The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (12 page)

So Mark said, “If you can’t stay awake, try some of this stuff.” He always had a little bump below his bottom lip. He handed me the can.

I opened it and saw the dark, coarse cut of tobacco. I immediately thought of my days spent fishing and the worm dirt. I squinted at it and then at Mark.

“Here, like this.” He took three fingers and pinched a bit of it.

I did as he said. At first, all I felt was a bit of warmth on the inside of my lip and then it was like someone had opened a faucet in my salivary glands. I was almost drooling, and I was trying to spit as best I could, but I could feel little bits of the tobacco going down my throat as my saliva slid down from my jaw. The next thing I knew, I was a bit dizzy and light-headed. Mark and a few other guys were laughing at me, and then suddenly my head was spinning and a moment later everything in my stomach came flying out of my mouth. The guys were laughing hysterically, and as sick as I was feeling, I couldn’t really blame them.

They told me that everybody has a similar experience their first time doing dip. That was the only real hazing, if you want to call it that, I experienced. Once all the training began, we really bonded as a team. By the time we finished that intense six months and learned we were on our way to Tikrit, I thought I was really ready. Of course, I wasn’t. I remember on our flight from Germany to Tikrit, I had a moment of panic when the red lights came on and the pilot announced that we were in Iraqi airspace. I thought that this was going to be like D-day. We’d land, drop the ramp, and run off with bullets flying all around us. That’s when the panic set in. I didn’t have any magazines of ammo with me or in my weapon. I tried to calm myself by saying that I could borrow some from one of the other guys. How could I have been so stupid as to not load my weapon.

When we landed, the ramp did go down, but we didn’t take any enemy fire. We all loaded into vans, kind of like airport hotel vans, and as we drove off, I saw the familiar arches of a McDonald’s, a Burger King, and what was unfamiliar, a Green Bean coffee store.

Nothing could have prepared me for the smell though. Diesel fuel and oil, human excrement. Still, the first time I set foot on Iraqi soil, I felt a thrill of pleasure. Wow. I’m here. I’m in combat.

I was still a bit out of it from the Ambien, the long hours of sleep, and the sense of disorientation that comes from climbing into an aircraft in one part of the world and climbing off it in another. We were told that we’d be conducting an operation that night. The briefing was a blur, and then what seemed like minutes later, we did a final check before mounting up. My squad leader came up to me and said, “Everything good to go? Give me a heads-up.”

“Batteries good, roger that.”

He rechecked my lasers, my night vision, my radio, both of us checking and rechecking everything.

Cunningham approached me and nodded. “Don’t worry about it. Everything’s going to be good to go. Should be in and out.”

Next thing I knew I was sitting in the doorway of a Black Hawk helicopter, squeezed between two other squad members, the pilot making sharp turns while flares and the rounds from the miniguns lit up the sky. I was startled by the sound of what seemed to be a chain saw, but it was just the laser array emitting more tracers downrange. When we got to the one-minute mark, I leaned out against my straps and saw this lone building in the middle of all this flatness.

Oh, crap, this is it.

As soon as that thought was complete, the helicopter flared to scrub off all its speed. Like a horse being brought to a sudden halt, the helicopter rose nose first and its ass end settled, and we were in a near hover.

Stepping onto the ground, I thought of the moon. The soil where we’d landed was so fine and dustlike that it reminded me of the images I’d seen as a kid of our astronauts jumping around on the moon, kicking up little dust clouds. I didn’t have time to get lost in space. Everyone around me was moving, seemingly in different directions, guys zigzagging, cutting off angles to the building. I remembered that my team was responsible for covering and cutting off anybody coming out of the right side of the building. I was really shocked by how fast everything was happening. By the time I was able to make sense of what I was seeing, half the team was already making entry into the door of the building. I was still fifty meters away. I noticed the quiet, the absence of the sound of helicopters.

