“As far as Al-Qaeda go? He was head and shoulders above the rest.” I fist-bump him for good measure. He’s still a cherry and not a total fucking nutbag, so he just nods back the way you do when you don’t want the other person to know that you have no idea what they are talking about.
I look over at Fulton and shake my head. Kids these days. A couple of privates are kneeling next to us. I reach over to one of the more timid ones and slap him on the knee, before placing the bag in his lap.
“Hey, could you hold this for the ride back?”
“Roger, Sergeant,” he says, completely unaware of the fact—to this day, actually—that he rode home with a severed head and arm in a garbage bag. Instead, he gets to read about it here in great detail, along with the rest of the world. You’re welcome, Sparkle Tits!
* * *
—
When we finally get back to base, it’s nearing 7:30 A.M., which is really late for us. Fulton and I go down to drop off our haul at the SSE room where the privates have already begun to lay out on a table everything they retrieved from the target buildings during the raids we completed earlier in the night. Since it’s so late, no one officially assigned to SSE is there to intake and catalog the stuff. Usually no one sweats it if you leave the more basic shit unattended until someone arrives to go through it, since you lock up the room once the last person leaves. But a garbage bag with a head and an arm in it is anything but basic. I hesitate to just drop it off.
“We can’t just leave it here, right?” I say, looking over to Fulton for clarification, hoping that the one guy I know who gives fewer fucks than me will give me the thumbs-up.
“I don’t know, man. I’m fucking tired and nobody is here.”
“So is that a soft yes?”
“It’s a ‘Let’s try and find someone, then say fuck it.’ ”
For the next ten minutes, we walk around the base trying to find someone to give it to. Anyone gullible enough to take a lumpy, unmarked garbage bag off our hands without asking too many questions. We do a full circuit, but no one is up yet, so we head back to the SSE room. It’s still just us, approximately one-eighth of an enemy combatant, and an empty command center.
“Soooooo…” I begin, like I’m dropping off a first date and hoping she asks me inside.
“I’m not taking that fucking bag back to my room,” Fulton says.
“Me neither. Merry fucking Christmas.” I drop the garbage bag on the table and we walk out. Fulton gives me a nod goodbye as I shut the door behind us. Walking down the hallway, he turns and heads toward his bunk, and I continue on to the gym.
Who the fuck knocks out a quick gym sesh after a night like we just had? That’s a good question. Although back then I probably would have said that’s a stupid question because only a pussy skips a workout—especially bi and tri work—and this was just like any other day, NBD. The reality is that you’ve got to put your emotions somewhere when you have an experience like this. The thrill of war turns to the terror of war, if you don’t get them out of you. I was lucky that I had music and working out, even if I didn’t fully realize it at the time.
I don’t give any of it another thought until I am awoken by a loud knock at my door. I look at my watch. It’s 4 P.M. What kind of stupid fucking asshole would wake me up this early? I open the door to find my platoon sergeant standing there shaking his head, enraged.
“The XO wants to see you. Now.” He can barely get out the words, he’s so livid. The XO (executive officer) is second in command at the company level. That means he has the power to fuck your life in half if he’s not feeling particularly charitable that day.
I wipe the sleep out of my eyes and throw on my tan T-shirt and black shorts, before shuffling down the hall with Fulton trailing right behind me. We already know what’s coming, and it’s not going to be pleasant. The look of shock on my platoon sergeant’s face says it all: We had crossed a line. Before we can even take a full step inside the ground force commander’s office, the shitstorm makes landfall.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“What, sir?”
“Don’t ‘What, sir?’ me! Did you guys cut off a goddamn head and arm?”
“Sir, you asked for DNA. You said you didn’t care how we got it.”
“I didn’t ask you to drag half his fucking body in here and leave it on the table like a fucking bird dog!”
“Sorry, sir.”
He gives us a long stern look, then nods. “It’s handled. But don’t you fucking guys ever do that shit again, you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” we reply.
The part of me that likes to drop bags of body parts into the laps of unsuspecting cherry privates wants to push his luck and ask his commanding officer what the proper protocol would have been, if bringing back the two-piece extra-crispy Al-Qaeda combo wasn’t the right one. You can’t ask a couple of sleep-deprived twentysomethings to grab DNA without equipment or training and expect them to know what they’re doing.
The part of me that likes killing bad guys without getting hassled about it just wants to go back to bed, though, so he shuts the other part of me up. When a commanding officer asks you for DNA, you give him more DNA than he can shake a beaker at. And if he gets a little testy about your methods, you respectfully shut the fuck up and then go on with your day. Because if you’re being honest with yourself, while you technically gave him what he asked for, in reality you were being the worst Secret Santa ever. Just imagine the look on his face if he had actually been the one to open that bag, not knowing what was inside. It’d be like when you were a little kid and you’d open your lunchbox and instead of a bag of Doritos next to your sandwich, there’d be an apple or a banana or some other ridiculous nonsense—all because someone forgot to go to Costco that weekend.
A week later, a box full of the most tech-savvy James Bond–level DNA swab kits on the planet arrives. I’m talking high-speed swabs, some type of probing device, and all sorts of other shit that Fulton and I totally planned on misusing on future operational endeavors. To this day, I like to think that we had a little something to do with the advancement of field equipment in the military. I’m not saying they should erect a statue in our honor at Fort Lewis. A plaque would be nice. A Jeopardy! clue would be swell. Maybe a Lifetime biopic starring Seann William Scott as Mat Best and the guy who played Hank in Breaking Bad as Fulton? Ball’s in your court, America.
I often wonder about the poor bastard who found the driver of that interdicted vehicle out in the desert—charred, decapitated, missing an arm. Imagine pulling up to a torched car sitting alone on a desolate road in the middle of nowhere, and here this fucker is, lying in the dirt, half the man he used to be. If you’re that guy, mentally you’re going to try to piece together what happened. That’s what anyone would do. Our brains want to tell us a story about stuff like this, stuff about death. We want to order events and make sense of it all, to distract ourselves from the total randomness of life. There’s no distracting this guy, though, because there’s no story he could ever come up with that is even remotely sufficient to explain what he’s looking at. Hopefully this account provides him with some clarity and some peace of mind.