The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (18 page)

But, man, I wanted a cigarette so bad. I bummed one from the .50 cal gunner. Once I got down to the filter, I tried to flick the butt out of the hatch. I immediately regretted that decision when I felt the skin of my neck starting to sizzle. Nate started slapping me, trying to put that butt out. Then he doused me with his water bottle.

All I could do was laugh.

“Some day, huh?” my personal fireman said.

Before I could answer, I heard enemy rounds pinging off the Humvee.

“It ain’t over yet,” I said, thinking that now I was going to have to bum some ammo off these guys.

7. A Whole ’Nother Danger

As painful as it had been to be crammed into that Humvee, I was grateful that we were no longer being shot at. I’d been under fire before, but our firefights seldom lasted very long and we so frequently outgunned our opponents that the action was over in a matter of minutes. July 10, 2009, was by far the longest day of my life and the longest firefight I’d ever been involved in. I didn’t want to ever come close to breaking that record.

When we rejoined our platoon, we took our captives and separated them from one another. After a very short debrief, I was assigned to oversee one of the prisoners. Our emotions were still running high as the rest of the guys talked about what had just happened. It was like we had to keep telling ourselves the stories over and over again to make sense of what had taken place. One of the craziest things that I saw, and what really shocked me, was that everybody on the operation had multiple bullet holes through their clothing. Our body armor had done its thing and we didn’t even feel the impacts. Maybe that had to do with adrenaline pumping as well. Things got so intense during the fighting that our combat cameraman even picked up a weapon, something, as a general rule, they don’t do. Even though I hadn’t really slept more than a few minutes, maybe an hour or so total, over the course of those ninety-six or so hours, I was still too jazzed to sleep.

Finally, though, when we were waiting for transport via Chinooks, I drifted off. Just as soon as I nodded off, though, I heard a loud crack go past my ear. I immediately jumped up, put on my rucksack and stood there looking around, surveying the scene. All I saw was the rest of the guys just sitting there as calm as could be. In my head, bullets were still flying; in reality they weren’t.

Our team of six was going to fly back separately. Second platoon was going to return to FOB Bastion. We’d formed a bond with all those guys, but now they were leaving, and in a short time they were going back home. We shook hands and congratulated each other, but you could tell that reality was starting to set in and to set in hard. Kopp was seriously wounded. Several guys were wounded. For a while, none of us wanted to be alone with our thoughts, but now, as the Chinook that was to take us back to our compound was landing, it was like the truth was setting in.

On the flight back, I thought of Kopp, hoped that somehow he was going to be okay. I also thought of another guy we all knew back in sniper section. Santiago was a little Hispanic guy who we all really liked. He was only five foot four or five inches tall, but he was the dad of the entire sniper section. He was older than all of us, had done his time in the navy and then as a Chicago policeman. In his thirties, he was the lowest-ranked guy, but you would have never known that considering how much we all looked up to him. He was a sniper/spotter, but he didn’t have the same kind of training background as most of the guys. One of the snipers, Harris, met Santiago, liked him, knew that he was a squared-away guy and chose him to be a sniper.

Santiago worked his butt off. I thought that getting to work every morning between five-thirty and six was a killer, but Santiago would show up at three or four. He’d come in before anyone else got there and take care of almost all of our administrative work. None of us wanted to deal with paperwork, and Santiago knew that, so he took it on for the rest of us. He’d also stay late, and we’d tell him to get out of there too, but he’d stay and do even more tasks for us, like checking and lubing the ladders and helping maintain a lot of the other gear.

I can’t say that we took advantage of him though. He was trying to catch up on some training, so he’d ask us for help. Once, after everybody else was gone, he walked outside with me and asked me to help him scale a building. This was free-climbing. I don’t really know why, maybe because I had to do so much work at heights, but my fear of them was mostly gone. I loved free-climbing. To me, it was like a chess match, figuring out the best foot- and handholds.

