Thank You for My Service - Mat Best Page 0,49

the fourth night of my two weeks with the PJs, I was in our squad room, deep into a gnarly solo on the expert level of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, when our radios kicked off:

“Roger, we have a downed fixed-wing.”

So much for the vacation. An unmanned Predator drone had malfunctioned during takeoff and crashed about ten miles outside the wire of our base. Rushing to my kit room, my first thought was: Dammit, I am NEVER going to beat “Through the Fire and Flames” this way! Then I realized that I was getting all dressed up and I probably wouldn’t even get to shoot anyone. That was even more disappointing. Pulling on all your body armor and strapping on your normal weapons load for a CSAR mission with no definable adversary is like putting on a condom to have sex with a blow-up doll. Sure, technically, it’s action, but it’s not like you’re gonna catch anything…

Then the master breacher in me took over: Wait…do I get to blow this thing up? I’d breached plenty of doors and walls before, but never anything this big and complex. I had no idea how much demo I would need to get the job done. In uncertain moments like these, whether it’s blowing up a drone or lighting up a party, I follow a very simple formula: P = Plenty. No one has ever said, “Damn, bro, you brought too much booze to the barbecue!” And I suspected that no one was going to complain that the crashed drone might get too blown up. Knowing that, I stuffed my backpack with █████████████ C4 plastic explosives, a few extra strands of timing fuse, and some command initiators…just in case.

Wheels up. Let’s party.

We took off in two Black Hawks for the easy eight-minute flight to the crash site. As the birds dusted off back to base, we quickly secured the wreckage. I placed my team in a defensive posture around the site as the PJs worked to grab anything sensitive from the downed aircraft. PJs are like the world’s greatest “Where’s Waldo?” players. Give them even a little bit of time, and it won’t matter where something is hidden, they’re going to find that shit and grab it up. Everything was going smoothly when I heard the Air Force combat controller’s radio frequency crackle. I stopped and took a knee next to him to see what was up.

“Roger, we are launching QRF [quick reaction force] immediately for backup,” the person on the other side of the radio signal said.

“Yeah, we are all set here, guys,” the combat controller calmly replied. “Stand by at gate, no need to launch, over.” Combat controllers are experts in airfield seizure, air traffic control, air-to-ground comms, fire support, and all manner of command and control. When one of them tells you we’re all set, we’re all set.

“Negative,” the voice responded. “We are en route to your position.”

Jesus Henrietta Christ, who is running this donkey show? Because it clearly wasn’t us—the guys with all the training and the guns and █████████████ brick of boom. At this point I was just wondering what kind of QRF they were sending. With how close and non-threatening our location was, I knew there was no way an infantry unit was on standby for this type of stuff. And it wasn’t like █████████████ was fast-roping in for high-fives and photo ops any time soon. All I could do was patiently wait to find out. Then the radio crackled again.

“Roger…ummmm…what is your location? Our GPS isn’t working.” This was the Army, so it wasn’t exactly a world-shaker that the piece of equipment designed to tell you which part of the soup sandwich you’d taken a bite of wasn’t working. Still, it wasn’t particularly reassuring that the Quick Reaction Force was this slow on the uptake.

The combat controller read out an exact ten-digit grid.

Silence.

“Do you copy, over?” the controller said.

Still nothing. Then I saw white Humvee lights far off in the distance breaking through a line of trees that bracketed our position for about four hundred meters on each side.

“DO YOU COPY, OVER!?”

The radio finally crackled to life again.

“I think…um…we are lost.”

“Goddammit, these guys are more of a fucking hassle than this drone,” I said, getting more frustrated. Not only were they making things complicated by distracting us from the task at hand, they were drawing attention to us by driving Miss Daisy with their white lights on.

“Ask them if they see my fucking IR