Washington, December 1944. The United States Army published a leaflet entitled Procedure for Military Executions. The soldiers who were sentenced to death at the time were hanged in the United States and those in charge of the army wanted the executions to be as speedy and clean as possible, as indicated in the same manual, the order to complete the Dwight D guide. He was handed over by Eisenhower, who was then head of the Army and later first NATO General Commander and President of the United States.

But this concern for effective and trouble-free executions was not new. The use of guillotine was imposed in the French Revolution as the fastest, most effective and least suffering method; it was said to be the “most merciful method of execution”. At least it wasn't the cleanest.

Hanging allowed to avoid splashes of the guillotine, but that does not mean that the thorn of the galley did not present any inconvenience. It was important that the hanger had basic knowledge of the procedure: the thickness of the rope, the drop distance, the weight of the condemned... Otherwise, the agony of the condemned man was prolonged and the agony of the executioner was prolonged. In the wide caseload of the hangers, it was not unusual for the weights and forces to be miscalculated and for the tie to cut off the condemned man's head, for which the guillotine was better, or, on the contrary, it was not of sufficient weight and the executioner had to hang himself from the condemned man's legs.

The purpose of the 26-page manual, published by the Army of Earth, was to avoid all these problems. It explains in detail how to make a special knot, data are given to build the galley structure well: sizes, thicknesses, distances... with illustrative figures such as Ikea instructions. But all of this was useless if you didn't take into account the drop table of bodies. According to this table, convicts weighing about 120 pounds (about 55 kilograms) or less need a fall of 8’1’ (almost two and a half meters) to make sure their neck is twisted. For those over 220 pounds (about 100 kilograms) a five-foot jump, just over a meter and a half is enough. But the data in the table were not infallible and the responsible executioner would also take into account other factors to adjust the drop distance, such as the constitution or muscular development of the condemned person.

The executions would be carried out by an army executioner. If there were no free combatants, they could be replaced by civilian executioners, who would benefit from the pay of the place of execution, without exceeding the $100 award for execution. If there were no civil executioners, they could name any member of the community according to the manual, on the sole condition that it was emotionally stable. Of course, I had to fulfill another condition: understand the instructions for riding the boat.