I was just a grunt in the desert, same as thousands of others. Afghanistan, 2004. Dust in my teeth, rifle in my hands, orders coming down from a chain I couldn’t see.\n\nBack home, Dick Cheney sat in the White House, calm, steady, the man who never flinched. He didn’t visit the troops. Didn’t need to. His fingerprints were on every deployment order, every drone strike, every black site memo.\n\nI never met him. But he shaped my life.\n\nNow I’m dead. Car crash on the way to a VA appointment. They took my heart—still strong—and put it in him.\n\nYeah. Mine keeps him alive.\n\nSo here I am, narrating his story. From the inside.\n\nYou want to know how one man got so much power?\n\nLet’s start in 1963. A drunk kid in Wyoming. No future. No direction.\n\nThen everything changed.