Rock and Roll, Part Three.

The preferred SEAL method of entering highly hostile territory is a HAHO jump. They'll jump out of a airplane at 30,000 feet, pop a chute, and float 30 miles to their LZ, then do their whole sneaky bastard thing. It's extremely effective, unless of course the country being snuck into has been setting up to defend against Israeli airstrikes for 20 years. With Iran, that simply wasn't an option from any direction, they weren't unaware that the US had invaded Afghanistan two decades prior. The entire country bristled with AA.

Of course, that's only the preferred method if you don't have pilots who specialize in low-altitude insanity. Staos and I were going to fly in from Dubai at about 50 feet above the waves, fly through Iran at about 75 feet above the dirt, drop an 8-man team of shooters into the reservoir just out of town without even slowing down, then buzz a few towns on the way out of the country, dodge the Caspian Sea portion of the Iranian navy, then land in Baki, Azerbaijan.

The shooters would sneak and steal their way into Tehran, wait for the signal while taking pictures, then slaughter their way through as many of Allah's chosen as possible when we got the signal. They'd be working in the same area as several other SF and SOF teams, and the chances of having a friendly-fire incident always goes up when those guys start calling in airstrikes.

PMCs, if they even have the capability, make damned sure that they don't accidentally splash a Coalition squad when airstrikes are called in. On the reverse, we don't always have those neat little IR strobes that mark us as friendlies. Also, they don't always let us know that cruise missiles are inbound, and one particularly unlucky PMC had lost an entire 8-man force when a SEAL team had targeted a bomb factory and didn't know the mercs were in the area.

PanamaJack's team met up with me in Iraq. We hadn't worked together in a while, but it's always cool to see old friends. His team is one of the more lethal teams in the company, they've got a reputation for shooting first, hitting the target, then shooting again just to make sure. Definitely the people we wanted to send in first, I'd pick up Wut?'s team in Azerbaijan and be ready to deploy them as backup if things really went south.

We took off just after dusk, and reached the Iranian shoreline just as night really fell. I'd been assigned a copilot for this op, Staos had finally gotten certified to our standards on multiple-engine aircraft. He was another guy who'd come from the website, and had spent years battling a heroin addiction. He'd beaten it eventually, and had come looking for us when we started getting famous.

Night flying is a boring exercise for everyone but the pilots. Especially when we're flying over Iran, which is a boring place to fly over anyways. Even at our stupidly low altitude, we didn't see much that shone in the night. Occasional huts were lit up, but on the whole, we were flying in darkness, past darkness. Just the way I liked it, to be sure.

Four hours of low-level flying after we cross the shoreline, I let the troopers know that we were about to fly over the drop point. This was going to be the hairy part, they'd leave a plane going 150 miles an hour over a lake at night low enough that their chutes would really only slow them enough to not skip across the surface of the lake like stones.

The cabin radio started blasting The Clash's Rock the Casbah, the green light went on, and mercs started the invasion. Eight men, with a week's worth of supplies, jumped out of an airplane flying 175 miles an hour only 75 feet above the water.

I turned the plane to follow the valley out to the coast. It would take us about 20 minutes to get there, and we weren't done with the dangerous portion of the flight.

If I get seen, we're going to have to make sure that they dont't think we dropped off a team. That means carnage on a serious scale.

"Make ready the port-side cannons!"

"Aye, Cap'n. "

My jumpmaster, an older Shogun named Mike, opened and secured the gun windows on the pilot's side of the airplane. We now had a pair of GM-134 miniguns and a 20mm cannon that used to be attached to a Messerschmitt aimed out the port side of the airplane. All were computer-controlled, aimed by the comms guy sitting behind me and staring at a pair of IR feeds. The miniguns were paired together, the cannon could be aimed somewhat independently if necessary.

"Mr. Torpido, let me the know the exact second we get spotted. We're about to hit the coastal areas, and we're going to be noticed."

They knew all this, and they knew that I knew that they knew, but decorum has to be maintained. One of the lessons of leadership is that leaders should always appear to be in charge, and I'm the pilot, which makes me the leader.

I always wanted to be a pirate, though.

I couldn't fly any lower, and with the troopers out of the building and the fuel load where it was, I was flying as fast the engines would haul us. We roared past first one lit house, then two more, then we were in the city.

There. That's the line.

I realized I was holding my breath. I hadn't been this on edge for a long time. I took a deep breath. We'd be fine.

"Shit! They know we're here. Radio just lit up like a Christmas tree!"

"Alright boys, we're on Plan B. have they launched any airplanes yet?"

"No, but Command says the military comms just went crazy."

"Fuck it. Plan C, everyone."

I wrenched us into a hard left turn. We had to go downtown, to make some noise. We couldn't let them know we'd dropped a tactical team in the resevoir outside town.

"Mr. Mike, make something important blow up. Preferably something that will really piss them off."