We were all pretty tight in the unit and we’d established an informal chain of command in case one of us got killed or seriously wounded. We called it our secret red alert. We’d be as factual as possible and tell all the wives what had gone down. That way, they could be there for the other women who were hurting. We knew that we could rely on each other, and so could they. When any of the guys in the platoon got hurt, we’d all get together. Sometimes we’d all just sit and watch the video footage. Somehow seeing how it happened made us feel better. That was because what we saw was real and not some image that we had mixed up in our minds.

For me, watching the live video feeds served another purpose. Pemberton and I always wanted to be out there helping when we saw our guys in any kind of trouble. We’d get flown in and try to take care of business as best we could. When you’re in battalion for a long time, those bonds are strong. A lot of us came into battalion at the same time, so we grew up together. A lot of the guys who’d seen early deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan had decided they’d had enough and retired. Some of the Rangers opted out by going on to Green Beret or Delta Force as well. The turnover was pretty significant so even though I was fairly young in terms of age, I was fairly senior in terms of years.

I didn’t become a sniper team leader right away. I’d failed my first exam and I needed to pass in order to become an E5—to be honest I just didn’t put in the study time needed. I was going through four different sniper schools and that ate up most of my study time. The guys at the board must have seen that, and they allowed me to take the test again. Right before my deployment in 2009, I was named team leader.

I didn’t ever really think too much about whether or not I deserved it. I felt like I had the experience in the field but I know that I didn’t know a whole lot about leadership. That’s the thing though. When you know you don’t know something, and you don’t act like you know it, people respect you. In some ways it was like being a coach for a professional team. If you’ve played the game at the pro level, the guys on the team automatically give you a pass—at least for a little while. After all, you’d become a Ranger and that was worth some respect up front. It was weird for me being only twenty-two and having to lead guys who were older than me. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t so strict about using rank and all that.

When the six of us who’d gone out on that original recon mission returned, we came home to something I didn’t expect. Everybody was out near our briefing room, fully kitted out ready to go out on an operation. Frick, one of the machine gunners and a guy who looked like he’d taken a leave of absence from his NFL team where he was a star linebacker, was the first guy to walk up to us.

We bumped fists and I asked him, “What’s going on? You got a mission?”

“Did have, but you guys made it back.”

“What do you mean?”

“Irv, we were coming out to get you guys. All the shit you were in, we couldn’t just sit here watching it go down.”

It seemed like at that point nearly everybody in the platoon came up and said something, patted us on the shoulder, or did something to acknowledge what we’d been through. To a man they talked about how watching the drone imagery was one of the coolest things they’d seen.

Benson, a college guy who’d walked away from a Wall Street job, put it best. “All those images needed was a soundtrack and I was back in the multiplex. I was willing to order popcorn for the whole platoon. That was insane. Seeing you guys come out of those blue doors and run through all that gunfire, that was unbelievable, Francis Ford Coppola shit.”

Everybody was happy we’d made it out and, as had happened before, some of the guys expressed their jealousy. As bad as things were, as dangerous as it had all been, they wanted to be in on it. That’s part of the mentality, wanting to prove yourself under fire. You spent all those hours undergoing exhausting training, and when you don’t get to see how you’d perform under the pressure of the real thing, jealousy is a genuine and understandable response. Having gone through that longest day, I wouldn’t have wished that experience on my own worst enemy. I tried to tell a few guys that, but I don’t think they really got it. Maybe they thought I was trying to build it up into something even more horrible than it was, but there were multiple times when I was scared out of my mind. I couldn’t really tell them that, or tell them about the feelings of just wanting it all to be over, but those moments were real.

I tried not to think too much about the Chechen, but in the days that followed I was still haunted by him. It’s one thing to come under fire. That’s a random act of violence and is what most of war is about. It’s just some guy on their side firing at you because your guys are firing at him. What I experienced was personal. Seeing sniper action from the other side made me realize how calculating the act was. Though neither of us had gone out there that day knowing that we’d be targets ourselves, that was how it had played out—for me especially. Lots of people think of war as being between armies and governments or between this platoon and that unit, but it really does sometimes come down to one guy with a gun and another guy with a gun.

