Weeping Those Salt Tears of Victory

Strictly speaking he shouldn’t have been selected for Operator Training, what with his tremor and his palpitations, the night sweats and the sudden screams, heebie-jeebies up the wazoo on newmoon nights and obscure pains from jawline to neckline and back again.

But they’d lost a lot of guys in that last blue-on-blue and they needed warm muscled bodies like yesterday. So Gonzalo blew the Chief Training Officer and made sure the transfer paperwork got squared away. How to Get Ahead in This Man’s Army, Chapter One. He was now an Operator, the closest thing to A God in this, God’s Own Nation.

Gonzalo’s first insertion after Basic Training had not gone so smoothly. On the way to the LZ the Osprey tipped over and they had to ditch the bird in the drink. The entire op was catastrofucked, screwed sixteen ways to Sunday.

Turns out our friendly drone cover had been compromised by adversarial hacks, somehow. The machines went kinetic on those few survivors of Gonzalo’s platoon as they bailed, discarding their body armor and swimming for the western shore of the bay. Which was the wrong shore, it turns out.

Subjected to suppressive fire from overhead close support UAVs, the beach zone was lit up and the emerging friendlies were shredded1 on the beach by twelve point seven mike mike. By the time the whole snafu had gotten unfucked, platoon sergeant Gonzalo was down a squad and a half and the whole miserable campaign was shitcanned.

So what was fucked about the op? What wasn’t fucked, you mean. Turns out the adversarial forces were not as disorganized as they’d seemed and that the whole thing was not what it had appeared to be going in.

It was even whispered that there might not actually have even been an adversary as such. There was always this glimmer of suspicion that something was seriously up in the intel room. That in actuality it was our intel that was the adversary…

This left a lot to think about on convalescent leave, as Gonzalo touched base with his baby Polly-Sammie, got some physio for the wrenched spine from the Osprey ditching incident, and chilled with a few brewskis and some light recreational crack with the boys.

That was the unpleasant beginning, but now things were looking up…

He was now an LT with a Purple Heart — that’s the medal, you dope, there was nothing really wrong with his cardio despite a few arrhythmic ticker murmurs — and had finessed a transfer to JSOC. Green berets, the full John Wayne: What makes the grass grow? Blood blood blood.

How to Get Ahead in The Army, Chapter Two. Now Gonzalo was an Operator with a bristling beard and a palestinian scarf in tactical green. So he worked hard on his musculature, bulked out with protein shakes and roids, with ambien and molly to counteract the crack and the meth, those wobbly-shakes that sometimes erupted without warning. Up and down perfectly balanced in the yinyang Dao of body chemistry.

There was an unspoken understanding that his JSOC advancement was the price for his silence on that last overseas omnishambles, so he practiced strict omertà, only spilling the details on a private Signal groupchat which was therapeutic in intent and for the most part secure.

He settled in quickly with his new team, roided Wunderkinder just like himself. Buddy-grips and backslaps, ass-grabbing in the showers and dick-docking with those uncut wonderboys. He needed to size them all up.

Next op was a doozy. Up at the Arctic Circle. The snowstorms were quite refreshing after the tropics, truth be told.

Gonzalo had drifted off a little at the briefing sessions in the warm command hut and wasn’t quite clear what they were doing up here in the icefields of wherever, but scuttlebutt said it was adversarial forces closing in on vital strategic resources. Rival whisperings had it that the adversaries were actually friendlies on a false flag and that the deployment was strictly kayfabe.

Howsoever it may be, the op entailed — guess what? — Gonzalo’s team on a lowlevel Pave Hawk insert running into an ice outcrop in a whiteout. Turns out the GPS had been spoofed and they were way off course. So rescue missions were running blind a hundred kilometers out from the crash site. This left the green beret survivors way out in the arctic blizzard with no comms and a number of shredded2 corpses for company.

It’s not widely known, but part of spec-ops survival training includes instruction on how to field-dress a cadaver, first stripping out the steamy guts and then climbing inside the warm thorax. Generally speaking this strategy is recommended with larger ungulates such as cows, yaks, oxen, camels and horses. But in a pinch and for want of larger mammalians, a huge six-foot-eight three-hundred-fifty-pound Operator will do just as well. So Gonzalo found himself living inside an Army Staff Sergeant named the late Hyland Porter III and chewing on chilled MREs until the storm cleared up and the spotter helos arrived.

Meanwhile the op itself went from bad to worse. A certain classified number of operators were lost, and the icy territory of whatever-the-fuck passed into the hands of a strategic rival which had been a strategic ally until three months before. This rival then changed sides and became an ally once more, but wasn’t really to be trusted from here on in. Their government was said to be a bunch of false flag operatives of a foreign power, or maybe a friendly power, but in any case not us. So it wasn’t exactly clear if the overall op had been a resounding success or a resounding failure. All that was known for sure was that an indeterminate number of guys had been chewed up in a blizzard.

