The Reaper Read online

  We were competitive, of course, but early on it became clear why I was the sniper and he was the spotter. I’d always kid him about it, and he didn’t really like it, but the man had some issues of his own. Three hundred of them to be precise. For some reason, when we were training and out on the range, Pemberton could not hit a target that was three hundred meters away. He could nail something at a grand (one thousand meters) and every other distance with some accuracy, but the three hundred seemed to throw him off big-time. I can’t really blame his choice of weapon; after all, other guys used the Win Mag very, very effectively at that distance and others. To its credit, the Win Mag does shoot really tight groups, but for me, it was just too slow. I felt it was a nuisance to have to manually load it and run the bolt back and forth. I figured that there were going to be a lot of times when we’d have to go after multiple targets. Manually racking that bolt every time was going to give the bad guys enough time to go to ground. I wanted to be able to neutralize targets before they knew what hit them.

  Even if it wasn’t for that issue he had, he knew that I was going to be the primary shooter. We both knew that, regardless of rank, I was the more accurate shot. He had his relationship with his weapon and I had mine. That might sound strange to someone who’s never been a sniper or a serious hunter or target marksman, but our guns are so important to us. I wasn’t the only one who had named his gun, but I might have been a little more over the top about care and maintenance of my weapon than most. I was very protective of her, and I didn’t like anybody messing around with it behind my back. To make sure they hadn’t, and I did this as we were flying to our insertion point, I inspected her again. I made sure that the scope ring was exactly as I left it. I also checked the stock to see if the spot of gun grease I’d put there was still intact. If it wasn’t I knew somebody’d touched it. I hated people touching her.

  A lot like baseball players with their bats, a sniper and his weapon have a way of communicating. You develop a kind of ritual in the way that you handle it and treat it. You take care of it and it will take care of you. Of course, war is no game, and the consequences are more often than not deadly.

  The last few minutes to the insertion point, I tried to just empty my mind. I was successful in eliminating any thoughts of home. When I felt us make contact with the ground and we wobbled a bit, it was like someone had given me smelling salts. I was very clear-minded and felt none of the fatigue that I expected I might. Our walk up to the objective was uneventful. When we got to the point where we split off so the assault team could do their thing, I was feeling hesitant. Part of that was due to the fact that even though I’d seen the topographical maps and the satellite images, everything looked slightly different from what I’d pictured. Night vision contributed to that a bit, but having boots on the ground and an eye-level perspective was very different from the intel we used. I wasn’t able to identify any of the features that I thought might distinguish one area from another, one building from another. To be honest, at the break-off point, I had no real idea at all where I was and where I was supposed to position myself.

  I hope I don’t screw this up, I thought. Then I checked myself and told myself to take a deep breath and play it cool. That seemed to help. I found the building Pemberton and I were supposed to utilize as a point from which we could cover the assaulters. Over the comms, I could hear the team members chatter and then the sound of explosives and the rattle of a metal gate.

  I looked at Pemberton, my eyes wide to indicate my surprise.

  “That was fast.”

  We hadn’t even gotten our ladder secure.

  A moment later, we heard that the target was secured. They’d snatched him up with no problem and were in the process of walking him out. Better to take them that way and get some intel off them than to neutralize them.

  We got word from the platoon leader that we were still needed. We were so far ahead of schedule at that point that they were going to radio the helicopters to extract us. The ETA was about fifteen minutes. Pemberton took the ladder off his pack, and a few moments later, we were positioned on the flat roof of one of the houses. The building didn’t have a solid roof, just a few boards and slim tree trunks balanced between the exterior walls in a loose weave. The sun was starting to come up, and that had me on edge. Darkness was our friend and when it turned its back on us, that meant bad things could more easily come our way.

  Something caught my eye, a slight stirring, and beneath me, I saw movement. A pile of blankets was on the floor and under that, a family had been sleeping. I could see the whites of a couple of pairs of eyes blinking. It was like they were trying to send me some kind of semaphore message. I wondered for a second if maybe Pemberton knew how to interpret that stuff, but I sure didn’t. And I was pretty damn sure the Afghanis below me didn’t either. I used another form of message to make myself heard loud and clear. I shook my head very slowly and then put one finger to my lips. I also patted the barrel of my gun, but I don’t think they needed that reminder.

  Ignoring the fact that one of the people below me could have been armed—well, not exactly ignoring that fact so much as hoping they weren’t—I resumed my scanning. To my right at about three o’clock, I could see a small stand of stunted and bare trees. Against that dark backdrop, three human figures in white stood out like spotlighted prisoners against a wall. I looked over to Pemberton, and once I caught his attention, I nodded in the direction I’d spotted the three figures. I could see Pemberton barely dip the front of his helmet in acknowledgment.

  I looked back and the three figures were close to the ground and then crawling. No one with nothing to hide would be crawling. Still, I had to keep the rules of engagement in mind. A moment later, I got what I was looking for. The lead guy swung around, and in front of him was the barrel of his weapon. Even in that dim light, I could recognize the shape of an AK-47. My first reaction was, Are you kidding me? This is Afghanistan. Things are supposed to be slow and boring out here. I kept squinting, trying to make my vision clearer. The man’s movements were so slow and deliberate that the slow-motion effect of it all, my newness to the field of operations, my sleep-deprived but high-adrenaline state had me wondering if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing.

