The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (8 page)

I also think that part of what contributed to that jump accident was my eagerness to deploy for the first time. I’d wanted to be a soldier for so long and the initial training phases seemed to drag on for so long. I enjoyed learning as much as I did, but I was tired of practicing all the time—I wanted to be doing it for real.

I can’t say that there was a single incident that transformed me from fearful to eager. Over time, doing all the training, receiving guidance from fellow soldiers and higher-ups made me more and more certain that I was doing what I wanted and was meant to do. I laugh now thinking of it, but when I went to the army recruiting station, I asked for a twenty-year contract.

The recruiter looked at me and said, “I’m impressed by your willingness to commit, but you should think about that for a bit. Twenty years is a very long time.”

“I know that, but I’m sure that I’ll be good to go for all that time.”

Eventually he talked me down a bit. Quite a bit, actually. I signed for a guaranteed six and a half years. I told my recruiter that it didn’t matter, I was going to do the full twenty anyway.

I’m sure that if you talked to the men and women who work in those recruitment positions, they’ll have plenty of other stories about overeager and gung-ho types like me. Reality sets in quickly, and some people it frightens away and other people it hardens to the task at hand. Sometimes hardness makes you brittle and more likely to crack.

Sometimes what you need is somebody to help you push through to find out that the limits you thought you had were just a little beyond your expectations of yourself. Sometimes you fall short of what you thought you were capable of, but then someone gives you the push you need to accept that limitations are temporary things.

My leg issues—the stress fractures—almost proved to be too much for me. The last evolution in basic was an FTX or field exercise. A guy by the name of Lloyd came to my aid and helped me on the last bit of the fourteen-mile road march. He knew I was struggling and took some of the stuff out of my rucksack and carried it the rest of the way to the finish line. In some ways, I was like this bike we had back in the neighborhood. We lived on a cul-de-sac and we used to race this bike around that circle. It was the fastest bike out there it seemed like, no matter who was riding it. But it didn’t have brakes. A couple of buddies from the street got hit while riding Speedy Gonzales because they couldn’t slow down when a car was coming. I guess that was kind of what I was like, only I got lucky and never got hit.

I was also fortunate that I struck up a relationship with a guy named Mark Cunningham. When I was still waiting for my first overseas deployment, he was already into his second and then third tour in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was only a year older than I was, but he was a pretty seasoned veteran in terms of his experience. I had taken advantage of my squad leader’s experience and asked all kinds of questions about what to expect and what it was like over there. However, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome with him, so to speak, and Cunningham always seemed fine with talking to me. He was from Tennessee, and a lot of times when guys told me they were from someplace other than the Northeast, I had a hard time picturing where that was. He was a good guy, had an ever-present dip of Copenhagen behind his lip, and was always patient with me.

What I knew about the war was what I’d seen on CNN or wherever. I was thinking we’d go over there and live in tents. I told the guys that and they all laughed at me. Cunningham always set me straight. He’d give me crap, but at least he’d laugh and tell me it was okay to ask and to not know things. Our informal briefings and debriefings helped me prepare for what really was unimaginable in so many ways.

That’s not to say that all my various training schools and activities were horrible. I loved firing the rocket launchers. Getting qualified on them was fun. By the time I did so, I’d been in the army for a couple of years. I’d also gained a bunch of weight. Mom was a great cook but with four mouths to feed and not a whole lot of income, things got spread pretty thin. I was one of those guys in basic and after who seldom complained about the chow. It was a good thing I put on those twenty to twenty-five pounds, because the recoils of the 203 and M240B were so powerful, it would have bucked that skinnier me back into basic.

I never got to fire them in actual combat, but spending all day on the range watching those things spiral and twist downrange until they impacted was about as relaxing as anything I ever did. Seeing those eighteen-wheeler trucks roll up with thousands and thousands of rounds of ammo ready to be offloaded and fired was like Christmas Day for me.