"Cap'n, your choices are the Parliment building or Khomenei's mosque."

"Mr. Mike, drop the bomb on the mosque, if we can hit it."

The original plan had been to fly low and fast out over the coast and go to Azerbaijan. The backup to that was to fly out a different way, still going to Azerbaijan. The backup to that was to make it look like an attempted assassination of someone really important. Subtlety is key in our business, but the best way to cover up an infiltration is to do something insanely obvious, and make it look like an accident.

Strapped to the back wall of the cargo hold were two 100-quart Rubbermaid coolers, solidly wrapped in five rolls of duct tape. Inside them, we'd stacked 99.5 gallons' worth of C4 blocks, and topped them off with a 3-minute delayed fuse and a parachute. Much like jump troopers in WWII, the chute was static-lined to the plane. Unlike the jump troopers, so was the fuse.

Technically, the closure rate for a ground target is the same whether the aircraft is 50 feet off the ground or 5,000. The calculation is rather simple: One aircraft, traveling at 225 miles an hour relative to the target, should release a chute-retarded package pretty much right over the target. Chutes go straight down, after all.

It helps when the target is lit up brighter than anything else in the city. The bombs got kicked out 3 seconds apart, I made a hard turn to the north, and firewalled the throttles. The coast was now 12 minutes away, the bomb would go off in three.

We'd just left Tehran's airspace when the sky lit up. We'd have to wait for the news cameras to show up to see what we'd hit, but a pair of coolers full of over 350 pounds pounds of exploding Composition C-4 each were bound to make a dent in whatever it had landed on.

It also makes a amazing distraction.

For the next 9 minutes, we flew lower than anyone sane would try. My eyes were throbbing, I'd been wearing wide-angle NVGs for six hours. We finally hit the coast, and I told my copilot to take us the rest of the way while I searched for some painkillers.

That was when the tracers found us. A ragged line of holes went through the starboard side of the aircraft and a matching set appeared in the top of the plane. I reflexively dove for the deck.

"What the fuck just shot us?"

"Patrol boat. Starboard side, 400 yards."

"KILL IT!!"

"Aye!"

Staos pulled the plane into a hard port turn. We could sink most boats, bet we had to be turning to port to do it. Another burst rippled our way, some of it hit the plane. I tried to stand up, but the plane was at too much of an angle, and I bounced off the wall and into a jump seat.

Damnit, why's my leg hurt so bad? I must have fallen into something.

I heard Kahlan scream.

Fuck, I hope she's OK.

Then the turn was completed, and Torpido jammed the firing button down. A standard GM-134 minigun has the barrels zeroed, meaning that all of them are aimed at the same place. When HM had first talked with me about making our C-47 into a Spooky, we'd decided to have the miniguns adjusted so that the six barrels would hit each point and the center of a 2-MOA star. At the 600 yards from us to the patrol boat, that meant a pattern about 12 inches across.

Holy shit are those loud.

A third-party observer would have seen twin bars of light reach across the distance between the plane and the boat. To me, looking out the window from a jump seat, it looked like fireflies gently floating out to the boat. The boat captain just saw a spray of death headed his way at 2,800 feet per second, and died befoe he realized what it was.

Torpido walked the miniguns' fire down to the waterline, back to the stern, then up and off the bow. He'd kept the cannon tracking the cabin, filling it with fire and death. The lights on the boat went out almost immediately, then the boat stopped in the water.

"Soren, the boat's toast."

"Good."

What's wrong with my ears? My voice sounds funny.

"Soren?" I heard a girl call. "SOREN!"

Fuckin' NVG migraine, I can barely see anything.

"Shit! He's been hit!" a man's voice said.

Who?

Then things went black.

Rock and Roll, Part Two.

HM called me into his office a few hours after we got back. The whole command staff was there, even the Color Guard. He motioned for me to take a seat in one of the chairs opposite his desk, which I'd rather not have done. That many people made me nervous, even though most of them had been on ops with me.

"General Soren, welcome back."

I haven't been called that in years, not since the website.

"Thank you."

"Why did you call yourself a General, back there?"

"I liked tactics and strategy, only Sergeants, Colonels, and Generals do that stuff. "Colonel" I dislike for spelling reasons, "Sergeant Soren" sounded too comic-bookish, so I used "General". Worked at the time, anyways."

"How would you invade and pacify Iran, General?"

"Well, there's three main power structures in place, military, political, and religious, and four factions, adding the academics. The military will get destroyed, hopefully, and the politicians will likely get lynched, or will be in hiding. They'll hope to trade favors for power, so the invading coalition can use them to sniff out corruption for a while. Religious types are a huge factor in the country, since they're officially in charge, but they took a massive credibility hit when the video went out. The academic establishments, students, professors, etc, are likely to be capable of stabilizing the citizenry, but not if the coalition is there for another decade."

"Go on."

