The soldier’s face was barely visible. He had covered his tag with a strip of black tape. But he was wearing an embroidered black star. A colonel. “Son,” he said in that assholey condescending tone adopted by assholey officers. “What we have here is called a situation. You do know what a situation is, right?”

The audio was clear, although slightly out of sync.

“Yes, sir,” the man wearing the camera snapped, his voice crisper than an officer’s dress pants. “A situation is something between a shitstorm and a snafu. Sir!” I recognized that tone almost instantly. Marty fucking Shaw. Son of a bitch, I thought. He’s been holding on to this since the night of the raid.

I remembered watching the colonel being interviewed. I didn’t remember his name but it would be easy to find. Shaw continued, “Sir, obviously nobody wants me to know what’s going on here, but if anybody is crazy enough to believe the people in that house are terrorists, they are out of their friggin’ minds. Sir!”

Jesus.

Shaw must have taken a step backward, because the body cam suddenly showed the colonel’s face—just in time to capture that don’t-fuck-with-me look that I knew so well. “Lieutenant, right?”

“Yes, sir. Sir, please, I’m telling you—”

“You are telling me nothing, Lieutenant.” The colonel took two steps closer, limiting the image to a square of uniform. “Let me tell you sumthin’, hotshot. As of right now, this area is quarantined. Locked down. Your people are going to perimeter. This isn’t any picture show and I do not want any pictures, so order your people to turn off those fancy-schmancy body cameras…” As he said that, he literally poked Shaw’s camera, but didn’t seem to realize it was still taping. I actually had to laugh. I’ve been there: Sir, I was told to order my men to turn off their body cameras, which I did. I was not instructed to turn off my own cam.

The colonel continued with that same nasty, officious Platoon attitude. “Then I want your people doing a house-to-house to shut down any surveillance cameras. Rip ’em the fuck down if you have to. No civilians within a six-block radius. I don’t give a rat’s fuck if Grandma needs oxygen, I want every swinging dick and dickess out of this area within one hour, and I do not care how you get it done. I want these shit-boxes emptied, and the only people I want to see anywhere near this house will be wearing this patch.” I assumed he indicated his camouflaged unit patch. “Do you understand?”

Shaw did not respond. Nodding, I guess.

The colonel stepped back again and eased off his aggressive tone, “We may take some casualties, so I want wagons standing by and a clear path to the highway. One final thing, unless you want to find yourself picking your toes in Poughkeepsie, I don’t want any reporters getting close enough for me to smell them.” He leaned his face closer and added, “And, son, believe me, I smell like a son of a bitch.”