Team leaders' meeting. Nate shows them a town on the map, Ar Rifa, that runs along the road for 2 km, population 75 thousand: their mission is to drive past it. Simple, right? Espera asks what happens after that, and Nate says same thing with the town after that. Which is, I guess, sort of like reconnaissance. Or a lovely drive along country roads. Albeit country roads that sometimes blow you up or shoot things into your head and organs. Not, like, a picnic.

"Sir, in that last hamlet, all it took was one shot. That was just an undisciplined grunt from RCT-1. Everybody opened up and schwacked it over nothing." Espera's like, Yo McNulty, cram it. "We could only keep our own honor clean, Dog. What these other motherfuckers do in this big wide A-O ain't on us." Which is, in a way, something Brad and Nate ought to be reminded of right now: their men didn't shoot. This guy with a face like a smooshed-face lion that's always with Captain America is like, "Yeah, it's hard enough just keeping our own guys out of the shit. We can't be worrying about the rest of the world." Fuck. Off. Do you think these guys ever hear themselves saying this stuff and then they're like, "That sounds like an asshole just said that." Right, because without categorical accountability or the intelligence and guidance of men like Fick and Colbert you'd just be a bunch of drugged-up mentally abused sleep-deprived killing machines without any ethical check on your actions or control-group rationality at all and wouldn't that just be so fucking weird.

Brad's not going to shut up, in true McNulty style: "I know you all saw our own CO try to fire off a 203 round in the middle of all that." They all give and admit that, yes, Encino Man is bullshit and went all Kill Crew for no reason, but you can hardly blame him because instead of a brain he uses Vegemite, and anyway, of course, he fucking missed. Brad starts to bitch and moan some more, and Nate -- boasting some nasty razor burn -- cuts him off, because there's not even a point right now, because the sky is green right this second, because he's in an impossible position: "-- Look, Brad, can't live in the past. You need to snap to. We got a lot of shit ahead of us."

Brad snaps to, because he's right, but he's still sad because sometimes Marines forget to be awesome, and he tries never to do that. But the sky-blue sky here and now is that Brad was standing in the middle of a shooting gallery begging them to stop, and nobody could hear him. Like a nightmare" mouth open, nothing coming out. Little kids died, because he couldn't shout loudly enough.