Thoughts on Taclink

I recently left Taclink, and at this point, I have no real intention to return, although I do wish that I was still a part of the community. It would be hard to overstate how much I've benefitted from my involvement with Taclink/Opchan. It's because of members of those sites that I'm a student at Tulsa Tech, it's because of members of those sites that I got to build my AR-15, and I've even had meals to eat because of them. I've gone on road trips, hung out in bars, and generally had a fantastic time.

Taclink/Opchan posters are among my best friends.

But I left, and the decision to leave took less than ten minutes.

Here's why:

I'm not allowed to defend my faith, or even to mention it. If the subject of the thread is "How's your day going?", I catch flak from the mods and the admin for mentioning my faith, even if, as in the most recent case, the only thing I mention is "I'm getting ready to debate my pastors".

Other people asked me questions about Christianity, I told them to send me an email. That's against the rules now.

Now, I have no problem with folks giving me all kinds of shit about what I believe. Most of the time, they don't even understand what they're talking about, and I view it as a chance to set the record straight. I generally do this by citing verses that back up my position, or linking a article on the subject. This is against the rules as well.

It was suggested that I should simply stop mentioning my faith. Well, it might be easier for some people, but it's not really possible for me. Let me try to explain that part:

Taclink's admin/owner, BTDT, is a decorated US Army Ranger, and I have a lot of respect for the man. He's retired, but he once lived, breathed, ate, and crapped Ranger. It wasn't an eight-to-five job for the man, it was a lifestyle. He thought like a Ranger, he talked like a Ranger, he acted like a Ranger. He lived a Ranger lifestyle because when it came time for him to fight like a Ranger, he wanted to be at his very best.

Now, if back while he was active duty in the Rangers, someone had asked him about his life, chances are the conversation would have at least brushed upon his status as a Ranger, and would most definitely have mentioned his military service. It would be hard for him to talk about his life without mentioning something he does seven days a week, right?

Makes sense.

Now, take me. I'm a Christian, and I'm training to be a Christian missionary aviator. My job will be to fly and occasionally repair airplanes, and talk to people about God. I'm currently in training for the repair part of it, and I practice the talking part whenever possible. If folks ask me about it, and I mention it frequently because it's who I am, I'm more than happy to spend as much time as they want to explain what it is I believe and why.

Being a Christian is not an eight-to-five thing for me any more than BTDT was only a Ranger while he was actually doing missions in Afghanistan. For me to avoid mentioning my faith would be about as logical, and about as possible, for him to do the same while he was training with his unit.

Now, I know there are people who treat Christianity like a chore to be taken care of Sunday morning. I've also met soldiers who treat their military service like a chore to be taken care of one weekend a month with a two-week camping trip in the summer. Those soldiers don't belong on a Ranger mission any more than a guy who never practices his faith belongs in the mission field.

I train hard for my future career. I train by studying my Bible, spending time in prayer, by talking to everyone I get a chance to, and by studying for whatever class I'm currently in. I train hard because I do not intend to be a half-assed weekend warrior when I get to whatever country I go on a mission to. I want to do the very best work I can for my CO, and to complete my mission, just as BTDT trained extremely hard so that he could do his very best, and complete his missions.

But, as things go, BTDT's not cool with the way I live my life, and has "ordered" me to stop mentioning my faith. It's his website, so he can make whatever rules he decides. As a user of the website, my choices are simply to either play by the rules, or to leave.

Because of the way I treat my faith, as central to my life and career, not as an accessory, I do not feel I can play by his rules in a respectful manner.

So I left.

I wish that it could have gone another way. I tried to keep the debates down, to do things via emails, and by not getting into the specifics of what I was studying, but that wasn't enough, and I was catching flak for it, so I left. I'm not bitter, I'm not pissed off, and I'm hoping this doesn't come across as too disrespectful, but it's simply no longer a place I feel comfortable hanging around.

Superheroes and Bridges

"Soon there will be war. Millions will burn. Millions will perish in sickness and misery. Why does one death matter against so many? Because there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise in this."
-Rorschach, Watchmen

I'm a philosopher who likes comic books, or perhaps more precisely the comic book heroes in them. The actual medium has never seemed all that attractive, perhaps because a 20-page installment of a story shouldn't cost $5. Regardless, I've always been attracted to the heroism depicted by comic book heroes.

Oddly, it's not the fighting evil part that I'm drawn to, it's the principles by which the heroes live. Anyone can go out and punch criminals, and while few people do (probably due to lawsuits and other assorted recriminations), it doesn't take a cape. What makes superheroes heroic isn't their fighting prowess, it's their refusal to back down when things aren't going their way.

In the world we live in, everyone loves a comeback kid, people who fight on despite grevious wounds. That's not what I'm talking about. No, what I'm talking about is when a superhero refuses to compromise his or her principles.

I think Captain America said it best in Amazing Spiderman #537. This is the panel, but I'll put the text below it.



"Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — 'No, you move.'"
Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man #537

See, when the truth is known, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to give in to anyone who says "It's not the truth", no matter what convoluted reasons they come up with. When the truth is known, one can never compromise it, or it's lost forever.

I've heard it said once that if a politician takes a bribe even once, he's forever bought. That small compromise not only opens to door to further compromise, but it becomes leverage against future principled stands. A once-bribed politician will forever fear the knowledge that he once took a bribe coming out, and it becomes easier to take the second bribe than to refuse it.

I'm hardly the first guy to have said this. It's conventional wisdom, there aren't many folks out there who will say that resisting compromise becomes easier the more one compromises.

So, why then do Christians allow even that smallest of first compromises when it comes to the authority and inerrancy of the Bible?

It's easy to start with the small things, things that don't have much bearing on the "major" doctrines like Salvation or who Christ is. So the Church ends up taking small step away from Truth and decides to compromise on the Creation. It's not really relevant, they say, and they don't realize that they've just compromised the authority of the entire book by weakening one part of it.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is a marvel of engineering. It's massive, beautiful, and made up of thousands of separate parts, all riveted, welded, and bolted together.

If you were to ask an engineer what would happen to the integrity of the entire bridge if one a minor structural member was to be cut in half with a blowtorch, but left attached on both ends, he would probably be able to tell you that the bridge would still hold, but wouldn't be quite as resilient in an earthquake.

But the Church doesn't stop with one compromise on the Bible, does it. That wasn't a question, these days it's hard to find a church that's never allowed politics to influence the sermon of the day. For example, there's a pesky pair of verses in the New Testament that say women should not be allowed to speak in church. 1 Cor 14:34 and 1 Timothy 2:12, specifically.

Surely they can't mean what they actually say? That sort of attitude is soooo 2,000 years ago. Church tradition values women in leadership, after all.

Now, go back to the engineer, and ask him what happens when a second structural member is blowtorched in half, but left attached at both ends. That dead weight, pulling on the bridge, but giving no strength, is going to start causing trouble when the winds pick up, or if an earthquake strikes, he'll say.

And the winds of change will pick up, won't they? It's 2011. We've got a dozen kinds of contraceptives, cheap and easy STD testing, most of which are now curable anyways, and hundreds of experts who will line up to talk about the liberating aspects of open sexuality. We've advanced as a culture, sex isn't something we're afraid of anymore, we don't have to speak about it in hushed tones.

Surely all those verses that talked about sexual purity were just the result of a misogynistic culture that oppressed women, hated sexuality in every form, and was afraid of disease and women bearing children out of wedlock, right?

Go back to the bridge, cut up a third piece.

Homosexuality can't really be an abomination before the Lord, right?

Go back to the bridge, cut up a fourth piece.

Abortion's okay under certain circumstances, right?

Go back to the bridge, cut up a fifth piece.

Casual drug use is fine if you're responsible, right?

Go back to the bridge, cut up a sixth.

Those lists of qualifications for positions of authority in the Church are just too much for anyone to live up to, right?

Go back to the bridge, cut up a seventh piece.

The Bible can't really mean that Jesus is the only way to Heaven, right?

Go back to the bridge, cut up a few of those cables that holds up the road.

The Bible wasn't really written by God, it was collected by men, right?

Go back to the bridge, cut a few more of those cables that hold up the road.

Jesus wasn't really who he said he was, right? He never came right out and said "I'm God, Israel. Bow to me!"

Go back to the bridge, cut up one of those big cables that goes end to end.

And about this time, along comes a big storm or an earthquake, in the form of a particularly rough patch of life. How long is that bridge going to hold? How strong can faith be when it's been compromise so many times? How strong can anything be when it's been chopped up every time it's inconvenient to keep it strong?

It is for that reason that I will never compromise my belief that the Bible is the inerrant, authoritative Word of God. I will not allow that first compromise, no matter how minor, to degrade the structure of the whole book.

Not even in the face of Armageddon.

New ink, and philosophy.

I over-think stuff. Which is fine, I think, and I think it's fine because I've spent hours thinking about how much I think about stuff, and concluded that it wasn't too much.

This, of course, extends to important stuff like "should I get a tattoo, and what should it be, and what would it mean to me, and what would it mean to other people, and would it mean more than 'I like how it looks', and would it accurately reflect the person I am?"

So, this is what I got:

On my left wrist is the Doomsday Clock, a bit worse for wear. It symbolizes the brief time we may have left. It's the idea that in five minutes, we could *all* of us be dead, cinders floating in the atomic breeze. In five minutes, you, I, and everyone we've ever met could be dead. It's a constant reminder that we're on our way out. That life is short, and often wasted. That the things we do will not last, that our greatest works will never survive Time.

On my right wrist is the Punisher's Skull logo. It symbolizes death, and judgement. It's a reminder that I will die, and you will die, and that on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. It's a symbol of harsh judgement, a reminder that when we die, there's no lawyers, no plea bargains, no early release for good behavior, no short sentences, but harsh, permanent, and black-and-white Justice. Frank Castle is not a man of gray areas and compromise, he's the embodiment of Genesis 9:6. Similarly, God's judgement is stark, final, and permanent. There's no hidden actions, no way to squirrel out of every nasty thing we've done.

