three words, the lieutenant fell into a fit of spasms, accented on each syllable.
"This guy's a looney!" whispered Cosmo to Timmy. Timmy chuckled.
"Do NOT call your commanding officer a looney!" shrieked the lieutenant. He paused and took a deep breath. "I'm Lieutenant Denzel Crocker," he finally said, nodding at each of them.
Timmy and Cosmo didn't know what else to say to their lieutenant, so they both just nodded back. Crocker looked at Timmy's mouth.
"What's wrong with your teeth?" he snapped.
Timmy's eyes fluttered down to his rather large and conspicuous buckteeth. "I was born with buckteeth, sir," said Timmy finally. "There's nothing I can really do about it—"
"Well, you're going to have to!" snapped Crocker. "Or else you'll get that caught on a trip mine!"
Timmy immediately tried to close his bottom lip over his teeth.
Crocker sighed. "Stare at the board until the lunch bell rings," he finally said, very dryly.
"Huh?" both Timmy and Cosmo asked.
"Oh, sorry!" cried Crocker, shaking himself out of a somewhat funk. "I used to be a second-rate elementary school teacher obsessed with FAIRY GOD PARENTS!"
"But now you're a second-rate lieutenant obsessed with fairy godparents?" Cosmo ventured.
"SILENCE!" hollered Crocker. Timmy and Cosmo paled and took a step back.
Crocker shot another glare at them, then turned around and walked towards another private. "The most important thing that you'll ever own out here is socks," he said to them, but not looking, as he walked on.
"Uh… why not monkeys?" Cosmo asked.
"I said SILENCE!" roared Crocker, spinning around to face them. Timmy and Cosmo had now turned death white.
"Lieutenant Denzel sure knew his stuff!" recalled Cosmo. "And he should have, too! Did you know that someone in his family had died in every—single—American war? I guess you could say he had a lot to live up to… or die up to… saaaay, how would you word that, anyway? Oh well, back to the narrative!"
After chewing out the other poor unfortunate officer, Crocker turned back to Timmy and Cosmo. "There are two standing orders here," he said to them, still giving them that sour, "get the hell away from me" look. "Number one, take good care of your feet—"
"Do you have some sort of foot fetish?" Timmy asked innocently.
"How many times do I have to say SILENCE?!" bellowed Crocker. Timmy turned so pale he was almost invisible.
"Uh… what's the second order?" asked Cosmo, who, too, had turned strangely transparent.
"The second one, which I highly doubt you two will follow, is to try not to do anything stupid… like getting yourself killed… especially by FAIRY GOD PARENTS!" Crocker spazzed his way into the makeshift toilet.
Cosmo blinked at Timmy. "I sure hope I don't let him down," he said finally.
O.o.O
The next few weeks were dominated with constant walking, walking, walking.
And Cosmo had absolutely no clue of what was going on.
"I had absolutely no clue of what was going on," remembered Cosmo. "But it was okay, because I sure got to see a lot of the countryside! And it was… well…" His voice trailed off. "I guess it wasn't always fun," he admitted. "Sometimes, Lieutenant Denzel would get these funny feelings, so he'd tell us to get down, and shut up!"
Crocker, leading his platoon, suddenly threw his arm up in the air, halting his troops. With a swift hand movement, he motioned for them all to hide by the side of the path.
"Get down! Shut up!" he snapped at them.
His troops immediately obeyed.
"Now, you know that I don't know much… so you already know more than me anyway!" laughed Cosmo. His voice suddenly dropped to a whisper, remembering the silence of the troops after Lieutenant Denzel's order. "But I think that some of America's greatest young men served in that war—either that, or I think pudding is tasty. I kinda lost my train of thought there. What was I saying? Oh yeah! There was Chester, from Chicago…"
A rather dirty but still friendly-looking young man with messy blonde hair shot a look of questioning at a black man with a rather large head, seeming to house a very large brain…
"And there was A.J., and he was from Truth or Consequences…"
A.J. shot the look back to Chester and rolled his eyes towards an Indian young man who wore glasses.
