Excerpts from the original book:
I rolled the man onto his back and looked him over carefully before checking him for documents. He would have been a handsome man in life. Medium-sized and tightly muscled, with a deep chest and wide shoulders, he had the perfect build for a soldier. I gazed at his dirt- and gunpowder-covered face as I closed his glazed eyes. Jimmy had finished sweeping the perimeter. After positioning his men, he came over to where I was kneeling in the dust. I held up a hand and stopped him before he could give his report. “Jimmy, take a long look and tell me if you think you've ever seen this man before,” I asked as I thumbed through the various papers I had found in the pockets of the corpse . I pulled out a Nicaraguan military ID. ―Jesus Christ, Eric. You know who that is? That's Keekee Saenz. You remember him,don't you? He was in my Special Forces class and he went to Selection with us. I thought I'd heard he went back to 3/7 Special Forces in Panama.‖ I turned the ID card over and read the name on the front: “Capitan Enrique Eduardo Saenz-Herrera.” Enrique Saenz-Herrera, staff sergeant in the United States Army Special Forces. I remembered him from Selection as a quiet, competent type. A professional. I didn't get the opportunity to know him very well, but I had enjoyed talking with him on several occasions. I remembered now—he had been cut from Selection on the Day of Disappearances. Now he was gone for good. Dead. On a godforsaken, nondescript mountaintop, in a remote and utterly worthless part of the world. And I had killed him.‖ I turned the ID card over and read the name on the front: “Capitan Enrique Eduardo Saenz-Herrera.” Enrique Saenz-Herrera, staff sergeant in the United States Army Special Forces. I remembered him from Selection as a quiet, competent type . A professional. I didn't get the opportunity to know him very well, but I had enjoyed talking with him on several occasions. I remembered now—he had been cut from Selection on the Day of Disappearances. Now he was gone for good . Dead. On a godforsaken, nondescript mountaintop, in a remote and utterly worthless part of the world. And I had killed him.‖ I turned the ID card over and read the name on the front: “Capitan Enrique Eduardo Saenz-Herrera.” Enrique Saenz-Herrera, staff sergeant in the United States Army Special Forces. I remembered him from Selection as a quiet, competent type . A professional. I didn't get the opportunity to know him very well, but I had enjoyed talking with him on several occasions. I remembered now—he had been cut from Selection on the Day of Disappearances. Now he was gone for good . Dead. On a godforsaken, nondescript mountaintop, in a remote and utterly worthless part of the world. And I had killed him.I didn't get the opportunity to know him very well, but I had enjoyed talking with him on several occasions. I remembered now—he had been cut from Selection on the Day of Disappearances. Now he was gone for good. Dead. On a godforsaken, nondescript mountaintop, in a remote and utterly worthless part of the world. And I had killed him.I didn't get the opportunity to know him very well, but I had enjoyed talking with him on several occasions. I remembered now—he had been cut from Selection on the Day of Disappearances. Now he was gone for good. Dead. On a godforsaken, nondescript mountaintop, in a remote and utterly worthless part of the world. And I had killed him.
Something about this was badly wrong, and I was beginning to feel dirty and used. Some of the nagging little oddities about this mission started to come together in my mind. Like why the CIA had pushed so hard for this operation, and why we had been denied other support. As always when dealing with those people, it was a good chance I wouldn't receive any satisfactory answers, but I was as hell going to have a serious talk about this whole mission with the CIA's chief of station when I got back to Tegucigalpa. But I couldn't stop to dwell on my thoughts just now, for there was still much work to do.
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