Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:38:19 -0700 (MST)
From: stories@mudcub.com
Subject: SHIT Squad (Part 2)

The author can be reached at stories@mudcub.com
--------------

SHIT Squad (Part 2)
by Mudcub

We were the first class of the SHIT Squad. That was an acronym for
"Special Hazardous Investigation Team." It was our job to root around the
cesspools and latrines of the enemy strongholds in Kandahar, looking for
weapons and illegal goods.

The terrorists had started to store the parts for Improvised Explosive
Devices in plastic bags buried deep beneath their shit pits. They thought
no US solider would look for them there. They were wrong.

We were the ugliest, stinkiest nuch of short fuckers you'd ever see. Every
man was built like a sparkplug... nobody was over 5 foot 6. We needed to
be small and wiry to crawl through the tunnels underneath the city. And we
had to have stomachs of iron not to puke every time we crawled down a
shithole to see what was up. It took the bravery of a bomb squad unit, the
toughness of a toe-to-toe unarmed fighter, and the cunning of an animal.

We flew our own transport plane, probably because nobody could stand being
in a small contained space with us. Our uniforms were completely brown...
covered in mildew and mud from head to toe. After the first couple of
weeks, most of the guys just pissed and shit in their own pants. Why take
time to drop trou in a combat zone? We wore filthy jockstraps which soaked
up the piss in front. And And shit fell down your pants legs anyway... or
smeared on your ass when you sat down. So what was the problem?

When we landed in Kandahar, the terrorists didn't know what hit them. They
had counted on their strategy of storing explosives and ammo in their
latrines. So, they didn't have a backup plan. In the first week of the
mission, we collected almost a thousand weapons. Fifty-two bad guys had
been killed. And we didn't lose a single man to injury or accident.

But what I didn't count on was the pure surprise of our appearance to the
Afghanis. As I said, they are a very religious people. They didn't expect
to see US soldiers covered in shit, growing beards and mustasches caked
with filth. When we smashed through a latrine wall, sending thousand yer
old bricks flying before a sea of human shit, we must have looked like
demons sent from hell. We certainly smelled like it.

But the bad guys were surrendering even before they could smell us. As
word traveled from Kandahar to Kabul and Herat, people were telling us
about weapons stashes.. hoping that we wouldn't pay them a visit in
person. Other officers had no idea how we did it. They certainly gave us a
wide berth... when we walked through the Forward Operating Base, fellow
soldiers would steer clear, holding their noses as we came by.

We ate alone, slept alone, and single-handedly solved the contraband
problem all by ourselves. Hoo-rah!

I didn't know how famous our unit had gotten, until I had just gotten back
to base after a mission of smashing up some false walls built on the
inside of a drainage ditch north of town. A captain came up to me and
said, "Follow me... we need you."

I looked down at my filthy uniform. "Um," I said, "Lemme get a poncho or
something." I mean, I was literally DRIPPING shit all over the floor.

"No," said the captain, "they want you exactly as you are right now."

I didn't know what to think, but I followed the captain through the base,
and into a building I had never been in before. There were two guards
inside the door, and then an airlock, and another set of guards. I had
never seen so much security just to get into a building.

One of the guard held his shirtsleeve over his mouth, choking on the fumes
coming off me. "Is this the guy?" the guard asked.

My escored nodded, "Yeah," and the second door opened up.

The captain turned to me and said, "You go on inside. Last door on the
right. I can't follow you in there."

Stranger and stranger. I started down the hallway, and was amazed at what
I saw.

The place was immacualtely white. So many florescent lights that it hurt
my eyes. I longed to be underground within the safety of the tunnel. From
down the corridor, I heard screaming... someone in absolute panic, yelling
at the top of their lungs. I couldn't make out the words, but I think it
was Pashto, one of the languages of Afghanistan. I was nervous when I
found the last door on the right and knocked.

