Good morning, readers.  I wrote this a while back and planned to work on it a lot more at the time.    Never quite got around to it.

I posted a while back about a man I used to know named Phil My Original Veteran’s Day Post . Good fellow, old Marine Corps shot up vet with a chest full of decorations. We used to do a lot of drinking, hunting and running around together during the ’70s and 80s.

Phil got himself hitched to a woman named Susan. Good woman, but perhaps the meanest female human I’ve ever encountered. A husband doing anything to violate her perception of justice was to be avoided on pain of the painfully unexpected. Which didn’t keep old Phil from sneaking around occasionally, doing something that would have violated her perception of justice.

Women liked Phil a lot and being one of the highliest decorated Marines ever to come out of the Vietnam War didn’t mean Phil had the will power to always refuse. Nevertheless, Phil and Susan had a happy marriage, more-or-less.  They vented their rages and frustrations, of which both had in plenty, having ping-pong ball gun battles, stalking one another around the house, sometimes lasting hours.

Every July 4th Phil and Susan would have a traditional Sex and Violence Marathon Party lasting a couple of days, or until everyone went home. A television would play The Sands of Iwo Jima non-stop at one end of the room and another would play porn flicks non-stop at the other end.

Lots of interesting stuff in the IWO JIMA flick. We’d sit there with the squeeze box backing up that film, looking at a particular scene, looking at it again, again again again, studying the camera footage (US gov footage from the Iwo battle) until we quit, but tended to go back and do the same thing again … two or three scenes in there are serious head-scratchers.

One scene, a bunch of guys are on a 3/4 ton truck, a wounded one on the front bumper, when they hear a big round coming in. They all hop off that truck, grab the wounded guy and rush for a foxhole… but midway between the truck and the hole, they realize there’s no time. They drop the wounded guy out in the open. They all dive headfirst into holes just as the round hits and the camera goes flying along with legs and maybe an arm or two.

Amazing footage.

Anyway, I’ve digressed. I wanted to tell you how Phil and Susan, thanks to his philandering, ended up in a long duration menage-a-troix situation. They all thought of it as a marriage for a couple of years.

The third of the three was a woman who looked almost exactly like the woman wossname son of Kirk Douglas played opposite in a movie named Romancing the Stone. Beautiful woman, but a rattlesnake extraordinaire who eventually gave both Phil and Susan a lot of grief.   But during the early-to-mid stages I think both Phil, and Susan believed it would last the duration of their lives, that marriage-like threesome.

But I’ve wandered so far what with ping-pong ball gun fights and Sex and Violence parties I suppose I’d better save the menage-a-troix story for another time.

Except to say, I’ve seen a lot of commentary from patriot-look-alikes lately expressing strong feelings about how many wives a man ought to be able to have.

At the time, and today again as I think about it, I figured old Phil had done more to earn the right to have as many wives as he wanted to than the folks who object have done earning the right to have only one.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules:  Living MLK’s Dream?