See if you get through more than a couple paragraphs of this gem before feeling sick to your stomach.  I embrace the hate.  This weaselly Steve Buscemi look alike, fondling his airsoft pistol like every Lethal Weapon veteran stereotype while he recounts losing men in Afghanistan, I love every detail.  It’s so perfect that I wonder if Katie Burford didn’t write this article as some kind of fictional social commentary, an exercise in interpretive surrealism. 

I rub shoulders with those scholastic over-achievers at J-School at Columbia University.  I get it, these kids couldn’t find pussy in a Mexican whorehouse.  Shit happens, we all make mistakes.  Katie, please pull this article, do your own internal After-Action Review and let’s move on.  I’m not going to throw you under the bus because I don’t have the energy for this type of stuff.  Next time just check with SOFREP first before you run with shit like this. -Jack

I stared into the abyss, crossed the Rubicon, went through the looking glass, and fell down Jacob’s Ladder…all in one mission. Then the KBR chick told me I could only have one starch with breakfast chow.

Timothy Oliver, a Georgia boy by birth, spent years with the Special Forces in Afghanistan hunting bad guys in hideouts in the night.

Sometimes he found them.

Now, he spends his nights sleepless in a dimly lit mobile home park in Hermosa. Gaunt, with dark circles under his eyes and a limp, he smokes Marlboro reds and handles a toy gun that is a replica of the 9 mm he used to carry in Afghanistan.

He says he sees the faces of the men he hunted, the villagers he found massacred and mutilated by jihadists and the friends he lost. He takes large quantities of Valium but does not sleep.

Still, he says he would not take back the five years, three months and 34 days he spent in the military.

It started in 1998, when he enlisted and started studying at the Georgia Military Institute, training when he wasn’t in school.

He finished a four-year degree in three years before the United States struck Afghanistan in October 2001.

A member of the unit commonly known as Delta Force, he said he hit the ground in Kandahar after a high-altitude jump with thousands of other specialized troops from different branches of service.

He recalls three days of intense “house-to-house urban warfare.”

Read it and weep over at the Durango Herald.