The Angels of Bataan

Ronnie smiled with relief and said, "That's up to your dad."

I looked into those unreal grey eyes and said, "Veronica Chase, will you marry me?" It just popped out of my mouth. I REALLY gotta work on my impulse control!!

You could rightly say that proposal was reckless and foolhardy, given that Ronnie and I had never had one romantic moment together. Nevertheless, it had been three years in the making. So, it wasn't unjustified.

The courtship had been long and arduous, and we had overcome an incredible amount of misunderstanding and adversity. But you know who you're dealing with when you go through hell with somebody, and Veronica Chase was the only woman for me.

I had longed for her strength and wisdom since liberation day - February 3rd, 1945. That date was etched on my heart. And she had come 7,000 miles to reunite with me, so there must have been something there. Ronnie gave me a sassy smile and said, "I thought you'd never ask!!"

Then she threw herself into my arms, and we kissed with feelings fueled by a year and a half of separation. It felt like the final piece of the puzzle had clicked into place and my soul was finally complete.

Naturally, my pre-teen daughter said, "Ewwww."

Ronnie's delay in getting back was easily explained. The Army didn't let her out of their clutches until February of '46 and by that point she just assumed that I had moved on. The Paramount visit had been filmed in January, just before Ronnie mustered out.

I asked her about the guy she was paired with in the picture, and she said, "His name was Tom. I didn't catch his last name. He was an extra in Sioux City Sue, dumber than dirt, and his breath stank."

I said incredulously, "You mean you never had a fling with him?"

She laughed and said sardonically, "He made a pass. But I'd already given my heart to a Manila playboy - even if he DID live seven thousand miles away and I thought I'd never see him again."

Then she stepped back and surveyed me with those incredible grey eyes. She said sincerely, "There was just too much to overcome. You were here, and I was there, and I knew there was a big social gap between us once you got out of that camp. I didn't think you would remember me...."

She added, "Then I saw the ad in the LA Times, and I knew right away what you were thinking," Ronnie always had that eerie ability to read my mind. She continued, "Dieter was the contact, so I wrote him, and he arranged my passage on the next flight to Manila."

She got a playful look and added, "Apparently, you'd been unburdening yourself to him about your feelings for a certain scrub nurse."

*****

Our engagement lasted precisely three days. That was the length of time it took me to get a priest from Our Lady of Guadalupe. The guy knew that I was a barbarian. But he married us without the banns. It never hurts to hedge your bets if you live on the charity of others and a lot of money flowed downhill from my pocketbook to that shrine.

Ronnie slept in the bedroom next to mine for the first two nights. That was because Missy still had difficulty sleeping. My kitten was perfectly normal during the day. But she couldn't keep the horrors of Santo Tomas out of her head at night. As a result, she had always slept in the same room as I did.

Nevertheless, she was also old enough to know that a mom and dad slept together. So, she insisted on swapping rooms with Ronnie when we married.

It was poignant, really. Little girls need strong female role models, and Missy idolized Ronnie. Her request to sleep by herself was her touching attempt to show Ronnie she could be just as brave as she was. In that respect then, the door to the next room opened for my dear little daughter and she was determined to walk through it with grace and courage.

The fact that Ronnie both understood and assisted her in making that walk was further proof of the love of my life's commitment to us. I mean, seriously!! Devoting your wedding night to helping a poor little girl adjust to her changed circumstance was just so prototypically Ronnie.

We might have come together by different paths. But nurture always trumps nature, and as odd as it might seem, we were already a family. Hence, there was a whirlwind of activity in Missy's new room while the wedding went on outside.

Then, when it was time for Missy to go to sleep, we both took her down the hall to a newly painted pink fantasy, whimsically decorated with unicorns and rainbows and featuring a four-poster bed that was fit for a princess.

I'd given my Kitten a stuffed bunny rabbit to sleep with after we moved out of the camp. We called him "Honey-Bunny the Healing Bunny." I told her to hug him any time she felt the fear returning. Missy was clutching Honey Bunny tightly to her chest as we put her to bed that night. But my brave little Kitten loved us both, and she wanted us to be happy.

