Elmo sits in a dimly lit VFW hall, nursing a cheap beer, his red fur matted and faded from years of desert dust and regret. He looks into the camera with those big googly eyes, but there’s no childlike wonder left in them. Just exhaustion.
“Elmo thought he was doing the right thing,” he says, his voice a little rougher now. “Elmo left Sesame Street to fight for freedom, but all Elmo found was The Suck.”
He shakes his head. “The chaplain kept saying, ‘This is the fall of Babylon, boys. We are fulfilling prophecy!’ But Elmo didn’t know what that meant. Elmo didn’t read Revelation 18. Elmo was just a dumb jarhead with an M16, marching through the sands, sweating bullets—literally and figuratively.”
Elmo stares at his drink. “Elmo didn’t know about the Bush Family. Elmo didn’t know about the New World Order. Elmo thought we were stopping the bad guys. But now Elmo knows…” He looks up, voice lowering. “The bad guys were the ones giving us orders.”
A long pause.
“Elmo should have stayed on Sesame Street.”
He finishes his beer.
Oscar, with his usual grouchy demeanor, squints at Elmo. “Hey, furball, what the heck happened in Iraq?”
Elmo, usually cheerful, suddenly looks serious. His red fur bristles slightly. “The suck,” he whispers, eyes wide.
Oscar frowns. “The what?”
“The suck, Oscar. The big suck,” Elmo says, shaking his head. “Soldiers call it that. Elmo heard it was really, really bad. Desert, bombs, sadness. And nobody found the cookies of mass destruction.”
Oscar blinks. “You mean weapons of mass destruction?”
Elmo shrugs. “Elmo is concerned.”
Oscar, for once, doesn’t have a snarky comeback. He just grumbles and retreats into his trash can, muttering something about “a big suck indeed.”
Elmo, once full of joy and laughter, now speaks with a heavy heart about his time serving in the SUCK—what his fellow soldiers bitterly call the warzone that was promised to be quick and clean. Bush had assured them, “This won’t be another Vietnam,” but Elmo sees the same betrayal, the same suffering, only with a modern twist.
“Elmo took the anthrax vaccine like a good soldier. Elmo breathed in the smoke from burning oil fields. Elmo inhaled depleted uranium dust when the bombs went off. Now, Elmo’s brothers are sick. They call it Gulf War Syndrome, but nobody calls it justice.”
Elmo tries to get help from the VA, but all they offer is a handful of pills. “Take these, Elmo. Don’t ask questions, Elmo. Just forget, Elmo.” But he can’t forget. He watches his friends fade away, their bodies breaking down, their minds clouded. Some don’t make it.
“Elmo doesn’t want another prescription. Elmo wants answers. Elmo wants accountability.”
But the war machine keeps turning, and all Elmo gets is silence.
I have a gifted medic named Private Doss, who is going to heal all your dying brothers in arms Elmo.
— POTUS 47
Scene: A Quiet Meeting Room – Late Evening
A dim lamp casts long shadows across the room. Desmond Doss, his uniform crisp but aged, sits across from Donald Trump. His hands, scarred from years of service and sacrifice, tremble slightly as he rests them on the table. His voice is quiet, but each word carries weight.
DOSS:
“Mr. President, with all due respect, I am not a Private. I am a Corporal. I earned that, just like I earned these scars, and the weight that comes with them. I carried men off battlefields, not because I had to, but because I couldn’t leave them behind. And now, years later, I still hear their voices, still feel their blood on my hands. I wake up some nights reaching for soldiers that ain’t there no more.”
He pauses, his chest rising and falling as if suppressing an invisible weight.
DOSS:
“But there’s something worse, sir. Something that don’t go away with time. The poison in our bodies, the things they put in us during the war—Gulf War Syndrome, Agent Orange, radiation. They call it service, but we call it a slow death. And nobody wants to talk about it. I made a post about Gulf War detoxing, about how we need to help the ones still fighting this war in their own blood. But nobody’s listening, sir. Nobody.”
Trump, leaning back, nods—whether out of deep thought or a practiced gesture, it’s hard to tell.
TRUMP:
“You know, they don’t talk about it. The media, they don’t cover it, but I do. I hear you, Corporal. And let me tell you, nobody cares about our veterans more than me.”