Still, I made my share of mistakes early on and even later. Those bumps in the road were good to experience, even when one of those bumps was an M1-Abrams reinforcement tank of ours that I nearly fired on mistakenly during my first deployment in Iraq.

*   *   *

I guess you can say that trusting my gut wasn’t something that came natural to me. But in this case, on that third night operation, maybe if I did trust my gut, I’d have thought to make sure that Pemberton and his weapon were truly squared away.

Even though we only had those two missions under our belt, things had gone so smoothly everybody’s morale seemed to be up. Just walking around our area within the compound, you could sense that people were really into it in a different way. It’s hard to say exactly how things were different, but people seemed to be moving at a different pace for one thing. It was like everybody had a designated time and location in mind. Instead of just killing time, we were moving around knowing that something was going to be up that night and we’d better be prepared for it.

*   *   *

Even in my earlier deployments, before becoming a sniper team leader, I’d gotten into the habit of hanging back when it was time to load up. That wasn’t because I didn’t like flying in the helicopters. Instead, it was a part of my desire to get out there. If I hung back on load-up, that meant I was going to be among the first out when we landed. I wasn’t troubled by visions of us being ambushed and trapped inside that fuel-filled bird. I just knew that given my role as a sniper attached to this unit, if anything was going to go down early on, I wanted to be out there firing as close to on point as I could be. With our night-vision and thermal-imaging scopes, we were the eyes of the platoon, and there was no sense in having them be in the back of our heads—let alone the back of the bird.

Besides, I liked riding along with the dog and the dog handler. If we were the eyes of the platoon, those guys were the nose and whatever other sense it is that those dogs possess that tips them off that something could potentially go upside down before we even had a clue. Something in my gut told me that as by the book as this operation seemed during our briefing, something was going to disrupt those plans. I trusted my instincts as much as I trusted the animal’s.

Forty-five minutes later, we touched down and offloaded. My earlier feelings about this not being a run-of-the-mill operation were confirmed. As soon as my feet hit the ground, I noticed two things. First, the full moon painted every bit of the location in a kind of primer-gray light. Our night-vision gear was going to be even more effective as a result. Second, we weren’t going to be sneaking up on anybody. For the first time in my four deployments, the enemy was firing tracer rounds at us. Their green glow against the ash-gray backdrop reminded me of flickering Christmas lights. It was a surreal scene to have what seemed the entire galaxy above us bathing us in light while those tracers arced and flared in the distance.

We formed up and set off with the dog Bruno and his handler, Sergeant Val, on point. About a click or so in, we came on another small village, and we could make out a circle of bodies lying outside. We could hear some heavy breathing and snoring and saw a few of the bodies rising and falling as they breathed in their sleep. I felt bad for Sergeant Val and even worse for Bruno. Bruno was trained to go after the bad guys and bite them to bring them under control, and his every instinct and training was telling him to seek and bite. Collectively, we made our way through the sleepers, figuring that the direct route was best. We entered the village marketplace. Bazaar was a good name for that location since I was always freaked out about moving along and through them at night. The small buildings all had garage door–like entrances, and they were recessed just enough to resemble cave entrances, providing who knows who with a good hiding place.

Besides Taliban fighters, the doorways could also be hiding IEDs. The dog led the way, his tail high and twitching, his snout high and sniffing. Eventually, I lost sight of him. The first and second squads moved ahead of Pemberton and me to do the clearing.

We had gone about thirty-five of the fifty meters we had to navigate to reach our destination when a green tracer round appeared ahead of me. I ducked and heard it sizzle past, like a bottle rocket the kids in the neighborhood used to fire at one another. It seems like a cliché to say this, but I saw all this happening in slow motion—the light wobbling as it fireballed toward me, giving off sparks of light. It was almost pretty the way it lit up the gray night. Fortunately, my brain wasn’t working in slo-mo, and I dropped to one knee and a few more tracers went over my head. Pemberton was just behind and flanking me and we both dropped to our bellies.

