“We gotta get fingerprints and dental, right?” I say in the most confident voice I can. “That shit has DNA. Let’s just get that.”
“Great. How do we do that?” he says, looking at me like I know what I’m doing.
“I got a Leatherman,” I say, as I pull out my knife.
“What, you want to pop his tooth off like a bottle cap?”
“I’m gonna rip it out with the pliers.”
“C’mon,” Fulton says, “you couldn’t pull his needle dick out of his pants with those candy ass pliers.”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
Fulton takes a second to look over the body again, as if he’s Gil Grissom all of a sudden.
“Let’s give it a go.”
Fulton grabs the back of his head as I pry open his jaw with my left hand and spend a couple minutes digging around inside his mouth with my right hand, trying to carve out some teeth. I am going at his mouth from every conceivable angle, trying to find the point of maximum torque, but nothing is working. I heard once that dentists, as a profession, have the highest rate of suicide. I’m starting to understand why, because I’m really getting pissed off. I feel like I’m trying to weed a garden and I’ve run into a plant with a massive taproot connected to the other side of the earth. I’m only wasting time, and by now I’m flirting with the daylight.
Fulton was right. What I really need is an honest-to-goodness pair of pliers. I look up at him and ask, nearly out of breath, “You got any other ideas?”
“I was beginning to think this was a pretty solid plan, actually,” Fulton says.
Staring down at this lifeless and burnt sack of shit as the sun is starting to come up, I can see only one viable alternative. “You want to just cut this fucker’s head off? It’ll probably be easier.”
“Yeah, let’s do it.” Fulton responds immediately. He is all-in, no hesitation whatsoever. Man, I love that dude. He just doesn’t give a shit when it comes to getting the job done.
“You want to hold the head?” he asks, like it’s his bridal bouquet and I’m the maid of honor. Then he whips out his own Leatherman.
“Doesn’t look like I really have a choice,” I say. What I’m really thinking is: Oh, so MY tool is too shitty for some teeth, but YOURS is somehow going to cut off a fucking head?
I slowly tilt the Al Qaeda fighter’s head back and Fulton starts cutting through his neck. I glance over the top of the car and see my platoon with confused looks on their faces, trying to figure out what we are doing. I can’t imagine what it looks like to see us on our knees over a body; me holding perfectly steady as Fulton pumps back and forth as he saws. Oh wait, I can imagine how that looks—like we’re Eiffel-Towering a corpse. When I look back down at the head, I remember thinking to myself how lucky those younger guys are that they’re not seeing this. Any one of them could have very easily ended up with a lifetime of nightmares, and I wanted to protect them from that until they had kids with their first ex-wives, when the nightmares are real.
I try to learn something new every day. That day, I learned that it doesn’t take that long to cut a head off. There really aren’t any ligaments or hard structures in the neck, except for the spine, and even that’s not very challenging. I’ve had a harder time getting the drumstick off a rotisserie chicken than Fulton did shelling this dude’s bean. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds. For a couple of first-timers, this has to be some kind of record.
Once Fulton gets the head off, I place it in the garbage bag and we move on to prints. Our initial instinct is to cut off the guy’s fingers. It’s not like we need his palms—the VI team already read this shitbird his fucking fortune. Fulton makes a good point, though: Five fingers would take a lot of work, and the skin might come off the burnt ones if we’re not careful.
“You want to just cut off his fucking arm?” he suggests.
“I think that would be most time-efficient,” I reply, very aware, again, of how long we’ve been on the ground and the amount of light filling the sky.
“Then let’s save fucking time. Grab his wrist.”
“All right, give me a second,” I say as I adjust and re-secure my black medical gloves. I might get PTSD from this horror show, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to get Hepatitis C from it too.
I reach down and grab ahold of the man’s arm so Fulton can begin the procedure. As I grip his wrist, his flesh peels back down his forearm toward the elbow, like a fruit roll-up.
“This is nasty,” I say. Fulton is trying not to hear me.
“Holy Christ, put your fucking boot on his chest so the skin won’t keep moving.”
I pick the skin off my gloves and clap my hands clean.
“You got this,” he says. Gee, thanks, coach.
I take a couple of deep breaths before standing and steadying my boot on his chest as I grab his wrist again. Fulton takes a knee and positions himself on the ground down by his shoulder and starts trying to cut surgically through the arm. Immediately, I see that he’s having difficulty because the flesh is too loose. Although I have absolutely zero basis in fact or experience for this opinion, I fully expected the arm to come off as easily as the head. Unfortunately, the limb is fully cooked, which makes it much harder to get any purchase on the thing. I bend down to help him and literally start pulling meat off the bone.
As I start to twist the arm, Fulton moves down to the rotator cuff and begins scooping it out like he’s carving out the inside of a pumpkin. After about two and a half of the longest minutes of my life, Fulton and I finally free the arm from its socket and it pops right off.
Sweating profusely and exhausted, I look up at Fulton. “What do you think? Anything else we need to grab?”
“We got the head, and the humerus bone, right? I think we’re good.”
“They didn’t want footprints, did they?” At this point, this deep into the dissection, there is no way I am leaving without making sure we have everything we need. If Fulton says the SSE guys back at base might want toe jam, I am fully prepared to put on my Rex Ryan face and get all up in those feet.
“I don’t think so,” Fulton says.
“Okay. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
With the head and arm now inside the trash bag, I sling it over my shoulder like I’m Johnny Appleseed and we head back. Our platoon stares at us as we walk around the side of the truck with the half-filled trash bag. I smile and wave to them.
“We got everything we need. Everyone get ready for exfil.”
“How’d it go with that guy?” one of the privates asks.