"OK, so the military gets raped in the invasion. That's a given, and hopefully the invaders don't take prisoners, like happened in Iraq 2003. Problem is the religious folks. They've got some power, they're the official leadership of the country, but they're hard to target politically because of the political implications of doing so.

"Standard blitzkrieg warfare will utterly destroy Iran's standing military, no question. The insurgency can be taken down, but not if they're doing it for Allah. That means the Ayatollah and his friends have to die. Not get put on trial, die. In the night, quietly if possible, and for goddamned sure not in a firefight with the Imperialist Zionist Capitalist Invaders from the West.

"Unless I miss my guess, that's where we come in. The two suits got sent here to hire us to assassinate the entire Islamic leadership of Iran, or most of it, since they can't be seen doing it. We're supposed to wipe out the Islamic leadership so that the country will split along faction lines as we roll in. Our contract probably says "Assist in the pursuit of high-value targets", unless I miss my guess."

One of the Agency types blinked, and his partner coughed. Hotaru Maniac stared at me, then started laughing.

"Shit, we should have done this years ago. Soren, you just got your rank back. You're now in charge of PBE's Combat Air Wing for this operation, which at this moment consists of your Spooky, one Huey Cobra that flew in Viet Nam, and two UH-1s that we took as payment for an op in South America. We're also trying to get another jump-capable plane for the shooters, but that may not happen in time."

"Well, that definitely gives us some options. How long are major combat operations scheduled to last?"

"Four weeks, starting in five. We start in three."

"Awesome sauce."

The Agency types ducked out the back. They looked mildly annoyed, they must have been furious to let that much emotion show. The CIA never likes being obvious, even when the only options are. Apparently, I'd guessed their exact plan, and they *really* don't like that.

"C'mon, Soren."

"What?"

"Party time. You got promoted, we're going to get drunk, then pay half of Miami's bikini models to make passes at you. You're coming, otherwise it won't be any fun."

"You're buying dinner first. Somewhere with good steaks."

"Deal."

The next three weeks were a flurry of activity. The C-47 got modern engines, sacrificing some flight range for a shorter takeoff. The helo pilots spent six days a week practicing landing people on angled rooftops, in narrow streets, and providing fire support on targets designated by the shooters. I don't know where they'd been, but they were not fresh out of flight school.

I spent most of the time going over target lists, probable locations for the targets to run to, and who might hide them if needed. Not very exciting by comparison, but while predicting the movements of the enemy isn't an exact science, there is some probability involved. They'd run to friendly locations, cities that were more Islamist than others. When those fell, they'd run to smaller and smaller villages, until they ended up in isolated compounds like Saddam did. By marking these beforehand, we hoped to narrow down the time they'd have to run.

The girl passed her training course in the middle of her class. Not bad for a girl who's barely 5'6", there's no such thing as "standards for women" in PBE. I got to hand her her certificate, she gave me a hug, then punched me in the jaw and called me an asshole for not warning her about Survival Week.

"What would I have said?" I asked her later. "Would you have gone through it if you knew what was in store?"

"Probably not."

"Then, are you glad I didn't tell you? No one would make it through if they knew what was coming, and how long it would take. Not me, not you, not any of us. The only way to get through is one step at a time, not looking at the big picture."

"Fine. Just don't do it again."

"I'm not going to. You're a PBE employee. One of our combat correspondents, camera, notebook, and brain, recording our escapades for posterity. You'll be there, in the plane. Should the worst happen, you're the one that's going to push you through it, not me."

"What happened to the novel? I'm not a journalist."

"You're both. What you see and do here can't be talked about outside, without official approval, but Maniac wants you to write it all down, and he's trying to get the real story out. That's where you come in. You're to write a form of tell-all book. Anything that doesn't go in that book, feel free to paraphrase and name-change the hell out of it, and call it a novel.

"Oh, and by the way, we're flying into Iraq the day after tomorrow. Call your folks, tell them you'll be gone, but you can't say where. This isn't official yet."

"Is this how it always is? Leaving for parts unknown in secret, never being honest with the people back home?"

"Yes. My family hasn't known my exactly location in years, although they do know I'm a pilot for Payback Enterprises. None of them know how many people I've killed, all the places I've been, or the people we've lost. Maybe some day, when this is all over with, I'll have you write my story. Hell, a lot of us would give you book deals, if HM let us."

"I can only hope so. That is closer to the original plan, after all."

"By the way, I heard they gave you a new name in training?"

"Yeah, I didn't like my old one anymore. Everyone calls me Kahlan now."

"Your eyes aren't green."

"True, but I look killer in a white dress."

That image isn't going to leave my head any time soon.

"I'll bet. Grab your gear, you need to pack for a plane ride."

Rock and Roll, Part One.

One of the benefits of being a higher-ranking PBE employee is that we get to do recruiting missions.

