Me and Johnny are great friends. We do everything together – drink beer, fish, chase women. Hell, we’ve even recycled each other’s old girlfriends, without even putting a hitch in our friendship. It seemed natural when we joined the Army together. We weren’t exactly high school standouts, and we didn’t score too high on the ASVAB, so we went into the infantry together. We did real well during that first training and were PT studs in our regular units for the first year. Then we got the chance to go to Sniper School, which we jumped at.

It was in Khost, near the Shembowat Valley, when Johnny and I started taking headshots. Up until then, we had been center-mass disciples. That’s what we had learned in Sniper School, and that’s what we had applied down range. In theory, center-mass was a sound strategy, especially when you are firing a .50 caliber round. A round that big will fell a man, or anything the size of a bear or smaller, if it makes contact with his chest or stomach. Gone will be the liver, heart, lungs, intestines, or probably a majority of the mix.

But me and Johnny, who worked as my spotter, were getting a bit bored by the time we rotated back through Khost. That was the summer of 2009 and, with the big troop surge on the way, we were busy beavers. We were killing two or three hajis a week, always center-mass. The thing of it was that we never got to see much, even through the scope. Sure, you would get a little of the pink mist rising, but the bodies we put down essentially stayed together. Laid there like a big lump of boring nothing. The thrill of the kill was gone, as it were, and it felt like we were taking pot shots at paper targets back home. It feels satisfying to hit those paper targets, but there’s no thrill to it.

So we felt we were back in business after business started picking up that summer. My first headshot was a tribal elder, about 50 years old. Intel had it that he wasn’t that bad of a guy in his own way, but it’s just that he kept feeding information to the Taliban. Poor sucker, he was probably being threatened into doing it, but that was just speculation and, even if it were true, it didn’t change the fact that somebody, somewhere, was giving up the location of troop routes and movements. For the entire summer of 2008, there were only thirteen engagements with Taliban forces in that area. For the first month of the summer of the following year, there were already twenty. Like I said, business was booming. Somebody had to pay for that.

We had a picture of this tribal elder and good intel on him. We knew he always went to a certain rock outcrop for tea and evening prayers at 5:30. To tell you the truth, with that kind of high profile, it was a bit surprising that someone hadn’t killed him earlier. Of course, he probably didn’t think in ways like that, changing up his routine. He wasn’t a soldier. The war just kind of happened around him. But when me and Johnny finally watched him saunter into view that early evening, the war finally happened to him.

When his head exploded I was reminded of the comedian Gallagher smashing one of those watermelons with a sledgehammer. It splattered just like the show, although not in slow motion. Next to that, the most interesting thing was that he fell to his knees and then forward onto the rocks. I figured the momentum would knock him back, like he was absorbing a heavyweight punch, but the round was so fast that the physics must have worked differently. Even though his head was gone, I though it looked like he was giving up. First to the knees and then to the ground, like someone who finally, after a long foot chase, gives up on an episode of COPS.

It felt damn good! Johnny gave me a whoop and then we high-fived (quietly, so as not to give away our position). The thrill was back, I can tell you that much. Sniper work looks real cool from the outside, but to be honest, it’s mostly waiting in the hot sun in a ghillie suit all day. You can’t talk much and you have to roll over and piss silently into the ground, so the big payoff is the Shot. You better make that Shot because it took your whole day to get it and, it better be fun or what was the point of going through it all? That’s what me and Johnny always say.

We went on a real tear from that shoot on. Pieces of heads and bits of brains did fly upon the valley floor and against the sides of mountains. We weren’t really authorized to do those head shots, but there wasn’t a lot of oversight. As long as the target was down, we got another kill and we got to go out again. We got creative with it. We shot the targets while they were walking, kneeling, taking a nap or eating, just to see what would happen. Once we waited for an Afghan National Army turncoat to line up directly in front of a new recruit and then took off both their heads with a single shot. That was one for the books.

Those were interesting times for us, to be sure. But things really started dragging along after a couple of months. There are only so many ways you can take a headshot, you realize after a time, and it settled into that feeling of the paper targets back home again. That’s when Johnny came up with a great idea.

“Say, Stevie,” he said to me in the chow hall one day. We always sat by ourselves so that our conversations remained private. “I’m getting a little tired of the same old same old.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“What do you say we start collecting some ears?”

“What do you mean collecting ears?” I asked him.

