Never Mind, We'll Do It Ourselves by Bierbauer Alec

Author:Bierbauer Alec
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510720923
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2020-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

WELCOME TO TACO BELL

June 2001

“Hoh-lee shit.”

A couple of the guys who climbed out of the Suburban echoed my response; others just whistled. I had asked for Tarnak Farm. But looking at the fortress of mud before me, I felt like I’d been given the Alamo.

That impression grew as I walked inside, noting two-foot-thick walls that could likely hold off a battering ram. Overhead, the ceiling was crisscrossed with twelve-by-twelve beams set on what seemed like twelve-inch centers. The thought of punching through this mud vault seemed a bridge too far; as I looked, I began to wonder if our twenty-pound warhead would even dent it. I could just imagine the tail of a Hellfire sticking out of the roof like a golf flag.

Spoon looked at me and chuckled. “Chyau go a little heavy on the mud?”

I shook my head, unsure what to say. My gut told me it was likely less a matter of Chyau overengineering than it was the NIMA guys having to guesstimate the wall depth from photos of Tarnak Farm. But whatever the cause, it was the only mud hut in town.

Someone along the way came up with a fanciful cover story for the existence of the oddly placed building, going so far as to hang a colorful sign that read Hellfire Tacos on the side of the alleged eatery. Almost instantly it collapsed into Taco Bell, and the name stuck.

Plywood silhouettes, “witness panels” in bomb parlance, were scattered around the scene to capture the effects of blast and frag. In a good case, a missile shot would leave them perforated with holes. In a great case we’d find nothing but splinters. The concept was familiar to anybody who has watched an episode of MythBusters. The patterns of effect would be carefully measured and mapped in three dimensions. That data would be back into the Black Widow’s sophisticated modeling simulations.

Even though all this work was deadly serious, suggesting that a bunch of Type-A personalities loose in the desert with a stack of missiles will produce consistently reverent behavior would be a lie. On MythBusters, the two mad scientists routinely added ballistic-gel mannequins or pig carcasses fitted with high tech sensors. We couldn’t afford that, so we placed watermelons atop our wooden silhouettes, the shape, size, and gooey red centers an arguably excellent stand-in for a human head. In the spirit of one-upmanship, somebody ran off a stack of life-sized photocopies of a human face and dutifully taped one to each melon. Any resemblance to Snake Clark, or anyone else, was purely coincidental.

We based the distribution of stand-ins, both in and around the building, on the footage from Mission 8. One specific target stood in for the Man in White. In addition to the humans-in-the-open we parked a number of thin-skin vehicles around the building to get an understanding of how well they would survive. All that remained was to shoot the damn thing.

We launched from ten thousand AGL, a height at which we had hit and surpassed over a week ago.

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