The screaming stopped instantly, but it took a few minutes for the door to
open. I was almost thinking it was a mistake and I should turn back. Then
all of a sudden, the door opened up, and a face appeared before me.

"Just stand in the corner, and dont' say anything," the guy said. He was
wearing dark sunglasses, but otherwise was dressed in civilian clothing. I
saw blood spattered all over his grey t-shirt, and wondered what was going
on.

When I stepped into the room, it had the same blinding white lights of the
corridor outside. But the difference was there was red blood everywhere,
the same as as spattered all over the guy who answered the door. There
were two guys in the room both covered in drops of blood: identical grey
t-shirts, identical sunglasses, BDU pants, and boots.

And then I saw the victim.

He was tied to a chair. All the blood in the room must have come from him,
since his face was covered in gore. He was naked and tied to a wooden
chair. At first, I thought he was unconscious, since he didn't move at
all, but sat slumped over. Only the ropes tying his hands behind him, and
binding his torso and legs to the chair kept him upright.

I stood in the corner amd waited. Nobody in the room said anything. One
full minutes, and then two. And then all of a sudden, the poor guy in the
chair lifted his head up, sniffed the air once, and looked right at me
with the one eye that wasn't puffy and swollen shut

All hell broke out. The guy was yelling in that strange language again,
and one of the sunglass guys was yelling right back at him. And the
tortured man was TERRIFIED. Of me. The look on his face when he caught my
was the emotion of complete fear.

I figured it out. I was there to scare the guy. My looks - completely
covered in shit and mud... long unwashed beard and hair. I was being used
as a bogeyman. When the stink of my body and clothes filled the room, the
tortured guy came to life. If he wasn't tied up, I swear he would have
thrown himself across the room and into the corner to get away from me..

The second sunglasses guy, the one that greeted me at the door, motioned
for me to come closer. I did it, and every slow step I took towards the
cringing figure before me raised the temperature in the room up a notch. I
played along, and soon towered over the pitiful creature in the chair, my
face and dripping uniform just inches from the babbling, crying man.

"Ok," said the bigger of the two sunglass twins. He motioned for me to go
back to standing against the wall. Meanwhile the smaller guy left the room
for a minute. I guess he must have gone into one of the other rooms along
the corridor, because when he cam back, he was carrying an old beat-up
bucket. There was a dirty towl covering the bucket, and I saw a bunch of
rubber tubing in the torturer's other hand.

With a flourish, the small guy whipped off the towel and showed the victim
what was in the bucket. Even without seeing the contents, I could smell
it. The bucket was full of shit Maybe human, maybe animal, but it
definitely had been fermenting for some time. I realized that the rubber
tubing was connected to a large funnel... an odd one that had leather
straps all over it.

The first guy set down the fetid bucket, while the other one started
buckling the plastic funnel into the victim's mouth. The poor terrorist
guy was trying to scream, trying to reason up until the last second the
funnel was buckled on. Then his voice turned into a pathetic high-pitched
whine.

The small sunglass guy turned to me. "We're gonna get the information out
of him one way or another." The bigger guy was fixing the ropes on the
chair, until the victim's head was pulled back severely, bent over the
back of the chair with a rope pulled down to the ground.

"You may not want to see this," the second guy said, balancing the full
bucket with one hand, a steadying the funnel with the other. With one last
look, I saw the eyes of the bound victim looking at me, his head and
throat violently forced open, the funnel leads straight into his guts, and
there was nothing he could do against the ropes holding him fast against
the wooden chair.

As I turned away to go out the door, the bucket tipped forward, and a
stinking mass of semi-solid waste poured into the funnel. The victim's
screaming turned into a GLUB-GLUB-GLUB sound of wet choking, and I hoped
the bastard passed out before the full contents of the bucket were
emptied.

But as I walked down the bright corridor out the building, I had a feeling
that other rooms held more buckets, and those more buckets held things
that I didn't want to think about. I could wait to get underground again.