Mark Fossie

  Mark Fossie was a medic assignment. Mark Fossie explained how he'd set the system up. It was expensive, he admitted, and the logistics were complicated, but it wasn't like going to the moon. Cleveland to Los Angeles, LA to Bangkok, Bangkok to Saigon. He'd hopped a C-130 up to Chu Lai and stayed overnight at the USO and the next morning hooked a ride west with the resupply chopper.

Mary Anne Bell and Mark Fossie had been sweethearts since grammar school. From the sixth grade on they had known for a fact that someday they would be married, and live in a fine gingerbread house near Lake Erie, and have three healthy yellow-haired children, and grow old together, and no doubt dies in each other's arms and is buried in the same walnut casket. That was the plan. They were very much in love, full of dreams, and in the ordinary flow of their lives, the whole scenario might well have come true.

On the first night they set up house in one of the bunkers along the perimeter, near the Special Forces hootch, and over the next two weeks, they stuck together like a pair of high school steadies. It was almost disgusting, the way they mooned over each other. Always holding hands, always laughing over some private joke. All they needed, were a couple of matching sweaters.

Mark Fossie was busted to PFC, shipped back to a hospital in the States, and two months later received a medical discharge.