This isn't to assume that "rank" as such exists in PBE, leadership has always been a question of skill and initiative first, seniority second. The FNGs (Fuckin' New Guys) start at the bottom, but a particularly intelligent employee can get promoted very quickly, and unlike military commanders, HM doesn't have patience for political games. Being seen to be a kiss-ass is a quick way to get sent on a less-survivable mission, where one's actions will either prove one's talk, or not. Most often not.

But anyways, as the senior pilot in PBE's employ, I frequently get sent out to recruit new pilots, raise awareness among the aviation community that PBE needs pilots, and look for new ways to use airplanes to slay bodies. The other specialists do the same thing, dropping by law school graduations, military bases, and medical schools on a frequent basis. We have a permanent booth at SHOT show.

This particular day, my cross-country tour brought me to the Dayton Air Show, one of the US's biggest annual air shows. Now, any pilot or organization that can bring a WWII-era C-47 will get some attention. The fact that it was painted like a WWII-era 101st Airborne jump bird, with the exception of our rifle/syringe/hourglass logo, raised some extra eyebrows.

Oh, and HM had instructed the mechanics to leave it armed. Nothing says "subtle" like real miniguns in an aircraft owned by a PMC at an air show attended by large numbers of mil/LEO personnel, with the Air Force Thunderbirds scheduled to show up. I was going to spend all day being watched by armed AF security personnel, but occasionally, we actually want attention from the officials, since we're always looking to hire the best and brightest of them.

I was told to especially look for helicopter pilots. Odd, since PBE doesn't have much in the way of helo assets, but HM thinks pretty far in advance. I'll give the man credit, he's often way ahead of us strategically. The man has plans for PBE that are so detailed I often wonder if the madness is just an act.

A few Little Bird pilots could really give us some new options for moving our troopers that we just don't have at the moment. Even two would give us the ability to lift a fire team off a rooftop instead of road exfiltration.

I spent most of the day wearing the polo and handing out business cards, telling mildly-interested folks that yes, PBE is hiring, and yes, we pay excellent wages. No, I'm not going to tell war stories, and no, I'm sure as hell not going to talk about selection and initial training. Yes, we're a good company to work for, no, I'm not going to tell anyone what countries we're currently working in.

I would have loved to put on a demonstration, but there was just no way to get *that* approved with the locals. I could just imagine the conversation:

"Yeah, we'd like to blow several large holes in the field opposite the hangars, and we'd also like to pour several thousand tracer rounds into some vehicles from 2,000 feet off the deck, preferably at night."

"Aren't you a little old to be making prank calls? Who did you say you were with?"

I hit pay dirt right after the Thunderbirds did their thing. By this time, temperatures were well over 90F, and it was a bright sunny day, so every who could find it was in the shade. For me and my temporary copilot, that meant a bright pink parasol and some insulated blankets on top of the plane. We stuck out, but we also had a better view than anyone except the airmen who were doing the same thing on top of a C-17.

How old is this guy?

That was all I could think of as this scrappy young kid was yelling up at me. I didn't know if he was old enough to shave, and I felt quite certain that he wasn't old enough to drink stateside.

"WHAT! Stop yelling at me!"

"Hey, I need to join you guys!"

"What the fuck for, kid?"

Start with the asshole card.

"I can fly a helicopter!"

"Great. Talk to the local hospital, go flying dying folks around."

C'mon, kid, tell me why you really want in PBE.

"Uhh, yeah, I don't think the cops will hire me anytime soon. I've kinda got a record with the cops."

"For what, exactly?"

"It was just one bad day, I swear."

We may have a winner.

"OK, come on inside."

I climbed down off the top of the bird, knowing I'd miss the blind-side knife edge pass that I'd been waiting all day for. Those Air Force guys can *fly*.

"What's your name?"

"Billy Dickerson."

Amazing. I can't wait to hear him tell the cadre his last name.

"Well, young William, tell me the entire story. It will be checked, and we will know if you're keeping secrets from us."

"I got out of highschool six years ago, went to helicopter flight school on Dad's money. He was a chopper pilot in the Army, but I didn't have the grades for Army flight school. Got out, got a job working for a lumber company. You know how they skyline logs up the hill and load them onto trucks? Well, they run those lines with a helicopter. I was the copilot on one of those choppers, working in the company until they'd promote me to my own chopper."

Kid's got balls, at least. Is he a total fuckup, or is there potential here?

"Ok..."

"Well, it was my day off, and me and some of the lumberjacks were blowing off some steam with some long-range shooting. You know how it gets almost zen when you really focus on the target?"

I nodded.

"Yeah, well, we'd spent a day at the range, and we were driving back to the job site when we got pulled over by some State trooper. This asshole saw us, saw the guns, and some old beer cans in the back, and pulled us all out of the truck. That was bad enough, but someone cracked a gay joke during the frisking, we all started laughing and adding to it, and he had us all arrested for disorderly conduct.

"We spent the night in jail, got a fine, and would have been sent on our way, but they weren't gonna give us our rifles back. Called it collecting evidence."

