Instead of going to college when I got out of high school, like a lot of my friends did, I signed up for the army. I’d never been very good at anything, so it came as a surprise to everyone, including myself, when it turned out I not only excelled as a grunt in the infantry, but somebody in the chain of command thought I had what it took to be a Ranger.

Long story short, I qualified and got selected, and not long after I was in the USARA. Man, I loved it. Three hots and a cot, and I got to jump out of planes and kill people. For once, I really felt like I was making a difference. For instance, I myself infiltrated Slobodan Milosevic’s presidential residence and surgically implanted a remote control bomb in his body while he was asleep.

Incidentally a good rule of thumb is that the blast radius of enemy leaders is 30 feet for eastern bloc countries, 45 for rogue nations. The Axis of Evil was after my time, but I’m given to understand that instantaneous collapse on a cellular level is the latest fad. I don’t know, just seems kind of tacky to me.

Soon, though, they decided they had something even better planned for yours truly. They pulled me aside and I got to train with different special forces guys from other branches. Out of a hundred guys they pulled out just 3 of us. They said we were “the best of the best” and that they wanted to create an ultra-elite group of top secret operatives to solve major “problems”, such as threats to our deep space Ambassadors, or paradoxes in the space-time continuum. I got sent on a lot of those. Did you know that in the original time stream, Einstein was an evil madman? Of course you didn’t: Mission Accomplished.

Then after less than a year of that kind of work, they pulled just me out of the squad right before a mission, and said “It’s time to separate the wheat from the chaff, son.” They wanted me to man a special, super-extreme agency formed of joint representatives from the Defense Department and the Vatican, charged with staving off a war between heaven and hell. Seems a second angel had gone rogue, and they needed my help. I said sign me up, but then they said “well son, the thing is, we really need the cream of the crop here.”

Turns out, they thought that the best part of me—really the best-trained, most disciplined part of my body—was my right hand and arm to just above the elbow. So they cut it off, sewed on an artificially intelligent brain, then, armed with a sliver of the true cross, they sent it through a portal. What happened next I don’t know. They say it’s top secret, and I guess I’m just an old soldier, obsolete and out of the loop.

A couple months later, I got a letter. It was from my right arm. Seems they’d given it the same poor treatment: they’d scraped off what they considered to be the most elite blood vessels and skin cells, the ones they could really count on in a pinch, and sent them off to negotiate with something called Shub-Niggurath.

There were no parades for me. No medals, no ceremonies. When I die there will be no dress funerals, no twenty-one gun salutes, no flag-draped caskets. I’m not bitter, though; at heart, I’m just another soldier who did his duty. If my arm were here right now, I’d salute it, except I can’t, because I don’t have an arm. And it would salute me, I’m sure, except, you know… no face.