The "12:13" and "ECC" stand for Ecclesiastes 12:13, the closest thing I have to a "inspirational life verse". I know other folks read the Psalms to marvel at the beautiful poetry and be inspired by it, I prefer Ecclesiastes' nihilistic treatment of this world, followed by the simple answer to life's only real question "What is the meaning of my life?" Ecclesiastes 12:13 gives that answer. "The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person."

Those three parts, put together, are basically the way I try to live my life.

I could be dead in five minutes, and standing before God. Do I want to spend those five minutes doing something that I would be ashamed of in front of God, or do I want to spend those five minutes doing something useful? Do I want to spend the rest of my life in pursuit of God's will for it, or in pursuit of my own fulfilment?

In the end, I will die. You will die. Everything we've ever said will be forgotten, the lives we lead will be irrelevant, the great things we build will end up falling apart. Perfectly illustrating this point, the food I've made for people, no matter how much I enjoyed cooking it, how good it tasted, or how much they enjoyed eating it, has long been turned into poo.

When I really think about it, the only thing in this life that's worthwhile is serving God. Everything else is vanity, and chasing after the wind.

That Guy

So, I'm a guy who loves action movies, good ones and bad ones alike. Being a philosopher, I tend to prefer the ones that have a slight philosophical undercurrent to them, something a bit more deep than "Rawr, kill the bad guys". But it can't be overbearing, or it'll rejected by most of the fans (I'm looking at you, Matrix Trilogy), and thus if it's there, it generally shows up in a Hero Speech.

A Hero Speech is the part where the hero, sometimes in a conversation with a Counterpart, gives a short, motivational speech. It's generally short, since heroes generally aren't portrayed as all that smart, and thus they're generally not exemplary, but occasionally, a real gem pops up.

Thus, I turn your attention to John McClane's speech in Live Free or Die Hard, where he talk about being "That Guy".

Matt Farrell: It's not funny, I'm not like you, I can't do this shit.

John McClane: What's that mean? Like what?

Farrell: I'm not like "heroic", and everything. I'm not brave like you are, I'm not that guy.

McClane: I'm nobody's hero, kid.

Farrell: You've saved my life like ten times in the last six hours.

McClane: Just doing my job, that's all. You know what you get for being a hero? Nothin'. You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah, blah, blah, attaboy. You get divorced. Your wife can't remember your last name. Your kids don't want to talk to you. You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me, kid, nobody wants to be that guy.

Farrell: Then why you doing this?

McClane: Because there's no body else to do it right now, that's why. Believe me, if there were somebody else to do it, I'd let them do it, but there's not. So we're doing it.

Farrell: Ah. That's what makes you that guy.

The most painful thing I've heard someone say to me in the past year, ehh, two years, is "You need to consider that you don't have the social skills to be a missionary." Big ups to a man at a school I used to attend for that bit of exhortation and confidence-building, right?

Well, the simple fact is, I've never really thought I'll make a good missionary. I'll be a pretty good pilot, and a skilled mechanic, but as for the talking and witnessing part? You better get someone else. I've met some people that would make great missionaries, but I'm definitely not one of them.

I'm not a preacher, I can barely hold a conversation with anyone. I'm tattoed, I wear black almost exclusively, and combat boots 365 days a year. I tend to ramble, I get nervous if I have to speak in front of people. I can't remember the reference for half the crucial verses of the Bible, even the ones that it seems everyone else knows. I don't even talk like a Christian, since I say words like "shit" and "fuck" too much. I'm also an asshole, and things get worse from there.

Things must be bad indeed if God needed to tap me on the shoulder. Obviously, God ran out of Billy Graham's, Al French's, and John Wesley's, I mean, I'm the bottom of the fuckin' barrel when it comes to people meant for missions. You'd have to look pretty hard to find a bigger asshole while still remaining inside the faithful.

Then again, if things are that bad, then the better people are either doing something else, or aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. So I got tapped on the shoulder, and shit, I've got nothing better to do, right? Why not throw away my otherwise pissed-away life flying in the backwoods jungle of nowhere?

The man who told me I lacked the social skills to be a good missionary was totally right, but the thing of it is, as soon as I know that someone else will take my job, I'll quite happily go back to being the angry asshole that just wanted to live in a shack and left alone. This was never my dream for my life, but I'll do it until I'm dead, or God finds someone better.

It's kinda funny, though, when people think that God really needs socially skilled, sweet-talking, nice-acting people in order to do what He needs done. If you really think that God needs anything but obedient people, you might want to open the fuckin' book, and read it instead of talking about it.

Take Moses, for example. Yeah, remember that bit about him being called by a burning bush on the side of a mountain? Do you remember why he was there? He was herding sheep, and the reason he was there herding sheep that day is that he ran away from Egypt to avoid being punished for murdering a man.

Or Paul, who was on the road to Anneus to find and kill more Christians when he got called.

Or Peter, who's a poster boy for bipolar people everywhere. Peter's the guy that had no idea what he was doing, or was supposed to be doing, but was going to do it as intensely as he possibly could.

Or David, the murderous adulterer who had so much blood on his hands that God specifically told him that someone else would build the Temple.

Or David's son Solomon, who built the Temple...and never passed up a chance to bang a new concubine, worship a new idol, or attend a party.

Or Jonah, who thought he could run away from God, and obeyed only so that God would be justified in wiping out those scumbag Ninevites...then got really pissed when the Ninevites repented and God spared them.

Shit, compared to those guys, I'm a saint, but in the end, I'm just another asshole who thinks that his meager contributions will matter. You know, someone like...you.

See, the thing is, we're all assholes, we're all too dumb, too stupid, too angry, and too arrogant to ever do anything right. There has been, in all of history, only one person who ever did it right. Jesus was the only guy that could ever have been a good missionary on His own.

The rest of us will fuck it up. That's not an "if" statement, it's a damned guarantee. We will fuck up every task God ever gives us, but doing it right isn't the point, just doing it is. We do our part, even if it's a task that's way, way beyond us, and God will do the rest. Really, it's all up to Him, all we have to do is show up and be there.

The only common thread among the people I listed above is that they obeyed when God called. And that's all I'm trying to do, and that's all you should worry about, either. Just obey, and don't worry about whether or not you're "That guy", so long as you go when you're told to go. Maybe we'll all get lucky, and someone else will show up to do it all for us, but until that day, it's up to us.

The best and brightest of the bottom of the barrel.

Dearest America;

(It's near the end of the movie, and the hero,having retaken the city from the enemy and beating the traitor villain in a brutal fight points gun at him. The traitor offers a defense of his actions, but the hero simply shoots him in the head.)

America, it's time we had a talk. I know, I should have done this years ago, but I'm worried about you. It seems you've forgotten who you are, and you're starting to come apart at the seams in your self denial. I'm here to help, because I love you with all of my heart, but this may still sting a bit:

(The heroes, having beaten the bad guy in a car chase, wax poetic about shooting criminals instead of searching and arresting him. They then allow him a chance to pull a weapon, and when he does this, the criminal is shot multiple times at point-blank range.)

America, you are a country full of lethal, death-loving, war-starting bastards.

(the good guys, having killed an enemy patrol, calmly state their intent to kill every enemy solder in it, then tear one of the enemy soldiers limb from limb.)

I know you talk about loving peace, but America, I'm not so sure you do. Oh, I know you talk about it, and I know your leaders will talk endlessly about diplomacy, but let's just be honest: At the most basic level, you don't settle for anything less than total victory and the complete destruction of the enemy.

(The hero, bound by rules to take prisoners if possible, asks the villain to do him a favor and attempt an escape, thus justifying the hero shooting the villain.)

While other countries love and celebrate their histories and cultures, you celebrate death and violence at every level. You're a country that hates the idea of taking prisoners, that thinks "overwhelming force" is a good place to start, and is never at peace with yourself unless you're kicking the shit out of someone else.

(The hero, unwilling to kill an unarmed man, screams at the villain to fill his hand, thus allowing him to kill the villain without remorse.)

You're a country that describes everything in terms of warfare: Football games are described as "gridiron battles", where men line up to "fight for yardage". Government programs to alleviate the burdens of low-income life are described as "Wars on Poverty". Hell, you've even declared war on a verb, and even though it's kinda complicated, you've managed to prevent that foreign users of that word from showing up on your soil.

I suppose it's a small wonder: From birth, you raise your children in a society where violence is a familiar and natural thing. Even your Saturday morning cartoons are brutally violent, featuring barnyard animals shooting and blowing each other up on a regular basis, ironically labelled "Looney Tunes", as if the comic nature of the violence will deny the inhere brutality. Once children are old enough that their parents allow them to watch movies, the body counts skyrocket.

It should come as no surprise, then, that by the time your children are grown up, they're inured to violence in a way that makes the rest of the world piss themselves in fear. Your children regard the idea that two knights would duel, and the loser would leave the field of battle, never to return, as an absurdity. Your children do not allow the possibility of their enemies ever coming back. Your children utterly destroy their enemies.

And if you want my opinion...it's fan-fucking-tastic. America, you're a country that is never comfortable with yourselves unless you are winning, and someone else is losing. You're a country full of people that are driven to succeed at damn near any cost, and it has made you a blood-soaked nightmare to people who end up on your bad side. In your entire history, nobody, not a single country, company, group, or person has been able to stand toe-to-toe with you and survive.

America, while other countries are concerned with their cultures, foods, and histories, you've always been concerned solely with survival, dominance, and success.

But sadly, it seems you're increasingly unable to accept this basic fact. Instead of accepting that you're a nation of killers, you're trying to change who you are, and as a result, you're going insane. America, this existential crisis of yours is killing you. You've lost the drive to succeed that made you a top military and economic power, largely because part of you is sorry for what you've done.

