Slaughterhouse-359. That was the number. He’d asked his bosses. Researched it. Three hundred and fifty-nine civilians he’d helped kill in 2009. That’s what Cian Westmoreland, a former drone operator, was telling us in Las Vegas, at the end of March 2016, on a warm and radiant desert evening. President Obama’s numbers were different. He said that during his administration drone air strikes killed between 64 and 116 civilians. The same year Westmoreland was killing for his commander in chief, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Whom to believe? And do the numbers really matter? And what inner imperative brought Westmoreland to stand before us at the Las Vegas Law School—head bowed, eyes fixed on an empty spot below the podium? A clean-cut figure in a black T-shirt, he cast the shadow of a broken man. Yes, he said, I killed those civilians. He had been twenty-two at the time. Now his own life, the real of who he was, was at stake. He said he was haunted by the memories, that he was in therapy. Slaughterhouse-359. He said it again, 359, raised his eyes, looked at us, added: “I’m here for those kids I helped kill.” Then he lowered his head and became silent. The audience was startled, unable to find his inaccessible eyes. His confession was an act of utter defiance, a radically political act—the choice that saved him from insanity.
His testimony compelled me to write this book. Having published several books on terrorism and having lived three decades in Nevada, I couldn’t avoid identifying with this vulnerable rebel. I was forced to hear the truth of his trauma. Westmoreland was the emblem of the American soldier when the soldier is the epitome of a nation’s subjectivity.1 He represented what it means to be American during these years of drone warfare—pilots hunting and shooting via satellite human targets thousands of miles away from Creech Air Force Base next to Las Vegas. You could sense his rage beneath the somberness.
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