It was 5:30 A.M.—typically the end of our workday—and all I was thinking about was getting back to base and knocking out a quick gym session before I went to bed. It was arm day. Those curls for the girls and tris for the guys weren’t going to do themselves, after all. That’s when my earpiece crackled alive for a second time. The █████ guys had just turned the HVT into a beard-covered s’more inside his late model Toyota Campfire, and they needed us to land and search the vehicle since they didn’t have the manpower.
“Best,” my squad leader says over the radio, “we need to go back out and ID the target.”
Reluctantly, I press the mic button. “Roger. How far out are we?”
“Ten minutes out,” he says.
Jesus titty-fucking Christ, doesn’t anyone have any respect for arm day anymore!!?
By the time we land, dawn is approaching and the sky is starting to go from pitch black to that strange gray-blue color that normally means only one thing in special operations: Your ride is about to leave your ass there. The 160th SOAR is hands down the best aviation unit in the world, but these Chinook 47s are big, easy targets when they fly during the day and frankly, no one wants to play dodgeball with RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) on their flight home, not the least of whom are the guys in the cockpit whose job it would be to dodge, dive, dip, duck, and dodge.
The helo pilots drop our team just beyond the torched vehicle and take off. I’m headed over to the car to make a quick assessment of the target when the platoon sergeant approaches me.
“Hey, Best, we got one guy charred up pretty bad. He’s still inside the vehicle,” he says before leaving to set a security perimeter with the rest of our platoon.
I pull my buddy Danny Fulton aside. Danny has outranked me since I met him on my first deployment to Mosul. He has been a badass far longer than that, in part because he is an early balder, and like any man who starts losing his hair before losing his virginity, he is pissed off at the world. He’s the type of guy you wish you could parachute into Berkeley to knock some sense into all those entitled assholes who think that no war is justified and that all cupcakes grow on vegan rainbows. Combine that with professional training in the dark arts of not giving a fuck, then stuff it inside a six-foot-two, 220-pound frame, and what you have is a turducken of maximum pain and minimum sensitivity.
Obviously, Fulton is the perfect guy to handle the kind of identification surely awaiting us inside this charred vehicle.
“I’m thinking you and I should do this alone so the others don’t have to see whatever the fuck it is we have to do in that car,” I tell him.
“Roger,” he says.
In this line of work, it’s inevitable that you’ll get your fair share of grotesque visuals. But if your team (like mine) has a lot of younger guys who haven’t seen many dead bodies yet, or at least not dead bodies that promised to be as nasty as this one, you might as well ease them into it if you can. My opinion has always been, as a leader, the more shit you can put on your plate, the less of it your team has to eat.
Without a lot of fuss, Fulton and I quietly sneak over to the car. When we get there it dawns on me that we don’t have any SSE kits on us to properly ID this body. No one in the platoon does. We used all of them on the dead guys from the target we left thirty minutes earlier. Quickly, we radio the ground force commander for some sort of guidance on the course of action they want us to follow. They respond with the kind of sympathy and understanding we’ve come to expect from military leadership.
“You need to get DNA off of that dude. I don’t care how you do it. Figure it the fuck out.”
“Roger,” I say, shrugging to Fulton. He’s keyed into the same channel, so he hears their response. “This is kind of a fucking ridiculous request, right?”
“It’s the military, isn’t it?” He laughs.
As we approach the car, I peer in through the window and finally get a good clean look at what we’re dealing with. It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen. The body’s still identifiable—I mean, it’s clearly a person—but anything more than that is going to take some work, because the dude looks like the top of a Texas brisket.
The first thing we have to do is get into the vehicle and cut this guy out. It’s a simple task, but not an easy one. The fire hasn’t just cooked the car’s occupant, it also melted the car’s door handle and locking mechanisms. It’s going to take some elbow grease.
Once Fulton and I get the driver’s-side door open, we each grab a limb and start to pull him out, but he won’t come easy. Even in death, this motherfucker is resisting us. We do our best to keep the body intact, but inevitably some of his torched skin doesn’t come with him. It’s stuck to the leather seats.
Have you ever put cold meat on an extra-hot grill that you forgot to oil up beforehand? You know how it starts to scorch almost immediately, and then you try to flip it so it doesn’t burn too badly on that side, but it’s stuck to the grill and the only way to pry it loose is to scrape at it with the edge of your tongs? And then even if you are able to successfully turn the meat, when it’s all said and done, the bit of flesh that was still stuck has become a layer of coal-black char that is practically fused to the grill grate and won’t come off unless you get the grill ripping white hot and then use a coarse steel brush and scrub the shit out of it? His skin is stuck to the leather seats just like that.
All right, who’s hungry!?
“Now what the fuck do we do?” Fulton says as we lay (most of) the driver on the ground away from the car. He’s less Al-Qaeda, more al pastor, and neither of us quite knows how to dig into the problem.
“This is a new one for me, dude.”
“How the fuck do they expect us to get DNA off of someone like this with no kits and burnt-ass fingers? This is so fucked.”
“We’re going to have to improvise,” I say, looking down at my watch.
Whenever you’re on a target, time is obviously of the essence. We tasked the rest of the team with securing the road in both directions, but you still never know how long it’s going to take for other Al-Qaeda to ride up out of the desert to survey which one of their buddies just got bombed back to Paradise. Feeling the seconds tick away, I start flipping through my mental Rolodex of relevant skills.
People assume that since you’ve been through RASP and Ranger School and had all this military training, you must know everything there is to know about war. They think you’re an encyclopedia of fucking shit up. Not to get all Liam Neeson on you, but the reality is that we’re each trained with a very particular set of skills, and identifying dead burned-up people without any medical equipment is not one of the skills Fulton and I have. We’re just two young Rangers, exhausted in the middle of the desert, with a char-broiled bad guy lying at our feet, trying to figure out how we get this asshole identified with enough time and energy left for the gym.