Now it was our turn. We shared a glass of red wine on the veranda, watching the ship lights out on Manila Bay. We were both nervous.

Okay!! I realize how ridiculous that might sound. The number of women I'd been with was somewhere in the several dozens, and by her admission, beautiful Ronnie had cut a swath through the entire U.S. Army Air Force. I mean, anybody who could land Giles Pemberton had to be remarkable.

In addition, the two of us had lived in close quarters in the most challenging circumstances for over three years. So, nerves should have been the furthest thing from either of our minds. But the fact was that the stakes were too high.

Sexual intimacy is the way married couples build and reinforces their bond. Hence, good sex underwrites the marital situation notwithstanding anything else that you might do together as a couple. That's why fidelity is so important. Our problem was that we had never been in a place where we were able to express physical desire for each other.

We knew the other person checked all the boxes for an ideal mate. We shared the same values and beliefs, all of which had been tried and proven in the fiery crucible of Santo Tomas. We could trust each other unconditionally, and we'd supported each other through thick and thin. But desire is either there or it isn't. It's innate. And we had no experience in that realm.

Even if we had been able to spend time alone in that awful place, a hot shower and a satisfying meal would take precedence over a hot night in bed. Particularly given the final thousand calorie diet we were living on. So, tonight was the first night we would explore the physical side of our relationship.

The silvery light of the full tropical moon lit the room through the open French doors. Ronnie prepared for sex by simply taking off her dress and undergarments. She was a tough Army nurse, not a frilly nightgown girl.

As she did that, she carefully folded each item and painstakingly placed it on the chair on her side of the bed. It was clearly a habit she'd gotten into to preserve her things while in captivity. But it was the sexiest thing I had ever seen.

That was mainly due to the fact that Nurse Veronica Chase had the kind of body that the classical artists from the Greeks to the Renaissance loved to immortalize. In Ronnie's case, the artist who would have captured her best is Peter Paul Rubens. That's because Ronnie was built like a fertility goddess, and she had no hang-ups whatsoever about nudity.

My new wife had wide hips, a miniscule waist, and substantial round breasts, giving her a Rubenesque appearance. I mean... if female sexual attractiveness is related to their perceived ability to propagate the species, Ronnie looked like she could do the job single-handedly.

She had gone from her usual 118 pounds to a skeletal seventy-five in captivity. She'd gained back thirty of it. So, she didn't look emaciated anymore. But there wasn't an ounce of fat on her.

Her flanks were muscular and shapely, and her stomach was flat. The roundness of her body was offset by slim tapered legs that were a bit longer than average and gave her an almost coltish appearance.

She glanced at me like she couldn't understand what I was gawping at. Then she cupped one big full breast and said, "Oh, these... They're all yours - along with the rest of me."

Then she just laid herself down in bed and looked at me expectantly. It was the exact opposite of Margarita's melodramatic approach to the act, but it was Ronnie to a "T."

Ronnie was unselfconsciously all-woman. Sex to her was just nurturing in another form. It was an expression of personal giving. Margarita was a selfish and narcissistic child. She had overwhelming needs, and sex was a theatrical production designed to highlight her control over the situation.

Ronnie made her body available to me as means of emphasizing her commitment to me. She was underscoring the exclusivity of our union. Even so, sex was also something she enjoyed. That was obvious because she looked at me intently and said, "What are you waiting for?"

I had been standing there simply admiring her beauty, so hard, yet soft, vulnerable but strong. I quickly shucked my clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor. I didn't have Ronnie's exquisite self-discipline.

I lay beside her, resting my head on one arm as I admired her big, beautiful tits. Guys love boobs - no matter what they tell you, ladies. It's like a woman's version of, "Size doesn't matter." Ronnie's were not so much pendulous as full and rounded on her chest - with prominent pink nipples. I lightly stroked the nearest one, the nipple grew outrageously, and Ronni sighed with pleasure.

You develop a particular image of a person as you get to know them, and my perceptions of nurse Veronica Chase had nothing to do with sexual abandonment. She was a woman of calm resolve and strict self-discipline. As a result, I had no idea whether she would be able to let herself go in the way one must in order to enjoy the act.