  I took my weapon off safe and called in the sighting.

  As I took the slack out of my trigger, I was thinking, Oh my gosh. This is really about to happen right now.

  I tried to get some moisture worked up in my mouth but I was as a dry as the terrain. Consciously willing myself to breathe steady, I lined my sights square on the lead guy’s chest. I had already dialed in my scope to three hundred meters, but this target was maybe fifty to a hundred meters outside that range.

  I squeezed the trigger and experienced again that slow-motion effect. The recoil came back and sank deep into my shoulder. The smell of the gas burning out of the suppressor mixed with the sweet smell of the gun oil I use. My eye still focused on the crosshairs in the center of the scope, I watched as the man collapsed, almost as if he was a balloon being popped. At the sound of my fire, the rest of the guys opened up on that tree line. The two remaining fighters started to return fire.

  I don’t know why, but I took out my ear protection. Everything had seemed too surreal to me up to the point when the sounds of all those rounds being fired made everything seem all too real. Next, my whole body shook as Pemberton fired that Win Mag of his. I followed the path of his bullet and watched as that .300 round removed the head of the second bad guy. I felt in complete control and lined up on the third guy, who was now running away, and fired. The force of the strike sent him sprawling forward and his weapon flew out ahead of him, pinwheeling toward the sunrise. With that, the rest of the guys stopped firing.

  All of the shooting took place in about thirty seconds. I didn’t have much time to consider everything that had just taken place, but I was struck by how fast it had all gone down. How could a simple capture turn into that? One second I was trying to figure out w
here the heck I was and the next I’m sighting on guys who had no clue in the world that I was watching them. They were probably figuring they were well concealed and they’d have our guys in their sights in just a minute, and anticipating how surprised we were going to be. We’d turned the tables on them pretty quick.

  I still had work to do.

  “Mike, face my six. We need a 360 to a mile out.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the rest of the guys hustling to get into a defensive perimeter. We were all eager for those Chinooks to come in so we could get the hell out of there. I could hear the thump of the rotors and, in a couple of minutes, saw the helicopters. I kept rolling my shoulders back to get the tension out of them, still scanning with my eyes. Once we got the word to go, Pemberton and I jumped off the building. We didn’t want to waste time scrambling down the ladder. We collapsed the device and I snapped it onto his back. Not wanting to slow ourselves by looking around, we raced to the Chinook, and my eyes were on the door gunners with their miniguns and their 240s, hoping that I wouldn’t see them go into action.

  Once we were inside, we were airborne in an instant. I knew that there’d be a time for a debrief and our after action reports (AAR), but for just a minute, I wanted to not think at all. I was glad to simply feel the vibration of those motors lifting us up and out of there, out of harm’s way. There would be a time for an accounting later on, but all I wanted to do then was feel the gratitude for having gotten out of there safe and sound. Despite my wanting to not think at all, a pair of thoughts got in under the wire. We’d done well on our first time out with me as a sniper team leader. At the time, I was thinking it was pretty likely that we’d seen the only real live action we were going to see.

  2. A Near and Colorful Miss

  One of the most difficult parts of going out on night operations was getting some shuteye once we were back inside the wire. Another was connecting to any kind of reality other than what was going on with that small group of guys in that small corner of a larger war. After that first night, I experienced a phenomenon like what I’d experienced a few times as a kid—sneaking into a movie late and trying to figure out what was going on after missing the first few minutes of it. That weird combination of sleeplessness, exhaustion, and dislocation was going to take more than a few days to overcome.

  In a way, I liked the whole sink-or-swim/get-tossed-into-the-deep-end-of-the-pool thing that was happening to us. Getting into the action immediately was an effective way of jolting us into recognizing that we really were at war. None of us thought that kind of action was going to continue, but it was what we all hoped we’d be doing, so we wanted to savor those few moments. Once back inside the compound, we all worked on our after action reports. I never liked doing them, but I knew they were necessary, mostly when things didn’t go quite as planned. Since that first op had gone so well, I struggled through the paperwork, especially since I was now a team leader and I had to have all my shit more squared away than ever before.

  Down the hall from where I sat working alone at my desk, I could hear the raucous sounds of the rest of the guys hooting and hollering, a bunch of “Got some!” and a lot less polite language. I knew that the guys were sitting in the briefing room in front of the wall of screens watching the operation on the monitors. It was like a football team, fresh off a victory, going into the locker room or players’ lounge to catch the highlights—the big hits, the touchdowns. During the operation, I wasn’t conscious of the fact that nearly everything we did was going to be captured, digitally or otherwise, and subject to review. We knew that the satellites and the drones were there, of course, and utilized the technology to help us out, but it wasn’t like having one of the guys help you out or calling in a drop or having the arty take out a target for you.

