The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (16 page)

“Are you kidding me?”

“This is bullshit.”

All the guys were upset, but this was one of those situations. We could call in air support, and with a big-deal scenario like we were dealing with, we could get just about anything we needed, a B-2, an F-16 or F-15, anything at all. At least that was what I thought. One of the pilots let us know the deal.

“We cannot accept anything less than point one collateral damage. We will not be able to assist. Repeat. No assist.”

The situation had gone from bad to stupid bad in that instant.

Simultaneously, the four RECCE guys with working radios were hammering the chain of command and the pilots, cursing them out and letting them know they had no idea how bad this situation was.

“We are in the middle of an open field. Guys are about to start dying.”

My radio kicked back in for a few moments, and I heard, “He’s hit. He’s hit. Sniper from platoon is hit.”

I didn’t know Walkens all that well, but anytime a guy is hit you’re pissed off. Fortunately, he was struck in the foot and he was being tended to and assisted out of there. The guy was pretty salty and had been with the platoon for years; I knew that if he’d taken one, given his position, the rest of us were in deep shit.

Finally, after I jumped on comms and just pleaded our case for something, the pilots agreed to do a show of force. They were going to do a relatively low-altitude flyover and hopefully scare the crap out of those other guys with flares. I wasn’t happy about that and told the team leader to just drop the bombs on us. We still had guys sprawled on the ground all around us. I could hear guys screaming, the sound of the enemy running nearby, and I knew we couldn’t last much longer. I had no idea how much time had elapsed, but when I took a quick look at my watch, we’d been pinned down for nearly two hours.

I tried to skirmish my way up to Pemberton’s position so that we could start to take on targets. I wasn’t doing anybody any good being hunkered down in that hole. Simultaneously, our RECCE team leader rolled into the hole. I came up firing and Pemberton joined in, wearing out that building and the window we suspected the sniper fire was coming from. I told Pemberton to crank off an entire magazine, five rounds, at the window as fast as he could.

He did as I asked. While he was firing, on the fourth round, I spotted a little bit of movement in the window; the curtain the sniper used shook as the bullet passed through it. Of course, he wasn’t at the window. He was somewhere back in the room firing through a small hole in the wall beneath the windowsill, doing something we called loop hold shooting. That was a tactic that had been used since the start of the war, and it was nearly impossible to counter. There was no way I could fit a round into a small space like that and hit anybody at that distance. At a hundred, two hundred, maybe three hundred meters, I had a decent chance.

Rounds kept coming in and with that sinking feeling that came with my recognition that we weren’t going to be able to get him, I was just shouting blindly into my radio asking for anyone to come to our position to assist. The sniper fire had tailed off for a few minutes, and I figured he was either reloading or changing position. Didn’t matter. We started to come under heavy fire again, the same 360-degree deal we’d dealt with at the start.

“Irv! Irv! I’ve got two guys running danger close at ten o’clock.” Pemberton’s voice sounded as if it was crackled with static as the sound of enemy fire snapped overhead.

“Shoot. Shoot. Shoot,” was all I could manage. Then I thought I was hallucinating again. Something long and thin and black punctured the sky and came screaming overhead about five hundred feet off the ground. The shape didn’t register at first, and I was thinking, UFO. It wasn’t but it was close. A B-2 Stealth Bomber, with flares trailing off it, came through. It confused me, but it didn’t scare me, and I knew it didn’t scare our opponents. The firing never let up.

Over the comms I heard our team leader asking for bombs and the same response about point one percent collateral damage. It was starting to get comic except for the message being delivered:
We don’t need a show of force. We need bombs. Guys are dying out here. Drop the bombs on us!

I don’t know what kind of damage the five hundred-pound bombs would have done to the Taliban or to us, but it didn’t really matter. I wanted this thing to be over, however it ended. If nothing else, that flyover discouraged the runners, who were now veering away at six o’clock. I couldn’t move at all—if I did I was sure I was going to get nailed—but Pemberton had angled his rifle toward them. The sniper was keened in on me and was using another tactic to take me on. He’d clearly figured out who I was and now I was his priority target. When you’re in the situation the Chechen was in, you had a kind of checklist to go down: sniper, communications guy, medics, and so on down the line.