"...And?"

"Well, I...uh...I mean we, well, a fight got started. In the sheriff's office, the four of us guys tried to run out the door with our guns, and we made it out the door, into the truck and 20 miles down the road before we ran into a roadblock."

He made it out without getting shot? Doesn't look like he's that good of a brawler, but that still took good initiative.

"OK, so Assaulting a police officer, theft of police property, evading arrest...why are you not in prison?"

"We pleaded guilty to the assault and evading charges, and the lawyers got the theft charges thrown out on account of the cops having no right to confiscate the rifles in the first place. I did three years for that shit, and now I can't get a job with any respectable company. Fuckin' McDonald's won't even hire me."

"So you came to PBE? You think we're going to give you a new start, without caring about all the stupid shit you did when you were younger, and we'll give you another helicopter to fly once you prove yourself to be something other than the useless faggot you definitely appear to be."

The kid paled. I nearly busted up laughing, it was just too much fun.

"Well, I mean you guys have a reputation...I just thought..."

He trailed off. This kid was serious, and would probably work his ass off for another chance.

"Yes, yes we do. You'll have to work harder and endure more than ever before, you know that, right?"

"Yessir."

"Do not call me "Sir" again. Payback is NOT your father's Army. If you've got a cell phone, call whoever you've been staying with, you're going on vacation for a while."

"Yes... uhh, what do I call you?"

"Everyone calls me Soren."

I had fun for the rest of the day, I told the kid to wash the plane, twice, claiming that I could still see dirt spots on it, then I had him run around to various concessions stands, bringing me cold and unspilled sodas. I think he knew that I was testing him, and while his smile lasted for about 5 minutes into the first wash, he remained polite for the rest of the day.

I've got a good feeling about this kid. I think he knows it's just a game he has to play in order to win his fresh start, and that puts him a ways ahead of the people who think they can actually impress the selection cadre and get it easy.

We locked up the plane at nightfall, I showed him how to manually retract and stow the guns, then we went to a hotel. I've slept in that plane, but with four-star hotels in the area, and military personnel guarding the airfield, I didn't need to do it that night.

I paid for a two-bed, four-star room on the company card, something which the kid had obviously never seen the inside of before. He asked why we were staying in such luxury, and said he'd be fine in a smaller room. I smiled and told him that PBE lives in a different world than lumberjacks do, and crashed out.

I woke up at 0600, and checked my messages for the first time in a week. I'd gotten one from my elder sister, she and her husband had been approved for their second adoption, which I was glad to hear about. One from my mother, who was still tending to a neighborhood's worth of cats back home, and still swearing that she only owned three. Or was it four now?

Several work-related emails were waiting for me to respond to them, mostly progress reports and logistics concerns. Accounting was pissed about the hotel room, but they're good at what they do because they get pissy about hotel expenses. PBE rakes in piles of cash, but we burn through it pretty fast, and we're not nearly as profitable as it appears to outsiders. The vast majority of what we make goes to operating expenses, and a small army of bean-counters is required to make sure that we're not wasting funds.

The final email from the Bossman regarded the girl. She was apparently doing fairly well in our support-staff training program, and was in high spirits most of the time. She'd made it through the PT phase in good form, was doing her survival course currently, and was becoming a fairly competent shot. I thanked HM for letting me know, and sent a token message to let her know I was proud of her, and praying for her.

Of course, she'd never get such a message, and I knew that.

PBE had at the beginning only run a single training course, the brutal experience known as "Selection" to outsiders, "Lovecraftian horror" to people currently in it, and "beginner's training" to insiders. Everyone who had a combat job went through that, but as PBE had grown, it had needed specialists who simply didn't have what it took to get through that kind of training. When the course was explained, no college-trained folks had even applied for the accounting job.

In the end, PBE had created a shorter training course, at first marketed to outsiders as "Tactical Training for Law Enforcement and Security Personnel." The four-week course consisted of two weeks of PT, weapons training, and a third-week "survival experience" that was one part training and three parts low-level suck, mostly being wet, marching, and camping, but without a lot of sleep. Week four was more weapons training, but geared towards teamwork.

Then we added that to the employment contract, and anyone in a non-combat job had to go through it. It turned out to be a huge success, the support staff suddenly had a new respect for the shooters, and the shooters had more respect for the bean-counters and cooks. The company ran smoother, and morale actually went up. We'd hire folks just out of college, and they'd get letters from home, watching their friends' waistlines increase, while our support staff did regular PT, spent time on the range, and got paid more.

They had also had fun, got to travel on a regular basis, carried pistols, and got to blow stuff up on occasion. Most of them, if they could work through the morality issues of working with mercs, would retire from us after 20 years. It was, simply put, one of the best legal jobs in the world for our support staff. I suppose Colombian drug lords would pay more, but no one really wants to work for those guys. Not after PBE took down one of the Mexican cartels a few years back.