In our earpieces, we were getting transmissions from the AC-130 gunships patrolling above us. Ignoring their words for a moment, I told Pemberton, “Let’s go,” and we low-crawled. By this time, the rest of the guys in the platoon had opened fire; the Taliban’s tracers were originating from a rooftop between one hundred fifty and two hundred meters away.

We continued our low crawl to the front of the formation. The rest of the guys were laying down a lot of lead, but they weren’t hitting any of the targets. From experience, I knew that using a laser and an M4, trying to hit targets that were popping up just barely high enough that their eyeballs were visible for only an instant was going to make for a very difficult shot. Shortly after that, we discovered that Pemberton’s gun wasn’t going to be able to get it done either. I thought for a few seconds and then spoke to Mike.

“Put your flood on the target and I’ll turn mine off.”

“Roger that.”

I knew I needed illumination, but I didn’t need to have my scope refracting and reflecting all that light directly back into my eye. With him flooding from a different angle, I should have been able to avoid that problem.

When Pemberton’s light went on, I saw a circle of light nearly six feet around tracing the perimeter of the rooftop ledge. Through my scope I saw what I was hoping to see—the whites of the Taliban guys’ eyes glowing in the dark. If you’ve ever been near a dog and seen how a light reflects off their eyes, then you can imagine to some extent what I was seeing. As I was looking, the white-eye glow went off and on as the men blinked.

They stopped firing at us. Thirty seconds to a minute passed. Blinking and silence.

“Hold the light right there. I’m going to take that guy out first.”

“Roger that.”

“I’m going to keep moving to the right and work my way from left to right.”

“Got it.”

Pemberton knew what to do. As I fired each round, he was going to move the light along the row of eyeballs.

I squeezed the trigger and saw a large puff of smoke through my scope. Low. I hit the wall and not the dude.

I reached up on my elevation and went up two clicks on the gun, two minutes. That way I had given myself a bit of leeway. Either I was going to hit the very top of his head and crease his skull or hit him right between the eyes. I reset the trigger and felt and heard the little click. I wanted to reduce the pull. That was crucial for such a precise shot, particularly with the two-stage trigger my weapon employed.

An instant after I squeezed the trigger, I saw the target’s eyes roll back just as his head first tilted straight back and then plunged forward like his head was on a spring.

I thought I’d hit him, but it was only when I heard a splash on the ground, what sounded like a chunky liquid being spilled, that I was more or less certain the round had found its mark. Nearly simultaneously with the sound, I saw Pemberton moving to my left as he brought his floodlight onto the second of the four men in line. That next target ducked below the ledge. For the next few seconds, I was reminded of the Whac-A-Mole game at Chuck E. Cheese’s as the three remaining heads popped up at irregular intervals and locations.

Each time a head came up, I fired another round, taking that guy out. After the second, I could hear a few of our guys on comms laughing.

“You’re getting them, Irv!” Lindley said. “This is un-f’ing-real!” I recognized Lindley by his signature expression.

I was gaining confidence and feeling pretty good about getting these guys. They’d been making our lives miserable for a while. Now it was our time to return the favor.

After the third guy had gone down, I fired another round, hoping to end things, but I missed. I could make out a figure on all fours crawling away from us, just a hairline of his lower back visible above the wall. No way I could make that shot. No way I wanted that guy to get away.

Torres was positioned to Pemberton’s left, the barrel of his grenade launcher barely poking above his helmet. He was maybe six feet away from me.

“Torres, dude, you’ve got to launch one of those directly behind the building. Let him know that he’s got no place to run.”

Torres nodded and brought the weapon into firing position. Before I could tell him to wait, I felt concussive pressure stuffing my ears. Every sound went muffled and it felt like someone had taken a huge pair of pliers to my head.

I was pissed, but I knew that it was my own fault. No one had told me to not wear my ear protection. That was my choice and now I was paying for it. I was notorious for not using those foam earplugs because they were a distraction when I was concentrating on a target.

I instantly felt bad for jumping Torres’s ass, but I couldn’t take the words back. We still had to eliminate that target, and I had no time to answer Torres’s puzzled look.