Captain of the MIT football team. I didn't know MIT had a football team.
Former Ranger company commander.
Passed Delta Qual and training. Went "over the wall."
Rotated out as LTC for lack of slots. Longest running field grade officer in Delta history. No notations on that but turned out later he'd been a "squadron commander," Delta's version of a battalion.
Went to Corp G-3 for operations.
He's already on the colonel's list but the Corps commander has a problem. A battalion so fucked up that you can't even call it mutinous. They're just playing whatever rules they want to play because their commander's having a nervous breakdown and everybody has been watching it in slow time. Know you haven't been here long but you seem like the kind of guy could get this battalion going again. Oh, and one of the companies is the guys over in Iran. What do you say? Help me out, here.
Guy's evals didn't walk on water. He walked on the fucking clouds and angels sang around him. His superiors seemed to be writing that they really didn't deserve to be evaluating the messiah.
Nobody was that good.
He was that good.
Was our luck turning?
He couldn't effect diddly except maybe air support. We were facing an unknown but large enemy force ahead and they had anti-tank weapons that were state of the fucking art.
Our luck was turning.
Chapter Thirteen
The Last Centurions
"Welcome to Skynews!
"This evening we have a special report from a team of intrepid reporters embedded with the American and Nepalese unit cut off in the middle east. As many of you know, this unit is attempting to replicate the famous march of the Ten Thousand of storied history. Instead of a dry report, we will be bringing you, weekly, a documentary intended to both entertain and educate. We bring you, now, The Last Centurions."
Call it reality TV. Call it counterpropaganda. Call it, as many did, propaganda.
The Last Centurions sort of defies description. Sure, I was the real producer and maybe I shouldn't talk about my show. But I'm not the one to say that, I think it was first said by Murdoch at a stockholder's meeting where people were starting to smile for the first time in a year. And it was repeated on news shows, talk-shows and every other medium of communications over the years.
We didn't send them video and then let them edit to choice. We sent them a complete show and told them to air it as is or else. As time went on, we got support from Skynet. And Fox and even the Beeb at one point. But at first, it was all a few overworked people in a bouncing commo trailer, often under fire.
It always started the same. A shot of some sort of horror that had perhaps become banal in 2019. A dead man Arab in what looked like a looted shop. A man blown apart by heavy machine-gun fire with no apparent weapon. A woman battered to death. A voice-over giving the impression that some evil had occurred, probably because of the evil Americans.
Then it would back up in time.
Every show was different, but they all had the same theme, the opening lines in that great voice of Graham's:
"This is a picture. All it tells you is what you see. If you don't know the context you know nothing."
Sure, it was exciting. Violence sells, as does pathos and sex. Last Centurions had it all. It was entertaining as hell. Hell, I lived through it, loved it, hated it, sweated blood. And I still watch some of the segments. Especially the one where Samad is sliding down the hill completely out of control. I laugh my ass off at that every time even though at the time it looked like a tragedy in the making.
And in the middle of it, we'd slip in context. History. Geography. Ethnology. History of propaganda. How news is made and manipulated. Military affairs. Diplomacy. How the two often interact badly.
Putting it together was a nightmare. Not my nightmare, generally, but a nightmare. Oh, I'd input on the basic script and some suggestions on the video we'd gotten. Also some stuff on background.
The scripts were usually, but not always, written by a pimply faced private in Mortars. The kid had . . . oh, a flare for storytelling and he was pretty knowledgeable for being all of nineteen. We'd find a particularly horrible shot and he'd back it up.
We were attempting to, and sort of did, undo decades of propaganda. We'd show the picture at the beginning then do a standard voice-over for the scene. That was usually done by a female announcer at Skynet.
"Stones." That's the one with the picture of the young woman who's obviously been beaten to death.
"American forces in the vicinity of the Iraqi town of Al-Kami were accused today of the rape and murder of Shayida al-Farut, daughter of a local tribal leader. According to local sources (young guy screaming and shaking his fist at the camera) she was seen in the company of American soldiers shortly before her death." Cut.
Back up.
Where in the hell is Al-Kami? Why were American forces there? Who was the guy? HOW DID SHE DIE?
(Go see the episode. For those of you who've never watched it, remember that thing about "honor rapes"? We tried to stop it, she chose to go back. For the honor of her family. That's it in a fucked up nutshell.)
The last shot would always be what happened to create the shot that led in. In that case, a beautiful young woman, dead and battered to a pulp on the ground. Back up and you see the heavy stones scattered around her. Back up further you see the men who had done it, in some cases members of her own family, walking away.
"We are . . . The Last Centurions."
In a way, this whole . . . huge fucking time-waster I've been writing is a written version of The Last Centurions.
It was also a living record of our time of suckage.
It spawned a whole fucking industry. Everybody tried to copy us. "Realer reality TV" whatever that means. But a story like the Ten Thousand, or The Last Centurions, is hard to beat. That's why it's been so popular over the centuries in the first place.
And everybody tried to figure out what the picture meant.
Understand, we'd send Skynews the picture and the "false" voice-over as soon as we had the script. And they'd tend to play it over and over. There wasn't much else new in programming at the time. After the first few, it got picked up by Fox News then Fox Network then a couple of minor networks that were holding on and finally it was even on ABC.
And it became, like, the standard water-cooler (actually, food line at the time) conversation.
"I think he was a terrorist . . ."
"I think . . ." "I think . . ."
Every week it was a mystery how we were going to fool people. What the "real" story was.
Oh, there was plenty of human interest. We had interviews and clips of just about everyone in the unit pretty quick and kept them up. There was a hard-hearted reason for that. When it involved the death of one of the troops, having file footage helped.
We could never go back and reshoot. The takes that we had were everything there was. Going back was rarely an option.