Danny, I'm not going to say anything about what you plan to do on Wednesday. I'm not. It's a big life, and certainly wide enough for everyone to get along. I'm not saying we'll ever even run into each other ever again. I'm not saying you'll run into a Labrador packed with C4, all smiles and wagging tail and thousands upon thousands of pounds of concealed destructive hell packed into its very body, sometime in the next 48 hours if you don't agree not to go on and say lies about Auburn university. I'm a dog. I can't even talk, let alone predict a painful and abrupt ending to your life. None of this could possibly be happening.
So I ask you to just remember this little fictional detail. Kuwait. 1991.
An American oddsmaker down on his luck and millions of dollars in debt has fled Vegas to serve a little time as the private sports gambler and consultant for a Kuwaiti sheikh with too much money and a case of diabetes so bad he can't think without an IV of liquid Kit Kat flowing into his veins. The American starts to skim a little off the top, no? Who would notice, right? So much money just lying around the place it's like the piles could cover the dead Indonesian servants the Sheikh's deranged son just left all over the place. After a while, it only seemed fair to take what was not yours, per se, but what was certainly not his, right?
So he's in trouble when, during a moment of insulin-fed clarity, the old sheikh realizes you've been stealing from the till. And it just so happens that like many gamblers, your luck hits at the right time and Saddam Hussein rolls 182 shitty old Russian tanks into Kuwait and sends the old fatling scurrying like a panicked, bearded sea cucumber rolling into exile, but not before he's about to load you up at the airport to torture you in the basement of his French chateau when--well, what do we have here? Who knew the SEALs had already secured the airport? Besides the SEALs, of course. We always know.
I'm not saying a lot of things. Again, I wasn't officially there. I don't know about things like a crying mustachioed little shadow of a man, a glorified confidence man and pickpocket on the run, sprinting away from his captors and yelling about how he was American and caught in the middle. I don't know about two Kuwaiti bodyguards who thought it was a good idea to reach in their pockets and shoot after you, but i do know that flying attack dogs don't just come out of nowhere, Danny Sheridan. Bloody pawprints don't just appear places. Someone puts them there with someone's blood, Danny. Blood that was spilled for them in someone else's name, most likely, when someone got careless and needed a shovel to get them out of a hole they'd dug for themselves without noticing the dirt piling up around their head, Danny.
So you just go on the radio and say what you like, Danny. Don't think about things that didn't happen, like the smell of a man who crapped himself from fear on a scorching tarmac somewhere on the Arabian peninsula, or the figure of a dog trotting away from two dead Kuwaiti thugs like the very notion of freedom receding away from you and into the night. Don't think about any of those things, Danny. You don't do that, and I won't think about the two bullets I took in Kuwait for a two-bit shyster not worth the fur on my dog-taint because he happened to hold the same passport as me.
Yours in freedom,
Lt. WarDogEagle
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