We left for the Chateau a few hours later. "Chateau" brings to mind a palatial cabin in the alps, but it's actually a compound in Florida. We own enough land to do live-fire exercises, survival training, have our own runway, and enough buildings to house everyone and everything we own. I mean everyone, too. We could house and feed every shooter, support operative, paper-pusher, and cook in the company, for several months, if the situation required it.

"Hey, Billy, what kind of music do you listen to?"

"Gangsta rap."

White kids these days.

"That's nice."

Strains of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Run Through the Jungle soon started fighting the engines for volume, and my copilot and I enjoyed the first round of preparing the kid for selection.

The Labor Party

I am a laborer by calling. Happiness for me is found in the productivity of setting up a party, not the relaxation and laughter of attending it. I needs to stop forgetting this, because once the work stops, no matter how much "fun" I try to have, I always leave the party depressed.

This isn't to say that parties are bad, or that the people who like parties are bad. I'm just not that guy, and it always seems that once the work is done, and the fun starts, there's nothing for me to *do*, so all the things I'm best at, working, teaching, problem-solving, go out the window, and only things I'm horrible at, like relaxing and being cool, are left.

I don't know if this is really a problem, I absolutely love getting things done. Maybe I'm too much of a freight monkey to ever enjoy being unproductive. Hands-down, the things I look back on as having been the most "fun" are the things that took the most to achieve. Crazy-long hikes in poor conditions, long nights at work, messes that defy explanation, and things like that are what I enjoy doing, because something is actually being done.

I don't know how to relax at a party and have "fun" like other people do, yet drop me into any situation that requires effort, mental or physical, and I'll have the time of my life, and look back on it fondly. Putting miles on my boots, running up a mountain, throwing freight like an animal, or simply spending a day pushing carts, those things make me happy because I've done something. Other people can do it, it's not that I've accomplished something others could not, it's that I've accomplished something so other folks don't have to.

I figure there are two kinds of people in the world. There are folks who live to achieve, create, and build, and hence love to work, and people who live socially, and live to be happy, make other people happy, and spread the happiness around. I certainly don't think that people like me, who are driven to the edge of self-destruction to get things done, are better, but the reverse isn't true, either.

We are simply different kinds of people. I look ahead in my life, I see a list of things to do before I die, an uncertain amount of time left to do them, and I'm eager to get to work. Other folks seem to look at labor as something to endure between periods of enjoyment. Try as I might, I'm not that sort of person. I look forward to the struggle, because that's what's meaningful to my life.

I've tried going to parties several times up here in Spokane. Every time I go, it seems the social folks take over, and there's no way for me to interact anymore. There's nothing intellectual happening, the subjects of conversation are inane at best, simple jokes, etc. There's nothing to be done, nothing to be debated, nothing to be reasoned with, nothing that takes any effort whatsoever.

I can't stand it. There's nothing for me at those places but the same ephemeral emotions that I can find in a productive day of work, only without the accomplishment to build on later. Give me an absurd amount of freight to move, let me lose myself in the labor, and when I'm done, I'll be grinning from ear to ear, dripping with sweat, and truly at peace with who I am.

There are a lot of different kinds of people in the world. I need to stop trying to switch groups.

Joy to Soren, in spite of the world.

"Hey Soren, where's the Joy in your life?"

I get this a lot. Like, way the hell more often than I want to hear this question. People always seem to assume that if I'm always grimface and rarely happy, I must not be a real Christian or some shit. Occasionally, I wonder if they're right. I mean hey, if God really does pour Joy into his followers, then why am I always depressed, right?

Here's a rather typical experience:

>Go to my PCM, skip church to do homework

>Get home, study for half an hour

‎>Score 42/45 on the first of two online tests

>Two classmates come over while they wait for a third to get home

>girl asks about guns

>Show her the 1911, WASR, and Savage Mk. II

>Teach her the three rules of gun safety

>She wants me to teach her to shoot

>I feel like F*** YEAH, MAN!!

>Third person gets home, they leave

>Random crushing depression

What the hell, man. I should not be depressed, but for some reason, I feel like shit. I know this isn't a rational emotion, so at least I know better than to act on it, but I hate this shit. I should be feeling awesome. I got to teach someone about guns, one of the few subjects in life that I have near-expert levels of knowledge of.

Now, obviously they only showed up to my house because they had to wait for a third person to get home at the girl's house. So I shouldn't take that to mean that they only tolerate me when they need me, that's unfair to them. But fuckin' depression, man. Strikes anywhere, all the time.

So, back to Joy. Where is the joy in my life? I'll get onto that just as soon as I figure out what the word actually means. So I used my google-fu (which is VERY strong) and looked up what Joy is. Turns out that Biblically, Joy is...wait, actually, I'm going to just quote the guy:

"Biblical joy consists of the deep and abiding confidence that all is well regardless of circumstance and difficulty."

