Mad Hatter

They call me the Mad Hatter. Most of them anyways, a few of them call me Soren. No one calls me by the name I was born with, no one calls anyone by that. The Boss we call a lot of things, not all of them nice, but Hotaru Maniac is how we all knew him first. Forgetting the "Maniac" in his presence will earn his displeasure. Hotaru's some Angel of Death from some anime. Never saw it, barely remember the title. Maniac is not Hotaru, he's a Maniac for Hotaru.

Anyways, I've never quite understood why they call me the Mad Hatter. It may have something to do with the fact that even around here, I'm considered crazy. I'm one the only religious folks here. Oh, we all have our gods and rituals, probably 95% of us have a good-luck charm, almost everyone has something they do to stay sane. I'm one of the very few to stick with an actual religion from the outside world, though.

I used to be a Christian missionary pilot. No, seriously. I'd fly missionaries into jungle villages, bring them supplies, medicine, that sort of shit. I had that job for about 3 years. I had a wife, too.

That was supposed to be a career. Me and my lady (Ex-wife, but I don't tolerate people insulting her) had our courses plotted, man. We loved the job, we loved the people, we loved each other. We were committed, like you read about. We were the elite, well-respected in the community. One of the best pilot-mechanic teams in the org, etc, etc.

Of course, such things don't last. I had this family I was supposed to drop into a village in Colombia. Nice folks, mom, dad, teenage kid. They were legit, I'd actually known the mother when I was in flight school. Lovely lady, almost dated her when we first met.

Anyways, my wife and I drop this family off, and as is our custom, we started to make a loop around the airfield before we turned back home. Only this time, apparently some drug lord had decided that a missionary might cut into his profits. As we're circling the airfield, we saw an 8-man kill squad leave one of the huts.

I was 500 feet in the air. I never had a chance to prevent the bastards from killing the son and his father. They never saw it coming, but I did. Slow-fucking-motion, man. My friend was next, we all knew it. Only, the squad leader brandished a rope instead of a rifle when he turned to her.

Missions pilots never carried a weapon. Guns, I mean. We all had knives, but that's a tool, we were told. Guns would have gotten us thrown out of countries where we were needed. It never occurred to the death squad that an unarmed 10,000-lb. airplane flown by an unarmed pilot is a weapon. It occurred to me.

Standing in a group to watch the leader, none of them avoided being run down. The plane ended up inside what was once this village's spirit lodge or something. The leader was covered in what used to be his buddies, so was my friend, the plane, and most of the village. I don't know what he thought had happened, but he didn't think fast enough. He died hard, some totem-carved spirit pole went through his chest. Several times.

Of course, that sort of shit doesn't go down well in the missions world. We praised martyrs, people who died for the faith. Having smashed a half-million dollar aircraft into 7 men, then murdering the last man with a stick kinda made me a target. I wasn't loving, merciful, or kind enough. My friend from college was about to get raped, I'm the bad guy.

The org was thrown out of the country. My family was thrown out of the org. I was thrown out of my family.

I don't blame my ex. I still love her, I think. But all the time we'd known each other, she'd never suspected I was capable of that. I never really knew that I was capable, either. What she saw that day was too much for her to handle. What she saw in me. The guy she loved, always nice, smiling, loving, tender, shoving a wooden spear into a man's chest with nothing but a grim smile on his face.

The man she saw that day was not the man she married. I understand why she left.

The casting call for PBE came two weeks later. If that's providential, I don't want to know what God has in mind. But it's amusing, you know? The hardest, most bat-shit insane band of kill-for-money people on the planet, and I'm one of the pilots. I still pray for these people daily. Only, unlike most of the world, I pray for their continued existence.

We sell death. When we show up, Death comes with us, and when we leave, we generally leave a quiet area behind. The outside world hears rumors about us, we're fine with that. Somehow we became popular, we don't really understand, because the outside world doesn't get it. We're the dogs of war, barely.

