Fine. You want the rundown? Here it is.
My name is Shane Andrew Mavic. Captain Shane Mavic. I’m twenty-nine years old. I’ve been in the United States Navy for 11 years now, or to be more precise, 4,105 days, 15 hours, and 26 minutes, give or take a couple of minutes.
I’ve been a SEAL for 3, 875 of those days. Out of those 3,875 days I’ve spent less than 45 days in the United States and exactly zero days in my hometown of Gulf Breeze, Texas. And as you can probably tell, I’m a little hung up on numbers. I’m not math whi
z by any stretch of the imagination. To the contrary, I barely graduated high school. I just like keeping track of things in my head. Counting helps keep me clear. Plus, I just like numbers. I find comfort in them. Numbers are safe, predictable, always logical: unlike most of the people I’ve dealt with in my life, where two plus two equaled any number but four.
During those 3,875 days, I’ve gone on missions in 24 different countries, most of that time having been spent in some of the world’s premiere shithole destinations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Columbia, Turkey, Croatia, and Iran; places you could not pay me to go unless I was there in service to my country.
Still, I’ve loved every fucking minute of being a SEAL. The intense training, the constant adrenaline and exhaustion, the heat, the cold, the dirt, the mud, the swamps, the shit, the danger, the fighting, the knives, the bullets, the bombs, and yes, the pussy. Hell, I even loved that tingly feeling that inched its way up my spine, like a spider creepy-crawling under the skin, knowing that the motherfucker asking to bum a cigarette or wanting to know the time might be wearing a suicide vest or waiting for you to let your guard down so he could slit your throat. That shit gets my adrenaline pumping, man.
So, to answer your question: who the fuck am I?
I’m a motherfucking Navy SEAL, motherfucker.
That’s what I do.
That’s who I am.
Don’t get me wrong. It hasn’t been all work and no play. During that time, I’d had sex with 432 ladies of various shapes, sizes, colors, and nationalities. My standards tended to waver based on the amount of readily available pussy and the amount of alcohol consumed.
I’d been the beneficiary of 319 blowjobs that ranged from “just okay” to “fucking mind-blowing”. In my humble opinion, there was really no such thing as a bad blowjob, although there was one Peruvian chick that had one hell of an overbite who left me with teeth marks on my cock that took a few days to heal. I didn’t mind so much. I just considered them to be battle scars, like the three bullet holes in my back that got me my first Purple Heart and the jagged scars on my forearms from that cocksucker in that Columbian bar who came at me with a butcher knife when he caught me talking to his old lady.
I’d been on the receiving end of 272 hand jobs and spent an entire furloughed weekend in Bogota once, cuffed to a metal bed while identical twins named Lola and Lulu—who didn’t speak a word of English—did things to my body that I wished they’d videotaped because you’d have to see it to believe it.
I walked funny for a week after that, but it was worth it.
I reckoned my looks were the main reason I got laid so much. God knows it wasn’t my sparkling personality that attracted the women. I didn’t smile much. And I wasn’t much of a talker. And my intolerance for bullshit had led me into so many fights that I didn’t even bother counting them anymore.
A Ukrainian chick whose name I couldn’t pronounce and can’t remember once told me, “Is good thing you good looking. You have personality like dog shit.” She said it while she was straddling my hips, riding my cock like a jockey in the Kentucky Derby. I just told her to shut the fuck up and keep on riding. And she did.
“Tall, dark, and dangerous,” is how my buddy Troy introduced me to the ladies who hung out in the bars we hit when we had some down time. My SEAL call sign was Vader, which I thought was kind of cool. It fit me. I’m 6’4, with buzzed dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, and I can grow a full beard in less than a week. Over the years, I’ve packed on 225 pounds of solid muscle, and have black tribal tats all over my shoulders and arms. Women dig tattoos. At least a certain kind of women do. And those women of a certain kind seem to flock to me and it would be rude to turn them all down (I just turn down the dogs… I know… I’m shallow that way…).
One woman in Germany wanted to fuck me because she said I looked like the dude on the cover of some dirty romance novel she used to get herself off when her husband—a German Army colonel—wasn’t around. I think the name of the book was like, Big Dick SEAL, which fit me because I was a SEAL and I did have a big cock. It’s exactly 10¼ inches from base to tip when fully erect, to be precise. I know… numbers again…
What’s that? Have I ever been in love?
Once. But that was a long, long time ago, when I was just a kid.
I lost my virginity when I was 16, roughly 4,745 days ago, to a girl named Annabel Lee back home in Gulf Breeze. Her daddy said he named her after that Edgar Allen Poe poem, but I knew that was bullshit. Billy Ray Lee had trouble reading the backs of cereal boxes. I knew for a fact he didn’t know who the fuck Edgar Allen Poe was. Somebody smarter than him must have pointed out that he named his baby girl the same name as the poem and it made Billy Ray feel smart, so he went with it.
Anyway, in the poem, the narrator fell in love with this girl named Annabel Lee when they were both very young. She was so beautiful, and their love so deep, he believed the angels were jealous and took her from him. His love for her continued even after her death and he never stopped pining for her. I remembered reading the poem over and over again in high school, hoping in some silly teenage way that it was not an omen of things to come for me and my Annabel Lee. No, she didn’t die, but her love for me did the moment she caught me with my dick in another girl’s mouth in the back of my mom’s old Chrysler after a football game. I tried to win her back, but she wouldn’t even give me the time of day, and I couldn’t really blame her. I royally fucked up. I fucked us up. It wasn’t too long thereafter that the sheriff put me on the bus headed for boot camp clear across country and that was all she wrote.
I never saw or spoke to Annabel Lee again.
It was the one regret that topped all others in a life filled with regrets.
I can still remember a few lines from the poem. I recited them in my head every night the first few months I was gone.
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
Like a lot of girls from south Texas, Annabel was one part Mexican, one part Cherokee Indian, and two parts “who the fuck knows”. Her hair was the color of a raven’s wings and her eyes were as deep a blue as the Gulf of Mexico at sunset. Fine, I’m no Edgar Allen Poe, but that’s how I remembered her, so fuck you.