Dying for a Cause: The Termite Squad

We all have  to die some day. Most of us will be completely forgotten not long after we perish, as though we never existed. Even by our families.

How often do you discuss your great-great-grandmother? Your great-grandmother? Many of us don’t even know the names of these people, let alone their accomplishments/exploits/passions. Even with the archival attributes of the Interweb, why should we modern folks be different? Once we’re gone, we’re gone, and all the fretting and hustling and striving that occurred during our fleeting lifetime will amount to almost nothing in the grand march of history.

For many of us, that’s quite all right. Maybe eternal anonymity is our purpose for being.

For some, though, the urge to leave a legacy, to be remembered after death, is a powerful motivator. A yen for immortality is why folks put their names on buildings; if all goes well, the edifices ought to survive far longer than human memory. It’s one of the reasons folks have children and write symphonies and carve sculptures into the black hills of South Dakota. And make history.

Imagine you’re a very old person, say, 90 or 100 years. Imagine you’re lying in a bed, in the bed you know you will die in. Imagine you’re in hospice. Your life is near the finish. Nothing feels good. You’re incapable of doing hardly anything. You must be helped by paid assistants to eat and defecate and bathe. Soon you will be gone, and soon — sooner than all the years you lived — you and the memory of you will have faded to black.

Now imagine you’re the same person. But instead of wasting away in a hospital, waiting, waiting for the end, you could make history. What if you could be a national hero? A true American Patriot that schoolkids will read about? Someone for whom statues are built and city parks are renamed? You’ll still be dead, but you’ll be far from forgotten.

And what if your heroic death left your society a better place? Wouldn’t that be comforting? Wouldn’t that make dying maybe even a little beautiful? What if you knew your family would be taken care of comfortably for the rest of their days, and all your neighbors and fellow citizens would be better off than when you were alive?

Welcome to the Termite Squad, America’s secret political assassination program, where hospice-bound elderly women are transformed into suicide bombers.

No one was supposed to know about it. And almost no one did. Until a 28 year-old named Joan Galt came along and decided to get all Snowden on us.

Joan Galt is the first woman under the age of 100 to join the Termite Squad, and the first person to publicly disclose the existence of the program. To yours truly.

The Termite Squad: My Official and Authentic Report, by Joan Galt, is her story. And my latest book.

You can read every shocking, provocative, thrilling word right here.