I’d heard the words before, but just among many clichés uttered by macho characters in any one of dozens of movies, good and bad. Pretty straightforward. But until you’ve actually spent time actively seeking out an enemy for the express purpose of killing them, you cant really understand what they mean. After an hour of splattering brains and the vile black sludge over an ever-shrinking spiral around Big Red campus, the true meaning of search and destroy was embedded in my soul. And as I was putting a bullet through the brain of a guy who used to sit next to me in History 109A—“Race Gender, and Power in the Antebellum South”—it hit me. I’m not afraid! Terror had vanished in a mind-numbing routine of violence. I kept telling myself our targets were no longer human, that their souls or whatever gave them humanity were long gone. Every time more than one of the things converged on a member of the team, the rest were there to take it down. I’m not saying it was a walk in the park—in fact, it was totally gross.
