I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (8 page)

Spencer nodded agreeably. That came easily now. He was squatting four hundred pounds in twenty-rep sets. Free curls, too, ten legitimate reps at fifty pounds each arm. He was clocking his run east across Bethesda, around Congressional Country Club, south to the river, then back to Walter Reed north through Little Falls Park, eleven miles, in seventy-four minutes. He could zip through twenty chin-ups and one-arm twenty push-ups. Going on for thirty-nine years old, but he was ready to go head-to-head with any Navy Seal. One kidney? No problem. He was getting faster, too. Not as fast as Captain Sam on those giraffe legs of his, but measurably ahead of where he expected to be.

“Race you,” he challenged the captain. They could sprint now without needing to tie themselves together. Captain Sam could feel the painted lines on the running track. If he missed and moved across lanes, Spencer shouted “left one” or “right two” and Captain Sam adjusted to keep himself in a center lane.

“Four laps. First to a mile.”

The captain won by thirty meters, but Spencer was still smiling.

“Three times a day, more,” Captain Sam admitted to Spencer afterward, “I just want to annihilate the world. But you, Jonathan, you’re always cool. Like, nothing ever gets a rise out of you. It’s amazing. God, I hate that about you!”

“You think too much.”

“How many people did you shoot? 131? You didn’t hate them, but you looked down a scope and blew their heads off. How do you do that?”

“It wasn’t all head shots,” he responded. “Seventy percent were center torso.”

He wouldn’t say so, but Spencer had nightmares sometimes. Other times, when he felt the rumble of helicopter rotors, he got this weird shiver that ran from his neck down to his ankles and just for a second he didn’t always know where he was. He always manned up, but it stayed inside his guts, poking.

“One time a couple years ago, in Khost, there was just one squad of us in this little outpost set up in the middle of a big open square,” Spencer told Captain Sam. “We had concrete anti-vehicle barriers set up a hundred meters out, but except for those were pretty lean, sandbags and razor-wire. We had a tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun and a Bradley on our backside with the 25mm cannon, but the chain gun on the Bradley was the main thing covering our butts. Anyhow, I remember that it was hotter than hell. I was inside this one sandbag room that was our quarters, our mess, supplies, everything, sacking out, sweating mainly, no way anybody was sleeping. All of a sudden there’s this noise, like a roar, getting louder. I don’t remember if somebody called me or I just came outside to see and there must have been thousands of people moving out of the covered market and stampeding right at us. They were packed in so tight that all they could do was just pour forward like a churning wave.

“From behind six feet of sandbags this one specialist, good guy, from Iowa I think, he had the fifty, he just didn’t know what to do. Nobody looked like they even had guns, but if he didn’t fire, there was nothing to stop them from douching all of us. Vehicle barriers, sandbags, and razor wire were never going to stop that mob. They were way inside 100 meters. There was zero time to call in help. We couldn’t even move to radio HQ. We’re talking close,” he said.

“People were screaming. I scanned through my scope and there were these flashing reflections. I kept looking there until I could see a clear picture. It was one man, long beard, sandy turban, faded black jacket. He had two swords and he was killing everything, men and women, dogs, goats, donkeys, slashing into the crowd, stabbing and driving them forward as they tried to get away. They were too packed together to avoid him; I don’t think they even knew exactly where he was.

“The lieutenant and Iowa kept looking at all those people and at one another, not knowing what to do. I sighted down and his red eyes were bugging out while he kept slicing with those swords. So I set to fire and blew his head up like a melon. He still moved forward two or three more steps, still swinging, before he dropped.”

Captain Sam couldn’t quite figure out why Spencer told him about that. Was he proud? Was he proving that something he did served a purpose?

“What happened after that?” the captain asked him.

“The crowd tore and kicked at his corpse until some men took the swords and hacked him into pieces. We got evacked out of there before dark to diffuse the situ before anybody decided to turn on us.”

“Why did he do it?”

“We heard later on that his son set out to blow up some Afghan government official. He never made it past the outer compound. Detonated his vest. The father watched the martyr video and he just lost it, started killing people, animals, everything. Went through the souk leaving hacked bodies and blood trailing behind him. I don’t know that he was thinking about the outpost or us at all.”

“And you’re OK? It doesn’t get to you?”

Spencer shrugged. “It’s what I do. What I was trained for. That time I know I saved lives.”

