The Reaper Read online

  This was post 9-11 and qualified candidates were in short supply, and that army nurse figured, why reject an otherwise well-qualified and highly motivated candidate?

  I guess I’m glad that I don’t remember that woman’s name because she might get in some kind of trouble for helping me into the army that way. Things worked out well, and the issue of my being color-blind never played a part in my career. Good thing the army has limited dress options, otherwise I might have been found out at some point. Either that or I would have had to have my little sister Jasmine enlist with me to serve as my clothes chooser.

  Before I went to sleep that night in the hotel room the military provided outside of Fort Meade, Maryland, I was grateful that things had turned out as they had. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have been a valuable SEAL team member and served honorably with them. I was just happy to be a Ranger. Although I let my thoughts wander, I knew that it wasn’t a good idea to speculate too much.

  After the debrief and going through all the intel and materials we’d collected from the HVT and his locale, Pemberton and I went to breakfast. The chow hall was filled with line guys; most of them had finished and were sitting talking. For Pemberton and me, it was like walking into the school cafeteria as outcasts, kids on the fringe.

  We ordered and Pemberton shook his head. “Six eggs? That’s not an omelet, that’s a henhouse. Where’s a little guy like you put it all?”

  This was an ongoing topic. I had an appetite out of proportion to my frame.

  “I may not be able to eat at all. The smell.”

  We had three choices of places to eat spread out within the larger compound. The smells coming from the French, Asian, and American spots were mixing in a way that reminded me of the streets of Ramallah, back in the day, during my first deployment.

  “It’s just cheese.”

  “Why’s it got to be a baguette and not just bread?”

  Our take on international cuisine over, we found a table by ourselves and dug in. Between bites and sips, the two of us talked about the night’s operation.

  “Didn’t expect that,” I began.

  “Weird.”

  “It is.”

  I knew that Mike’s kill was his first. Not his first overall, but his first with his rifle, relatively close range. Like me, he’d taken out a guy on a previous deployment with the .50 cal., back when he was a private and first joined the battalion. If watching those satellite feeds gave you a sense of detachment, then being the operator on a .50 cal, with a remote-controlled weapons system (RWS), was really like playing a video game. Regardless of what weapon you used, or what range you were at, there was something about your first experiences in combat.

  In 2005, we were doing a Ground Assault Force (GAF) operation, taking the Strykers to a location outside of Ramallah. This was my first deployment, so I was a little more gung ho than the rest of the guys. I was still in that stage of cherry new guy where I was hoping to get into one of the big firefights I’d heard about when guys came back Stateside. It all sounded so cool. Most of the firefights I’d participated in to that point had lasted five to ten minutes tops. While we were in them, it seemed like hours, but later when we reviewed the footage, only a few minutes of real-time action had occurred. Most of that was due to the enormous firepower advantage we had. At that point in Iraq, we weren’t doing any kind of nation building or advising. It was pure and simple controlled chaos. I liked that. The objective was clear, the rules of engagement were clear, and we went out there and in a controlled but chaotic manner we destroyed things and people. We’d head out at night and a few hours later we were showering.

  What took the most time was arresting, searching, and processing detainees. I had done all kinds of training related to destroying or capturing targets; helping gain intel was something I was having to learn more about while on the ground. I would want to talk to the guys about what we were doing, but I picked up on a vibe and listened to it. To them what we were doing was no big deal. Just another day at the office. Just do your job. Don’t bring your work back home with you.

  As a cherry new guy, I was busting inside with questions. What was it like to shoot someone up close? Do you even think about it?

  One night that first deployment, we set out. I’d been trained as a Stryker driver, and it was pretty thrilling to be in control of a forty-ton, eight-wheeled vehicle capable of seventy miles per hour. At that point, though, I was a gunner, stuck sitting in a little pod where all I had was my joystick, my video display, and my team leader Salazar’s feet to look at. If I turned around, I could see the other assaulters behind me in the back end of the vehicle.

  By this time everything had become routine. We’d reach the objective, offset about a thousand meters from it, drop the ramp, and I’d stay behind to offer cover fire for the assault team. On this particular operation, everything went as smooth as could be. We went in without incident. No shots were fired. We got the guys while they were sleeping and then loaded them up.

  The worst part was always the drive to and from the objective. IEDs were the biggest threat, as well as vehicular-borne devices.

  Salazar was up top and he said to me, “Hey, I want you to check this car out to the left. Make sure no one gets inside our formation.”

  Seemingly out of nowhere, a car came flying past us on our left, traveling about seventy miles an hour. We’re on Route Tampa, the sun has just come up, and there’s light traffic, just a few other vehicles out there. Something was up or maybe some guy just didn’t want to be stuck behind our convoy of six Strykers. We were in the lead one and guys were freaking out over the comms, wondering what the hell this dude was up to, where he came from.

  Salazar’s voice cut through the chatter. “If this guy turns around and approaches us at that same rate of speed, take him out.”

  I acknowledged his order, but my mind was racing. “Is this serious? Do I really take this guy out? Is it that easy?”

  Truth is, I was hoping that the guy would turn toward us. I wasn’t wishing that he’d do any damage to us, but I wanted to see what that .50 cal could do. Another part of me was thinking it would be good if the man just kept speeding down the road and out of sight. It was one of those “angel on my right shoulder and devil on my left” situations. For a while, neither of them was winning the debate and the man in the car wasn’t cooperating either. He just stopped the car on the side of the road. I zoomed in on him through the gun’s scope and I saw his dead clear eyes sizing us up. We were still moving toward him and he was about a half mile away.

