From the motel’s security room, Robert guided us to our target: “Hot water,” he signaled. “Objects one.” This meant chief voice of the Republican Party was dodging drafts in the indoor hot tub. We all acknowledged and proceeded. Because capturing the demagogue was the most dangerous part of our plan, it was the most carefully rehearsed; we had covered seven different scenarios, training to the Colonel’s exacting standards.
The extraction went like clockwork. Sam, Don, and I carried out the kidnapping in less than two minutes. Rush Limbaugh objected to our masked, armed entry, but was immediately subdued with the help of a taser. We gagged, hooded, and handcuffed the fat bastard before levering him into a wheelbarrow with scrap two-by-fours.
Keying my mike, I whispered the word “secured.”
“Roger. Tango,” Robert replied, naming our exit route. We left the scene while Robert pointed the critical camera in another direction. Our threats of immediate execution kept Rush Limbaugh silent until he heard the van, specially modified for paraplegic drivers, come to a halt almost on top of him. With a supreme effort, we dumped the demagogue into the van and climbed in after him, abandoning the wheelbarrow.
The Colonel’s op-order was extremely detailed, right down to the unwritten insults: Rush Limbaugh is so fucking fat, we had to use a wheelbarrow.
Underway, the three of us in back took turns kicking Rush Limbaugh in his stomach with our combat-booted feet (Top using only his solid prosthetic foot). Rush Limbaugh made a terrified scream through the gag. He tried to curl into a fetal position, but the gelatinous mass of fat on his stomach forestalled him. Drawing my Tanto knife, I cut away at his swimming trunks and ripped them from his naked body, causing him to scream again. His genitals looked pathetically small under his putrescent flab. Sam and I each took one leg, straining against all his strength, for he knew exactly what we intended, and shrieked at the imminent damage to his manhood. With a coordinated yanking, Sam and I pulled his legs apart like a wishbone so that Top could steady himself against the ceiling and give Rush Limbaugh a powerful kick in the testicles.
Limbaugh’s scream retreated into his chest. He coughed, strained for air, and snapped into the fetal position again. We grabbed his legs and pressed his feet flat on the floor of the van so Top could step on the toes with his artificial foot, slowly increasing the pressure until Rush Limbaugh’s sobbing was a plea. Then we applied Chloroform to the whimpering sack of excrement before us and settled in for a good, long drive.
Driving far out of our way was an essential part of Operation Punchface. Our first destination was no more than a forty-five minute drive from the hotel, but we didn’t want Rush to sense this; we wanted him disoriented in time and location to encourage feelings of hopelessness.
First was a scheduled stop at a highway gas station. Sam had arranged for the automatic car wash to be left on after the store was closed. The Colonel supplied a roll of quarters; five minutes later, the water-based paint was gone, and whereas a sky-blue van had kidnapped Rush Limbaugh, we were now in a dark green van.
Less than one minute with a cordless drill, and the van had its original license-plate back on. The Colonel was one hell of a planner.
We turned back onto the highway and made for the interstate. Altogether, we spent six hours on the move. At one point, we revived Rush Limbaugh with kicks to the stomach so he could hear the section of highway passing under us. He soiled himself on the blue plastic tarp as we snapped on rubber gloves to insert a soporific suppository. He remained unconscious all the way to the prison, reviving only when we force-marched him into the building and deloused him.
Finally, we applied Chloroform and laid him on the mat in his new home, a small cinderblock cell. We’d set up a heater and humidifier to turn the basement into a sweltering, Central American summer. He woke up an hour later, gasping and wiping sweat from his gelatinous folds. We recorded him crawling across the dirty concrete floor. He retched into a disgusting, lidless toilet. After a few dry heaves, he wept into his fat hand for a moment, collected himself, and roared his desire to do us harm.
It was time to begin.
We opened the metal door with a slamming insistence. Sam and I had spent an entire afternoon on the installation, making sure it had precisely the right kind of booming clank when open or shut. The Colonel gave orders through a megaphone, mixing choice foreign phrases into his invective: “Ya’llah! Sieze the fatass! Vamos! Drag his worthless fat ass out here!”
All carefully rehearsed. All specially chosen. Operation Punchface had consumed us all, most especially the Colonel, in the month since we’d learned where the great gasbag would next be speaking.
