Featured image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay
Some days and or/ moments hear my own special version of a Pretenders tune. I can’t stop it, the thing just keeps running through my mind.
*****
My head’s up my ass and I’m fighting for air
feels good
feels fine
I’ts just the shit in my lungs
*****
As long as you are active in black OPs your training stays and nobody can really tell who you are. Once you retire, the first part of the training to slip is the ability to hide your skills. People like to say you simply get rusty at it or old age has crept in, neither statement is correct. The reason others who have been in black OPs or been near black OPs can tell is really because your training keeps kicking in and you have to keep smashing it to the back of your mind.
Movies can’t get enough of the techniques killers are trained with. The cooler they can make them look or sound, the better. Not one single skill will help you more than the mental training which does not translate to camera, so only gets a single line of dialogue in passing. It’s about putting all of the shit you can’t deal with into a little box in your mind, then slamming the lid shut and carrying the box to the curb. In short, they teach you how to be a successful sociopath.
The party line to the press always talks about the honor a soldier fights with. On rare occasions the press will run a story about what happens to a soldier that isn’t a successful sociopath when he or she has to kill a ten year old child because they have a bomb strapped to their chest, or are about to pull the pin on a WWII surplus grenade.
You always hear about people who are kicked out of the volunteer military because they fail a psych evaluation. I always wondered why the military didn’t simply route the natural born sociopaths to a special unit under CIA or some other acronym soup department’s control. There is always some God-foresaken piece of the world where dropping in a trained force of 20 with only enough food an ammo for a week and letting them do what they enjoy doing will make things better without getting noticed. If you don’t believe me, then you obviously haven’t watched news reports about all of those third world countries with multi-year civil wars and genocide atrocities. There are already a bunch of mercenaries there. It’s not like a few more would make headlines.
Then again, the psych evaluation is mostly there to weed out people they “don’t like”. When it is war time and volunteers are down, you find they start to like a lot more people. The evaluation process gets changed and people who failed it before start getting letters and phone calls to come in and take it again…or simply report for duty. The biggest “don’t like” class used to be gays. The majority of that problem comes from the top though.
Yes, there are still a few bible thumping raw recruits with the same baggage as the grey hairs, but they are getting fewer and farther between. The rank and file is routinely called the “Will and Grace” generation because they grew up watching that show or others with an openly gay leading character. They grew up listening to music from Elton John or a band called Queen. Some of them even grew up with two moms. No, the “don’t like” issue is dying out with the grey hairs at the top. The bible thumpers seem to be focussing more on becoming CEOs that go to prison and trying to replace all of the judges on the Supreme Court to change the ruling on Roe V. Wade.
I took you down this little mental side trip so you would have a faint hope of understanding of why it is easy for anyone that has been near black OPs before to spot someone who used to work in black OPs, not matter what country they are from. You see, it’s not just the bad shit, like killing children, you put into that box, it is everything you find morally repugnant or “out of character.”
The phrase “out of character” is what tends to trip most people up. Every cover you put on requires anywhere from 30 seconds to 4 hours of character building. The length of time is due in large part to however much backstop information and documentation was created. All of the traits of that character have to be filled out. You really cannot take many, if any, of your own traits.
If your birth name really was Bill Smith and you are a bible thumper who things drinking, smoking, and homosexuality are all morally repugnant, then every character you put on is going to require you to put a lot of things into that box. Some people manage to build their own little UPS pack and ship store in their mind just to keep the worry tank empty. When we talk about putting things into that box which are “out of character” we mean “out of character” for Bill Snith, not any of the other characters you have to create to do your job. The bible thumpers tend to have deep moral convictions which somehow manage to let them put on a chain smoking character that can knock back shots of whiskey with two guys that are ass raping a third guy as an “interrogation technique.” Of course, there is the occasional strike at the UPS store in their mind, then there are a lot of bodies to either clean up or explain all of a sudden.
When you finally bail on such a life, you become easy to spot for a while. Some people are easy to spot forever. They develop noticeable little tells when they encounter something which is “out of character” for them and they have to fight down the impulse to simply put it in that box. I’ve heard it called the I’m-not-wearing-a-character twitch. The other tell is that look they get of being lost. It can happen in the middle of a meeting or the middle of a crowd, there is no warning or no predictable pattern. The only way to describe it for those that haven’t been through it is to continue with that UPS pack and ship analogy. You built the store, but have no idea how to take it down or get rid of the workers…even if you go through all of the exit therapy provided by your former employer the damned thing will still be there. Periodically the works for that store stage an open revolt about having nothing to do and you have to listen to them, hence, you get that lost look while the labor dispute plays out in your mind.
Some people find a solution which may not be considered ethical, but keeps the body count down. They create a new character which has most, but not all, of their own personal traits. They assume a new identity and a line of work which is only slightly offensive to them and doesn’t require dead bodies. Sometimes the bible thumper types end up working for adult film distributors. It keeps the UPS store workers busy and doesn’t typically require the former operative to shoot anyone. It does mean they can never really let their family know what they are doing or come visit, but you cope as you have to.
The other crowd, those who try to put back on their own identity and return to “normal” life, they are easy to spot. Not only will they get the tell I spoke about, but they will go to one of two extremes when faced with the “out of character” things. Some will be quiet and silent while their mind goes through hysteria trying to figure out how to respond, others will loud, boisterous and Rambo like with responses to “out of character” things because they understand they now have the skills to actually do something about it.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the last group is a problem which has to be quickly eliminated.
[…] <Previous-Part Next-Part> […]