chunks of proof like a fucking truffle hog and then bring them back to be counted.
For a knuckle dragger like myself—even one who’d been promoted to sergeant and team leader—it was hard to accept that this information-gathering aspect of war was as important as pulling a trigger, especially when conducting direct action raids to kill or capture HVTs (high-value targets). But once you realize that you can’t just ask someone who they are and where they hid the launch codes when all you can find of them is a limb (like with my old friend the none-armed man), you begin to understand the need for inventory and intelligence gathering.
The military calls this process “sensitive site exploitation” (SSE), and certain members of our unit were trained for it and were in charge of it. They documented the scene with video and searched the bodies for maps, documents, cell phones, computers, personal effects, and other bits of information that might be useful. They swabbed stuff and did hair and tissue analysis—all that CSI shit that I was too poor or too dumb to understand when I was growing up. Because war is war, and the Army is the Army, this theoretical system always went totally FUBAR in practice. A mission would blow up in your face, or it might go better than you expected, and then you’d be out there chilling with a bunch of bodies and either not enough supplies or no designated DNA analyst, because the mission planners hadn’t thought you’d need one. If that happened, and you unexpectedly stumbled into a little game of Guess Hussein?, you were on your own.
Nobody I knew looked forward to this part of the job. The last thing anyone wanted was the delicate, precise tasks of SSE left to guys whose idea of a surgical strike was fucking as many VA nurses as possible when they were back home. Plus, the whole process got boring very quickly. You know that old proverb “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”? Well, bored hands must be the devil’s whorehouse, because that’s when things always got seriously fucked and someone ended up having to pay for it. Still, we knew this kind of exploitation and identification helped us going forward, so the general rule around SSE was “shut up and nut up.” You never knew when you’d come across very sensitive information or information that might lead to a high-value target. It was like going on Terrorist Tinder and getting an immediate match—you didn’t want to mess up that little love connection.
Down to get fucked?
Totes. ETA?
Look out your window.
I don’t see any—
pew pew pew
* * *
—
One night we got a call over the radio that ███████████ might have swiped right on some desolate road on the outskirts of Goatfuck, Iraq. My platoon had already done two direct-action raids that night. Nothing special, just the usual: kicking down doors, looking for bad guys who were already gone, getting shot at by their buddies who weren’t. We were riding in the back of a pair of Chinooks, completely smoked on the way back to base, when the initial call came in: █████ had just done a VI (vehicle interdiction) on an HVT. To most people, “vehicle interdiction” sounds like a fancy military phrase for “traffic stop,” and in a sense it is, because it usually involves stopping a suspicious vehicle and either seizing its cargo or detaining its occupants, or both. In Iraq, however, VIs can go a little differently, especially when an HVT is involved. In a nutshell, we roll up on the skid of a helicopter, smile and wave at the asshole who hates Americans, and if he’s one of the dudes who has been trying to blow up our people, we serve him with a good old-fashioned Grand Slam breakfast of 5.56 and 7.62.
It was 5:30 A.M.—typically the end of our workday—and all I was thinking about was getting back to base and knocking out a quick gym session before I went to bed. It was arm day. Those curls for the girls and tris for the guys weren’t going to do themselves, after all. That’s when my earpiece crackled alive for a second time. The █████ guys had just turned the HVT into a beard-covered s’more inside his late model Toyota Campfire, and they needed us to land and search the vehicle since they didn’t have the manpower.
“Best,” my squad leader says over the radio, “we need to go back out and ID