America, that's absurd. You are what you are, and there's no real point to changing. See, while the rest of the world is looking backwards and considering past glories, you've always looked forwards to the future. That's been your greatest strength, and while it has at times caused problems, everybody makes mistakes, and yours are no worse than anyone elses.

Even the fact that you feel bad about some of the things you've done is a good thing, it means you haven't lost your soul, but having some regrets about how something got done isn't necessarily a valid reason to change everything about yourself. You've been the driving force of progress in this world for a very long time because you understood that when things move forward, some other things may get left behind, and that's not a reason to stop moving forward.

The future is not an all-or-nothing event, and not everyone will get there. America, you have to stop this navel-gazing hippy bullshit, and admit that only the strong, self-reliant countries will make it to the future. I know, I know, we all feel bad that not everyone in America has a house, and not everyone lives a life devoid of fear. It's a scary world, and nobody's perfect.

Just stop for a second, though, and look around. There are really only two or three countries that are capable of stopping wars in other parts of the world, of making peace by making warlords back down. You're the only one that's ever done it for the cause of peace alone.

Please, we beg of you, accept who and what you are, and stop trying to apologize for the things you've done. Accept that you don't really want to see the bad guy survive to the end of the movie. Accept that you're the good guy, not the nice guy, and keep that saber sharp and polished so that when you rattle it, the other guy backs down. Accept that you'll make mistakes, but have always made things better on the whole.

America, you're not a country of weaklings who just want to be loved. Stop acting like it, stop trying to be everyone's best friend, and go ahead and kick the shit out of the next guys who mess with you. Don't worry about taking them alive, we all know what justice really looks like, and it's not a man sitting before a judge. Justice comes when the judge passes down the sentence, and the murderer is hung for his crimes.So the next time you get sucker punched, the next time someone attacks one of your friends, the next time you have a great idea that not everyone agrees with, give the critics the finger, and go balls out. WIN, as you have always won when you allowed yourself to. We'll be right behind you, we support you, and we'll have some burgers ready for you when you get back.

(All parenthesized bits are from actual movies and television shows.)

Let there be no mistake:

During my journeys around the internet, I occasionally run across an atheist who says "You'd have to be insane to be a Christian." I got called a "Christophrenic" once, which made me chuckle a bit. Being the philosopher I am, I figured I'd overthink and codify a point I've been trying to make for a couple years now that the posters I've talked would probably hate hearing. Here it is:

Let there be no mistake: I am saying, with full knowledge of the options, that either God exists, OR I am a madman of the highest order.

I do not live a life that allows for me to be "mistaken" about my faith in Christ. If Jesus is not God, and God does not exist, then I am a man with a severe mental illness who talks to the voice in his head, and dangerous to the extreme because of the utter disregard he has for the consequences of obeying the voice.

It bothers me intensely when I hear "Christians" say things like "Science doesn't support Creationism, so I'm an evolutionist, but I'm a Christian too" then go on to explain that only a madman disregards scientific evidence. I hear folks say that they can't have faith because it doesn't make sense. I see all these people who stand there and say "Fundamentalist Christians are lunatics because they believe the Bible!" (Thrown in exclamation points and profanity where necessary.)

Well, yeah, it would take someone absolutely insane to do that. Someone like...me. I'll be that guy.

I'm done dancing around the honesty of what having faith in Christ really means. Faith is not science. Faith is not weighed and measured, and decided based upon the evidence. Faith is an suspension of disbelief. It believing in things we cannot see, and trusting that things will happen.

I'm sick and tired of people trying to make "faith" and "reason" coexist inside Christianity. To be fair, Christianity makes sense, but not because the evidence supports it, or because Jesus is performing miracles in Central Park every Sunday morning before His sermon. It certainly doesn't make sense because Jesus was a "moral teacher with a good message" as I heard one man say.

No, Christianity makes sense because every madman's leap of faith I've ever made has paid off. The voice in my head, the one I pray to and call God, is right every time. Every. Single. Time I have ever placed my trust in God, I've been rewarded. There have been things that I do not understand, of course, and not everything has worked out like I thought it should, but my life has gotten better, and more rewarding, every time.

It makes sense because of Faith, because of trust placed in the the barely-comprehensible God, through which things begin to make sense in the way that JFK assassination theories make sense once all the parts of the conspiracy are seen. Disregarding small pieces of Christianity because they don't make sense soon leads to larger and larger chunks not making sense, and it all falls apart. If Jonah never got swallowed by a fish, then what was Jesus talking about when He talked about the "sign of Jonah"?

Much like C. S. Lewis stated, Jesus is either exactly who He said He was, or He was a madman, or He was the Devil himself. His followers, the ones who actually place their faith in Him, are much the same: We are either right, or we are utterly insane. Jesus wasn't asking for people to believe small things that aren't very important, or to make only a few small changes to the way they lived, and anyone who is actually trying to follow Jesus' teaching isn't making minor changes to their lives.

Jesus asked people to leave their families, and their jobs, and everything they'd ever known to follow Him. He didn't offer it as a career improvement, with better benefits and vacation pay, or even dental benefits, He promised that His followers would be hated, and that it would suck intensely.

Christianity is not a religion that can be added to one's life, it replaces it. Choosing Christ is choosing to change everything. It's choosing to leave your old life, with your old ways of acting, your old ways of thinking, and the old places, behind. It's choosing to become an entirely new person.

It is choosing to adopt a way of life that, should you be wrong, means you have chosen insanity, but if you are correct, means that you've chosen an eternity with God. You can choose to try walking on water in Faith, or you can choose to stay in the boat because the idea of walking on water is crazy, but you cannot choose to both walk on water and say that it makes sense.

The last, best, best friend.

"You're my best friend." The man said.

I blinked. What? How can I be this man's best friend?

"Thanks" was all I could get out. I couldn't say the words back, it felt disloyal.

I had a best friend, a man I'd grown up with. He hasn't called in months, I haven't either. Neither of us are the boys who stayed up late talking about life in tents. I'm not the boy who used his bug spray to light fires in a dry bush. He's not the boy who, for some reason, didn't have much trouble with it.

Or was she my best friend? She's the last person I'd said "You're my best friend" to, and we were certainly very close to each other. She's the person I reference as my best friend the most, and mostly to make a point. "My best friend..." I say, as if I have the right to brag about my friendship with her.

And these days, we don't talk much. I don't know what to say anyways. I have a lot I want to talk with her about, but she's got a boyfriend now, and I won't try to compete with him for talking time with her, it wouldn't be right.

Of course my first best friend, we were like brothers, and we haven't had a conversation in 18 years or so. He's married now, but I know very little past that.

Then it hit me. I'm all grown up. "Best friends forever" is a childish thing to say to each other. Life moves on, and I don't think I'm supposed to have best friends anymore. So this latest guy, he's my last, best, friend, and he's the last best friend I'll ever get to have.

Friends, these days, help each other out, then move on when life forces them to. We keep in touch, passively watching each other through electronic eyes. Until the day that we realize we don't know this person or that anymore.

I hate that it got easy to stop being friends with people. Friendship became a thing of ones and zeroes. "We used to be friends" stopped being a heartbreaking sentence, and started being a tragic thought three mouse-clicks away from a hyperlink hatefully labeled "unfriend".

Echoing our world of no-contest divorces, we now ask permission to be friends with each other, then relax in the knowledge that instead of any commitment to actually be a friend to that person, we can "unfriend" and "block" the person from our lives before it gets too complicated.

Friends, these days, meet for burgers, then tap away on smart phones with people who aren't there. Conversations with friends, interrupted by conversations with friends. A subtle, tragic reminder that some friends aren't deemed worthy of being paid attention to. A reminder that friendship is an inconvenience, and really takes a lot of work.

I know that, now.

A true friend of mine was there for me before, during, and after the darkest hours of my life. The man I had trusted and confided in most sat and watched in silence while I was led away in the aftermath of one of my best (that word again) friends abusing all the trust I had given him. The contrast haunts me to this day, how I failed to spend time with the people who ended up my best friends until it was too late.

Maybe...maybe I don't want another best friend. I'm too old, and too cynical, to say to any one person "you matter more than the rest of them" and have any expectation of that being reciprocated. I think, maybe, that I just want friends, and those I have. While I miss having a "best friend", such is the way of life. I guess I grew up.

(I'm intentionally not touching on the sort of best friend that I'll marry. That's not the point of this post.)

Sunshine and Death: Aftermath

The bombing mission had made worldwide news. Ivan, now "Crazy Ivan", had fundamentally changed the way Mexico viewed the US. They'd decided that "war on drugs" was a losing proposition, and had formally declared War on the United States. Which, amusingly, consisted of posting half of a division on the border, split between Tijuana, Nogales, and some shithole in Texas. Every couple weeks, they'd shoot at, and miss, some of the Guardsmen assinged to "drug interdiction" work, who would dive for the dirt, complain about their ROE, then go back to the base.

When it hit the papers, though, a bunch of congressmen had decided that if this was the "War on Drugs" that they'd been promoting all those years, it smelled to much like real war, and the assholes legalized pot. Since the Mexican cartels were only traffickers of coke and heroine, and not producers of illegal drugs, we lost our contract.

The CIA spook cited some technicality about "excessive force" (which pleased everyone in PBE) and canceled the contract, which we thought was totally unfair. We downsized the Arizona base, bringing staffing down to just a few new guys and some drones. We'd keep it open for business, but only as a training base. It wasn't going to make us money anymore. Those of us assigned to combat duties went back to Florida.

Crazy Ivan decided that he wanted to keep killing cartel members, so he took his paycheck, reinstalled the MAFFS unit, filled that thing with gasoline, and started firebombing coca fields in Colombia. It worked for a week or two, then his plane exploded in midair. That incident also made the papers, and some commie asshole in Venezuela worked out a deal wherein the Colombians would accept VZ help in the same manner the old Soviet satellite countries accepted Soviet help.