"And there was Sanjay, who was from Delhi… waaait, that's not in America! Of course, he might have just been born in a deli. Let's go with that!"
Sanjay, in turn, shot a look to another guy wearing glasses, but who also had en enormous boil on his cheek. "Psst, hey Elmer!" hissed Sanjay in his curious accent. "What's going on?"
Elmer shrugged. "I don't know… do you know, Bob?"
"And Elmer, he was from… well, I don't remember where he was from," said Cosmo. "But he had a boil named Bob. That was really creepy!"
Up at the front of the line, Crocker apparently decided that there was no danger after all. "Alright, on your feet, you miserable little pip-squeaks! This job doesn't pay enough…"
"There was always something to do in Vietnam!"
"Fire in the hole!"
BAAAAMM!
The hole behind Cosmo and Crocker exploded like none other. Cosmo grinned at it once the dust had cleared. "Coo-al!" he cried.
Crocker rolled his eyes. "Uhsmith, you idiot, check out that hole," muttered Crocker, handing Cosmo a pistol (dangerous combination!).
"Yay!" cried Cosmo, practically leaping into the hole.
"One day, it started to rain, and it didn't stop for FOUR MONTHS! Four months of rain!" Cosmo sounded horrified. "It was terrible! It rained… well, every type of rain there is, but I don't want to explain it all, so let's just say that I was ALWAYS wet. ALWAYS! It even rained at night!"
"I can't sleep with all this rain," Cosmo mumbled to himself. It was nighttime and the troops were camped out on the ground—the soaking wet ground. Cosmo huddled up in his poncho in a vain attempt to warm up.
"Hey, Cosmo." Cosmo turned his head to the voice; Timmy was scooting up next to him, wrapped in his own poncho.
"Hey, Timmy," said Cosmo, making no attempt to hide the unhappiness in his voice.
"This stinks, doesn't it?" moaned Timmy.
"Yeah, it smells like stinky feet," said Cosmo.
"Hey, I'll lean up against you, and you can lean up against me, and then we won't have to sleep with our heads in the mud, okay?" offered Timmy.
"Okay!" It was the first good thing that Cosmo had heard that day.
"Hey Cosmo… I've been thinking about something."
"Does it involve shrimp?"
"Well, actually… yes." Timmy's voice suddenly became faster and almost business-like. "So I want to win Trixie's heart, but she won't have me. And you want to win Wanda's heart, but she won't have you. Since we're both in the same boat figuratively, why not be in the same both literally?"
Cosmo blinked. "Uh, I lost you on the word 'so'," he admitted.
"What I'm trying to say is, once we get out of the army, do you want to join the shrimping business with me?"
Cosmo blinked again.
Well. Did he? It wasn't a question he had lied awake thinking of constantly—shrimp was never a big factor on his mind, not the way Wanda, cheese, and monkeys were.
But still… once the war was over, what would he do? He didn't really have any other plans, and shrimping with Timmy might actually be kinda fun.
"Okay!" said Cosmo finally.
"Yay!" cried Timmy in an almost Cosmo-style type of voice. "And I've got it all figured out too. We can just live right on the boat, and split everything fifty-fifty! Once we get rich and prosperous, and when Trixie and Wanda finally open their eyes and see how wonderful we are, we'll marry them and they can live on the boat too! And we can raise families on the boat… and then, like, my son and your daughter could get married and their children would carry on the shrimping tradition! How does that sound?"
"That sounds like a great idea!" cried Cosmo, imagining little crosses between himself, Timmy, Wanda, and Trixie (at least, the vague picture he had of Trixie, as he had obviously never seen her before) running around on a boat, eating shrimp.
"Timmy DID have a great idea!" remembered Cosmo. "I even wrote Wanda about it—although I left out the part about our grandkids, cuz I thought that might scare her. I wrote her all the time—not everyday, but almost. I'd always tell her what I was doing, and how much I wanted some pudding, and all that. And I signed the letters 'love' because, well, I didn't know how else to sign it," said Cosmo finally. "I didn't know how to spell 'sincerely', and besides, 'love' seemed to be the only thing that fit! Well, anyway, back to the story… one day, the rain finally stopped!"
As the troops were trudging through the jungle, the rain, very suddenly… stopped. Cosmo stopped walking for a moment to look up at the suddenly clear sky. So did many of his companions.
A sudden ripping noise shot through the air, as the man next to Cosmo suddenly fell over.
Then all hell broke loose.
"We're being attacked!" Crocker screamed over the bullets and explosions that were filling the air. "I knew it! They tracked us with their FAIRY GOD PARENTS!"
Cosmo instinctively dropped to the ground and crawled to the ditch where the rest of the platoon was firing at will at the unseen enemy.
"We need reinforcements!" Cosmo could hear Crocker screaming on the backpack phone over the endless firing. "We need help! We need FAIRY GOD PARENTS!"
Cosmo turned to look at two of his companions, who were setting up a large gun to fire back—but were suddenly blown away.
"Aaaaah!" he screamed, despite himself.
So this was why Mama didn't want him to join the army…
Crocker pulled the phone he was yelling into away from his ear. "PULL BACK!" he screamed.
"Pull back what?" Cosmo screamed back.
"Run, Cosmo!" It was someone else yelling this time; it was Timmy. "Run!"
And then Cosmo remembered what he had promised Wanda.
"Promise me that, if you're ever in any danger there, don't try to be brave. Just run away, okay?"
And Cosmo jumped up and ran.
And ran.
And ran.
"I ran, and ran, and ran… just like Commander typed!" said Cosmo. "I ran so far, that pretty soon I was all alone, which was not a good thing."
Cosmo was out of the jungle… and he was the only one out of the jungle.
He turned and looked behind him. "Timmy?" he called out in timid dread.
No answer. No response.
Cosmo ran back into the jungle.
"Timmy was my friend! I couldn't just leave him there!" cried Cosmo, the tone in his voice clearly indicating impending doom.
He ran, but this time he was running towards the danger. Towards! But he could just leave Timmy behind. He couldn't leave Timmy to—no, no, Timmy couldn't die. He wouldn't.
Cosmo suddenly heard a moan, and he instinctively spun around and aimed his gun at the person who made the noise—and then lowered it. "Elmer!" he cried out.
There was Elmer, "the boil guy", laying on the ground, with a pained expression on his face.
Cosmo could feel a sob work its way through his throat. He had to find Timmy, and yet he couldn't just leave Elmer here too! Elmer was hurt!
He reached down, and, using all the strength he could muster (now that physical training, from boot camp all the way to high school football, was finally being put to good use… that is, other than beating up people who hurt Wanda), hoisted Elmer up on to his shoulders and stumbled his way out of the jungle and to the beach area that he had found earlier.
"Hey, thanks—OUCH!" cried Elmer as Cosmo dropped him on the ground. Cosmo didn't even reply. He spun around and ran straight back into the jungle.
"I kept running back and forth… every time I went in there, I heard somebody saying, 'Help me, Cosmo! Help me!' So I did… I pulled out Elmer, and Sanjay, and Chester, and A.J., and a bunch of other people… but I started to get scared that I might never find Timmy at all!"
Cosmo was starting to feel exhausted, but he was pushing threw the jungle again, looking for his friend—and suddenly tripped and fell flat on his face.
He gasped in horror when he saw what he had tripped on, or rather who—it was the form of one of his buddies, Vincent. At least, it might have been Vincent. His face was so blown apart, it was hard to tell.
"I'm tellin' ya, they're all over this place! The only way to get rid of 'em is to blow them all to smithereens! Either that or wish for them to go away with our FAIRY GOD PARENTS, but we don't have them, do we?"
Cosmo fell to the ground and grabbed Crocker's shoulders. "Lieutenant Denzel, Vincent's dead!"
"I KNOW he's dead; my whole Goddamn platoon has been wiped out!" shrieked Crocker.
"Not all of them!" cried Cosmo. "I've saved some of them, and I'll save you too!" With that, he lifted Crocker into the air.
"Put me down, God dammit, leave me here! That's an order!" cried Crocker.
Cosmo usually obeyed the orders given to him by his commanding officer, but not this time. He continued to head in the direction of the beach, despite Crocker's protests.
"I said, you freaking moron, leave me here! Get out of here and leave me be!"
"And then… it felt like something just jumped up and bit me!" cried Cosmo in recollection.
"Ow!" cried Cosmo, stumbling and falling to the ground, still holding Crocker. "Something bit me!"
Crocker pulled out his gun and began firing at… something. "You son of a—"
"Hey!" cried Cosmo, struggling back to his feet and continuing taking Crocker to safety.
In no time, he was on the beach where all the other men he had rescued were. Cosmo deposited Crocker on the ground and turned to go back to the jungle, but Crocker grabbed him by the collar and jerked him down.
"I didn't ask you to pull me out of there!" he cried.
Cosmo tried to pull away from his grasp.
"Where the hell do you think you're going!" cried Crocker.
"To find Timmy," said Cosmo.
"I've got an air strike coming in there that's gonna nuke the entire area! You stay here and that's an order!"
"I've gotta find Timmy!" screamed Cosmo, finally pulling out of Crocker's grasp and running back into the jungle.
Air strike? Nuke? Whatever the heck that meant, it sure didn't sound good.
His running had turned to a forced quick walk by now. He stopped by a tree and panted, trying to catch his breath… oh God, he could hardly breathe! And yet every second wasted could mean the matter of life and death!
"Cosmo…"
Cosmo spun around and there, lying on the ground, was…
"Timmy!" Cosmo gasped in relief. He had found him, finally, finally! He knelt down to pick him up… and noticed the dried leaves that Timmy was clutching to his chest. They were wet and red.
Timmy noticed Cosmo looking at the leaves. "I'm okay, Cosmo…" he said in a terribly weak voice.
Cosmo pulled the leaves off of Timmy's chest and saw, bored into his chest, a hole leaking blood.
"Oh, Timmy…" Cosmo knew that, although he didn't know all that much, that was a pretty serious wound there.
"No, really, I'm alright…" Timmy's eyes fluttered and his limbs shook involuntarily.
Cosmo pulled Timmy up off the ground and, drained though he was, started back on the familiar trek back to the beach.
With each step he seemed to get faster, and faster, all the while the whirring on helicopters and planes above him…
That must be the air strike! thought Cosmo.
And when he felt the heat of an explosion not too far from him, he realized what the air strike must do.
So he ran faster.
Finally, somehow, he reached the beach and fell to his knees, still holding Timmy.
"If I'd have known that this would be the last time I was ever gonna talk to Timmy, I'd have thought of something better to say," recalled Cosmo sadly.
Panting, Cosmo looked straight at Timmy. "Hey… Timmy."
"…Hey Cosmo…. Cosmo? Why did this happen?"
"What, you mean the war, or you getting shot?"
Timmy grimaced in pain and grief. "Both."
"And then, Timmy said something I'll never forget…"
"Cosmo?... I wanna go home…"
Cosmo's face crumpled into a grimace too as he watched Timmy's breathing become more and more labored.
"Timmy was my best friend besides Wanda…" Cosmo remembered, trying to choke back tears, "and even I know that that's not something you can find just lying around! He wanted to be a shrimp boat captain, marry Trixie, and start that whole shrimping empire… but instead, he died right there on that beach in Vietnam."
O.o.O
(AN: Well… I didn't like this chapter, again, but this time I sorta have an excuse—I'm not used to writing a war story, even just a single war chapter. It's not something I have first-hand knowledge of! (Then again, neither is love, but that hasn't stopped me from writing about it.) So I'm sorry that I pulled off another sucky chapter. I think it should be easier for me to write next chapter though, so let's keep our fingers crossed! Thanks for reading, and see you next chapter!)