Moments like these are tricky. Those first minutes when the action feels like it’s over and the mission has been completed, that’s when the adrenaline dump happens and you’re most liable to lose focus or let your emotions take hold of you—whatever they are. Unnoticed and unchecked, a weird anxiety can start to build, and that’s when things can go sideways.
As a team leader, it was my job in those situations to stay frosty and read the room, so to speak. If people were too loose, I’d go Scared Straight on them. If they were too amped, I’d bring down the energy. Having just dodged a hail of cooked-off ammo, a dude with a locked-and-loaded PKM, another with an AK, and his peek-a-boo pal the human grenade right behind him, there was a fair amount of nervous tension in the air. There is only one response to a scenario like that: gallows humor.
I grabbed the severed arm by the elbow, trotted back, and just as I got over the berm in full view of the squad, I started waving the hand like I’d just won a beauty pageant.
“Hey, guys!” I shouted. “Does anyone need a hand?!”
The entire squad took a second to register what they were seeing…and finally busted out laughing in a huge wave of catharsis. Once the laughter started, the floodgates opened, as much for me as for them. I’m like a can of Pringles that way: once you pop, I just can’t stop.
I held the arm toward the center of my chest and grabbed a finger. “Finally, something I can count on!” Then we arm wrestled. I won. I finished it with a Stone Cold Stunner. To celebrate I threw the hand in the air and waved it around like I just didn’t care. Then I curled the fingers into a loose fist. “Who wants the first hand job?” I assured my squad that this was not the bomber’s wiping hand, but sadly I had no takers.
It’s no wonder Carrot Top had such a long career—you can get a lot out of just one prop.
The poor intel guy tasked with fingerprinting and inputting everything into the computers just glared at me when I held out the arm with the hand fully articulated and tried to input the fingerprints myself one by one. Boop. Boop. Boop. “What?” I said, bobbing the arm up and down like a puppet and taking a stab at the voice of a severed limb. “I just want you to run my prints so your friends can go home already!”
When we were all finished, we called in the 160th SOAR (Special Operations Aviation Regiment) to come pick us up. Just for fun, we set their HLZ right next to the pile of dead bodies. Those SOAR dudes are a bunch of hardcore seasoned flyers, but some of their new crew chiefs don’t get to see this much death up close. Imagine being the eighteen-year-old aviation crew chief whose job is to man an M240 machine gun on the side of a helicopter and your pilot sets you down next to six dead bodies (ok, five and a half) with giant Sharpie marks labeled 1 through 6, arms and body parts stacked, everything neatly organized into a row.
I looked at the kid and waved as I got on the helicopter. From the look on his face he seemed both awestruck and dumbstruck, so I pulled out my camera to show him the photos we’d just taken. Most of them were for intelligence-gathering and evidentiary purposes. The picture I took of the arm, though, was more of a reminder that this one piece of flesh and bone could have been responsible for five or six more flag-draped metal coffins rolling out of a dull gray C-130 on the tarmac of Dover Air Force Base.
There was nothing especially gruesome about the photos—nothing out of the ordinary—but it was clear from the kid’s reaction that he disagreed. After nine or ten of these Ranger glamour shots, he shook his head and turned back to his machine gun. He was intrigued right up until the point when I showed him what real war was like, then he was like, “I’m good.” Smart kid.
Looking back, I’m a little disappointed in my behavior in that moment. I completely missed a chance to hold on to the arm a little longer and high-five guys with it as I boarded the helicopter. Instead I hastily threw it into the pile of dead people to be counted, like a total amateur. In the heat of the moment, though, you can only do what you’ve been trained to do, and for me that meant making inappropriate jokes to entertain my men (not just myself) and—at least for a minute—help them cut through the horror of war. I mean, what are the chances that the only identifiable part left from a suicide bomber is the arm he detonated his bomb with? How do you let that kind of awesome irony go by without saying something? It’s one of those funny little bits of karmic justice that life throws at you so you don’t lose your mind.
It’s also one of those moments when any sane person has to ask themselves: How the fuck did I get here?
Chapter 2
From Green Day to Green Thumb
Despite being the youngest of six in a military family growing up in Santa Barbara, California, I hadn’t put much thought into joining up when I entered high school, largely because I didn’t feel like I fit the part. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t see a soldier; I saw an awkward, introverted kid, one who loved playing music and who was more interested in science and business than anything else. Instead of playing sports or working on cars or going surfing, like most of the other guys in my class, my extracurricular interests drew me into two of the coolest groups anyone could ever join on a Southern California high school campus: the botany club and an emo band.
I know what you’re thinking: Bro, those groups must have been total pussy magnets. And you’d be totally right, broseph, they were. Each one was filled with total pussies. In botany club, all we did was sit around talking about girls and money. The closest we ever got to actual agriculture was bullshitting about how to cross-pollinate the marijuana strains we’d read about in High Times. At one point we managed to pull our green thumbs out of our asses long enough to try to build a greenhouse, but that didn’t get much past the planning stages.
Things weren’t much better in the band, which we called Blind Story, because of course we did. I’d gotten taller by the time we actually played some gigs, but I was still way too skinny, my teeth were a little too bucked for my mouth—I basically looked like a Christmas nutcracker—and if my jet-black Flock of Seagulls haircut wasn’t quite repellent enough, I decided to play bass, just to make sure all the girls knew that the last vagina I’d been inside of was the one I’d come out of.
There’s nothing particularly unique about that combination of physical characteristics or even my circumstances, but when you throw in the strong military pedigree—and the fact that things only got more awkward as I grew from adolescent boy to pubescent teenager—what you ended up with was not G.I. Joe but “Gee, I don’t think you’re ever going to have sex.”
Don’t misunderstand: I don’t regret a single second I spent in Blind Story or in botany club. Surprisingly, when you’re not fucking, you can actually learn stuff. In the band, I got experience with teamwork and finding my place as part of a larger unit. In botany club, I learned one of the most important lessons of all: how to hustle.