Six weeks after the bombing mission, a man arrived from India, with a briefcase full of gold and a contract to start a war.

Sunshine and Death (Part Eight)

A modern shoulder-launched missile can reach out as far as 25 kilometers if the shooter can see the target. It also leaves a quite visible trail back to the shooter's location, not that the outskirts of Hermosillo had all that many places to fire such a weapon. As I turned towards the city, we saw a green pickup speeding away from a taller building that was roughly where the guy who saw the missile said it came from.

"Ok, let's kill that truck, and see if anything else shoots at us." I snarled.

"Got it!" came the reply from the back.

I dropped down to roughly the level of the tallest building I saw, hoping that would prevent too many people from being able to shoot at us. They obviously spent some money on missiles, I didn't want to risk getting hit with a SAM. The driver was trying to go down side streets to dodge us, but the buildings weren't tall enough for him to lose us. The guy in the back was shooting back, something small and one-handed. I didn't care what he had, we had more.

"Fire as you bear, gentlemen!"

I love those old naval terms.

Just as the truck reached a particularly wide intersection, I stood the plane up on its left wing and drifted slightly to the right, and the three men sitting on that side of the aircraft held their triggers down. Three streams of lead stitched pockmarks into the street, then into the vehicle, which suddenly swerved and slammed into the corner of a large adobe building.

The side door opened, and a man slumped out of the truck, but he was down. One of the troopers had reloaded, and a second burst went into the cab. They were dead, no doubts about it.

By the time we got back to the base, we all wanted blood, and now we knew that only only were the drugs being stashed in the cities, but the cartels had spent money on weapons that posed a serious threat to us. Intel was providing us with nothing worthwhile, and how they couldn't find drugs in Mexico was beyond the grasp of anyone who was in harms way.

Ivan, who'd recently gotten his contract signed, was in a particular foul mood.

"Fuck! Is bullshit! I go fix problem!" He finally yelled. "I need barrels!"

"Barrels of what?" One of the troopers asked.

"Fuel. Time for bombing raid!"

The entire room went silent, and men who'd seen it all had blank stares.

"Uh...what?" Athanasius asked. "What, exactly, are we going to be bombing?"

"Drug cartel owns city, we find warehouse in city, blow it to hell. Next day, we find fancy house of cartel Don, blow it to hell. Next day, we find power plant, blow it to hell. Eventually, no cartel."

Well. I'm rather embarrased that I didn't think of that. This is certainly an option we hadn't thought of. Should work, too.

18 hours later, the MAFFS had been unloaded, and three dozen 55-gallon drums had been filled with gasoline from, wired with detonators, and loaded into the back of the C-130. Our plan was to fly to the towns industrial district, line up with the railroad and kick barrels out the back at one-second intervals. We weren't even going to bother waiting for night to fall, we'd hit them at noon.

I volunteered to help with the mission. I had more experience with timing jumps than Ivan did, and that sort of experience would somewhat translate to timing bomb drops. Also, I'd just gotten a video camera, and wanted to make sure we got what would certainly be a glorious serious of explosions on video.

Ivan was flying the mission, I had the right-hand seat. He'd been giving me some basics on multi-engine flying, but I wasn't ready to take over yet. I'd head to the back when we were over the target, then fly the return route.

A flight in is a flight in. Most of them are pretty boring. This new guy, Talbot, was arming the detonators, he'd done some demo work while he was in the military, and had volunteered to arm the weapons while we were in flight. Not a job I'd want, but it's not like it was safe to be in the same time zone as those things anyways.

At three minutes out, Ivan opened up the back doors, and the desert streaked past in shades of brown. Then we were over the city, the green light went on, and barrels started being rolled out the back. I'm not going to lie, it was amazing, and the hi-res video camera I had did an amazing job of catching the details. The barrels were all gone in less than a minute, and the entire warehouse district seemed to be on fire.

Cause fuck you, Michael Bay.

"Hang on back there, time to turn for home!"

We barely had time to grab the nearest piece of crash webbing before the plane made a hard right turn, and we zoomed north over the city on our way home. I started to make my way back to the cockpit when I heard someone fire a burst out of a side door. I didn't have my rifle on me, so ran to the guy who was shooting, hoping to see if there was a threat that needed to be dealt with.

"What are you shooting at?"

It was the guy who'd thought his prior service had made him worthy of the right-hand seat.

"Oh, hey there, General-sir. Fuckin' Mexicans, man. They're all in on it!"

Another burst out the door. I hadn't seen return fire.

"Who the fuck are you shooting at?"

My hand went to my sidearm.

"Haha! There's one of them!"

A short burst from his weapon hit a lady who was hanging laundry on a rooftop. She spun like a top, then collapsed.

"My God, what the fuck is wrong with you?!"

He glanced back at me, slightly lowering the rifle. I didn't like what I saw in his eyes. It wasn't human so much as it was...wild.

"The whole country's in on it, man! They're all making money off the drugs, so let's waste them all!"

I saw a group of kids playing soccer in a field, and he started to raise the rifle. The corner of his mouth twitched into a smile, then a look of shock crossed his face as a bullet from my 1911 hit him under his armpit, smashing first one lung, then his heart, then the other lung.

"Vendimus mortem" I snarled as I reholstered my pistol. I grabbed his vest with one hand, his belt with another, and threw him out of the plane. "Rest in peace."

Sunshine and Death (Part Seven)

PanamaJack had been having one of THOSE days. Aside from being stuck with a pair of FNGs, the folks who ran the shipping and receiving department at the Chateau had misplaced his most recent order of tobacco products. He'd been out of cigars for two days, and was alternating between wanting to murder someone and wanting to murder everyone. When his turret gunner, a new guy named Rimfire Lincoln, sent a long .50-cal burst into a cluster of trees a half-click off, he snapped.

"What the fuck! Are you fucking retarded? Why did you shoot that tree?"

"I saw somethin'!" The kid shouted. "There's something in there, I saw the reflection!"

"OK, we'll check it out, but if you just wasted some hippies, I swear to fuck you're going to be walking home."

As the truck drew near, the nearest tree started to shake, fell over, and a small SUV dragging camo netting took off across the desert, quickly followed by two more.

Well, would you look at that? PanamaJack thought. "Looks like we get paid today! Get after him!"

"Yee-haw!" one of the new guys shouted over the radio.

Evoking all the best parts of an old western, a Humvee full of hollering mercs started chasing across the desert after a trio of SUVs full of contrabandistos, guns a-blazin'. The cartel men, trying to hang out the window and shoot at the mercs, were unable to slow the vehicle down, and Rimfire, trying to see through the dust and being new to the ways of war, couldn't see well enough to aim his weapon properly, but was shooting anyways.

"Soren, PJ. We flushed a group of hidden jeeps near Hermosillo. We're trying to get them before they make it into the city!"

I hope that flying asshole makes it in time. PanamaJack thought. Or we're going right into the city after them. We're not going to lose these guys, and we'll follow them right to their goddamned front door if we have to.

"Ammo! I need more ammo!" Rimfire yelled.

"What the fuck, man. Did you even hit the guy?" Seraph yelled at him. "Wait until you can at least see the fucker, new guy!"

"What? I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome this machine gun is!" Rimfire replied.

"If he survives this, I'm going to kill him" Seraph muttered.

"Soren, it's getting close, how far away are you?" PanamaJack asked over the radio.

"Not far. A minute out, " came the reply. "We'll kill the first vehicle, then work our way back."

"How original!"

"Yeah, fuck you too."

As the first rounds shredded the lead vehicle, PanamaJack noted that the cartel men had stopped shooting back, and idly wondered if they were out of ammo. Then, out in the distance, he saw the white streak of a missile being launched, and slammed on the brakes.

SAM? Where's it going?

"Troopers! IT'S A JAVELIN!"

Then the missile hit the apex of it's arc, and he started yelling at the troopers to get out. Four PBE troopers bailed out of a perfectly good truck, and started running for cover. Rimfire Lincoln, happy to finally have a decent shot at the retreating vehicles, never saw the missile coming.

It hit the humvee just in the grill, just below the hood. As the missile detonated, the initial charge ripped the hood off and sent a spray of hot metal into the windscreen of the truck, the gunner's shield, and the gunner. Then the second portion of the warhead, designed to penetrate Soviet-model tanks, detonated, and a blast-focused jet of hot copper obliterated the engine.

Rimfire collapsed into the now-smoldering vehicle, and Seraph sprinted towards the truck to get him out.

"Soren! Kill that launcher!"

"On it! Casualties?"

"One, the new guy Rimfire. It's bad."

"Fuck. We'll be back for him as soon as it's safe."

Sunshine and Death (Part Six)

War.

Another day, another briefing, another list of targets we can't find, and another list of places we can't search.

"HM, why the fuck are you wasting our time in the desert again? We know the shit's in the cities, and we know they're in there, hiding from us. Can't we go waste them and be done with it?"

Everyone who'd been with the company for more than a month dove for the floor. The FNG was saying what most of us were thinking, but we didn't want to get in the way of a bullet.

"Because, fucktard, we don't have intel on where in the fucking cities the drugs are, and we're not in the business of wasting money doing cop work. Intel is working on it, and for now, time is on our side. We will find the right building, but we don't have the ability, for now, to hold down the city while we go door-to-door," PanamaJack said. His team had been out in the field more than most, and had turned up a lot of intel, but "They're in Victoria de Durango" is not a precise enough statement to launch an operation on. "Now, shut the fuck up before you get someone killed."

HM was up at the front of the theater laughing.

"Yeah, pretty much. Soren, you're in the air again today, but you're doing overwatch on that little gulf between Baja and the rest of Dustico. Take a jump team...fuck it. Who wants to fly with Soren today?"

Way too many of the new guys raised their hands, but a few of the veterans were bored and raised their hands as well.