Failure cascade. That’s what they were calling it now, when each fuckup fucked up the next fuckup. ‘Cascade’ is a good name for it; the terminology in This Man’s Army just gets better and better.

The real-time intel, the command-and-control networking tech, and the overall look and feel — that strapped tactical buff warrior style — these were all improving rapidly, with great strides made every day. Only the operations themselves remained a shitshow.

Back at Fort Bragg, Gonzalo was treated for a light hypothermia and given some new meds to counteract traumatic reactions, which generally worked quite well except for the hallucinations and the outbursts of uncontrollable rage and terror. His stool, that’s to say his actual crap, was also analyzed for DNA indicating human remains. He passed the cannibal test with a resounding negative, but others in his team were not so fortunate.

The alleged cannibals disappeared from the unit to be replaced by other guys. It wasn’t known if the anthropophages were shitcanned with bad papers or booted upstairs into an even more special and secretive unit. In any case they were replaced by more guys who looked exactly the same and the unit was prepped for new exploits.

For Gonzalo, the blocky shoulders and the bull necks of his comrades began to blend into one another, forming a composite Operator: square-jawed, fork-bearded, intermediate between Causasian and Afroamerican – say Pantone 1255 medium tan – and simply gi-fucking-normous, that kind of slab of pure muscle that could break a compact car just by sitting in it. He started to see these guys as blocks of interchangeable meat, to be hollowed out if necessary and occupied, as long as he, LT Gonzo, got to keep on keepin’ on. How to Get Ahead, Three.

His baby Polly-Sammie wasn’t his baby any more. She’d left his ass for a girl who was really a guy, the type they were now calling a Jody-Blue-Hair. Lot of them around, it seemed. Girls didn’t want real men any more, they were settling for ladyboys who were ‘more in touch with their feelings’. So Gonzalo got his own back. He’d found a place outside of Fayetteville, on Coalition Boulevard just off the All-American Freeway behind the Amazon Fulfillment Center. Here he found his own fulfillment: ultra-feminine chicks-with-dicks, semigirls who intuited what a fella really desired, since all of us know that Peter Knows What Dick Likes.

‘Twas bliss that dawn to be alive and be Gonzalo the Operator. Medal ribbons crowding the left breast of the dress tunic, which need never be worn on duty — no uniform at all worn on duty. Days hunting quail in the Carolina swamps, throwing plastique charges into ponds to make the trout float. Nights seeking bliss in an industrial unit crowded with hermaphroditic temptresses. Ups and downs running level, ambien nights when the deep terror slept peacefully.

Before the next op, still to be firmed up but supposedly involving a regime change somewhere, an all-SOCOM pep talk was mandated at Bragg’s JFK auditorium. Full dress uniform, tunics stretched out over yards of pec, and burnished brass buttons bright in the hall’s red glare. It would make you proud to see those hunks of warfighter lined shoulder-to-shoulder, the rich kempt beards, the berets just so.

The Chief of War stepped up to the podium in front of a jungle of unit banners and service pennants. Behind all that was a newly-painted stars-and-stripes backdrop stretching to the ceiling with the correct new number of fifty-three stars displayed. But the painting work had been somewhat rushed and the new stars inserted rather awkwardly. They kinda looked like they had six points rather than five.

The Chief was not tethered to a lectern like a schmuck; he ranged freely, his commanding whine relayed to the men by means of a face-mic. He paced up and down, up and down. It was a torment to Gonzalo who had to sit there and not fidget once. But he had a secret weapon to counteract the jitters.

The Chief spoke: ‘Though the military gets a lot of flak — shouldn’t that be the air force, har har — it’s really no more of a constant fuckup than any other organized enterprise in the world that’s larger’n a rowboat crew. Sure, a few people’re killed, some hostiles, a couple friendlies, whenever things go wrong. Okay. Point taken. Boo hoo. But you shouldn’t let that stop you feeling proud of what you’re doin’. After all, there are also plenty of people killed when things go perfectly right. A few stiffs more or less shouldn’t become our universal yardstick of success.’

While the Chief went on, Gonzalo was enjoying a moment of insubordinate pleasure. Under his uniform he was wearing fur-lined crotchless thong underwear gifted to him by Dolly Hardon from down at the She/He-Teepee. He felt like a real commando.

But his delight was spoiled when he realized that someone among the audience was softly groaning. Moaning and groaning as if in a state of arousal. Softly... luxuriantly. The muted throaty expression of unlimited desire... How dare they show such flagrant disrespect to the Chief of War?

The regime-change op was firmed up at last and Gonzalo shipped out with his team. Unit commander Captain Noballs had looked quizzically at him after the pep talk, but LT Gonzo stared him down. He had no demerits against him and his shit had stayed frosty throughout. He was a twice-decorated vet of two approximately successful campaigns and nobody could ever prove that he had eaten anyone. Get Ahead, Four.

