Part Two

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Okay y'all, you know how some people swear they could never run for office because of the skeletons in their closet? Well, part two of his story is part of the graveyard in his closet that keeps him from ever running for office. Names in this part are changed to protect the guilty innocent.

Here Manny was a 20 yr old guy, completely disillusioned by life. The woman he thought he loved had cheated on him and tried to have him killed. His plans for a military career got derailed by the grasping greediness of his bitchy, cheating, soon to be ex. What could he do?

Luckily, Manny had some valuable skills and a streak of testosterone fueled crazy a mile wide. See, when Manny was in high school, his dad was stationed in Europe and that meant his JROTC unit went out in the field and trained with the active duty troops at his base. So, Manny had as much military training as most young enlisted men. Manny was also a fully trained field EMT. Through some of his buddies, word got to Manny that someone was putting together a private military unit to do some in-country black ops. It was the late 70s, almost early 80s and the drug war was raging. One area that had a particularly bad problem was the swamps of Georgia. The drug smugglers knew the area and, even though the local and state police knew there was a major smuggling ring operating out of said swamps, they couldn't gather the court admissible evidence needed to get approval to go after these drug smugglers. The cops were getting desperate because this smuggling ring was chock full of some really nasty characters. There were way to many suspicious deaths associated with this smuggling ring and the cops and local governments decided it had to stop them. The local government and cops down there in Georgia hired an ex-military man to put together a private military unit to come in and clean house. Manny was a part of this group. When he and the others were hired on, they were fully briefed on who they were going after and the fact that this was going to be a classic black op. If the private military unit got caught, they were on their own. The locals would deny any and all knowledge of the operations and that small unit would be hung out to dry.

Manny never shared the exact details of what went down. When he talked about this time in his life, he just said they went in and successfully cleared out this drug smuggling ring. I guess he figured this was one area where don't ask, don't tell was a good policy. It really boiled down to some really good guys doing some not completely savory things to get rid of some of the baddest of the bad. Manny did share some non-operational stories of this time. Manny's deathly fear of snakes almost did him in once because he almost shot of his foot when he tried to shoot a snake that was crawling across the path he was on. There was also the time he came face to face with an alligator as they were crawling through the swamp. Luckily, the gator was asleep and Manny was able to back away without waking it up.

This part of Manny's life didn't last too long, less than 2 yrs, and, in between Georgia expeditions, he and his buddies were bar hopping all over the place. It wasn't long after this that his obsession with women in uniform reared it's head again. But, that's the next part of the story...