We kill evil men. We show up, we don't target civilians. I've heard some of the other groups have had mishaps, civvies got splashed. That happened once on my plane. Some fucker thought it'd be fun to have target practice, shot a lady doing laundry as we flew past. I shot him, threw him out of the plane, and started laughing. For the record, I think he died on impact with the ground. The record itself said he took fire from the ground and fell out. No one argued with me.

"Mad Hatter" started going around some time after that.

I haven't stopped laughing since I got out of training at PBE and realized exactly what I'd gotten myself into. We're rock stars in the world of death-dealing psychopaths. The polo could get me laid in 15 minutes if I wore it to a bar. The same girls would scream in terror if they saw us in our work clothes. I fly a plane that the org I used to work for would have scrapped, only I get shot at in it. The whole situation is so absurd, it's hard not to laugh.

Some Days, Part Three.

We didn't end up having to wait around for nightfall. Wut's boys did a fantastic job of walking onto the highway and pointing a lot of rifles at the first bus to drive past. I don't think driver knew what the hell was going on, but we paid him for the bus.

In gold coins, which has been one of Maniac's more genius ideas. I like not having to dick around trying to get some third-world mud eater to take American currency. Small gold coins are accepted in places that VISA just doesn't cover.

Everywhere we'd want to be. Except no one ever wants to be here, so we pay in gold.

Turned out to be a fairly nice one. Air conditioning, a radio (which of course couldn't pick anything worth listening to), and enough gas to get us well into Iran.

After we smoke that AAA. That's personal.

One of the benefits of working with PBE is that we have a fairly good intelligence group. Not perfect, obviously, but we've got a pretty good reaction time. Considering our recent work in Afghanistan, we still had air assets in the area. 18 hours after the shootdown, there was a drone circling the area at 20,000 feet. It took the drone controller another two hours to find the gun. By that time, we'd eaten, acquired a bus, driven off the beaten path and gotten some sleep.

It was on.

The gun was situated on a mountaintop. Someone had at some point build a small villa up there, featuring a low wall, a pair of adobe-looking buildings, and a vehicle gate. The gun was in the courtyard, which was maybe 50 yards on a side.

A PBE tactical team should never be mistaken for a US Infantry team. We're not going to charge up the hill, waving a flag and shouting battle cries, fighting for glory, honor, and liberty. We fight for money, and we've got to be alive to spend it.

Tactically, that means we generally try to be as lethally efficient as possible. We're not going to be concerned with taking things intact, or trying to hold a certain building. Which, in this particular case, meant that at precisely 0230, Sageless and NSWG took out both gate sentries. Suppressors are standard issue with PBE, the only real rule for choosing a personal rifle is that it must accept a suppressor. We're not big fans of being heard, and it wasn't any different this time. Both men went down silently.

At the same instant, OCG threw a ten-pound block of Semtex in a window of the taller of the two buildings. For lack of a more precise term, the building exploded. Pieces of it showered the area, along with pieces of the men who'd been sleeping inside. Mud brick buildings have one beneficial attribute: Hit hard enough, they collapse completely. The four-man team tasked with taking the building simply ran over it.

The other building turned out to be an outhouse. A frag grenade in through a window eliminated anyone who may have been inside. None of us wanted to look anways, a spray of shit and piss came out the single door when the grenade went off. I hate third-world countries.

I wish I could give a better account of the battle. I never remember much of the few infantry jobs I've helped on. Too frantic to ever get a good idea of what's going on. We came over the walls from two directions, four men each. Athanasius and I had the job of making sure no one came in or out of the front gate. Not glorious, but we're not grunts.

The whole thing took less than five minutes. There were 22 men in the compound. I personally only killed one of them, a man returning from the village in a truck. 3-round burst, in through the windshield. He never saw it coming, but he wasn't meant to.

The AAA turned out to be some old Soviet cannon, a single-barrel repeating thing probably left over from the Cold War. We sabotaged it, the next idiot to fire the weapon was going to be in for a nasty surprise, it'd probably take out the whole crew.

Back at the bus, I noticed that someone had spraypainted pedobear on the back door. I started laughing, some things never change. Ten armed men, trying to infiltrate one of the most hostile countries on the planet, and we're still making jokes.

