Just a wild stab, but are you sure that the line-endings for /home/hesco/sandbox/EC2/trick_out_my_server.sh are correct? Not Windows line endings or something weird?

And are you sure the interpreter mentioned after "#!" exists in the AMI?

I'm asking this because something in the AMI startup is apparently being more picky than what your local box needs. Or, something is corrupting the base64 decode (are you exceeding the size? try something smaller).