  I didn’t really think of it this way at the time, but it was kind of like having your conscience—a carbon fiber, metal, and plastic one—as a kind of running commentary going through your head. You could choose to pay attention to it or not when the operation was going on. Later, like having to do those AARs, it was almost required that you pay attention to what those camera eyes had seen. I think we would have done that kind of review anyway, but having it be up there on the screen kind of distanced you from it. It wasn’t like the images ran through your mind as you lay in bed, though that would happen too, they were up there on a screen. Even though you could see yourself in the replays, it was like watching someone else, a character, an icon, a substitute for you that was running through that compound and scaling that wall.

  We were, almost to a man, video game guys, so it felt natural to us to see that kind of violent action rendered on a screen. As time went on, I had less interest in watching those videos, but I still did it. We had the regulation AARs to do, then Pemberton and I had our own version of them to do. As the amount of violence we saw and participated in increased, the more important those unofficial reviews became. At least for me they did. I’d done the killing. While I watched them on screen, it was that guy, the one in the video, and not me who was now responsible for those deaths.

  Those thoughts would come much later in that deployment. The first morning back was all celebratory, a lot of fist bumps and genuine bravado. We were warriors and we were proud of how we’d done our jobs. Let those images burn into our brains. We didn’t need a screen saver to keep that from happening.

  But as I sat there with the guys watching the ghostly black-and-white images on the video, I wondered if they were seeing what I was seeing. More specifically, I was wondering if they were seeing things the way I was seeing them.

  It’s funny that my ability to see things played a big part in my life—and by “see things” I don’t mean seeing dead people or something supernatural. In my case, I’m talking about my vision and what I literally couldn’t see that other people could.

  I had a bad case of childhood Navy SEALs-itis. I saw Charlie Sheen in that movie and it was over for me. That was what I wanted to do with my life. The SEAL teams seemed to have it all—weapons, explosives, cool submersibles, and all the rest. I wasn’t into the water part of being a SEAL that much, but I knew that if I disciplined myself and got the necessary training, I could handle it.

  You have to understand that “discipline” isn’t something that came easily for me. When you’re a kid, school dominates your life. I knew that I needed to buckle down and do well in school, but I didn’t like school. It was boring. So, although I knew I needed to do well in school, to please my parents mostly and to stay out of trouble, I never really put in the necessary time and effort. I earned one A grade in my entire school career through high school graduation. That was in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) class I took in ninth grade. I think you get the picture of what kind of kid I was.

  Prior to seeing that Charlie Sheen SEAL movie, I knew that I wanted to be a sniper. Not many kids make their own ghillie suit in middle school, but I did. I used to scare the crap out of the rest of the kids in the neighborhood when I’d pop up out of nowhere. I had an air rifle with a scope on it, and I terrorized the neighborhood birds with that until my father took it away. That didn’t really stop me, and I’d sneak into my parents’ bedroom where I knew it was hidden and take it out and use it. It would have been smart of me to restrict my use of that weapon to the outdoors, but I’d fire it in the house, putting little pockmark holes in the wall. I was smart enough to use my sister’s Play-Doh to fill in the holes like it was spackle. Good thing the walls in the house were mostly white and my sister was good about not mixing her Play-Doh colors together. I never got caught for that little bit of destruction.

  My dad didn’t push me into a career in the military. He answered whatever questions I had about it, but I think he saw my interest as a phase that I was going through, one that I’d inevitably outgrow. He did support me in my interest though. Once I made the transition from sniper to SEAL, he’d drive me the couple of hours it took to get to Ocean City, Maryland, so that I could do my
open-water swimming training and beach runs. After my senior year in high school, I attended the Navy SEAL Cadet Corps camp down in Florida. I went through and passed the mock Basic Underwater Demolition/Seal (BUD/S) class and took the Navy SEAL physical fitness test. After I returned home, I went to a navy recruiter and told him to sign me up. I was going to become a Navy SEAL.

  A couple of weeks later, I shipped out to Florida, thinking that I was going to join the navy and start down that path. Well, that trip only lasted as long as it took to do a vision test. I aced the visual acuity test and was told that my vision was twenty-twenty. I remember sitting there, after passing the physical and that first part of the vision test, thinking about that SEAL obstacle course, when a navy doctor held up a comb-bound book and asked me what I saw on that first page.

  I said, “The number twelve.”

  She tried to keep her expression neutral, but I could tell that something was up. She flipped to the next page.

  “What do you see now?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing. Just a blank page.”

  She went on to explain that I was red-green color-blind. That meant I couldn’t be a SEAL. As I thought about it I realized it meant that I couldn’t have a career in any branch of the military. I sat there stunned. The only odd thing I could recall was my sister once asking me why I wanted to wear a pair of purple socks to school. I didn’t have any purple socks. They were black. Why was she messing with me?

  I didn’t have too long to sit there feeling sorry for myself. At the recruiting station where the preliminary screening was taking place, other branches of the military were also testing candidates. An army nurse swooped in and led me to her side of the room. You want to be in the army, son? Yes, I do. Then follow me. She used her finger to trace the number on what I thought was a blank sheet of paper, basically helping me cheat my way out of the world of color blindness and into the military. Later, after I got home an army sergeant showed up at the house and gave me the pitch on what the Rangers were, basically SEALs without water. Despite having done all that swimming work, I was okay with that. I just wanted to do cool stuff overseas.