Robert sicced the German shepherd on Rush Limbaugh, giving it just enough lead to chase the cowering talk radio king to the back corner of the cell. Sam and I stepped in as soon as Robert called the dog to heel.
Rush Limbaugh blubbered, his face contorted in fear as we approached. We were masked and bore cattle-prods at port-arms, like rifles. “Oh, no,” he moaned, turning. He scratched at the cinderblocks in his fear, trying to escape an eight-by-six foot cell.
We shocked him. He collapsed. We shocked the supine sophist again before dragging him out into the hall.
The Colonel cursed Rush Limbaugh for a whoreson in Arabic. “You will learn to respect authority, ya ibn sharmouta.” He switched to a bit of Dutch: “When we say goede tag, you will greet us with your backside and your hands on the wall!”
After applying hood and handcuffs, we forced Rush Limbaugh to walk through a plywood maze. It was very important to disorient him this way. The demagogue gasped for air, fighting to suck oxygen through the burlap. Finally, we reached the torture chamber and pulled the hood off so he could take in the tableau we had prepared.
Rush Limbaugh blinked at the light of a single naked bulb.
The Colonel sat in a lounge chair with torn fabric. A bucket sat by the end of a six-foot long wooden ramp reinforced with two-by-fours.
“Waterboarding?!” Rush Limbaugh erupted. Still maintaining a veneer of resistance, he made the word sound as if he had just gotten the joke, and was not amused.
“Live your rhetoric, fatass.” The Colonel was the only one of us who spoke to Rush Limbaugh. The rest of us had taped out mouths shut to avoid thoughtless violations of this rule. It was critical that the Colonel’s voice be the only one Limbaugh could hear during our enhanced interrogations.
Rush Limbaugh protested his poor health as we strapped him down.
“Do you fear for your constitution?” The Colonel asked him. “This is not the draft board, you sniveling turd. You kelb. We won’t excuse you from our service because of hemorrhoids.”
“Who are you people?” Rush Limbaugh demanded as we reinforced his bonds with duct tape – which we would later rip from his flesh.
“We are a tax-raising, sushi-munching, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body piercing, Hollywood loving left wing freak show,” the Colonel said. He never raised his voice a decibel, delivering his lines in a cool, smooth tone – quite eerie, I have to admit; even I felt a shudder to hear him. “We are left-coast latté-sipping moonbats. We pal around with terrorist appeasers and plot to install socialism in America and force everyone into gay marriage.”
“Democrats,” Rush Limbaugh spat. He wiggled his head, trying to refuse the blindfold. “Did Nancy Pelosi put you up to this? I always knew that bitch woul…”
I punched him in the face. Catharsis became more than a word: the sound and effect were so satisfying that I punched him again, and then again, each blow more satisfying than the last, with greater precision and strength, so that for a moment I wanted to keep punching Rush Limbaugh in the face until he was destroyed.
“Enough,” the Colonel said, assuming a voice of authority. He cursed in Japanese.
A tense moment followed. It was not the first in our group’s history. I should explain that his rank was just an ironic title, a moniker earned in a poker game. Having humorously declared the establishment of his own militia group with the sole purpose of becoming its ranking officer, he demonstrated his authority: ‘You boys can call me “Colonel,”’ he said, handing an empty beer bottle to Top. ‘Top,’ he commanded, ‘get the Colonel another beer.’
‘Top’ is an affectionate nickname for First Sergeants. Prior to his loss of limb, Top had been exactly that. Now he took the empty. ‘Sure, Colonel. Would his colonel-ness like his diaper changed as well?’
For one dangerous instant, the entire room stopped breathing. Top had directly challenged the manhood of a soldier missing a key half-inch of spinal cord, condemned to a lifetime of sexless incontinence.
But the Colonel spun his wheelchair around to point at me, retorting: ‘No thanks, Top. That’s the Major’s job.’
The joke brought the house down – and formed our little band of broken brothers in one instant.
For myself, I had, in fact, been a major once, and the highest-ranking expert on Arab extremists in the US Air Force – until the bombing of Khobar Towers took my eye and most of the mobility in one arm. Robert was missing a lung from oil-smoke and God only knew what else. Sam was missing an arm from an IED. We were the Band of Broken Brothers, and Rush Limbaugh had offended us once too often.