"OK, Possum, take a squad of new guys and get them some field time. Do try to bring them all back this time. The rest of you...split into your usual teams and go blow something up."

War never changes.

Another day, another flight, another group of FNGs that will bug the shit out of me.

Fifteen minutes later, as I'm running a magneto check on the engine, one of them monkeyed his way into the right-hand seat.

"What."

"Oh, hey, General-sir, I just wanted to introduce myself, my name's..."

"of zero fucking interest to me."

"Hey man, before I got here, I was in the.."

"Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of the cockpit before I crash the plane just to piss you off."

My icy-death voice was getting better, the guy scrambled back to the cargo hold faster than I thought possible. It's not that I don't care for these guys, but I don't let a single thing come between me and my job proficiency any more than the shooters would stop and talk to kids in the middle of a firefight.

Throttle up, brakes off, watch the gauges, stick back, check gauges, retract flaps, check gauges, radio the tower...the deadly monotony of flight in a combat zone always feels the same, yet the danger is always there. One mistake, one thing I don't notice going wrong, and everyone's dead. The shooters have the same problems, but Bushwacker and Echo0sierra are miracle workers when it comes to patching their mistakes up.

I flew to the first waypoint, then dropped to the deck and flew a short path over Mexico and out over the Gulf of California. It was going to be a wonderful day of swooping low over any boat we saw, hoping to see one that just happened to have a bunch of pallets marked "COCAINE" in bright letters openly sitting on the deck.

The radio crackled. PJ's voice, more excited than usual.

"Soren, PJ. We flushed a group of hidden jeeps near Hermosillo. We're trying to get them before they make it into the city!"

"Gimme coords, dude! I'm on the way!"

Within seconds I had a flight path. We'd intercept them about 15 miles shy of the city, and the troopers in the back could waste them from the air. While PJ's team was having a grand old time playing cowboys and indians down in the desert. I could hear Panama and Seraph laughing over the radio, apparently the desert was too rough for them to hit anything during the chase, and some FNG was up in the turret eating dust. I got there 20 minutes of flight later. It's funny how long firefights can last when no one can line up a shot.

"Oh, merry men! Three vehicles, 12 miles to the city, 10 minutes to fight. Kill the fuck out of the lead vehicle first, then go to the second."

A mixed chorus of cheers and groans came from the back. The guys on the right side had the first pass, then the guys on the left would get a chance as I started orbiting the fight.

The first pass went well. The right-hand guys had a pair of SAWs, so the lead vehicle ate a few hundred rounds of ammo and came to an abrupt halt. I started to pull into a hard left turn to get into orbit when one of the gunners started yelling.

"SAM! SAM! SAM!"

What the fuck?

And if war has a single constant, it's that no stalemate is permanent.

"Call that shit out, where's it headed?"

"It's gaining altitude, headed right for us! Pull left!"

I pulled left as hard as I could, praying that the wings wouldn't fall off the airplane, that no one would fall out, that the missle would lose us, and that I could keep everyone alive for at least one more day. As I came around and got my eyes on the missile, I realized that it was still gaining altitude.

Cruise missile? I briefly wondered, then the horror of the situation hit me.

"Troopers! IT'S A JAVELIN!!"

Sunshine and Death (Part Five)

As we all left the theater, the team leaders and I walked over to Maxi's garage. They had to check out what they'd be working with, and I figured that since I'd be flying supplies out to them, I'd better know what to expect. Major Maxillary's a weird cat. He's got a grin that's about two miles wide and NEVER leaves his face. He'll be under an engine, covered in mechanical fluids from head to toe, and that grin is still there. It's unsettling, to say the least, but if you want a car upgraded, he's the guy to talk to. He's a mechanical genius.

HM had told him to make five uparmored SUVs that would be able to hold four guys, resist medium-caliber fire, drive for three days days on the onboard fuel. The first four were flat tan Humvees. He'd taken the original military version, worked his magic under the hood, then found a beautiful desert-colored paint that barely showed up from 200 feet in the air. Apparently, even after the armor job, they handled quite well. The Long Range Desert Group would have sold their souls for these vehicles back in the day.

The fifth was an abomination unto the LORD. He'd taken a Humvee, cut it in half, then stretched it out into a limosuine and lifted it. By my guess, it was well over 30 feet long and eight feet tall. It had two roof ports for mounted heavy machine guns, could resist fire from a Mosin-Nagant rifle at point-blank range, had enough fuel onboard to drive for a week, enough space for ten men, with gear, and a GPS/Comms sweet that looked like it belonged on an AWACS. It would have been the greatest vehicle ever driven into a war zone...but it was yellow.

Oh, I wish I could say that it was some sort of subdued-desert-sand yellow, but no, this thing was the brightest shade of Canary Yellow that I'd ever seen at a car show. It glowed in the shade, the damn thing was so bright. Not only that, all the trim had been done in black. It looked kinda like a 30-foot-long wasp.

We all just kinda stood there, not sure what to make of it.

"Well, it'll be easy to see from the air, that's for damn sure," I said.

"I could set up a clean room and do surgery in that fuckin' thing" Bushwacker added.

"They'll never know what the fuck just hit them when we show up in that," Kain quipped.

"Maxi, it's perfect. I decree that anyone assigned to this vehicle must wear a top hat while in it," Hotaru Maniac stated with certainty. "Wonderful work."

That was all it took, and we suddenly realized just how perfect it was. And in a way, it was a perfect vehicle for what we were doing. It would take a pounding, and fit the personality of the company to perfection. We were not trying to compete with WhiteDirt for the title of Most Professional Kill Squad, we were simply out to make a name for ourselves as ourselves.

Three days of planning later, the teams had been assembled. PanamaJack, Gravspec, Kain, and Possum each had their own, while a fifth, larger team had been assembled under Balci's command to fit the limo's new role as a C3 and reinforcement vehicle.

Our MO was simple. The teams would leave at dusk, drive two or three hours into Mexico to a site that satellite or mini-drone imaging had suggested might be a pot farm or cartel house, investigate with extreme prejudice, then travel to another site a hundred or so miles away and repeat the process. It worked well enough to become a routine thing, and pretty soon guys who weren't even in grunt contracts were taking "The Tour", as it was starting to become called.

Mexico just wasn't big enough for drug runners to travel down the highways and not be seen by the myriad of drones we had up , and after a month, everything and everyone on them within 300 miles of the border had been shredded, yet the drugs were being made further south than the troopers could go without supply drops. my biplane simply couldn't carry enough weight to handle bringing them fuel, ammo, and supplies in a large enough quantity to take them to where the drugs were coming from. The orders soon came down to start spreading the word that we were looking for a real cargo plane, something that could handle supply runs.

Two weeks later, an old C-130 painted in US Forest Service colors lands on the runway. We weren't expecting it.

"I have landed. Where is tower?" The voice said in a thick Russian accent.

We didn't have a tower per se, having only two aircraft, so our secretary normally handled radio work.

"Sir, you've landed on a private runway. We'll send someone to help you find your way to a public airport," She said. "Stand by, they're on their way."

"My name is Ivan. This is Payback Enterprise base, da?"

There are better ways to get our attention than to land on our airfield with no warning and ask if it's us. Our Arizona base looks enough like an airport that lost pilots land on it on a weekly basis. An unmarked car will drive out to them, and someone not wearing a PBE polo will check their maps and help them out in getting to where they need to be. This guy, by naming us, earned a hot reception, and within minutes every rifle at our base was pointed at him.

HM, this time wearing a pink dress, walked out on the tarmac. "Get the fuck out of that plane before we kill you!"

The back hatch opened.

Beer cans rolled out.

Followed by a small black man clad in track pants and shoes.

"Shit!" We heard the man say. "Is hot out here!"

To say we were laughing at this point wouldn't cover it. We'd been stressed-out and on full alert for so long that the utter absurdity of the situation was simply too much. The entire welcoming party was laughing to the point of tears, much to the chagrin of the pilot, who simply refused to drop the accent or admit his name wasn't Ivan.

The plane turned out to be a c-130E model with the MAFFS tanks for wilderness firefighting already installed. No one really wanted to knoww where it came from, but our mechanics promised that they could convert it to a mobile gas station without much trouble at all. The Long Range Desert Group would have sold their souls to have our logistics. With the additional capability that the C-130 afforded us, our teams could roam anywhere in Mexico that wasn't inside the cities.

Within another three months, the cross-border drug trade had dropped another 37%. Human trafficking was down 91% from when we started work, and the Coast Guard was reporting a 287% increase in ocean-based drug smuggling. Which wasn't even our problem, as we saw it.

If the original YouTube video had made us infamous, our sustained campaign and lethal efficiency had made us famous. The Mexican government was screaming at the US gov't to stop us, and the US gov't was officially telling us to knock it off, but unofficially paying us. It was working great, and for the first time ever, we actually had full selection classes stacked up and waiting. Apparently, a large portion of the US population appreciated our stance on the drug trade, and since we started working, the level of day-to-day violence in Mexico had gone down somewhat.

While various groups of assholes had tried to "militia up" the border before, they now saw that the best way to do that was to join PBE. For the first time since we'd started, full selection cycles were a regular thing. It was a very good situation for the guys at the Chateau, indeed, and new graduates were starting to trickle out to the base in Arizona.

Sunshine and Death (Part Four)

What we hadn't prepared for and had no way to predict was that we'd be filmed in action. 18 hours after we'd wiped out the kill squad, an email landed in HM's inbox, and a half-million others, that had a link to a video. The cartel squad had laid a trap for us, and had filmed their entire operation, from their first shots until we'd taken off to go back home. It was shot in good-quality infrared, and had everything: Paratroopers landing, the biplane circling and trashing vehicles, and PBE troopers going from body to body making sure the kill squad was dead.

That would have been bad enough, but it also went to various news outlets and gov't agencies. The news agencies immediately and predictably thought that the US Marine Corps was sending a US Navy SFOD-A team to wipe out suit-wearing Mexican stock traders.

