from the birthplace of mathematics, this guy understood angles for shit. But that’s to be expected with a lot of suicide bombers: They’re not known for being deep analytical minds who think things through completely. It’s hard to get mad at a walking Darwin Award like that, especially when he saves the U.S. government the thirty-three cents it would have cost to shoot him. Still, I managed to find a way, because now he’d made it virtually impossible to identify him.
A lot of people have this Hollywood picture in their heads of war casualties, like one second they’re lying there shaking and taking in the enormity of what has happened, then the next moment they accept it, cough up some blood, close their eyes, and die. No, sir. If I just put seven bullets in some dude’s head and he didn’t see me coming, there’s no contemplation, there’s just a mess. A mess that I end up having to clean off with the little bit of good drinking water I brought so that our photographer can get a clear(ly useless) picture of the dead combatant. There is no amount of water, no camera angle, no Instagram filter, that is going to make up for the lack of a face. And that is never truer than when you’re dealing with a walking IED who is also really bad at terrorism.
On the bright side, we did have most of the other five combatants. We lined them all up by their vehicle, which had burned itself out by this point, and began to catalog and identify them by taking photos and fingerprints. When we turned our attention to Lil’ Sammy Suicide Bomber, we discovered to my great displeasure that all we were able to find were his legs and ass. There are three people on this planet I can identify from those body parts alone: Serena Williams, Kim Kardashian, and that South African sprinter who killed his girlfriend. There was no way we were going to get anything useful from the lower half of this dude’s body.
Frustrated, I walked away from my squad over to the blast site and started pacing out into the desert on an arc where I thought the blast might have thrown body parts big and sturdy enough to survive the explosion. Maybe I’d get lucky and find a head or something. Fifty meters from the bottom of that little berm, I spotted an arm, severed at the elbow, fingers still attached. Boo-yah. The arm wasn’t just important for identifying the final combatant, by the way. It was also the last piece of the puzzle that was going to let us exfil and go the fuck home.
Moments like these are tricky. Those first minutes when the action feels like it’s over and the mission has been completed, that’s when the adrenaline dump happens and you’re most liable to lose focus or let your emotions take hold of you—whatever they are. Unnoticed and unchecked, a weird anxiety can start to build, and that’s when things can go sideways.
As a team leader, it was my job in those situations to stay frosty and read the room, so to speak. If people were too loose, I’d go Scared Straight on them. If they were too amped, I’d bring down the energy. Having just dodged a hail of cooked-off ammo, a dude with a locked-and-loaded PKM, another with an AK, and his peek-a-boo pal the human grenade right behind him, there was a fair amount of nervous tension in the air. There is only one response to a scenario like that: gallows humor.
I grabbed the severed arm by the elbow, trotted back, and just as I got over the berm in full view of the squad, I started waving the hand like I’d just won a beauty pageant.
“Hey, guys!” I shouted. “Does anyone need a hand?!”
The entire squad took a second to register what they were seeing…and finally busted out laughing in a huge wave of catharsis. Once the laughter started, the floodgates opened, as much for me as for them. I’m like a can of Pringles that way: once you pop, I just can’t stop.
I held the arm toward the center of my chest and grabbed a finger. “Finally, something I can count on!” Then we arm wrestled. I won. I finished it with a Stone Cold Stunner. To celebrate I threw the hand in the air and waved it around like I just didn’t care. Then I curled the fingers