“One hundred meters and closing, “Pemberton said.

“How fast?”

“Jogging.”

“What angle?”

“Thirty-five”

“Aim .5 mils in front of them. Hold .5 right and send it.”

I heard his rifle emit its big boom.

“Missed.”

“Where?”

“In front.”

“Go to .2. Decrease to .2.”

“Got one.”

Then a moment later, Pemberton added, “I think.”

“They’re just standing there. Checking to see where the shot came from,” McDonald added. I could see him. He’d rolled over onto his back and he was bridging his neck to look backward. “Oh, yeah, you got him.”

“How can you tell?” Pemberton sounded pissed off.

“Dude’s entire right side is red. That ain’t normal.”

We all laughed.

Pemberton fired again. “Jesus Christ on two sticks,” he muttered.

“Dude,” I said, “I could have hit that guy with a rock.” I hoped that would ease some of the tension.

The wounded guy still hadn’t gone down, and he and his buddy were walking back toward the village.

McDonald kept going with his upside-down play-by-play describing how the wounded man started staggering and his comrade took off his turban and put a tourniquet around the dude’s shoulder. Pemberton and I crawled back into the hole on top of Derek. It took a few seconds for us to disentangle.

Intermittently I could still hear the transmissions indicating that we weren’t going to get any assist. The team leader yelled to us and said, “I have one grenade and one smoke grenade. I can either pop smoke and we try to bound our way out or we can take this grenade and hug it.”

At that moment, I think we were all feeling the same way. I could hear it in the voices of the guys over the radios and see it in the vacant looks I got from Pemberton and Derek. This was it. We were going to die. The Taliban forces were pinching in. Either we give them a fight or we hug the grenade.

Pemberton’s face was inches from mine. I nodded at him, and we both smiled, wordlessly letting each other know how we felt. We bumped fists, and I felt this knot in my throat choking me.

Pemberton’s expression hardened and he stared at me, as bullets smacked nearby.

“No, man. Fuck that. We’re getting out of here. No way I’m facing your wife and tellin’ her you died. I’m scared of her. She’d kick my ass, dude, and I can’t let that happen.”

I shrugged and said, “Roger that, man.”

We formulated a plan. We’d use the smoke grenade as cover for us as we bounded back toward the road and a ditch that ran alongside it at our six. We’d do that in pairs. Pemberton and I would be the last to go, so that we could continue to lay down some precision cover fire.

Just before we set the plan in motion, I did up the chinstrap of my helmet. Normally, I used to do what I called the “John Wayne” because I didn’t like how the chinstrap irritated my skin. I was waiting for the countdown to when we’d pop smoke when I saw some movement over my left shoulder. I could see a small group of Rangers coming toward our position. I was able to identify one of them because of his football running style—Benjamin Kopp. He was a buddy of mine and the machine gun team leader. He was joined by a few other guys who were heavily armed with .48s and M4s. I was looking at them and had another out-of-body experience.

I watched as they came gliding in, kind of like geese in formation, and did a perfect baseball-slide landing simultaneously and took up a position. Above the sound of all the other gunfire, I could hear those machine guns pounding away. They were interlocking sectors of fire and laying waste to anything and everything in that zone, traversing those guns six inches off the ground.

I sat there listening to that sweet zinging song as the rounds passed right over our heads. I remembered as a kid we’d toss rocks at the high-tension power lines that ran through an easement in our neighborhood, and that sound like an electric guitar’s D string being plucked buzzing in our bellies.

They were putting down so much gunfire, as we lay there pressed to the earth, I felt that same vibration coming up out of the ground.

“Hell, yeah!”

“Get some!”

Derek threw the smoke grenade, but of course, the wind was against us, and it didn’t do much to cover our bound back. Pemberton and I waited a bit.

“Let’s do this, man.”

We bumped fists and took off, running our zigzag pattern as fast as our tired legs could go. I had the sensation that I was like those kids in
E.T.
I felt like my feet weren’t even touching the ground and I was rising up. Usually, with all the irrigation ditches, the rocks, and everything else, I’m pretty much a stumble-freak and fall down. Pemberton was right behind me, running half hunched over, and we slid into that ditch, me doing my best imitation of Troy Aikman sliding for a first down.