"What the hell is this for?"

"Panda Force, Soren. A super-scary bear."

"Pandas don't even eat meat, you retard."

"Yes, but these idiots don't know that."

Some days.

Some Days, Part Two.

As usual, the plan was to wait for nightfall, enter the city, steal something that can hold 10 armed men, and get out of Dodge. We could wait for the angels, but as the ranking officer, I had to get us moving before whoever shot us down found us, and there was no excuse for staying put when no one was hurt.

PBE troops are good in the woods. We're really, really good in the city. However, we're just not top-tier desert warriors when the plane carrying the toys gets shot down. We didn't have a lot of food, we didn't have a lot of water, and we didn't have a lot of that most precious of commodities, ammunition.

Much as I want to find the fucker that shot me down and return the favor, we're getting out of here.

Anything that can put a small artillery shell a mile into the sky can put one into a mountain. I knew what the Germans used to do with their 88mm AA gun, and it wasn't pretty for Allied tanks. Also, AAA guns aren't small, aren't cheap, and can't be used solo...

Who? Who's got the balls, the funding, and the actionable intel to shoot down...oh, fuck me.

"Guys, the timetable just got bumped. We're going NOW. Wut, move these boys out, we are not going to have time to jerk off and wait for a rescue."

"Rescue? Why...yeah that makes sense. No one else around here."

It took us the better part of two hours to reach that village. That was probably the longest two hours I'd ever marched. Every PBE employee is regularly qualified on several different weapons, but I'm a pilot. I work for a living in a seated position, and while I'm damn fit compared to most pilots, I'm just not up to the level of PBE troopers. Furthermore, I just don't have the level of Infantry training they have.

Some days, I go from valuable asset, relied upon to deliver death to the enemy and bring salvation to the troopers, to a liability.

And I hate that.

Wut's boys managed to find an empty hut on the outside of town. Of course, it was empty because it had once been part of a much larger mud hut, which had at some point been exploded. Still, it got all of us under one roof. How one of the trooper had the presence of mind to grab a camp stove was beyond me, but they had chow on.

Then my cell phone rang. I knew from the ringtone that it was the Boss, so I stepped outside to take the call.

"OK, so from what we can gather, you got shot down by Quds Force operators."

"Shit, I didn't want to hear that confirmed."

"Yes, well, it gets better. They got the Prince."

"No."

"Yes. Want to guess the next step?"

"Not really. Iran is a big place, and you want us to invade it with ten men, eight rifles, and two machine guns?"

"You guys left your sidearms in the plane?"

"Fuck you. We are not prepped for that level of engagement, we have no intel"

"Actually, you do. We know where the Prince is, but you're going to have to get him. You'll be reinforced as soon as possible, but that won't be tonight. Oh, and Soren?"

"Yes?"

"He's got some data they'll tear the country down for. They're not going to play nice."

"This mysterious data had better be something other than his porn stash."

I walked back inside the hut.

"Guys, you're not going to like this."

Some days

Some Days, Part One.

That's it, accounting is now officially out of excuses for making me keep flying this piece of shit.

It's odd what goes through my mind when I should be panicking. After all, I had a cargo hold full of pissed-off PBE troopers, and something had just blown three feet off my left wing. There wasn't supposed to be any trouble on this mission, either. Hell, it barely qualified as a mission, all I was doing was picking up an off-duty squad from some shithole town in Azerbaijan before they got themselves in actual trouble.

For the record, it's a really bad idea for some dive brothel owner in a dive town in a dive country to post proof that he's got some absurdly hot women working at his establishment. Perhaps especially when it's within a 72-hour pass distance of some off-duty PBE troopers. They will show up. They will try to have sex with all of the women in the area. And some of the men.

And that will piss off the locals.

Some days, I go from combat jungle-owning aviator to airbourne taxi-driving wet nurse. Pay's the same either way, benefits of having a rare skill, but it's more fun to get shot at.

