I don't know how long this will stay up for.

Three letter agency spooks are usually pretty good at finding these sorts of things

and shutting them down before it can spread too far.

But hopefully, I've left out just enough trigger words to keep their automatic software

from picking this up immediately, but that probably won't be enough in the end. They'll find

this and me, and that'll be the end of that.

You should also know that I've changed the names of everyone involved here as well as

some other details for the sake of security and privacy at least for as long as I still have it.

Some of these guys had family and I don't want any of them

stumbling across this.

It's always difficult to decide where to begin this story.

No matter how many times I've written this draft without hitting submit,

but I suppose that everything really kicked off in early 2015

when my unit was deployed to Afghanistan.

We'd been rotating in and out of country for going on three years by that point.

Despite what the Torgenheads in DC said about drawdowns and sending troops home, there were more active operations in that part of the world than most people would imagine.

They'd just gone under the radar.

More clandestine activity, less open warfare than before, secret squirrel stuff, as our CEO liked to put it.

I won't say exactly who we were.

Comes with the nature of our job, you know.

But to keep things broad, our unit fell under the purview of the United States Joint Special

Operations Command, or JCOC.

...