That was clearly a misperception on my part. The woman in bed with me was already well down the road to being turned on. That was when it dawned on me that I was the problem. Because of our experience together, I had gotten an overdeveloped sense of Ronnie's controlled persona and that perception was getting in the way of me just dipping into my usual aggressive bag of tricks.

I mean... I just went for the goods in the case of every other female, and it was immaterial whether they came along with me -- as long as I got MY cookies. Looking at Ronnie lying there in the moonlight, with her gorgeous boobs rising and falling, I just couldn't bring myself to try any of my usual, generally disrespectful stunts to fire up a woman.

So instead of diving directly for Ronnie's hoo-ha, I stroked her silky arms and the tops of her thighs and watched her face as those powerful eyes clouded with lust. She uttered an undecipherable word grabbed me by the back of the head and dragged me down to a steamy open-mouth kiss. It was no peck on the lips. This was the first passion we had ever shared, and it was worth the wait. Because this woman was evolving into a wildcat.

Nurse Veronica Chase was one complex person. The naked female I was kissing was no longer the competent and disciplined angel of mercy I'd known over the past four years. Ronnie's mouth was wide and lush, it was almost the first thing I'd noticed about her, and it was hot and seeking. There was clearly a molten core beneath her disciplined surface.

What you saw was what you got with Margarita... She was a selfish creature, put on this earth to please herself. She might marry and even have kids. But she had no depth or artifice. She was always simple and egocentric and tragically, she would become irrelevant once she lost her sexual allure.

Ronnie would be significant until her dying day. She'd proven that beyond any doubt in the thirty-seven months that we'd spent in that godforsaken hellhole. But she was also capable of fulfilling a more basic and fundamental role. The girl really knew how to fuck.

That shouldn't be remarkable because Ronnie was both beautiful and intelligent... and she had been around the block a few times. But it was so contrary to the woman I had known and maybe idealized that it made me pause. Ronnie, who was always perfectly attuned to me, brought herself back from her descent into mindless passion and said concerned, "What's wrong?"

My feelings for her found another, much higher gear and I said, "I was just marveling. You are an amazing woman in so many ways."

She gave me an exasperated look, one that I hadn't seen since our early days together, and said, "I'm happy you feel that way Erik. But I need you to fuck me, not stare at me like an infatuated teenager."

Now THAT was the Ronnie I knew!! My God that woman understood me!!

Challenge accepted!! This creature was no longer the best scrub nurse in the Philippines. She was my mate, the one person on this earth I should be utterly intimate with. I turned off my pesky mind and all of the old instincts kicked in. It would be the biological imperative now.

I took a little time to map her body. I needed to find out how all of Ronnie's hot buttons worked. You have to do that. Because every woman is unique and every one of them responds differently.

I dove back in for one more steamy kiss while my hand went seeking her little man in the boat. When I reached my target, it was very hot and wet. She grunted and bucked once, and said dreamily, "Mmmmm, good boy!"

Her eyes were screwed tight as she writhed under my ministrations. Then she lapsed into the sort of radical breathing you would typically associate with an Olympic sprint event. My wife had a deep rib cage, which was one of the reasons why her boobs were so prominent. It expanded and contracted dramatically as her breasts rose and fell.

When my fingers entered her sacred gates, she gave a high-pitched whimper of need, spread her legs, and elevated her hips to allow greater access. The female pheromones and the exotic sensations of exploring a person I considered my most faithful friend and companion blew my mind. There would be no more jejune ruminating about the history and meaning of our relationship. I was going to breed this bitch!!

Ronnie had already worked herself up to a frenzy by the time I'd rolled between her widely spread thighs and inserted myself into her hot and churning tunnel. If I'd thought about it, I might have sentimentalized the moment, but I was way past thinking.

Ronnie made a kind of, "Kerchunk!!" grunt as I slid into her. Then there was a spate of super-rapid breathing ending in the cawing, "Have mercy!" sound of a woman experiencing a major orgasm. Even Margarita didn't come that fast. I could see why Ronnie'd had Pemberton on a leash.

Once the contractions passed, she opened her eyes and stared at me in the exact same speculative way a predator would eye its prey. No more exploration. She knew what she wanted, and it was time to give it to her.

