Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. - West Indies report of the Closer Union Commission (Leeward Islands, Windward Islands, Trinidad and Tobago) April, 1933.

That was the number. Hed asked his bosses. Researched it. Three hundred and fifty-nine civilians hed helped kill in 2009. Thats 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 Obamas 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 Schoolhead 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: Im 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 actthe 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 couldnt 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 nations subjectivity. He represented what it means to be American during these years of drone warfarepilots 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.

Cian Westmoreland had been raised in the shadow of his family hero, General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam when Robert McNamara was secretary of defense, the same man who, during the World War II firebombing of Tokyo, had helped General Curtis LeMay incinerate one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in just one night. Such deaths had not traumatized McNamara and General Westmoreland, who remained proud of their military careers. Why couldnt Cian Westmoreland feel that way?

Ethics, you might say. But whose? At one time McNamara had argued it was unethical not to burn the fifty square miles of Japanese homes, thereby forcing American soldiers to battle and die on Tokyos streets. Later, as an architect of the Vietnam War under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara conceded that US intervention in Vietnam had been terribly wrong, a result of ignorance and bad judgment. He said that if hed understood Vietnamese nationalism, and how wrong the domino theory was, millions of lives might have been saved. Still, asked if he ever felt guilty or traumatized by those millions of people he helped kill during World War II and the Vietnam War, he replied, Never. Responsibility belonged to the president. Why couldnt Cian Westmoreland forget that number and feel the same?

His confession of murders was bad enough. But as bad, if not worse, was that his trauma, for almost everyone else, was nonreal. After all, according to President Obama, the mainstream media, and the general public, those whom drones kill are not innocent civilians but terrorists. Most politicians and military men subscribe to the ethical position, best illustrated by President Truman in Hiroshima, that sometimes killing innocent civilians is a necessary evil. So why couldnt Westmoreland feel that the killing was justified, that hed done something honorable, instead of telling us he had become a war criminal?

Cian Westmoreland, emblematic American drone soldier, was our war criminal and our hero that spring evening in Las Vegas. We, his spellbound audience, were Veterans for Peace members, Catholic radicals, Code Pink activists, writers, and filmmakers. We, eighty people in a country of 350 million who, polls suggest, overwhelmingly approve of drone warfare, had just driven the forty-six miles on Highway 95 back to Las Vegas from Creech Air Base, where wed spent the day protesting killing people thousands of miles away by drone.

A year after that first meeting with Westmoreland, during the Shut Down Creech protests in April the following year, he and Brandon Bryant were back in Las Vegas for the screening of National Bird, a documentary film featuring testimonies of former drone pilots. It wasnt some ideological objection that had caused his military leave; it was the trauma and his bodys physical incapacity to keep killing serially in a casual manner.

Months later, in early October 2017, Code Pink organized another annual Week of Protest at Creech. This time, along with the drone victims, other killings were also on our mindsfifty-eight tourists killed and more than five hundred wounded in Las Vegas the weekend before by a gunman, Stephen Paddock, who, from his thirty-second-story room in the Mandalay Casino, rained bullets on people in the outdoor music festival below. One more mass shootingthere had been 521 reported (with four or more killed) during the previous 477 days. News of the shooting focused on the unknown motive of the shooter; nothing was more disturbing to the public than the killers normalcy. But for most Americans, killings from Creech do not present similar problems of incomprehensionthe pilots are simply following orders. Mass shooter and drone killer, both hunting people, read one protesters sign at Creech. However its done, from Creech or hotel casino, its killing in Las Vegas and from Las VegasAmericas emblematic city where novelist Hunter Thompsons two gonzo protagonists attempted their savage journey to the heart of the American Dream.

Says protagonist Dukes attorney in Thompsons novel to a waitress in Las Vegas: Let me explain it to you.... Were looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area. This dialogue follows: