the setting until our breathing had regularized. We then kissed and worked each other's bodies with our hands until we were in full rut once more.

Pete pulled me up from the ground and took the army blanket and draped it over the stone altar in the middle of the grove. He then pushed me onto my back on top of the altar, spread my legs wide, and we worshipped the exuberance of our youth and vitality and our healthy, lustful bodies at the altar with merging and rhythmic thrusts and counterthrusts and with me crying my passion to the tops of the swaying pine trees.

In Pete I at last found my escape from the somewhat tedious routine of the Okinawa assignment, but I had hardly found him and started to be introduced to a very active male-male underculture on the island, when my government decided that the North Koreans were just rattling rockets they didn't actually have, and I was on my way east across the Pacific Ocean, leaving Pete and the fascinating Okinawan castles behind.