John MacArthur (Not the General with the corncob pipe, that was Douglas)

So, using that definition, let me look at my life:

First off, I know, and I mean *know* on a gut level, that things will be OK, and are in fact OK right now. My emotions do not dictate reality, and the reverse is also false.

Second, fuckin' bring it, man. I can handle depression, it's not a limiting factor in my life. So when I start feeling depressed, I want to laugh it off. It's not going to stop me, and it's not a sign that God has abandoned me, and it's not even a sign that I'm in the wrong place.

Third, according to Nehemiah 8:10, "The Joy of the Lord is my strength". Well, I am a particularly resilient man. I've gone through a lot of shit in my life, and not only am I still going stronger than ever, I'm more and more motivated to learn from the past and do it right the next time.

His Joy, my strength.

The more nihilistically I view the world, the more I find myself unable to comprehend living for anything but God, the tougher I get. When I was concerned about finding a career job, buying a house, and finding a nice girl to marry, it seemed like every little thing got me down, and I was always depressed. But the depression back then made it hard to get out of bed, made it hard to work, made it hard to live.

Nowadays, depression just makes it hard to smile. Smiling's overrated. I'm still here, and wether or not I can smile 24/7 is irrelevant. I will not quit, since God put me here, and I'm not about to bitch out on the only real, driving, motivating thing in my life, the thing that's given me more meaning and purpose than anything else, ever.

Some days it seems like actually making it through flight school is going to prove impossible, and some days it seems like ever finding a worthwhile lady is less likely than that. But every time I start feeling down, regardless of the reason I start to feel like it's all worthless, I try to remind myself that God put me here.

Not just "here" on earth, but here in this house, at this time, at this school, in this major. So...maybe I would be a horrible missionary at this time. I freely admit that one, actually. I'm also not done with training, not done growing, not done with anything.

I often joke that I'm here because God ran out of polite, well-spoken, and Biblically-smart folks, so He got desperate and called a bitter, pissed-off, foul-mouthed asshole with a legendary reputation for being stubborn, knowing that at the very least, I'd make things entertaining.

The crazy thing is, the only thing that had really been missing in my life for all those years was a worthy cause to throw it all away on. God gave me that when He called me to be a missionary pilot, and while I'm still a little bitter, still often pissed, still occasionally foul-mouthed, what He needs is people who have reputations for being stubborn.

So, where's the Joy in my life? It's when I find a way to be stubborn *for* God, not myself. It's where I keep going when people tell me that I'm wasting my time up here. It's why I didn't quit when it seemed impossible. It's when I drove up here with no job, no savings, and enough money to buy groceries and pay the first month's rent.

It's when I get a 24-hour ban from Opchan for telling some guy to get it through his head: I'm not trying to bang every hot girl at MBI-S because I have far more important things to do, like getting trained to fly planes for Jesus, and if they don't think I'm worth dating, I will be happy to leave them behind when I fly away.

It's when some random anon on 99chan lets me know that I'm the reason he reopened his Bible.

That's my joy. That's when I'm really smiling, when I feel like a million bucks. My emotions are meaningless. They're not even real. The money in my wallet is only there because God provided it, it's not mine. The car in my driveway, the guns under my bed, the laptop that brings me all the knowledge I can ever handle...God provided all of it.

My joy is when I get to use my pathetic talents for God. It's not my emotions, it's not my stuff, it's not the people around me, it's just being secure in the knowledge that even though I'm the bottom of the barrel, God is using me for His goals.

Valentine's day

There's a trio of long-stemmed red roses on the table in front of me. They're extra from some party some of my housemates went to, and those that didn't attend have free reign to give one away if we so choose. The more I think about it, the less I actually want to give one of those roses to anyone at this school.

There is a girl I'm interested in, but I'm not going to do anything romantic for Valentine's day for her. At this point in my life, I do not feel ready to be a proper boyfriend, so it doesn't really make sense to try to start a relationship.

The only thing worse than being alone would be for her to start to like me, then look a little deeper and run away. Right now, I've got some shit to work on in my life, and if I actually care about the lady I want to date, I'll sort it now so that she never has to deal with it.

I'm tired of being this guy. I'm tired of being two different people, of being awesome one day and an asshole the next. I'm tired of never being open with my friends, even if I'm honest with them. I'm tired of never trusting anyone except the people I never see.

Maybe next month, maybe when the next school year starts, but at some point I'll be able to stand in front of a lady and tell her honestly that her life with me would be vastly better than life without me. Right now, I can't do that, so I'll wait.

It's not about what she'll do for me, it's about what I can do for her. So I'm waiting until I'm at the point that I'm solid enough that dating me will make her life better. That's the best thing I can do for her.

Even if it makes for another lonely Valentine's Day.

Trust Me.

"Thanks for trusting me"

I didn't. I expected you to keep walking, and then I'd have called you a bitch in my head as you walked past.