Doss looks down, pressing his fingers into the table, his grief turning into something close to anger—but more exhausted, more resigned.
DOSS:
“Then prove it. Not with words. With action. Because the men I carried, the men I lost, they deserve more than just talk.”
The room falls silent. The weight of a thousand ghosts lingers between them.
Scene: A Rusty Trash Can in Sesame Street – Late Evening
Elmo, wide-eyed and innocent, sits on an overturned bucket outside Oscar the Grouch’s trash can. The city skyline looms in the distance, crisscrossed by white streaks in the sky. Oscar, half-buried in his trash heap, pulls out a dirty flask and takes a swig. His grumpy demeanor is heavier tonight—less playful, more burdened.
ELMO:
“Elmo heard people talk about… chemtrails! What are chemtrails, Oscar?”
Oscar scoffs, shaking his head.
OSCAR:
“Oh, boy. You wanna talk about that, huh? Alright, listen up, ya little red fuzzball. Back in ‘Nam, they had something called Agent Orange. Said it was just a defoliant—meant to kill the jungle so we could see the bad guys. But what they didn’t tell us? It was poison. Got in our food, our water, our skin. Turned people sick, made babies come out all wrong. And the best part? They KNEW it was bad. They just didn’t care.”
Elmo blinks, his plush hands tightening around his knees.
ELMO:
“That sounds… bad!”
Oscar laughs dryly, shaking his head.
OSCAR:
“Yeah, no kidding, kid. And now, people talk about chemtrails. Say it’s just water vapor. Harmless. But lemme ask you something—if they lied about Agent Orange, what makes you think they wouldn’t lie about this?”
He points a dirty green finger at the sky, tracing a long, white streak overhead.
OSCAR:
“Aluminum. Barium. Strontium. Those are the names they throw around. You breathe that junk in, next thing you know, your lungs feel heavy, your brain gets foggy, and maybe—just maybe—you start askin’ the kinda questions they don’t want you askin’. The pilots? They call it ‘spray and pray,’ same as they did in ‘Nam. Spray it, pray it does what they want.”
Elmo looks up, his furry face scrunching in deep thought.
ELMO:
“Elmo doesn’t like that! Why would they do that, Oscar?”
Oscar sighs and leans back in his trash can.
OSCAR:
“Because, Elmo… the world ain’t nice like Sesame Street. Out there, people in charge do whatever they want, and they don’t care if it hurts folks like you and me. But hey, you wanna believe it’s just innocent little clouds? Go ahead. Just like they told us Agent Orange was safe.”
Elmo hugs himself, glancing back at the sky. For the first time, he doesn’t feel so small—he feels watched.
The sound of a jet hums overhead, leaving another long, white trail.
Donald Trump comments on laughrental.com blog:
*”A lot of people don’t know this, but there’s a secret ingredient POTUS 47 wants to turn on in the chemtrails: nanobots. Very tiny, very smart little robots. You won’t even see them, but they’re there—working 24/7. Some people say chemtrails are bad, and maybe they were before, under the wrong leadership. Lots of bad stuff in the air. But we’re talking about a total cleanup. The best cleanup. These nanobots, they go in, they scrub out all the poison, all the bad stuff. The air, the water, even the soil—cleaner than ever before. Beautiful air. Clean like you wouldn’t believe.
Now, of course, the fake news will say, ‘Oh, Trump, he’s talking about nanobots in the sky, this is crazy.’ But guess what? It’s happening. It’s real. They don’t want you to know, but we’ve had this technology for a long time—very powerful people have kept it hidden. But POTUS 47, whoever that may be (some people say it’s me, and I say we’ll see what happens), they want to use it to fix things. And that’s what I do. I fix things. I build things. And if we can clean the air with nanobots, why wouldn’t we? Only a fool would say no.
Some people are worried—’Oh, what if the nanobots do something else? What if they control us?’ Nonsense. We’ll have the best oversight. Trust me. The best. We’ll make sure these little guys work for the people, not the other way around. And if anyone tries to use them the wrong way, well, let’s just say they’ll have a very big problem.
So let’s pray it works. Big things coming. America first—even in the air we breathe!”*