into a loose fist. “Who wants the first hand job?” I assured my squad that this was not the bomber’s wiping hand, but sadly I had no takers.
It’s no wonder Carrot Top had such a long career—you can get a lot out of just one prop.
The poor intel guy tasked with fingerprinting and inputting everything into the computers just glared at me when I held out the arm with the hand fully articulated and tried to input the fingerprints myself one by one. Boop. Boop. Boop. “What?” I said, bobbing the arm up and down like a puppet and taking a stab at the voice of a severed limb. “I just want you to run my prints so your friends can go home already!”
When we were all finished, we called in the 160th SOAR (Special Operations Aviation Regiment) to come pick us up. Just for fun, we set their HLZ right next to the pile of dead bodies. Those SOAR dudes are a bunch of hardcore seasoned flyers, but some of their new crew chiefs don’t get to see this much death up close. Imagine being the eighteen-year-old aviation crew chief whose job is to man an M240 machine gun on the side of a helicopter and your pilot sets you down next to six dead bodies (ok, five and a half) with giant Sharpie marks labeled 1 through 6, arms and body parts stacked, everything neatly organized into a row.
I looked at the kid and waved as I got on the helicopter. From the look on his face he seemed both awestruck and dumbstruck, so I pulled out my camera to show him the photos we’d just taken. Most of them were for intelligence-gathering and evidentiary purposes. The picture I took of the arm, though, was more of a reminder that this one piece of flesh and bone could have been responsible for five or six more flag-draped metal coffins rolling out of a dull gray C-130 on the tarmac of Dover Air Force Base.
There was nothing especially gruesome about the photos—nothing out of the ordinary—but it was clear from the kid’s reaction that he disagreed. After nine or ten of these Ranger glamour shots, he shook his head and turned back to his machine gun. He was intrigued right up until the point when I showed him what real war was like, then he was like, “I’m good.” Smart kid.
Looking back, I’m a little disappointed in my behavior in that moment. I completely missed a chance to hold on to the arm a little longer and high-five guys with it as I boarded the helicopter. Instead I hastily threw it into the pile of dead people to be counted, like a total amateur. In the heat of the moment, though, you can only do what you’ve been trained to do, and for me that meant making inappropriate jokes to entertain my men (not just myself) and—at least for a minute—help them cut through the horror of war. I mean, what are the chances that the only identifiable part left from a suicide bomber is the arm he detonated his bomb with? How do you let that kind of awesome irony go by without saying something? It’s one of those funny little bits of karmic justice that life throws at you so you don’t lose your mind.
It’s also one of those moments when any sane person has to ask themselves: How the fuck did I get here?
Chapter 2
From Green Day to Green Thumb
Despite being the youngest of six in a military family growing up in Santa Barbara, California, I hadn’t put much thought into joining up when I entered high school, largely because I didn’t feel like I fit the part. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t see a soldier; I saw an awkward, introverted kid, one who loved playing music and who was more interested in science and business than anything else. Instead of playing sports or working on cars or going surfing, like most of the other guys in my class, my extracurricular interests drew me into two of the coolest groups anyone could ever join on a Southern California high school campus: the botany club and an emo band.
I know what you’re thinking: Bro, those groups must have been total pussy magnets. And you’d be totally right, broseph, they were. Each one was filled with total pussies. In botany club, all we did was sit around talking about girls and money. The