Thank You for My Service - Mat Best Page 0,51

a defensive posture as I could with my Rangers, given that they had no night vision and kits that did not even come close to preparing them for being out here. It wasn’t their fault. They were just following orders, probably from a commander who wanted to “see some action” before his tour was over. It was just lucky for them that I didn’t have any more time to dwell on the shit show this could have become.

“We’re ready to go. PJs got what we need. They said we can blow in place,” the combat controller announced. Then he asked a question that was music to my ears. “Do you have any demo?”

Do I? I was like the Kool-Aid Man crashing through a wall: Oh Yeeeeaaahh.

Having never blown up a Predator drone before, now I was the one with a severe case of not knowing what the fuck I was doing. All I could be reasonably confident about was that if I looked really cool doing it, I would be fine. So I had my team push everyone back to the minimum safe distance, then I jumped back in there, yanked the C4 from my bag, rigged up ██████████████ across the airframe (which was actually the appropriate amount of explosives to dispose of a huge-ass Predator) and wrapped all the large, reachable parts of the plane with det cords for good measure. Once I ran out of shit that goes boom, I hooked it up to one of the five-minute time fuses I brought with me and waited to finish off this Iraqi rave party in the way only the United States government was capable: with a multi-million-dollar fireworks show.

Burning…

The PJ team leader and I ran back to where we had pushed everyone, including the National Guard unit, in order to enjoy the—

BOOM!

The massive explosion kicked off and woke up the entire neighborhood. If anyone in this godforsaken place owned a car worth stealing, every alarm within a mile radius would have been going off. As for the drone…uh, what drone? That thing was vapor. Satisfied with our handiwork, we called in our ride home. Eight minutes later, two Black Hawks descended out of the darkness and scooped us up.

As the dust kicked off and covered the National Guard convoy we were leaving behind, I looked down to find the entire unit staring up at us in awe, like they were watching angels hop aboard death chariots for the ride back into hellfire. It was my first real glimpse at myself in someone else’s mirror since going home for block leave after my first deployment. When you spend so much time training and living and fighting with one group of guys, you start to measure yourself only against them, not against the larger population back home or soldiers in the conventional units of the military. To this National Guard engineer unit, we were the epitome of the recruiting poster hanging in the storefront window next to their local Piggly Wiggly or tacked up in the high school hallway for Career Day when they were getting ready to graduate. We were the silent green-eyed killers who came and went under the cover of darkness, and they’d actually caught a glimpse of us in the flesh. We’d gone from Guitar Hero to superhero in the space of a couple hours, which was a pretty cool feeling, though I personally reject that hero label, since I could never beat that fucking game no matter how hard I tried.

Chapter 11

Balad. James Balad.

The way the cliché goes, senior year in high school is supposed to be the best year of your life. You’ve got your solid group of friends that you’ve grown up with over the previous three years. You’ve got everything dialed in, and you know how shit works. You know all the tricks and the shortcuts—what matters and what doesn’t. You’re captain of this or that team, you have privileges that the younger kids don’t even understand. You basically run the school, and the administrators stay out of your way as long as you don’t blow up too many things or get too many people pregnant.

Minus the restriction on blowing things up—breachers gotta breach—that’s what it was like during my fifth deployment as a Ranger. I was coming into the final year of my enlistment contract. I’d made E-5 (Sergeant) on the previous trip. All my buddies were either team leaders or squad leaders. And best of all, unlike high school, I