No journey of self-discovery will ever end with a happy discovery. I'm living in a house with seven other guys, and I have several times that number of friends up here. And yet, every day, all day, I feel alone. There's no one up here that I'm really close to. It wasn't too bad last semester, but as this year started, it felt worse than usual.

So I applied my intellect to the situation. Why did I feel alone, surrounded by friends?

Here's what I found: I trust exactly zero of them. Oh, sure, I'd be honest with them, but I never really let anyone inside the armor that I wear all day every day. So, it wouldn't take much for me to be honest, because if I honestly represent who I am, and you're not cool with that, piss off, right?

I mean, it's your problem. You're the one who can't accept me, or what I believe. There's nothing wrong with me, it's you.

I took this hypothesis, and I tested against my past.

I used to attend Nampa First Church of the Nazarene. It's a fair assessment that at the time, it was a church that was rather full of affluent folks, and so single-parent children of working mothers kinda stood out. My friends and I got picked on almost constantly, for whatever reason the rich kids had that day.

What did I do with that? I got pissed, locked myself down, and withdrew. The same thing would happen at school, but at school I could hang out with the heavy metal stoner kids, and we could talk about music. They never gave a care that I didn't smoke weed, they accepted me.

I never trusted anyone at that church. I could be honest, but I was always ready to slam the door if I saw trouble coming. And, for the most part, trouble always came.

I tried being duplicitous and manipulative, but I couldn't keep up the happy-guy image long enough, and it never worked very well. Some of the worst mistakes of my life came from trying to make other people like me.

I eventually wound up at Crossroads church in Nampa. I thought "Hey, maybe I can trust people here." And for a while, it worked, but I was always ready to slam that door. Eventually, I'd had enough of them not letting me into their lives, yet hypocritically not letting them into mine, and I told them all to piss off as well.

Luckily for me, there was a trio of folks that actually cared enough to talk to me. One of them in particular tried to get me to understand how the social society at that church worked, and to a large extent, it helped me. But I always seemed to stay in fight mode.

Any time I ever put myself out there, it seemed someone was always ready to slap me back down.

I talked to my pastor once, tried to get some advice on being a missionary. All I wanted that day was some confirmation that going to flight school was the right thing, but he told me that I would be expelled from Moody.

So I took off again. Cause, you know, fuck that guy too.

Went to a church across the valley after some prayers for guidance. Found a nice Bible study, and some people I really cared about. A former preacher joined that small group, and I thought I'd finally found someone nice, who knew a lot about the Bible. I told him I was Methodist, and he replied that if I ever read my Bible, I'd get over that. My parents should have raised me in the Bible, not in Wesley's heresy.

And so the armor came back on in an instant. Fuck that guy, man. I don't need him, I don't need anyone. I tried to be nice, but haters gonna hate, you know?

Then I came to Moody, and tried to start fresh, and trust folks up here. I went evangelizing with a guy one afternoon, thought I could learn how to witness to people. Instead I got lectured on how it was horrible for me to listen to metal bands that weren't explicitly Christian.

It seems that every time I ever attempt to trust people with my emotions, I get burned. I've worn my hand-crafted armor of staying aloof from everyone and kept a "piss off" in a quick-draw holster for so long that it's become my primary nature.

I've got a fuck-you haircut, a fuck-you beard, I wear fuck-you clothes, and I never let anyone inside my shell, ever. I own an AK. I prefer secular heavy metal to the Christian variety. I like this, I like that, I'm totally different from you, and I don't care. You don't like it? Fuck off.

But honestly, it's fuckin' miserable inside my head. I had an epiphany a few days ago, I was dancing around my living room to a song, and I realized that I could never do something like that with people around. I can make excuses, but honestly, I'm terrified of letting anyone see me in a truly unguarded moment. That one realization, that I never relax my guard, blew apart the house of cards that was my self-deceit.

I haven't let anyone see me in a vulnerable moment in years, probably a lot of them. That's what my life is missing. That's what I need, someone, anyone, I trust enough to be vulnerable in front of. I don't even know what that would feel like, but it's the one thing above all that I'm looking for. I'm tired of being strong, I want to be vulnerable.

No wonder no one seems to care about me. I'm probably a pain in the ass to have around. Unless everyone is totally blind, people have picked up on that forced aloofness, and have taken the hint. So...no wonder folks don't stop by to say "hi." No wonder guys don't invite me over to hang out. No wonder girls seem like they're interested right up the point I start to let them inside.

I don't really know if I even have a point with all of this. I feel like I've made a great discovery in my life, yet it doesn't actually change anything unless I apply what I know to my life. In my eternal quest to live authentically, I must now find a way to adapt.

I suppose that ultimately, it's up to God, but that's a copout. If I don't work for it, and God doesn't miracle my ass one step nicer than I was, I can blame God and stay this way with a deceptively clean conscience. So, I guess I don't really have an answer to it, but I do know the problem.

And that's a good place to start.