Fear and Self-Loathing with the Merchants of Death

originally appears on The Hunt for Tom Clancy Substack.

At the Swiss Ammunition and Arms booth a two dimensional Schweizer Fahne pulsed and popped into three dimensions. The quarter ounce of ‘Penis Envy‘ psychedelic mushrooms I’d ingested back in the press room were kicking in; a quarter ounce, I’ll note from the outset, was perhaps too much. I was there with the Commodore, a serious Journalist from a Major Paper, and Yael, a woman I suspected was Mossad or CIA. I have a high tolerance for edibles, a high tolerance for mushrooms, and a low tolerance for bullshit. I was going to test all of those boundaries today, at the largest weapons show in North America, one sponsored, in a roundabout way, by the Army.

Live and learn. This was October 10 in Washington DC, at AUSA:2022, a professional development forum / expo / conference for the Association of the United States Army, up at the DC Convention center across from the Carnegie Library that’s now an Apple Store.

In civilian language, AUSA was a major merchant of death convention I’d attended while still a soldier freshly back from the conflict, over a decade ago. It was coming back on-line fully for the first time since the Pandemic. I was going to be out on the east coast for Yorktown Days, celebrating the 241st anniversary of the battle that finally won the American revolution. Why not go?

I needed a plan; I needed a companion and a local guide and I knew of only one person with the balls it’d take to pull this off. Enter the Commodore: once a sailor who spent a lot of time in the desert defusing bombs, he would be unflappable as my battle buddy. I’d planned on the two of us doing bounding overwatch up the aisles of AUSA’s vendors, collecting shwag, asking questions, running the routes, learning the things but I hadn’t planned on an infiltrator this early.

Yael was ostensibly doing PR for a company that made directed energy weapons to shoot down kamikaze drone swarms of the sort that the Ayatollah’s military was getting pretty good at developing, she told me. I figured that was a cover job. Spies don’t just come out and tell you they’re spies. She looked surprised when I ate the mushrooms right in front of her.

She’d shown up when I was typing on my laptop in the press room after the opening ceremonies, waiting for the Commodore to arrive—he’d agreed to keep watch on my six on the floor, make sure I didn’t get out of line—before I ingested the psychedelics to begin my very serious research into this Merchant of Death convention’s heart of darkness.

Spies do their research, they would’ve known these things from SIGINT, signals intelligence. Me and the Commodore talk on the phone. We text. We can’t escape the spiderweb of digital surveillance any more than anyone else on this spinning marble can. Especially not now, with starlink and shit.

It definitely wouldn’t have been from HUMINT, human intelligence. The Commodore’s a friend from way back and one of the few people on earth I trust. We got our start in journalism at roughly the same time and with freelance pieces in the same section of the same Major Paper, but we’re wired different.

For one thing, he was a Navy Officer, Naval Academy guy in fact, who tried in his military career as an Explosives Ordnance Disposal guy, to make sure things *didn’t* blow up. I barely made it through college, wound up enlisting in the Infantry, and literally blowing up things up with forty mike mike grenades lobbed from the .203 launcher slung under my M4 was, for a time, my professional specialty. I still covet an old school M-79.

A similar dynamic applied here at the merchant of death convention. The Commodore had always been more professional than I. He’d even gone to journalism school. Our interests overlapped. My original plan was to stay with the Commodore in Arlington once we were done walking the floor; that way we could rap about what we’d seen, figure out what it meant, two pairs of eyes that look for different things. I’d brought a bouquet of gem corn as a thank you for his family’s hospitality, but he had to jet out to Brussels with the Secretary of Defense, and his wife had to travel too. So today was all we had.

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