I finally got my stuff together and ran toward the angle I was supposed to cover. As I was moving, I heard a loud pop. At first it didn’t register, but then I realized it was the flash grenades/bangers going off. I tried to picture what was taking place inside the building, but more than that, I was wishing I was inside there. I’d been told that nothing we did in training could really prepare you for the real thing. It was kind of like the difference between a practice and an actual game. Yes, you were told that you should practice with the same intensity you’d bring to the game, but the violence of action they’d talked about didn’t really compare.

What bothered me as I sat loading my weapon before we left was realizing that I might have to fire these live rounds at another human being. You couldn’t really train for that reality. I grew up in a religious family, and obviously, “thou shall not kill” is something we all believed in and put into practice. As I was sitting there on the Black Hawk, all kinds of thoughts were flying around in my head. By the time we’d reached the objective, I was really numb to all those thoughts and feelings and just kind of went on autopilot. That’s what all that training was for—just do the things you’d done dozens of times before, don’t think too much, just respond.

The mission went well. We killed two of the targets and apprehended a third. What I remember most is getting back to base and eating chow and watching CNN. Our mission was a breaking-news headline. I thought of all those people in all those airport terminals waiting for their flights half listening to what was going on in my part of the world.

I’d arrived.

5. A Long Day of Reckoning

By the time I’d gotten to Afghanistan and my deployment as a sniper team leader with Pemberton and the rest of the guys, I’d become used to the idea that we were making headlines. At that point those stories weren’t major ones and I knew that back home a lot of people had grown tired of our involvement in Afghanistan. It had to seem to them that nothing was ever going to change. We didn’t take that attitude at all. I was beginning to see that the Taliban really had their boots on the neck of many of the civilians, that the people were caught up in a big mess not of their own making. Regardless, we had a job to do and a way to put our training to its best use.

Even though we’d had those two days off, I think everybody could sense that this was not going to be a typical deployment. The high operational tempo of those first few days had really set the tone. You could tell that morale was high because of what was going on. Some of the guys in the squad were so hyped up they couldn’t sleep well, so all-night movie marathons went on, and eventually some of the guys were in the computer room watching replays of our missions, looking at the satellite feeds, anticipating what our next objectives might be, and doing their own form of recon. I think that, to a man, we sensed that there’d be another mission coming up and that kept us at a high pitch.

Our forty-man platoon was housed in its own separate area, so we didn’t have much contact with anyone else, but even within that small group, Pemberton and I were the only snipers. It wasn’t like there was a rule that you only hung out with the guys who did the same job or were in your squad, but most of the other Rangers we were with had deployed together. Because you carried out the same role with the same guys, you naturally spent more time with them and got to know them better. To put it in football terms, it was as if you had the offense and the defense, and Pemberton and I were the kicker and the punter. Other guys from those first two units also worked with us as part of the overall special teams unit, but there was only one of him and only one of me. I was back, in a sense, to being that new kid at school.

Pemberton and I had been through training together and we were pretty tight, but we both knew that sitting around together on our off hours was a recipe for disaster. During training we had been with other spotters and snipers who’d been paired off, and in some ways we were like married couples. And if you hang around with enough married people, you probably know someone like Thomas and Albright. After we discovered how much the two of them got into verbal fights with each other, we referred to them as Itchy and Scratchy, after the TV cartoon characters on
The Simpsons
. They shared a room, and they were almost like little kids, brothers, who argued over who got to sleep on which level of the bunk beds.

The walls of our rooms were just sheets of metal, so they weren’t exactly soundproof. The rest of us would be in our room lying in bed and we’d hear Itchy and Scratchy going after each other.

“You suck.”

“No. You suck.”

“You suck worse. Why can’t you give me the right windage?”

“What? You suck at windage. Don’t complain to me about that.”

“Yeah. Well, you suck worse.”

“No. You suck.”

It wasn’t exactly a battle of wits, but still we would laugh and laugh and egg them on.