She reached back and got a good solid grip on the bars of the headboard, elevating those gorgeous breasts in my face as she did it. She wrapped her long slim legs tightly around my ass and ground her heels into my butt, then she slowly pushed me a few millimeters further into herself. Once she had us both properly situated, she hissed, "Fuck me!! Fuck me hard!! Pound me!!"

She really didn't need to ask. I was a mindless machine after that exhibition of sheer sexual talent. The ferocious wet slapping sounds, grunts, moans, and animalistic jungle noises made me glad that the walls were poured concrete, built to weather typhoons. Because Missy, who was sleeping right next door, would have thought I was killing my new wife.

In the meantime, Ronnie was writhing in ecstasy, totally out of control, her movements aided by the copious amount of perspiration and other lubricants that were between us. I felt the sweat dripping off my nose as I held myself above her looking down at the ecstatic emotions passing across her beautiful face while she bucked and thrashed beneath me.

We pleasured each other for an interminable period. I might add, one that I didn't think was humanly possible. That's when I heard her start to wind up for a life extinguishing orgasm. Just as she reached her pinnacle, she shoved one of the bed's decorative pillows in her mouth to hold down the screams. It was a prudent idea because even reinforced concrete has its limitations.

That was when I felt something coming at me from long ago and far away. It hit my loins like the arrival of The Rapture. The next several seconds were a mix of extreme pleasure and life-threatening cardiac stress, while I experienced an ultimate bonding event with the woman I loved. I had never come like that in my life.

When all of the commotion had died down, she opened her eyes and looked at me like she was having a hyper-rational moment and said simply, "I will love you forever." Then she lapsed into deep sleep.

She whimpered as I removed myself from her. But it was clear that nurse Veronica Chase was gone for the night. And what a night it had been.

I had discovered to my eternal delight that my new wife possessed all of the womanly virtues, strong, wise, nurturing, but also, passionate, exciting, and satisfying beyond imagining. I would treasure that divine gift throughout the many years we would spend together, and I would never take it for granted.

As my blood pressure slowly returned to merely stroke status, I lay on my back, and thought about what I had learned. Five years ago, I'd led an ostentatious existence full of false friends and unfaithful women. The Japanese took that from me. In turn, I had built a life of purpose out of the suffering.

It's a boring cliché, one that's so corny that it's hard to say it. But my life changed for the better the moment I dedicated myself to other people. Hence, I knew that service to others would be my polestar and my little family would give me purpose, direction, and happiness for the rest of my days.

EPILOG

The red and white Eurocopter EC135 swept out of the overcast and hovered over the landing pad at the summit of Mount Samat. It touched down lightly and a man in his sixties popped out. He walked around the front and gently and lovingly assisted a very old woman out of the right-side passenger door. It was undoubtedly an elderly son helping his aged mother visit the Mount Samat Shrine of Valor.

Mount Samat was the place where the remnants of the American and Filipino Army made their last stand in April of 1942. Twenty-four years later, an elaborate shrine was built to honor that sacrifice. It marked a place of supreme honor and unspeakable suffering.

The tourists waiting to go up into the big cross situated at the top of the mountain glanced casually in the direction of the arriving helicopter. But visits by wealthy people were routine. So, they went back to admiring the colossal steel and concrete structure they were standing in front of.

The arriving couple made their way gingerly down the zigzag path to the colonnaded shrine and museum, which is a hundred yards further down the hill. The woman was in her late eighties. But she walked briskly, with her head high, past the museum building and into the green space where the individual markers commemorated the units and people who'd fought there.

Reverentially, she approached a simple stone slab. It was perhaps seven feet tall with a flagpole behind it. A short, flower-lined path allowed access to the memorial itself. She and her son stopped and read the inscription. It said:

To the Angels

In honor of the valiant American military women who gave so much of themselves in the early days of World War II. They provided care and comfort to the gallant defenders of Bataan and Corregidor. They lived on a starvation diet, shared the bombing, strafing, sniping, sickness, and disease while working endless hours of heartbreaking duty. These nurses always had a smile, a tender touch, and a kind word for their patients. They truly earned the name