‘This is our plan,’ the Colonel always reminded us. ‘We are in on this together.’ Yet to be honest, it was his plan. His leadership skills were not in dispute at all by this point. Yet for all his strength of character and intellect, the Colonel was the youngest and most damaged of us; and while he had turned these weaknesses into strengths, during the time we held Rush Limbaugh every one of us found ourselves sullen to the Colonel’s orders at some point.
This was strange for us, as we are all men of long military experience. Here in the torture chamber, this became more important than ever: the Colonel had to restrain us, to channel our anger and aggression to maximum effect.
“You are taking part in a great experiment,” the Colonel told the demagogue. “Your every reaction will be recorded for posterity, so be sure to give our techniques your utmost attention.”
I held a cloth ready over Rush Limbaugh’s face.
“What the hell do you people want from me?” Rush Limbaugh demanded.
“To find out how torture works,” the Colonel replied. He nodded to me, and I settled the terry-cloth over Rush Limbaugh’s face. “We will apply water for exactly twenty seconds. Quit squirming! This is no worse than a college hazing ritual, fatass. Don’t be such a little bitch.”
Don poured. Robert ran the camera. Sam held the timer. Everyone held their breath.
Rush Limbaugh withstood the procedure well…for about three seconds. Then he went into a fit, convulsing and nearly overturning the board by rocking from side to side in panic. Rush Limbaugh gagged, coughed, and shook until the twenty seconds were up. This short interval seemed an eternity to me, and I was only watching.
Our victim alternately sobbed and coughed for several minutes afterward while the Colonel spoke. “According to the Geneva Convention,” he explained, “you have just been tortured. By your own prescient analysis on the air, however, this was not torture at all. Do you wish to revise your statement at this time?”
Limbaugh spluttered “Yes.” After a wracking fit of coughing, he refused to say more.
“You are one determined fatass,” the Colonel observed. “Forced, for the first time in your miserable existence, to admit being wrong, you have done so. Too bad it took this much. But this is good. You will need your courage, because we have scheduled this treatment another one-hundred and eighty-two times over the next thirty days.”
Rush Limbaugh made the sound of an immense ego being ripped from a human soul.
Want to read the rest? You can have a copy in PDF for any reasonable donation:
The extraction went like clockwork. Sam, Don, and I carried out the kidnapping in less than two minutes. Rush Limbaugh objected to our masked, armed entry, but was immediately subdued with the help of a taser. We gagged, hooded, and handcuffed the fat bastard before levering him into a wheelbarrow with scrap two-by-fours.
Keying my mike, I whispered the word “secured.”
“Roger. Tango,” Robert replied, naming our exit route. We left the scene while Robert pointed the critical camera in another direction. Our threats of immediate execution kept Rush Limbaugh silent until he heard the van, specially modified for paraplegic drivers, come to a halt almost on top of him. With a supreme effort, we dumped the demagogue into the van and climbed in after him, abandoning the wheelbarrow.
The Colonel’s op-order was extremely detailed, right down to the unwritten insults: Rush Limbaugh is so fucking fat, we had to use a wheelbarrow.
Underway, the three of us in back took turns kicking Rush Limbaugh in his stomach with our combat-booted feet (Top using only his solid prosthetic foot). Rush Limbaugh made a terrified scream through the gag. He tried to curl into a fetal position, but the gelatinous mass of fat on his stomach forestalled him. Drawing my Tanto knife, I cut away at his swimming trunks and ripped them from his naked body, causing him to scream again. His genitals looked pathetically small under his putrescent flab. Sam and I each took one leg, straining against all his strength, for he knew exactly what we intended, and shrieked at the imminent damage to his manhood. With a coordinated yanking, Sam and I pulled his legs apart like a wishbone so that Top could steady himself against the ceiling and give Rush Limbaugh a powerful kick in the testicles.
Limbaugh’s scream retreated into his chest. He coughed, strained for air, and snapped into the fetal position again. We grabbed his legs and pressed his feet flat on the floor of the van so Top could step on the toes with his artificial foot, slowly increasing the pressure until Rush Limbaugh’s sobbing was a plea. Then we applied Chloroform to the whimpering sack of excrement before us and settled in for a good, long drive.