Flight to the deployment AO was quicker than usual and Gonzo started to think he should have paid more attention in the briefing to the operational details that speak of what it’s about rather than just the tactical details about who shoots whom. But that shit had never seemed to matter much before. It’s just a job, bro – shooting someone in Mali is pretty much the same as shooting someone in Antarctica; only the outfits and ambient temperature are different.

So after a short transit and a quick deployment to a transit zone just outside a fairly fucked-up looking city, the team deployed by night in an unmarked van to a suburban location. This time there was no mistake, no transport snafu or zonal mixup. The boys inserted quietly and snaked silently into the compound, actually a fairly nice leafy mansion with oaktrees and topiary hedges. The target, designated Codename U-Haul, was likely one of those drug barons who buys themselves a nice veneer of old-world culture. Gonzo hated him already.

The security guys were easy-peasy, fatso klutzes from a rentaguard outfit with no situational awareness. One-two-three. Then moving in to clear the first floor, silent and cavernous with deep woolen carpeting and gold fittings on marbled kitchentops. Gonzalo’s resentment of this fat cat ramped up ballistically.

Up the marbled staircase to the second floor. Here Gonzo’s furlined underwear became engorged with a sudden onrush of blood. Thick commando desire crowded into his groin and his dry caked mouth. He slurped from his Camelbak and snaked on up with the rest of the team.

The kiddies were sleeping. Piff-paff, twin suppressed taps to bodymass center and dome. Then the tac-stack ghosted in to the master bedroom. Gonzo’s chubbie became dense and restless, his head swam from lack of blood to the brain and his vision jittered like a glitched videolink.

Target U-Haul, that hated scumbag who’d been accumulating dirty cash from his oppressed people, skimming and scamming his way to the top of this nameless banana republic, well, he woke up just moments before he met his fate. He sat up suddenly and cried out into the dark: ‘Just what are you men doing here? I’m Senator Charles– ‘

Good conversational English. These cartel guys get more and more educated by the day. LT Gonzo, with team tactical command, canoed the asshole with a trio of soft-tips to the cranial pan. The other guys did the wife, then they proceeded to clear the upper floor. Gonzo grabbed pix of the target on the phone, both for G2 purposes and as something of a personal souvenir.

For once the op had gone smooth as a baby’s butt-cheek. Smooth as the regulation clean-shaven jowls on a rookie grunt from the regular schlubs. Smooth as the syntax on a Medal of Honor citation. The killteam exfilled exuberant.

So as it panned out, this great and gamechanging op went down in history as one that the SOCOM boys were able to carry out to perfection, a true feather in their cap instead of the accumulation of black eyes that had dogged operational history heretofore. The regime change was effected without friction. And so it came to pass that the regime change was duly changed — but not changed at all, as it turned out. Because the regime change was actually a regime continuation, which was fairly heady and confusing stuff.

LT Gonzo felt a little embarrassed that he hadn’t paid more attention during the operational phase of the briefing, but in the end it was all okay. The historical importance of all that shit could look after itself. He became a captain, replacing Captain Noballs, who’d finally balked at the quote-unquote ‘unconstitutionality’ of the op. Pretty fancy word for an asshole exiled to shit-burning latrine duty in Guam.

Now, at the Grand Beautiful Victory Parade, his chest throbbed with pride and his furred crotchless briefs swelled with the thrill of that fleeting recollection at his small but vital place in Operation Final Countdown. He even risked a cheeky wink when it came time for the Chief of War to present him with his gong. He could have sworn that the Chief winked back at him, but his eyes were now misting over with blisswater and he couldn’t be entirely sure.

As the medal was pinned to his tunicfront, Gonzo jittered a little, pulse-rate a touch janked up and wobbly, but then the molly kicked in to the bloodstream and he stood even straighter-backed than before, running again on a more-or-less even keel, as the Chief of War progressed on down the line to his left.

That tune from Star Wars, that joyful final march of conquest, was being belted out by a brash military band behind him. He felt like a wookie, like a great triumphant Chewie who’d achieved a final fulfillment and sported a gleaming medal while he received his princess’s kiss with great and merited pride.

His wookie heart was swelling fit to burst. Something liquid and warm rolled down freely through his moustache and beard, and onto his parched lips, stinging into the cracks where he’d gnawed the lips right through. He tasted saltwater again. Not bitter this time, somehow that salt was sweet.

At last Captain Gonzalo was able to savor those long-sought salt tears of victory. His heart swelled more and more, swelled up right beneath his ribboned chest, as if it were a detonating flashbang of joy.

NOTES

1shredded (adj) here meaning torn to ragged shreds by gunfire, not heavily muscled.

2shredded (adj) here meaning endowed with impressive musculature, not torn to shreds.

=== WEEPING THOSE SALT TEARS OF VICTORY // ENDS ===

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