Last two things I want to say about this, and then I’m closing this report. I’m going to seal it and make sure that it gets buried someplace that sane people won’t ever look. I’m sure as fuck never going to look at it again.
We buried Staff Sergeant Albert “Cheech Wizard” Sandoval, Staff Sergeant William “Bear” Pulaski, and Gunnery Sergeant Treyvon “Jazzman” Walker back home in Arlington National Cemetery. Mr. Church fixed it so that they were given official military status again and it was noted that they’d died honorably in combat. All of the proper awards and flags were given to their families. Before they were buried, a team of forensics experts and pathologists from Mount Sinai did full autopsies on them. They confirmed without any doubt—based on the degree of tissue decomposition and other factors—that all three men had been dead at least thirteen days.
The autopsy was done three days after Echo Team brought their bodies home. That means that they had to have died during that ambush in the old town.
Explain that to me in a way that doesn’t make me scream at night. Because that’s what I do now. Maybe I will for a long time. I’m still drinking more than I should. Rudy’s on me about that, but he knows what really happened, so he doesn’t push too hard.
So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is that we’ve started getting reports of hits on certain Taliban teams in the region around Tekleh. Not all of them, not most. The hits aren’t interfering with those assholes fighting us and the Afghan regulars, and it sure as shit hasn’t done much to slow down the opium caravans. But since that day in the hills near Haykal, every attempt by Taliban forces to occupy or desecrate the old shrines hidden in the mountains has been met with armed resistance.
The stories are always exaggerated, of course. The Taliban blame it on drones, on CIA kill squads, on U.S. surges. And, who knows, maybe that accounts for some of it.
Call it 1 percent, overall.
I’ve been to three of those sites, and I’ve seen photo documentation of eight others. The Taliban at those sites haven’t just been shot—they’ve been torn apart. Even if you put the pieces together, it doesn’t add up to whole bodies.
I’ve walked those three scenes. You can read a firefight by shell casings and footprints.
In all of them there was only one set of footprints going in, and one coming out.
Just one.
American military combat boots.
I’m a reasonable guy, a rational man, so I guess there are a lot of very reasonable and very rational explanations for all that.
But, go ahead . . . name one.