The DEA knew it wasn't them, realized that we were why they'd been losing bribe money, and called the ATF. The ATF lost their shit when they saw the video of us wiping out a tactical team with automatic weapons fire, and called both the FBI and various Senators. The Senators called press conferences, while the FBI assigned a large team of agents to start collating all the rumors they'd picked up over the previous six months about an "elite paramilitary organization" operating in the area, then called a caterer for the local field office's field team. The CIA operatives working in the DEA, ATF, FBI, and the Legislature called their bossess, who turned down the lights, put in their earpieces, and adjusted their ties, then called us on our FOB's unlisted land line.

The Central Intelligence Agency. The C. I. Motherfuckin' A. They're elitists, they have absolutely no concept of right and wrong, they can't be trusted to not stab everyone involved in both sides in the back, and they're the absolute definition of an anachronistic organization. While the FBI gets bogged down in public-relations productions like chasing down Anonymous and high-profile serial killer cases, the CIA has never much cared about their image, and is probably the only agency left that's still obsessed with their original mission: Quietly kill as many people as possible in the name of Protecting America, Fuck Yeah.

So naturally, while the shit was hitting every fan from Los Angeles to New York, the CIA watched the video a few times, realized that they'd get rid of us faster by paying us to wipe out a Mexican cartel, and decided to work with us.

31 hours after we'd returned from our failed attempt to rescue the rancher, a Lear jet landed on our runway. It hadn't told us it was incoming, and everyone who could walk grabbed a rifle. Even the Boss had grabbed a rifle to greet the plane. When only one man got off, wearing a white T-shirt and a flak vest, the Boss strode out to meet the man in true PBE style, wearing his finest top hat...and nothing else. No one was going to tell HM to put clothes on when he had a weapon on him.

I was impressed with the Langley cat, he didn't even blink. He obviously knew to expect a large amount of weirdness, and after few quiet words with HM, they walked into HM's office. Ten minutes later, both of them walked out, and HM called us all into the theater.

"OK, that was the called we'd been waiting for. Agent Smith of the CIA has just handed us a contract to go South across the border to begin anti-cartel operations in Mexico. We're being paid by the US government now, but we're still not officially working for them, which gives us a lot of freedom in how we do things, and a lot of room for them to cut us loose if things go bad.

"We start in three days, Major Max and the vehicle teams have been working on refitting some vehicles for long-range recon into Mexico. You'll be taking those and doing basically the same thing the SAS did in Africa. We'll do resupply work from here, and your jobs will basically to kill everything with two legs and a weapon, no questions. All available intel says that the only folks with weapons are the guys working for one of the cartels, so they're all legal targets.

"Officially, you're not trying to start a war, so there's no point in trying to take ground. Kill cartel members, burn the drugs, steal everything else. You have your orders, get to it. Vendimus Mortem!"

"FUCK YOUR SHIT!!" we all yelled back.

Sunshine and Death (Part Three)

Southern Arizona was at that time a very empty place, no one who wanted out was still there, and no one who wanted to stay was considered to be a civilian. The few folks who were still flying American flags in the area slept in shifts and shot at anything that moved, which suited us just fine. As far as we were concerned, anyone who shot in the same direction we were shooting was a friend, and it was a pretty common attitude.

It didn't take long before the local holdouts were reaching out to us, and it was easy to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. We'd spend a day or two at some guy's ranch, and in exchange for beds, water, and intel on movement, we'd provide security while we were there and promise a QRF if they got in trouble when we weren't. Deep down, we all knew the ranchers were getting in over their heads, and that it was going to end badly for most of them, but sometimes the only way to fight a dragon is to lure him out of his lair.

For the first several months, things went pretty well. The cartels were a little slow to react to us since cell comms were spotty, and they didn't have the radar capability to catch me flying above visible range, so they didn't realize what was wiping out their shipments. When we first got there, a shipment of drugs would come in a single SUV, which is ridiculously easy to kill with small arms fire. Then they started sending armed escort vehicles, technicals in the Arab fashion, but those are even easier to kill.

The cartels were losing large numbers of men, and the only thing we left in the kill zones were corpses, shell casings, and burned cars containing burned drugs. It wasn't a popular move, a lot of our men thought taking and reselling the drugs would make us more money, but the command decision was that if we burned the drugs, the locals would support us instead of seeing us as simply another cartel, even if we were every bit as murderous as the cartels.

Partly due to our "no survivors" policy, and partly due to the fact that we were loved by the ranchers, things were mostly kept out of the press. Vigilantism had been a growing trend on the border for years, but it was being kept very low-key, and we certainly played on that as much as we could. We knew it was only a matter of time before it hit the press, but we also knew that the moment it happened, if things didn't go perfectly, we were going to become wanted outlaws in minutes.

We'd been there less than six months when the first rancher got hit. We got a frantic radio call at about 0200 from this crotchety old bastard that always gave us shit when we stopped by to check on him, letting us know that some cartel boys were shooting up his house. He told us he'd be returning fire, but said he didn't know how long he could hold out against them.

It was the fastest we'd ever been in the air. Most of the shooters were still putting on their clothes when I got us into the bird, and it was a very tense thirty-minute flight to the drop zone. I red-lined the engines, and hit the green light the instant we hit the drop zone a half-mile short of the ranch house. Low-altitude drops are never the sort of thing we like to do at night, but we're good at it. All eight men got out in less than 30 seconds, and I throttled the engine back until the warning lights went out, then pulled in a slow port turn that would have us orbitting the firefight.

By the time the shooters had landed and formed up, I'd gotten a good look at what was going on, and what I saw was not comforting. There were four SUVs of some kind, and one technical with something really big mounted to the trunk. While that was bad, and would make short work of anyone inside, what really bothered me was the guy with the RPG who was slowly demolishing the house and had already started a fire in one corner of it.

Anyone involved with night operations has a love/hate relationship with light. We've gotta have it to see what we're shooting at, but we don't ever want to look at it, or anything that's lit up too brightly, or we're going to miss a guy who's hiding in the shadows. Our guys know that by heart, and were sneaking up behind men not only lit up by a burning house, but watching it intently. Not only would we have the element of surprise, they wouldn't be able to see us when they turned around.

"OK, Shooters, we've got four SUVs full of bad guys, at least one has an RPG. The house is on fire, so we've got a time limit, but they're also real easy to see in the light. Gravspec, grab your machinegun and kill those vehicles, technical first, then try to find the fucker with the RPG. Swissguy, you take the first shot, then give us the signal to kill."

The guy with the RPG was the first to go. He stepped out into the open to avoid backblasting any of his own guys, and Swissguy put a rifle round into the back of his head and started shouting "GO, GO, GO" into his radio. Gravspec took the cue and started pouring fire into the vehicles, and the rest of the grounded shooters immediately followed suit.

The cartel shooters reacted faster and more intelligently than I would have expected, but they simply never had a chance. Caught between the house, PBE's grunts, and CAS support from the sky, and unable to see us because they'd been watching a fire, they went down in less than five minutes. As soon as the last cartel shooter went down, Kain busted into the house to get the rancher and his family out.

We got them out, but we were too late to save them. The smoke had been too thick, and since they were stuck inside by the firefight, they'd been unable to breathe. The rancher and his wife were in their 70s, and hadn't been in the best of health before the fight. The combination of combat stress and massive amounts of smoke inhalation had simply been too much.

I put the plane down on the access road and ran in to help with cleanup. We got the cartel squad piled into their cars, lit them on fire, and threw the weapons into the plane. The bodies of the rancher and his wife were carried into the plane, we weren't going to leave them there for the coyotes.

Our flight back was one of the saddest flights I've ever been on. The man had called us for help, and we had failed to get there in time. We'd let him down, and he and his family had died because of it. By the time we landed, no one was in a mood for a debriefing, so HM let us get some rack time. There wasn't much to say anyways, and we all knew that no matter how quietly we'd kept things so far, that part of the game was over.

Sunshine and Death (Part Two)

There were three of us left. Three, 3, tres, drei, troi, THREE. That's how brutal selection was. Out of the fifty men that started selection in our group, 23 were dead, 24 had quit, and there were only three of us left. The other group must have had it easy, they had four guys left. To this day, I don't know how we made it through, it was simply the most grueling experience I'd ever been through. I've heard that if you debate quitting during selection for other elite groups, like the SEALs and shit, your mind will eventually decide that quitting is worth it. In ours, quitting didn't necessarily mean survival, and everyone was debating it constantly.

Anyways, the three of us were sitting in the infirmary a few days after selection, and HM walked up to us and handed us each our first paycheck. I'd never made that much in a year, and I'd only been in PBE for six months at the time.

"That's for making it through. Once you actually start work, that will get bigger, and once you start learning something usefull, it will keep getting bigger. I pay for what I want, and I get what I pay for. Remember that, it will benefit you...or cost you dearly."

I was only in the infirmary for a week, and then I was taught to shoot, move, and communicate. I made the mistake of remarking to the cadre that I was a pilot, not a shooter only once. Within ten minutes, a crate of 2,000 rounds of ammunition was sitting next to me, unboxed, and the cadre informed me that I was to shoot, move, and communicate until it was all gone, even if I was shooting, moving, and communicating alone and in the darkness. That's just how PBE works, though. Every mistake is punished by more training, and in our fashion, you never forget the lesson. Things that start as punishment become muscle memory.

I finally got an aircraft three months after selection was over. It was, for lack of a better term, a flying junkyard. Well, slightly worse than that, the thing was a antique flying junkyard. I shit you not, it was an An-2, a single-engine biplane that was built in the 1960s. HM told me that it was going to be our jump and transport bird for the shooters, and I remarked that he must have stolen it from a skydiving company.

"Well, something like that. You can make this work, right?"

