Art tells me you were a sniper with the Rangers.
Yeah, I was.
What's the longest you ever had to watch a target?
Three days. Shitty little village outside Kandahar. You watch a man that long, you can get to know him better than his wife does. How he reads the paper, picks his nose, what glass he likes for tea, what one for milk. If he jerks off, what he looks at when he does. If he's nice to the dog when no one's around.
What's the trick to something like that? Keeping your focus?
Well, they told us to come up with stories about ourselves and the target.
What do you mean, "stories"?
Well, nothing elaborate. Imagine taking Shirley to the movies, watching Price is Right, eating takeout Chinese. They eventually stopped that, the business with the stories.
Why is that?
They found some folks get so involved in the tales they're telling themselves, they grow to like the target. And when they got the green light, they couldn't pull.
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