Except when something comes right out of fuckin' nowhere and kills my plane, I reminded myself.

This was going to be one of those days.

"GET THEM OUT OF THERE, WUT!!" I screamed over the intercom. I'll give the mudmarchers credit, half of them hard already jumped out. I mean, they're still just grunts, but at least they know when to get the fuck out of an airplane. I hope they got parachutes on before they jumped.

OK, fuel pumps off, the wing's not on fire, and I've got enough altitude to glide for a ways...we were on course, right?, which means that patch of sand down there should be...fuck.

I know we were on course. That's Turkmenistan. I know for a damn fact that's Turkmenistan, I've flown this way on more than one occasion in the past few months.

The glorious US gov't has a habit of paying off local gov'ts to ignore Air Force birds. PBE does something similar, only I've heard that our payments come in denominations like "horsepower", "kilogram", and "vintage". Our way is far more efficient, we generally get the stuff from the last warlord we knocked over.

Who the fuck just shot me down? I know we delived the payment, I was the fuckin' delivery pilot that time.

I hadn't been painted. Accounting doesn't normally spring for things like paint, performance upgrades, or seats that are younger than I am, but they do pay to make sure that the plane can alert the pilot to SAMs. Of course, it could have been one of those shoulder-launched heat-seeking types, but we were flying in a prop-driven plane.

I glanced at the wing again. That explosion was way too small for a Stinger, too small even for an RPG, even if it could have gotten up to 5,000 feet.

Flak? Of all the fuckin' things.

I checked the hold. More credit to the grunts, they'd exited the plane in under a minute. The plane had about five left, less if the mysterious enemy started shooting again.

Land now, stay alive, ask questions when the bodies are cold.

"Ace, call the Boss. Tell him we've been shot up, and we're about to crash on the Turkmen side of the Iranian border."

Accounting had finally assigned me a door gunner a while back. Athanasius used to do combat demo work for PBE, took a leg injury that keeps him from running, but he didn't want to leave the company, so they gave him to me. "Now you finally get that door gunner", they told me. Worked out well, too. He's just amazing with an M-60, would've made my Nam-era grandfather proud. My grunts were happy, too. It's amazing what CAS is worth, even when it's just a GPMG and the occasional satchel charge thrown out the door.

"They're sending help, but it'll be a while in coming."

"Of course", I muttered. "Wouldn't want to make this an easy we-just-lost-a-plane-full-of-mercs mission. Grab your chute, we're jumping."

I knew the plane was done for. The sooner we jumped, the safer we'd be. The kid was already out, so I threw the switch on the ceiling marked "FUCK YOUR SHIT", and jumped after him.

Maniac has this thing about not letting the enemy getting a look at our hardware, especially some of the more sensitive stuff that's on our planes. Exactly 181 seconds after I threw the "Fuck Your Shit" switch, four precisely-placed charges blew that plane into pieces. Both wings just fell right off, and a fifth charge, about 75% thermite, completely obliterated anything resembling a flight computer.

And the picture of my ex that I had taped to the window. God I miss her.

Of course, that switch was intended to be used while the plane was on the ground, preferably close to something that would feel bad for my plane...and explode along with it in a sympathetic fashion. Not all of the troopers realize it, but I have fairly strict orders to never let a PBE plane fall into enemy hands. The last thing we need is anyone getting our decryption gear.

I'm a pilot. I hate jumping out of airplanes. Even so, I've done enough jumps that I landed just fine. The troopers were already on the way over.

Good boys. We get out of this, they need a bonus.

"So where are we, exactly?"

"Wut, we're about 100 miles short of Asgabat, Turmenistan, which was supposed to be a pit stop. Nearest town is just north, named Geok-Tepe."

"And you just had to get us shot down. Near Gook-Tape, on our way to Asshat?"

"Dude, don't even blame me. Something blew a large chunk off our left wing, not a rocket, not a SAM. Had to be a flak cannon left over from some old war, and they did it without tracer rounds or radar assist. Also, the city's named Asgabat, but at this point, I just don't care."

Some days.