HM's questions were always meant to be answered in the affirmative. He never gave anyone with less than several years in the company what they actually asked for, he'd always give them not quite enough. No one asked why, we all kinda knew the answer. HM believed that everything was training, either good habits or bad habits, and "making do with what ya got" is a good way to instill good habits.

It was a full six months after selection until we got our first contract. Fuck if I ever figured out how we were being funded during that time. We were doing something related to training six days a week, with not a single week off. It had to have cost a small fortune, but by the end of it, we were pushing the limits of human capability. I never caught a fly with chopsticks, but inside my cockpit, I could literally push any button I needed to with my eyes closed, and I could fly the plane with fireworks going off on the copilot's seat.

By the way, HM thought that one was fucking hilarious. I was supposed to spend the day giving lifts to a group of jump troopers, but right as I started the takeoff roll on the third round, someone pushed a button, and a remote set off one of those 16,000-count rolls of ladyfingers. Those things went off for ten full minutes, smoke filled the entire plane, my eyes were watering so bad I could barely see, I had numerous minor burns, and my ears rang for days, and the things I said on the radio once I was airborne earned me my very first fine for an FCC violation.

One day, HM called everyone in to the theater we used as a briefing room. There were 26 of us now, none of whom had done anything since selection and basic training [i]but[/i] various types of training. We were ready to do something real, to actually get to work.

"Gentlemen," he said. "It's time to earn your keep. I'm sure you've all been wondering how and when we're going to start doing jobs, and the answer is Arizona. Shit's gotten so bad down there that we think they'll look the other way if we move in and quietly clean the place up Wild West-style, so that's exactly what we're going to do. We are going to set up small FOBs on the border, we are going to kill everything that comes across, and we are going to take anything and everything that glitters in the sunlight as we do this."

Sunshine and Death (Part One)

I guess I should start at the beginning. We're famous now, everyone knows who Payback Enterprises is. We're the world-famous mercs, and everyone knows what we do. Back then, it was a totally different world. We were broke, we were rookies, and we didn't even have a slick plane to get us out of nasty situations.
The "casting call" was what we called it. Hotaru Maniac posted it, the first time he'd used a picture of Hotaru herself to start a thread in months. He'd been acting wierd for a full year. A single post to start a thread, with a hint that something was being planned, that progress was being made, and that more info would follow. He'd post normally in other threads, as normal as HM ever got, but with those threads, it was always one post, no comments of any kind. It was never specific, not until that day.
That day, it had a set of GPS coordinates in Florida, a date and time two weeks out, and a simple statement that if anyone wanted in, they'd best be there. "Bring your own weapons and gear", the last line said. It was discussed for less than 12 hours, then we packed bags and got in our cars. I don't know how many people thought it was legit, and how many expected to find a sign with "LOL I TROLL U" on a post in the parking lot.
I was living in Idaho at the time. I'd just been divorced, and had lost my position as a missionary pilot because I'd killed eight men. Actually, that was the reason I'd gotten divorced, too. My wife had seen a part of me that she hadn't known about, and couldn't handle it. So when the casting call came, it didn't take much for me to give it a shot.
It took me three days to drive out, the GPS data corresponded to a parking lot in Florida. I got there a day early, and was surprised at how many people were there. There were very few familiar faces, but the wierd part was how many names we all knew. I don't remember who thought of it first, but I know that it was Bushwhacker who first got everyone to stop trying to remember real names, and stick to trips.
I guess I should explain. There was a website I used to hang at. It was full of the usual internet types: fat, lazy, and opinionated, although we did have a pretty solid core of military types. We never really got anything finished, we'd just spend hours raging and complaining about some bullshit someone would find and post. The thing was, we'd been talking about PBE for years. It was always next time, next summer, another couple months. No one ever expected it to happen, it was just our inside joke, our dream of someday being the storybook heroes.
Anyways, so we're all there, and we're finally putting faces and voices to names we'd seen for years. About a hundred of us actually made it all the way. No one was even claiming to be Hotaru Maniac, which in any other situation, someone would have done. Sure, we all knew that HM wasn't the blonde guy in the video, and we all knew that he wasn't likely to really be the character that posted, but we didn't really know what to expect. Hell, we didn't even know how many people to expect. No one had ever seen his face.
That's when a burst of rifle fire shredded Kain's car. He'd been leaning on the hood, too, and a mag dump went right into the engine. He's a big guy, but he jumped a full two feet into the air. The rest of us dove for cover and starting flicking safeties off.
"Ho-lee shit. If I didn't know better, I'd think I just saw the biggest group of suckers on the entire internet. Only, they've all got guns, and they all act like they know each other, so I guess I better call the cops, right?"
I'll admit, I was surprised when I first saw him. It wasn't that he was big or especially scary-looking, he didn't have a facial scar or glowing eyes, he simply looked...normal. He looked like everyone else, albeit more fit. And older, even though some of us were in our thirties at the time.
"Alright, faggots, on your feet. Yes, I am Hotaru Maniac, and yes, you are the first batch of recruits that Payback Enterprises will be training. No, I will not be your only trainer. I won't even be doing most of it, actually, I've got a few friends that will be handling that. Yes, we will be using live ammunition, no, not all of you will survive it. For those of you who are dumb enough to think that this won't be all that bad...you will not survive if you don't take this to be the most serious thing you've ever done.
"Now, follow these men, and have a nice day, gentlemen."