“What do you say that we go on down there after we take down our target and pick up some ears, something to remember the target by?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It seemed to me like Johnny was turning a dangerous corner, a point of no return. “There are rules against stuff like that. We could get in trouble.”

“Oh, we don’t got to show nobody. Be just for us,” he said. The man had a point.

The next mission we had was two days later. Some Taliban lieutenant was getting cute on a cell phone, saying way too much on an unsecured line, and we had intel out the ying yang on him. He never even turned the damn thing off, just switched out batteries that he kept in his PJs. From his conversations we got a good jump on a location he was due at and we were waiting when he got there.

His driver and him came in a Jeep and met with two other hajis. We waited until the meeting broke up to take him, less action that way. When the people they were meeting with had left, they stood around and fired up a joint. (Halos often slip even with members of the Taliban.) I popped his head off and lay cool to see what his buddy would do.

When the first loud boom of a rifle is heard, no one is ready for it. They never know where it comes from. You would have to know it was coming beforehand to even take a rough estimate of point of origin. So I wanted to see what his driver would do. Freaked out is what he did. He had some piss ant AK that he fired wildly in all directions until it went click. Then he reached into his vest for a new mag and that’s when I dropped him. I had to plug him center mass because we weren’t set up for him.

We waited an hour and, after we saw that no one was coming for them, we made our way down the valley. Our original target’s ears were easy to get because we had blown his head apart. One of them was just lying there on the ground, all by itself. His other ear was still attached to some skin but that was easily removed. The driver was a different story. His ears were still on his head, of course, and so that took some sawing.

Still, we had two pairs, one for each of us, and we were happy with that. After we got back to the FOB we treated them when no one was around, attached them to an old dog tag chain, and carried them around in our cargo pockets. Sometimes we would lay them next to us when we got settled in, just for good luck.

The thing about ears it that they’re like potato chips and tattoos – no one can stop at one. Soon enough we were popping two or three headshots a week, me and Johnny, and then going down for our just desserts. It got so that our cargo pockets were bulging with ears, but we never wanted to throw any of them away.

“Sergeant, what’s in your pocket?” a light colonel asked me once as I was coming back through the wire. “It stinks and it’s red.”

“Oh, that’s nothing, sir,” I told him. “We were doing some mass casualty training the other day and I forgot to take a tourniquet out of there that had some fake blood on it. Figured I could use it when I went out still.”

“Damn it, soldier. Police yourself. Men are looking up to you, for Chrissake,” he said.

I told him Yes, Sir and that was the end of it.

After we had filled up two big cargo pockets with those ears, me and Johnny started getting the bug again. Headshots and ears can only keep a man going for so long. But two big changes were on their way. The first was that the summer months of fighting were running out. The Taliban really slows things down in the winter because it’s just too cold for fighting. This meant, of course, that there would be less fighting. The second bit of news was that we were moving to FOB Zero in Paktika Province. Although this was technically a valley too, it had a lot more flat land for us.

“I’m getting bored with the same old stuff,” Johnny told me on our first night there. “I mean, the headshots were fun at first, and the ears were a rush for a while, until we had to get rid of them.”

“You’re right,” I said, as I ran some pipe cleaner down the barrel of our rifle. “But I think we came to the end of the line. We kind of maxed it out on fun.”

“Actually, I got something new in mind,” Johnny said with a smirk.

After three days of waiting, we got our first mission at our new duty station. There was a tribal elder about thirty miles from post that conveniently disappeared every time an IED happened to tear apart a HUMVEE or an MWRAP, and intel was convinced he was behind it somehow. We didn’t much care of the details, we were just happy to be out shooting people again. Plus, we would have a chance to put Johnny’s new idea to the test.

It was a difficult shoot because of the flat land. We had to stake it out the night before and sleep there in shifts. First to make sure nobody stumbled on our position and second to make sure the other one didn’t snore in his sleep. That was always a problem, the snoring. It’s something you had to look out for.

At just past dawn our target haji came out of his tent to take a dump. He lifted up his PJs, squatted down, and did his business. As he was bringing his left hand up to wipe (no paper, of course), I shot him right through his chest. I would have preferred the head shot not a week ago, and we were more than close enough to chance it this time, but it would have ruined the plan.

After ninety minutes of waiting, in which no one came, we high crawled to the body. The exit wound had opened up the right side of the guy’s body, so it was easy to cut the intestines out and divide them up between us.

“These are gonna make some fine belts,” Johnny said, and I had to agree.