Why I Am Not A Calvinist

I figured I'd type this up, since it occasionally comes up in conversation. This is a codification of what I've come to generally agree with, it is not an attempt to start a debate. No such attempts shall be suffered kindly.

Obviously, both Wesley and Calvin have verse support for what they espoused. That's not even up for debate. What is up for the debate is the interpretation of those verses, which I'm sick and tired of debating, but to do that is to miss the point entirely.

I prefer Kierkegaard over Wesley, and Wesley over Calvin.

Soren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Danish Philosopher. His early life can best be described as unpleasant, and he didn't handle it very well for the most part. However, his treatment of Christianity is brilliant.

What Kierkegaard did for me, when I read his works and innumerable summaries of them, was to remove the tendency to treat Christianty as an academic exercise. That's what Existentialism does for me, most of all. It gets rid of that tendency to have a list of things I "believe" that in no way matches the way I live.

After reading some of his works, I basically threw away the entire concept of "following a human interpretation of the Bible that has been deemed 'official Christian doctrine'", and replaced it with a much simpler idea: "If God exists and I exist, what does that mean for me?"

Anyways, back to Calvin and Wesley: It comes down to the lives of those two men. Whether or not they have verses to support their interpretations is irrelevent, if I'm going to follow a man's teachings, I must follow the man as well. If the man doesn't live out what he taught, then he's a fraud, and his teachings are worthless.

So, when I first ran into Calvinism, I researched the man himself. Here's what I found:

Calvin was French lawyer, broke with the Catholics after experiencing God as something more than a ritual, went on to write a crap-ton of books, and ended up running Geneva when his influence in the Reformation gained him political power. While there, he accused a man (Micheal Servetus) of heresy. Servetus was convicted in absentia.

Here's a direct quote from Calvin about Servetus, c. 1547:

"for if he came, as far as my authority goes, I would not let him leave alive."

(Source)

In 1553, Servetus showed up in Geneva, attended one of Calvin's sermons, and Calvin had him arrested. Servetus was then burned at the stake, although Calvin tried to show mercy and have him beheaded instead. Yeah, "merciful".

I've held grudges before. I'll even admit to wishing a slow painful death upon someone, and yeah, it lasted longer than that. But hey, I'll also admit that I wasn't walking with God at the time. Calvin kept that hate going while he preached sermons on a near-constant basis.

That's jacked up, yet that's the reality of the situation. He may have been completely right in everything he ever wrote down about the Bible, but when it came down to it, he completely failed to live it out. 1st John has some interesting things to say about people who hate, I'm not in the mood to copy/paste them.

He did have an epic beard, though. I'll give him that.

Now, why Wesley?

John Wesley was born in England and was an Anglican Cleric. During what was essentially a missions trip to Georgia, he had an encounter with some Moravian missionaries. That encounter led him to realize that they had a much more personal relationship with God than he did, and that influenced Methodism to be a much more personal faith than Anglicanism.

He did much of his preaching in the open air, which was revolutionary at the time. The vast majority of the money he made he then gave away to various causes, and was one of the first to speak out against slavery. He approached social issues as something to be influenced towards God, not legislated against sin.

When his friend George Whitfield, a Calvinist that he'd had several arguments with, died in 1770, Wesley said the following:

"There are many doctrines of a less essential nature ... In these we may think and let think; we may 'agree to disagree.' But, meantime, let us hold fast the essentials..."

He coined the phrase "Agree to disagree", by the way.

In short, he lived it. He wasn't perfect, but instead of cooping himself up in a library and writing about what Christianity should be, he went out and lived it to the best of his ability. He didn't just write books about Christ's Love, he attempted to demonstrate it.

I could probably write a book on various doctrinal issues I have with Calvinism, but then I'd be doing exactly what I hate about Bible-thumping anybodies. I'm not writing this to convert people from one denomination to another. I'm writing this as an explanation, which I'll simply summarize like this:

I'm a Wesleyan, not a Calvinist, because Calvin wrote about Christianity but didn't live it, and Wesley lived it.