Captain Sam thought he knew about heroes and warriors. No soldier thinking about offing himself was ever going to wait for a rich guy to come along so he could take a billionaire out with him. It didn’t work that way, not in real life. Guys killing themselves weren’t thinking about jihad against the rich or anybody else. They were like the guys on the ward, so scared that there was nothing else out there for them that they pulled the plug just to stop being scared and useless and chugging back pills and liquor. Veterans were never going to rise up. Soldiers get orders and follow them. That’s what you do. Why would soldiers trained to obey orders suddenly start to question the social order?

“Well, you’re starting to question, Mr. Tower of Power,” Cap said. “You’re never going back to working for anybody like Miller.”

“We’re just talking, Sir. I get my Physical Evaluation Board then I’m going back into combat. Maybe not working for Miller, only doing what I’m trained to do.”

“Jesus, Jonathan. I told you. You can’t be some empty vessel and leave it to the army to fill you. Man up! The military doesn’t make you into a person. Life does! Have you ever been in love? Have you ever made love to somebody you love?”

Spencer understood the army. Understood what was expected. Exceeded expectations. These other things were a foreign language and he didn’t have the words.

“I don’t know if I could be good at that,” he finally replied.

“So you fail!” Captain Sam shouted. “Hell. Experiment! Make mistakes. Fail! You get up, dust yourself off, and you try again. That’s how we figure it out. Haven’t you ever wanted to get yourself a deep-throated Harley and just take off for the open road? Try something different?”

“The army always has a place for me. I perform.”

“You perform. They can depend on you. Tell me something. What if the army ordered you to fire on Americans?” Captain Sam challenged him. “Are you going to do it?”

“That’s stupid.”

“Really? Stupid? Add it up.”

Captain Sam rattled off statistics. Two million, three-hundred-thousand men in prisons and growing. Did Spencer know when the numbers started shooting up? Exactly when incomes stopped growing for regular people and all the increases started flowing to the rich.

“Coincidence?” Sam asked.

Police stopped carrying revolvers and moved to semi-automatics (MSJS pictured S&W 38s and 9mm Glocks). SWAT teams got started and kept growing at the exact same time prisons added more and more solitary confinement cells. Every major police department has armored vehicles, helicopter assault training, tactical weaponry, and commando squads. There were drones over U.S. cities.

“Coincidence? Captain Sam pressed.

“Jonathan, crime is going down. Pretty soon 9/11 will be a generation behind us. But those things don’t seem to matter. The government still listens to our phone calls and reads our email. You think that’s a coincidence? Really?

“This government isn’t America. Not the Democrats and not the Republicans, either. Jonathan, this was a great country once and we can be great again. We’re great when regular people thrive, when next year is better than this year and when our kids do better than we do ourselves. That’s when we believe again. It’s never going to happen with a government doing what the rich want and putting blinders on everyone else. We let them corrupt everything and turn us into a nation of greedy parasites. We’re heading toward a police state and you can’t wait to go right back to fighting bullshit wars for bullshit reasons. Wars on the other side of the planet that we can’t ever win!”

The veins stood out along his neck and across his forehead when the captain got all worked up. Spencer liked him too much to tell Captain Sam how crazy he sometimes sounded. Like he was talking about Pakistan or something, not America. Besides that, the captain didn’t know the first thing about recon, mission procedures, tactics, or anything else that goes into turning words into actions. All the planning and training and discipline in the world wouldn’t help sight-down on a billionaire who is smart enough to lay low and hire disciplined security.

“The banks brought down this economy and nobody went to prison, Jonathan. Nobody,” the captain said. “That’s fact, that’s not opinion. If we don’t start going in different direction, if we don’t let regular people have a real chance to live better lives, to educate kids, to get ahead, then it all falls apart, the whole apparatus we fought for. How many people die then, when we sit back and wait for that to happen? You know how you shot that guy with the swords? You saved lives by killing that one guy. Would you kill a hundred people to save this country?”

“Captain, it doesn’t work like that. Once people know they are targets, you might get to one or two and then the others run for deep cover. You sound a little wacky. For real.”

“So what, you wouldn’t even try to rattle them, to put up some resistance? As long as we keep thinking as individuals, they keep winning,” Captain Sam explained. “It’s the ‘you’ thing, exactly what Davies does in Group, telling us to think about our individual futures. None of it is about supporting one another. The only reason it’s Group is they won’t pay the money for one-to-one counseling! You make an Oklahoma City-size truck bomb; drive it outside their next billionaire’s club meeting. You do that and this country starts working again.” Then he went off on the Koch brothers.

Then Spencer smiled. “Captain, you and I both know we were just shooting the shit, right? Nobody is going postal.”

Captain Sam was deadly serious. “We can’t stop them in the courts. We can’t do it in Congress or in the media. So stop them with fear.”