Back from the Dead

Damnit, I was hoping to get some sleep.
My phone was ringing. I hate it when my phone rings and the sun isn't up, but I don't really have the option of turning it off when I sleep, part of the job of being a PBE employee is that we're technically on call for the duration of our contracts. I looked over at the clock. 0300 local, I was in Madrid, supposedly taking it easy while my leg healed.
"Soren here, what is it?"
"Can you talk freely?"
It was BTDT, one of the few people who can give orders in the company that I actually have to listen to. I don't normally have to deal with "orders", I'm generally just attached to a team of shooters and told to do what they need done, which gives me a pretty large amount of autonomy. Still, if he was calling, it meant this was coming from the top.
"Get your ass back to the Chateau, immediately. Yes, I know you're on leave for the month. We lost a pair of operators in Florida, and we think one is still alive and being held captive. We're going to extract them both, and everyone not currently engaged in combat is coming back."
"They did what? They're actually holding one of ours alive? Do we know who these soon-to-be dying in a painful fashion assholes are?"
Somewhere up in Heaven, or more likely Hell, there's a list of things people have done that were recorded for posterity as notable examples of human stupidity. There's a fairly lengthy list of things people have done that guaranteed their demise, and if taunting the world's most notorious mercenary company wasn't on the list, I'm going to add it when I get there.
"No, we don't, but we have a rough idea where they are, out in the Keys. Frankly, their names don't matter, we'll search their bodies for ID."
"Yeah, we're on our way. We'll be there by...fuck, we'll be there as soon as we can. You'll get our ETA as soon as we get it."
Oh, yeah, I wasn't alone, either. I'd finally snagged a decent girlfriend, one who could actually deal with the hassle of dating a PBE employee, and instead of giving her the ring I'd gotten in Paris while we were in Switzerland next week, I'd be doing something personally violent to some shitstain in the Florida Keys, which is a place that's only romantic to people who've never been outside the US.
Damnit.
I got dressed, threw my gear into my day pack, and walked into the next room and turned on the lights.
"Kahlan, wake up. Rise and shine, darlin', it's time to get to work."
"uh, wha? Soren, it's not even dawn." She mumbled sleepily. "They said you had a month off for your leg to heal? What happened?"
"One of our guys got kidnapped, or so they think. Everyone on the payroll's getting called up."
That woke her up.
"Oh. Oh. Alright then, I'll be ready in five. We're taking a charter?"
"Unless stealing a plane is faster, but we need to get to Florida without stopping for gas, so probably."
You know those guys, the rich executive types, who've got a such a good relationship with some airline that they can hold planes without any reservations, that can just walk into an airport, flash a card, and get a free seat?
Well, PBE is kinda like that, only it's the charter companies that cater to us. A few phone calls later, I had the name of a guy at the airport who had a charter jet that had landed last night, and was supposed to be waiting in town for a few days for some executive type to get his business done.
I bet I'll pay more than the exec does.
Kahlan's good, she was ready in four minutes. We grabbed our stuff and left, the hotel the kind of place that had cabs waiting overnight just in case guests needed to leave. A signature for the charges at the desk, and we were gone.
It was another half hour to the airport in question, a smaller municipal place outside of Madrid proper. It only took a few minutes of haggling to get the pilot, an Italian, to abandon the exec for the next 48 hours. By haggling, I mean I offered the guy $5,000 in cash, with $10,000 more upon landing in Miami, and told him that with his accent, he wouldn't be spending the night alone unless he wanted to. He'd still be able to collect his executive fare as well, so this would be additional profit.
Just over 12 hours later, we touched down in Miami. A PBE SUV was waiting for us, and we got inside to find out that we'd be waiting another half hour for some operators coming in from Rio to land. While we waited, I was on the phone, trying to figure out where my plane was.
It turned out that PBE's AC-47, an old DC-3 that we'd picked up in Iran and upgraded the hell out of, was currently sitting in a hangar in India, along with a very, very pissed-off flight crew. Our single most valuable non-meat asset wouldn't be involved in this operation, not even as backup. Granted, raining fire from 3,000 feet into a compound that has hostages isn't the best way to get them out alive, but it's still a nice thing to have.
OK, so why do I need to be here? I can't do grunt work anymore, I'm barely up to walking a few miles and still being able to stand the next day.
We all got back to the Chateau by 1900. I'd seen our base full of people before, but we'd never been all called back like this. It wasn't a case of the normal staff plus a bunch of guests, these were all shooters. Nearly two hundred legit grunts, plus pilots, drivers, mechanics, and gunsmiths. Whatever was going on, it was certainly not going to stop after the sacking of one Florida Keys villa, that much was obvious.
I dropped my gear off at my quarters, grabbed my rifle from the armory, and headed to the chow hall. Kahlan and I had cleared out the meager amount of snack food that was on the charter plane, and PBE doesn't do drive-through orders from a fast-food joint. Or, at least, I was headed to the chow hall, an overhead announcement came through that everyone was ordered to head to the theater for a initial briefing, which would be followed by specialized briefings for various teams.
We all piled into the theater, nearly 300 personnel, about 275 of whom were carrying rifles. That we were on high alert had gone without saying, and because none of us knew what to expect, everyone who was authorized to had grabbed their rifles and was carrying hot. Normally, a family reunion like this would be a party, and the place would be full of laughter and smiles. This time, no one was laughing, and no one smiled.
It was an intimidating sight.
"Gentlemen, as you've all been told, Revived and Wombat, a probational operator, were attacked two days ago. Also a non-PBE guy named Sonny was kiled. He'd been doing some UC work for us, but we can get more of those without much trouble.
"From the information we've gathered, it appears that Revived is still alive, although the enemy has removed his tag. Wombat appears to be KIA. We've got a close enough trace on their location that we know they were, up until recently, in a certain villa. We don't really know who's behind this, but they just fucked with the wrong people. Their time on earth is nearly over, we're going to take down this entire group.
"We're going to split you up into five groups, one of which will be tasked with recovering Revived. The other four will be tasked with hitting the rest of the group that's behind this. We know that it's not a small-time gang of swamp rats, they've been promoting themselves as the guys are tough enough to have captured a PBE employee.
"Yeah, you heard that right. These shitstains are using Revived to put themselves on the radar. Well, we picked up the blip, and we're going to make them regret it. All right, that's enough for tonight. As you leave, stop by the mess hall, get some food, say "hi" to your friends, and find your newly-assigned platoons. PBE is officially at war."
I hate sad homecomings. The Chateau's always been an interesting place. For the first few years, while the company was pretty small, it had some empty parts, but when folks came "home", they'd get welcomed back, and we were a really tight family. As we grew, it stayed really tight, much like other elite units around the world. This time, however, we were back not because we were done fighting and it was time to relax, but because we were about to start a small war.
Not to mention that even if this went perfectly, we were still going to have to bury one of our own. He might have been a FNG, but he was still [i]our[/i] FNG, and the guys Wombat came through selection with were taking it pretty hard.
Regardless, it was good to see some old friends. The command staff and I had been working together for a decade now, and some of us had known each other for nearly 20 years. Before long, quiet laughter could be heard, and that was a good sign.
As we ate, the command staff was going from table to table, handing out envelopes. They contained our team assignments, and I was glad to see that they'd assigned us in a relatively logical fashion. We were going in by squad.
PBE normally runs teams of four, bigger assignments will get squads of eight, or multiple squads as needed. Squads get assigned to missions based on a lot of different factors, but outside of death and retirement, they generally keep the same guys. It makes for better unit cohesion when guys are familiar with each other. Support staff, like pilots, mechanics, cooks, etc, get assigned to whatever squad needs us.
No sense in paying a five-man flight crew sit on the runway while a squad halfway around the world goes without air support.
Anyways, since my plane was halfway around the world, I was being assigned to a helicopter as a door gunner. I'm not even remotely qualified to actually pilot a helo, but apparently that doesn't prevent me from sitting in the back with a belt-fed MG and covering the medics. If we get shot down, of course, I'll be about as useful as the guy we're extracting.
The basic plan was to send in two squads (16 shooters) by Zodiac, with the helo on station to get Revived out once he was found and freed. Once he was in the helo, one of the squads would exfil on the bird while the other would check for survivors, grab anything shiny that might tell us who these assholes are, then level the place and leave via boat. Additionally, a sniper team would be inserted on a small island offshore, and would get picked up by the exfil boats.
Who the fuck wrote this thing up? Shit, it's like five times as complicated as the standard "Kill everyone we don't know, then leave" plans we normally have. Those are solid plans, not this chess game shit.
I am a pilot. I fly in a line from place to place, occasionally making wide circles around things that need to die, or deftly flying past things that I shouldn't fly into. I have never really understood how the troopers can keep a complicated plan, complete with single-use code phrases, in their heads while they're getting shot at. More than I could ever do, anyways, but we all have things that we specialize in.
The op was set to start at 0400, so I went back to my quarters. "If possible, sleep" is one of those rules of war that no one ever talks about, but everyone who's ever been on an actual operation knows. An hour here, two hours there, and it's better than caffeine ever could be.
I got up around midnight, and by 0300, I was sitting in a helicopter in full body armor, with an M-60 on my lap, sweating my balls off because it was still 85 degrees with 85% humidity. I looked over, and both Bushwacker and Echo0Sierra had the exact same expression on their faces as I did. Nothing's more fun than the waiting game. Even worse was that none of us really had anything to say.
Seriously, fuck Florida. Oh, I know it's His Madness' adopted home, and it ain't a bad place to live, past the annual "God hates us all" hurricane season, but it's still a shitty place to fight a war. It's hot, it's humid, and it's fucking crawling with civilians. Not one of them is unaware of who PBE is, of course. If we do this wrong, it'll be all over the news before we even get back to the Chateau.
The radio crackled at 0315. The Zodiacs were five miles out, so we took off to play the next round of the waiting game, orbiting a random spot in the ocean and waiting for the good news. Ten minutes later, the second Zodiac dropped the snipers off at the small offshore island, and they immediately started an overwatch on the structure.
"Base, we're in position. Winds are light but steeady, and the building is lit up like a Christmas tree. The compound's got some lighting, but it's spotty, looks like their genset's not up to lighting interior and the exterior at the same time. Should be great for infiltration. Oh, and the guards are lazy as fuck. They're just standing around, but they're not watching their sectors. Standard weapons, nothing fancy, but there are a lot of cars in the lot."
"Copy, Swissguy. Stand by for the shooting to start. You're clear to kill everything you see once that happens."
"Copy that."
BTDT was taking personal command of this op, which meant that everything would go smoothly, so long as we didn't mess up too badly. He'd been there and done that enough that most contingencies had been planned for.
The man's getting old, though. He'd have his stars if he'd stayed in the .mil Damnit, he's only four years older than me. I'm getting old, too.
"Not yet." I muttered. Just loud enough to get picked up on the microphones we all wore.
"Not yet?" BTDT said angrly. "Get the fuck off comms, Soren. Green team GO! Blue team GO!"
Bushwacker reached over and punched the side of my helmet. You dumbass, he mouthed. I grimaced, I'd catch hell for that when we all got back. I have a push-to-talk button on the flight yoke, I can, and do, rant and rave while I'm flying without anybody knowing, but apparently the helo mics are always on.
The two entry teams had been practicing in a shoot house in a relatively part of the Chateau. PBE uses shoot houses in a way that makes most SWAT teams jealous, mostly because we don't really care if we light it on fire while we're practicing. We've torched them more than once, often just because HM wants a team to practice shooting in a burning building.
Practice, however, pays off. The opfor may have known the layout of their compound, but so did we. BTDT and his teams had crept to within scant feet of the fence, and once the command to attack was given, were over the fence in seconds.
They dispatched the first sentries with short bursts from their rifles, and Swissguy smoked the only guy that had been standin on the roof, then started watching the second-story windows, hoping someone would stop look look out at the ocean. The entry teams swiftly moved to the target buildings, setting charges on the vehicles they passed, and stacked up outside the main entry doors, and set small breaching charges.
While the op had been "quiet" so far, there's no way to be quiet while running inside a house, so the teams would enter with charges, kill everyone they didn't recognize, and hopefully find Revived alive. There wasn't any concern about damaging the building, we'd level it anyways.
I didn't get to see exactly what happened, but apparently they hadn't been expecting us. Not only had they not been expecting us, they'd been so not expecting us that they'd decided to have some friends over for dinner. While over a dozen men had been expected, there were nearly three dozen men, the majority of whom were wearing nice clothes that marked them as foreigners from all over the world.
I'm told that BTDT, upon entering through the shattered door and seeing the crowd, had simply ducked and fired his M203 into the far wall. The resultant explosion blew a hole threw it, and had the side effect of injuring half the crowd, which the fire team then mowed down.
Revived was found in the basement, as expected, and alive, which we had only been hoping. No one was really sure how "alive" he'd be, since we'd only heard rumors that he was alive. He was relatively fine, the beatings had apparently stopped soon after he'd been captured, although his arm had been broken pretty badly. Once he saw the rescuers, apparently he'd said something incoherent about sleeping angels, asked for a weapon, then collapsed.
The actual combat phase of the operation had taken just 13 minutes. We'd started flying in the instant we heard Revived was alive, and got to the LZ just seconds after the entry team did. Bushwacker and Echo ran out, strapped him to a stretcher board, and carried him back the the chopper, then the entry team fell back to the chopper by twos and we started the short flight home.
Considering I flew home from Madrid in the early morning yesterday, this seems really anti-climactic. I haven't even gotten to shoot anything, not even a pod of dolphins from the helicopter.
The radio crackled again. The boat team had finished loading computers, valuables, and Wombat's body into the Zodiacs, and were about to blow the place. We'd bury Wombat tomorrow, with as much formality as we buried anyone. Tonight, however, was to be a solemn night, and it'd be a few days before we got any solid data from the computers.
It wasn't our job to hide the bodies, although I didn't really want to know how much that would cost. Things were about to get very interesting. I was right about one thing, though: News reports of the demolition of the villa did make it on the air before the boat teams got back, but initial reports were indicating that an explosion had occured when a generator malfunctioned.
I was able to visit Revived in the infirmary the next morning, although he was still sleeping. Echo'd doped him up pretty good, and his arm was in a cast all the way up to his shoulder.
"Someone's gonna pay for this," I told him, even though he couldn't hear me.
I don't know who you are, but Payback is coming your way.