Driving far out of our way was an essential part of Operation Punchface. Our first destination was no more than a forty-five minute drive from the hotel, but we didn’t want Rush to sense this; we wanted him disoriented in time and location to encourage feelings of hopelessness.
First was a scheduled stop at a highway gas station. Sam had arranged for the automatic car wash to be left on after the store was closed. The Colonel supplied a roll of quarters; five minutes later, the water-based paint was gone, and whereas a sky-blue van had kidnapped Rush Limbaugh, we were now in a dark green van.
Less than one minute with a cordless drill, and the van had its original license-plate back on. The Colonel was one hell of a planner.
We turned back onto the highway and made for the interstate. Altogether, we spent six hours on the move. At one point, we revived Rush Limbaugh with kicks to the stomach so he could hear the section of highway passing under us. He soiled himself on the blue plastic tarp as we snapped on rubber gloves to insert a soporific suppository. He remained unconscious all the way to the prison, reviving only when we force-marched him into the building and deloused him.
Finally, we applied Chloroform and laid him on the mat in his new home, a small cinderblock cell. We’d set up a heater and humidifier to turn the basement into a sweltering, Central American summer. He woke up an hour later, gasping and wiping sweat from his gelatinous folds. We recorded him crawling across the dirty concrete floor. He retched into a disgusting, lidless toilet. After a few dry heaves, he wept into his fat hand for a moment, collected himself, and roared his desire to do us harm.
It was time to begin.
We opened the metal door with a slamming insistence. Sam and I had spent an entire afternoon on the installation, making sure it had precisely the right kind of booming clank when open or shut. The Colonel gave orders through a megaphone, mixing choice foreign phrases into his invective: “Ya’llah! Sieze the fatass! Vamos! Drag his worthless fat ass out here!”
All carefully rehearsed. All specially chosen. Operation Punchface had consumed us all, most especially the Colonel, in the month since we’d learned where the great gasbag would next be speaking.
Robert sicced the German shepherd on Rush Limbaugh, giving it just enough lead to chase the cowering talk radio king to the back corner of the cell. Sam and I stepped in as soon as Robert called the dog to heel.
Rush Limbaugh blubbered, his face contorted in fear as we approached. We were masked and bore cattle-prods at port-arms, like rifles. “Oh, no,” he moaned, turning. He scratched at the cinderblocks in his fear, trying to escape an eight-by-six foot cell.
We shocked him. He collapsed. We shocked the supine sophist again before dragging him out into the hall.
The Colonel cursed Rush Limbaugh for a whoreson in Arabic. “You will learn to respect authority, ya ibn sharmouta.” He switched to a bit of Dutch: “When we say goede tag, you will greet us with your backside and your hands on the wall!”
After applying hood and handcuffs, we forced Rush Limbaugh to walk through a plywood maze. It was very important to disorient him this way. The demagogue gasped for air, fighting to suck oxygen through the burlap. Finally, we reached the torture chamber and pulled the hood off so he could take in the tableau we had prepared.
Rush Limbaugh blinked at the light of a single naked bulb.
The Colonel sat in a lounge chair with torn fabric. A bucket sat by the end of a six-foot long wooden ramp reinforced with two-by-fours.
“Waterboarding?!” Rush Limbaugh erupted. Still maintaining a veneer of resistance, he made the word sound as if he had just gotten the joke, and was not amused.
“Live your rhetoric, fatass.” The Colonel was the only one of us who spoke to Rush Limbaugh. The rest of us had taped out mouths shut to avoid thoughtless violations of this rule. It was critical that the Colonel’s voice be the only one Limbaugh could hear during our enhanced interrogations.
Rush Limbaugh protested his poor health as we strapped him down.
“Do you fear for your constitution?” The Colonel asked him. “This is not the draft board, you sniveling turd. You kelb. We won’t excuse you from our service because of hemorrhoids.”
“Who are you people?” Rush Limbaugh demanded as we reinforced his bonds with duct tape – which we would later rip from his flesh.
“We are a tax-raising, sushi-munching, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body piercing, Hollywood loving left wing freak show,” the Colonel said. He never raised his voice a decibel, delivering his lines in a cool, smooth tone – quite eerie, I have to admit; even I felt a shudder to hear him. “We are left-coast latté-sipping moonbats. We pal around with terrorist appeasers and plot to install socialism in America and force everyone into gay marriage.”
