Being a Ruthless Mercenary Has Not Affected Me in the Least

Some of you PC/Commie types have characterized me as a half-cocked brute, unable to assimilate back into society after having spent decades orchestrating every major armed conflict in recent memory.

Well, I, Everett “Bruise” Brouseau, am here today to say that those allegations are utter bullshit. You’re lucky that I turned in my neutron cannon when I left the Special Forces, because I have a good mind to melt your innards with its searing blasts of nuclear hatred, you little bitch.

I was born and raised in this small Minnesotan township I still call home. I joined the Marines at 21, fresh out of high school. After training at Fort Bragg—where my superhuman and innate combat skills were instantly recognized by my superior officers—I was flown to a secret base in Nevada. There, I underwent a battery of tests and was subsequently given an interior cybernetic implant that was linked to a monitor on my right forearm, thus enabling me to increase or decrease blood flow to any region of my body and release morphine, adrenaline or—in a worst-case scenario—cyanide directly into my bloodstream. My left hand was replaced with a robotic limb of titanium alloy, upon which could be mounted any number of tools, weapons, and devices, and I was officially promoted to the rank of Sonderkommando.

But all of these are “enhancements”—nothing more. They don’t make me so different from all of you, with your Mitsubishis and your barbecue grills.

And not all of my missions had me slaughtering the innocent, you know. My first mission was to end the festering 17-year civil war in Addis Ababa. With the help of nine strategically placed thermonuclear devices and a native guide named Saadiq, I crushed the opposition and escaped the country under cover of night. Peace was restored almost immediately.

Just like in America!

I was then deployed to Sudan, where I annihilated all rebel opposition to the proposed Jonglei Canal in the marshlands of the south. Later, I served as a security attaché to Jaafar Nimieri, Sudan’s erstwhile president. My daughters love the photos on our mantle of me carrying him on my back through a crowd of armed supporters of his nemesis, Imam al-Hadi al-Mahdi! What a laugh we had that day!

As the years went by, I never forgot where I came from. Not while annihilating Tutsis in Rwanda. Not while obliterating a Uranium dump near a residential area in Kyshtym in the South Ural Mountains. And certainly not while currently working as a double agent to murder Senator Arthur Marshfield of Wisconsin. I’m still that same little freckle-faced kid, eating an ice-cream cone and throwing antique grenades into the gymnasium.

So maybe you should think twice before you accuse me of not being the person you married.

Or I’ll slit your throat while you sleep.