Members of the second platoon were in that ditch with us, and while I was thanking them for saving our asses, they were telling us about the grenade-tossing party they had going on.

“Dudes were picking ours up and tossing them back at us. It was nuts.”

“Got to the point, we’d toss them a few feet in front of our position and hope like hell we didn’t get blown up.”

I could barely talk. My cheeks felt glued to my teeth and my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

I barely managed to squeak a request for water. I drank half the bottle and tossed the rest to Pemberton. After that, I told the guys that we needed to pick it up and get to a safe house. We formed up with Pemberton and me at the rear. Suddenly it went all quiet.

As the movement began, I saw out of my peripheral vision a man in white clothing peeking from behind a corner of a nearby hut. I called Pemberton over to me and laid my rifle on his shoulder. I told him to inhale and then exhale, timing my breaths with his, making sure that I could compensate for the rising and falling of the gun’s barrel. As soon as my eye focused on the scope reticule, the man popped out pointing an AK-47 barrel in our direction. I squeezed the trigger immediately as the center of my crosshairs landed on his chest. His body crumpled under his dead weight, partially exposing his head from the corner of the building, with the AK-47 lying underneath him. Pemberton jumped when I fired, and who could blame him with my weapon being so close to his ear.

“Got him, dude. Let’s go.”

We made our way to the front by doing something stupid. We took a route right up against the tree line. All it did was silhouette us against that backdrop. I didn’t know what the Chechen was up to, but I’d given him a huge opportunity. I guess we were more interested in speed than safety at that point, so I relied on the old geometry lesson about the shortest distance between two points. I wanted to get over to help the guys in second platoon since they’d bailed us out. Gunfire, from maybe fifty meters away, was coming in on us. Another ambush. We made a left turn and I could see, all along my left side, heads popping out of the ground. Vietnam. These guys had freakin’ fighting tunnels.

To our right was a ditch, and I cartwheeled headfirst into the muddy water. I came up spluttering in the chest-deep water, while all around me guys were returning fire helter-skelter in the direction we thought the shots had come in from. I put my rifle up on the embankment and looked through the scope. It was coated with mud, I was dripping wet, and now, my intermittent radio was completely dead due to drowning. I cleaned the sight as best I could and began scanning.

I heard the report of a rifle and a snapping sound right next to me. I thought whoever was next to me was way too close, but I looked over, no one was there. The sounds coming from my left were the supersonic snaps passing close to my ear and impacting the mud wall behind me. I now knew for sure the Chechen was still out there, and as I moved to my right, each of his shots grew closer and closer to hitting me.

Firing off another shot and hitting an enemy Taliban in the face, I looked back to my left and prepared to move away from my targeted location. I saw Kopp, half in and half out of the ditch, his right foot up on the embankment, and he was firing away. I heard another strange sound, but not the sound of a bullet snapping overhead; this was a different sound, like someone slapping a ruler against a pillow. That was followed by a loud scream. Kopp, one of the men who came in to save us just a few minutes ago, had been struck in the thigh. A stream of blood sprayed out from his leg and into the water. He was screaming that he was hit and cursing. A couple of guys dove on top of him and then began applying pressure on his wound. Blood quickly filled the stagnant water that we were in, turning the water a dark, reddish brown. Pemberton and I and a few M4 and machine gunners raised ourselves out of the water and emptied our magazines on the partially obscured enemy.

While we were engaging, one of our medics, Melvin, a big black guy, ran under heavy incoming fire and through waist-deep water to reach Kopp. Upon reaching him, Melvin tossed his medical bag into the water, opened it and proceeded to provide care. I was in complete awe watching the medic go to work with his medical bag floating in the ravine and bullets impacting all around him.

We had to get the hell out of there. I turned around and the platoon leader (PL) was behind me. I shouted, “Do you want us to move up and secure your entry to the Alamo?” I was referring to the name of the safe house. He couldn’t hear me, so I pulled him close. Then, I felt what seemed to be water smack the side of my face.