“Jesus, Cap, how do you, of all people, talk about bombing?” Spencer disagreed. “Don’t talk about that, you hear me. Not even shooting the shit. And what’s the major supposed to do, sign up the guys for an invalid army? We’re going to hit the streets with M16s and wheelchairs?

“Tell me about your daughters,” Spencer suggested. “Do they do well in school? What sports do they play?”

Captain Sam scowled.

“Captain, you’re not going to change the world, but you can do things for those girls. But first you have to believe you can be a dad. You try to fix the big stuff because you think you can’t fix what is right in front of you.”

“Right in front of my eyes?” Captain Sam thrust the scarred, hollow voids toward Spencer’s voice.

“You know what I mean.”

“You sound like Major Davies.”

“Agoraphobia is a natural response to acute stress and anxiety, Captain. Top-down processing is consistent with belief-biased effect and chunking dissimilar data into schemas as a result of cognitive dissonance.”

“Fuck you,” Captain Sam laughed begrudgingly. “You’re smart, Jonathan. You try to hide it, but you know that, right?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

*****

“Jonathan, if you didn’t go back to Afghanistan, what would you do instead?” the captain asked.

“But I am going back. That’s what I’m built for. One of these days I’ll be at Benning, getting set to deploy. I’m not disappearing, Captain. I’ll phone you. Really. You’re not getting rid of me so easily.”

“But what if you didn’t go back?” Captain Sam pressed him. “What’s your fallback, your Plan B?”

Spencer shrugged. It was a stupid question.

“Humor me. The war won’t last forever. If you weren’t going back, what would you do?”

Spencer didn’t give it a lot of thought. “It isn’t up to me, Cap. I’ll get reassigned. Harmony Church, maybe. Maybe they’ll have me instructing.”

“Think bigger. Beyond the military. What would you do if you weren’t in the army at all? You could apply your training lots of places,” the captain told him. “You could do police work or get a job working for private security services. Or you could get a job working for a gun manufacturer.”

“Naw. I wouldn’t want to do that. I’d surprise you. I’d bet I’d go and do something completely different.”

“Jonathan, you listen to me, OK? Don’t go into the PEB on your own. They have to let you have legal representation if you ask. You hear what I’m saying? Tell them that you want help. These guys are a bunch of insurance actuaries in military uniforms; they’re there to negotiate. It won’t be cooperative; no matter what they tell you, your evaluation is adversarial.”

“I’m not trying to get a better deal, Captain. I just want to pass and be reinstated to full duty,” Spencer said.

“You’re nineteen-and-a-half years in. Six more months and they pay you for the rest of your life.”

“They spent a million dollars training me,” Spencer chided. “I’m a proven asset, Cap. It’s all good.”

*****

During the middle of a random morning he was called into Major Davies’ office, where she handed him the directions to his Pre-PEB counseling interview. Just like that. Weeks and months of waiting were over.

He floated through his Pre-PEB counseling interview like it was a joke. CMP exams are easy when you aren’t trying to prove disability, right? He waived legal representation. He wasn’t seeking medical retirement. They were going to love him… just put him right back where he came from and let him get back to doing the job he was trained for.

Nobody told him the expected dress code so he debated between a combat-ready look and full dress, then settled on the latter: full brass-button greens, ribbons and badges included, spit-polished and parade-sharp. For two hours he sat patiently in a non-descript room with two long wooden benches on either side, waiting like the others for his name to be called.

The actual PEB went even faster than he imagined. He was shown through a set of double doors into a medium-sized, plain army green hearing room where three officers in shirtsleeves sat behind an eight-foot long collapsible plastic banquet table. The American flag hung in a floor stand behind them on one side and the Army flag on the other. He could just make out 1775 showing in the hanging folds. A private in short sleeves was off to Spencer’s right side, operating a video camera set onto a tall tripod.

“State your name,” the middle officer, a lieutenant colonel, ordered. He did so. The Lt. Colonel was handed a clipboard and ran his finger down the page.

“You have been offered legal representation and you have chosen to waive having legal counsel. Is that correct?”

“Yes Sir.”

“You have declined Compensation and Pension examinations?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Your sole claim to injury is the full loss of one kidney, is that correct?”

“Yes sir.”

“Sergeant, you are to be separated forthwith with severance pay and injury compensation totaling $32,000. On behalf of a grateful nation, I want to thank you for your service.”

Spencer stared at the three officers while remaining at full attention. They didn’t understand. This was a snafu. He wasn’t trying to get out. “Sir? Begging the colonel’s pardon, but I’m not trying to get out. Sir, I’m Army, thick and thin, tried and true. I’m not looking to leave. I’m ready to deploy in an hour.”