Shredding a location with a machine gun is one thing. Firing artillery rounds or dropping bombs on a position is another. I’d been a deliverer of death: the Reaper who came and collected lives. Being the target of someone else’s reaping wasn’t something I’d ever even considered before that day. We’d trained to respond to sniper attacks, but that always felt like a remote, beyond-worst-case-scenario contingency, something like quadratic equations you’d learn in school, something with no application in your real life.

We all, I think, tried to make death an abstract reality. That’s a contradiction, but we knew it was out there, kind of like a tornado or some other freakish part of nature that was no use spending too much time thinking about. Living in Maryland, we didn’t even do tornado drills as school kids, the chances of one churning up were that remote. So what I guess I was left with was thunderstorms and the possibility of being struck by lightning, and how rare was that? Even though I was in the stormiest place in the war, I still felt like death was random. Now I started wondering if maybe I was on the enemy’s radar, a recognizable threat that needed to be taken out.

I had another more immediate concern. I smelled like death, that ammonia smell that comes from not having showered for a week. The rest of the guys were preparing to stand down for the night, and Pemberton and I were standing there like a couple of zombies. Our platoon sergeant, Casey, came up to us and he put his hands on us.

“I don’t want to get too close and catch whatever funk it is you got.”

We all laughed.

“We were worried about you guys. Helluva day out there. You guys showed some balls though. Proud of you. Ranger proud.”

Pemberton and I mumbled our thanks.

“But seriously, man, you guys smell like Mrs. Satan’s vagina. Get a shower.”

“Roger that.”

Pemberton and I shuffled off to our rooms. We shrugged off our packs and left our weapons in a storage room. We stripped in the hallway, not wanting to bring our clothes and our smell into our rooms. The fluorescent lights in the hallway always messed with my vision, but in my sleep-deprived state, everything seemed liquid and wavering as I made my way to the shower room. I can’t express what that shower felt like. Pemberton and I didn’t talk at all. I know we found comfort in being together, and having gone through that experience together applied more cement to our bond. At one point, standing with my head down and the water beating down on my neck and shoulders, I was shaking uncontrollably. At first I thought maybe the hot water had run out, but then I realized it was my body shutting down or signaling me in some way that it had had enough.

I racked out for eighteen hours, interrupted only by a couple of guys knocking on the door to deliver some chow. I was so tired an empty Gatorade bottle became my urinal. I was hurting down to my bones, and the last time I’d felt that kind of muscle and mental fatigue was in Ranger school. Pemberton and I were stood down for three days to allow us to recuperate. Somewhere somebody had secured two lawn chairs and they donated them to our cause. We sat up there on our balcony cleaning all our gear and prepping for our next operation.

Fortunately for us, there was a bit of a lull. That serious engagement had taken place on July 10 of 2009. I was so out of it at the time, you could have told me that it had taken place on Thanksgiving Day. I remember the next important date very well, and I wish I didn’t.

Pemberton and I were baking on the balcony, getting a little bit of fresh air after too many hours in the air-conditioning. Platoon Sergeant Casey walked up. I didn’t know Casey all that well, except that this was going to be his last deployment. He was a good guy, not too gung ho or by the book and not so fast and loose that you didn’t really respect him. Like me, he was from a military family, from somewhere out west. He had the habit, like a gunslinger out of the old west, of squinting whenever he spoke, even indoors. This time, I noticed no sign of his trademark expression.

The skin of his face hung slack. “I thought you guys would want to know. Kopp. He didn’t make it.”

Kopp had been airlifted out of Afghanistan and on to Germany and then home to the U.S. It had been eight days, and though it wasn’t completely a case of out of sight out of mind, with each day that passed without any news of him, we assumed that he was recovering. For a few moments, I had that same feeling I’d had while being pinned down in that ditch by the Chechen. I tried to shift mental and emotional positions, but always came up hurting.