Next morning, we’d see the two of them at chow eating breakfast, and you could never have guessed that they were pissed at each other the night before. People aren’t consistent, but I was surprised that if you started to say something bad about Itchy to Scratchy, he wouldn’t come to his buddy’s defense; he’d agree with you and add something to top your negative remark.

Pemberton and I never got into those kinds of fights. We could disagree with each other, but it wasn’t a constant thing, and we didn’t provide all kinds of entertainment for the rest of the guys. Maybe that was because we made a conscious effort to get out and get to know the rest of the guys in first platoon. I may have a bit of ADD because I sometimes get bored really easy, and getting to know the other guys was a way to avoid having things get stale in my marriage to Pemberton. Those first couple of days off were our opportunity to start developing bonds with the other guys, and while I can’t say we became a family over the course of those first couple of nights, we did make a start at it.

Our fifth day in, Pemberton and I were out on a little ledge, what we called “the balcony,” of our building, cleaning our weapons, sitting there in shorts and T-shirts. He was telling me about a cousin of his who was big-time into motorcycles and was planning a round-the-world trip on his bike. Some of the snipers from second platoon came over and wanted to talk shop with us. They were pretty open about being envious of us. They hadn’t seen any real action to that point, so they were into talking about tactics. Were we doing holdovers, dialing in our scopes on guys? It was all still pretty new to us, so we were happy to swap stories.

As we were talking, I spotted a couple of guys with long beards and dirt-covered faces and clothes. It was almost like I’d spotted Bigfoot or something. We all knew that these guys existed, but you seldom saw one out and about. I recognized one of them because we’d been in battalion together, and what we called the RECCE guys (Regimental Reconnaissance Division—a special unit within the Rangers) were legendary. This was my first actual sighting of any on that deployment. As much as I thought it was cool to be a sniper, and as much as some guys thought my job was the best, I admired the RECCE guys and what they got to do. I liked the stalking part of my sniper training, building hides and camouflaging myself and all that, and I’d never really gotten to use those skills in actual combat. (That is, I really liked it if I knew there were no spiders involved.) Call me a kid, but who wouldn’t like going around playing a very complicated and very high-stakes game of hide-and-seek? Those guys were gone for days and sometimes weeks living outside the wire in tents and really roughing it. They looked so scraggly partly because it helped them blend into the environment and partly because hygiene wasn’t a big priority given their task.

Davis came up to me and said, “Hey, man. We’ve got to talk.”

Given my inglorious past, I immediately thought,
What did I do wrong?

What I said was, “Sure. What’s going on?”

He led me away from the rest of the group. “Been hearing good things about you. We’ve been tracking this target for quite some time. We can get eyes on him but that’s it.”

I looked over his shoulder and saw all the snipers from the other platoons staring at us.

“He’s been within a thousand maybe. Can you make that? If he’s at that range and in a car moving, can you make the shot?”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to make any promises I couldn’t keep, and I also didn’t want to disappoint him. “That’s a really long shot for my weapon. If I had a Win Mag that would be one thing, but with the .308, not likely. With the Win Mag, yes, but only if the vehicle was coming at me head-on.”

“Got it. We can make it happen.”

He filled me in on the rest of the details. They just wanted me and Pemberton and a few other select guys. They were two weeks away from going back home, and they wanted to wrap up this deployment in a neat little package by neutralizing this one very important target.

“So, like this is a pretty secretive thing, right?”

Davis shrugged. “Somewhat.”

I was pretty excited, to put it mildly. I stood there thinking. A week behind enemy lines? Fully self-supporting with our own food, water, and ammo? Tracking this single target. I was jumping up and down on the inside.
Hell, yeah!

“Well, yeah, sure. We could tag along,” I said.

Later, I relayed the information I’d received to Pemberton, and Caleb and Julian, two other snipers. Pemberton’s eyes lit up and he set down his cleaning supplies and dashed out of the room. He came back with a rucksack and started stuffing it with everything he could find.