“Democrats,” Rush Limbaugh spat. He wiggled his head, trying to refuse the blindfold. “Did Nancy Pelosi put you up to this? I always knew that bitch woul…”
I punched him in the face. Catharsis became more than a word: the sound and effect were so satisfying that I punched him again, and then again, each blow more satisfying than the last, with greater precision and strength, so that for a moment I wanted to keep punching Rush Limbaugh in the face until he was destroyed.
“Enough,” the Colonel said, assuming a voice of authority. He cursed in Japanese.
A tense moment followed. It was not the first in our group’s history. I should explain that his rank was just an ironic title, a moniker earned in a poker game. Having humorously declared the establishment of his own militia group with the sole purpose of becoming its ranking officer, he demonstrated his authority: ‘You boys can call me “Colonel,”’ he said, handing an empty beer bottle to Top. ‘Top,’ he commanded, ‘get the Colonel another beer.’
‘Top’ is an affectionate nickname for First Sergeants. Prior to his loss of limb, Top had been exactly that. Now he took the empty. ‘Sure, Colonel. Would his colonel-ness like his diaper changed as well?’
For one dangerous instant, the entire room stopped breathing. Top had directly challenged the manhood of a soldier missing a key half-inch of spinal cord, condemned to a lifetime of sexless incontinence.
But the Colonel spun his wheelchair around to point at me, retorting: ‘No thanks, Top. That’s the Major’s job.’
The joke brought the house down – and formed our little band of broken brothers in one instant.
For myself, I had, in fact, been a major once, and the highest-ranking expert on Arab extremists in the US Air Force – until the bombing of Khobar Towers took my eye and most of the mobility in one arm. Robert was missing a lung from oil-smoke and God only knew what else. Sam was missing an arm from an IED. We were the Band of Broken Brothers, and Rush Limbaugh had offended us once too often.
‘This is our plan,’ the Colonel always reminded us. ‘We are in on this together.’ Yet to be honest, it was his plan. His leadership skills were not in dispute at all by this point. Yet for all his strength of character and intellect, the Colonel was the youngest and most damaged of us; and while he had turned these weaknesses into strengths, during the time we held Rush Limbaugh every one of us found ourselves sullen to the Colonel’s orders at some point.
This was strange for us, as we are all men of long military experience. Here in the torture chamber, this became more important than ever: the Colonel had to restrain us, to channel our anger and aggression to maximum effect.
“You are taking part in a great experiment,” the Colonel told the demagogue. “Your every reaction will be recorded for posterity, so be sure to give our techniques your utmost attention.”
I held a cloth ready over Rush Limbaugh’s face.
“What the hell do you people want from me?” Rush Limbaugh demanded.
“To find out how torture works,” the Colonel replied. He nodded to me, and I settled the terry-cloth over Rush Limbaugh’s face. “We will apply water for exactly twenty seconds. Quit squirming! This is no worse than a college hazing ritual, fatass. Don’t be such a little bitch.”
Don poured. Robert ran the camera. Sam held the timer. Everyone held their breath.
Rush Limbaugh withstood the procedure well…for about three seconds. Then he went into a fit, convulsing and nearly overturning the board by rocking from side to side in panic. Rush Limbaugh gagged, coughed, and shook until the twenty seconds were up. This short interval seemed an eternity to me, and I was only watching.
Our victim alternately sobbed and coughed for several minutes afterward while the Colonel spoke. “According to the Geneva Convention,” he explained, “you have just been tortured. By your own prescient analysis on the air, however, this was not torture at all. Do you wish to revise your statement at this time?”
Limbaugh spluttered “Yes.” After a wracking fit of coughing, he refused to say more.
“You are one determined fatass,” the Colonel observed. “Forced, for the first time in your miserable existence, to admit being wrong, you have done so. Too bad it took this much. But this is good. You will need your courage, because we have scheduled this treatment another one-hundred and eighty-two times over the next thirty days.”
Rush Limbaugh made the sound of an immense ego being ripped from a human soul.
Want to read the rest? You can have a copy in PDF for any reasonable donation:
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