  That’s when he turned the car around and started coming toward us. I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is really going to happen.”

  He revved his engine and came toward us, but then stopped right in the middle of the road as if he was going to block us.

  Salazar started beating on the roof of the Stryker, yelling, “Shoot! Shoot!”

  I hesitated, looking at my view screen at this expressionless man. I took the weapon off safe.

  I felt Salazar’s boot on my shoulder and heard him saying, “Shoot! Shoot the mother——!”

  I opened up with a seven-round burst, watching the bullets climb up the car’s hood and then into the windshield, and through the smoke of the shattering glass, I saw something explode inside the car. It wasn’t an IED; it was the man inside it. He turned into mist and chunks.

  We stopped the vehicle and, just like in any operation, the assaulters approached the car acting as they would if they knew the man was still alive. I knew better, but still they needed to be cautious. When the man didn’t respond to any of their orders and it was clear that he wasn’t going to be able to, they opened the driver’s side door and this pile of stuff dropped to the ground. They made their way to the car’s trunk and unloaded some AKs and then one of the guys held up the head of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). If we had charged the guy and run him over, that RPG could have gone off and done some damage. We didn’t know exactly what the guy’s intent was, but
it didn’t matter, both because of what happened to him, what I’d done to him, and because of how he’d chosen to respond to our presence.

  A couple of the assaulters congratulated me, and that felt good, but later on, when my shock wore off, I had this funny coppery taste in my mouth, like I was sucking on a penny. I felt a little queasy, with that stomach-sinking feeling you get when somebody gives you some bad news.

  Later that night, the image of that man returned to me. I had a dream where I was in a room with a ceiling fan spinning above me. The blades of the fan were the man’s four limbs plus his head and chest. He was staring at me with that same dead-eyed stare, but as the fan spun faster and faster, he started screaming at me openmouthed. Eventually the fan got spinning so fast that his limbs were whipped off and he sprayed the room with blood and guts, covering me as well with this gelatinous goo.

  I woke up thinking about what my platoon sergeant had told me prior to our going over to Iraq. We were in a Humvee, with me in the back and him in the front seat. He turned and said, “You know what, Irv?”

  “What’s up, Sergeant?”

  “After you kill a man, there’s no other feeling like it. Mark my words. You won’t want to do any hunting again. The excitement of that will be gone. You won’t find any joy in it either. Once you kill a man, you can’t replace that feeling.”

  He was right. The combination of emotions and the physical rush that floods through your body after combat is unlike anything I’d experienced before or since.

  Sitting in the chow hall, I knew that Pemberton was sorting through some of those same thoughts and feelings as a result of that first close-in kill that night. It helped that I was there, even if we weren’t talking about his mental state directly.

  Pemberton nodded toward a few of the occupied tables. “They don’t get it, do they?”

  I shrugged. “I doubt it. From what I’ve heard most of them haven’t been outside the wire at all.”

  “They think they want to be out there.”

  He left the last part of that unfinished, but I knew what he meant. “Roll of the dice, I guess.”

  Depending upon how I felt at any particular moment, when our operational tempo proved to be consistently pedal to the metal, I sometimes thought we were rolling double sixes or snake eyes. A lot of the time, though, it was like we were rolling both.

  I did tell Pemberton that I had taken the wrong route into the compound that night and that I wouldn’t let that kind of thing happen again.

  “Walking past that open area along that wall? That was messed up—anything could have been on the other side.”

  “At least we cleared it.”

  I appreciated him saying that, but I knew that I didn’t want to do anything like that again.

  Eight hours or so later, I sat in bed looking at the display on my pager. I decoded the message and was immediately wide awake. I ran across the hallway and banged on Pemberton’s door.

  “Hey, man. Get ready. I think we’re about to go out.”

  As I made my way down to the ready room, the scene reminded me of something from a movie about Wall Street or some busy office. Guys were trotting and hustling, all of them with papers or shadow light imagery, weapons and ammunition. From top to bottom everyone was excited. Another army unit had taken casualties the night before, and based on the message, we had an important target that had to be taken out ASAP.

  I was still in my PT (physial training) shorts and T-shirt, and I joined the first, second, and third squad leaders, the weapons squad leader, and the platoon sergeant, Casey. They were all huddled in front of a sixty-inch flat-screen TV. When I came up, I looked at the images on the screen. A compound wedged into some thick bush and a few individuals milling around in front of a building that was several stories tall. Somebody paused the video and we focused on one individual. We had our man.

  Next, we focused on the environment. We debated whether we could do an offset drop with the helicopters or if they should land on the X. Everybody contributed and we could all sense that the clock was running, so there wasn’t a whole lot of back-and-forth. Each squad leader knew what his team had to do. Pemberton had come into the room, and I split off from the others. As snipers, we had to put ourselves in the most precarious position a lot of times. Personally, I preferred being on top of a building. It gave me the best field of vision, meaning we had the widest coverage. The disadvantage was that we’d be skylining ourselves—we’d be silhouetted against the nighttime sky, offering the enemy a better view of us.

  By then I’d gotten used to viewing two- and three- dimensional images on a screen or a document and calculating rough distances. Pemberton and I went over the distances we estimated between buildings, what our points of vulnerability might be.

  Meanwhile Sergeant Casey sat at a computer inputting all the different elements of the operation—directions, the roster, who’s going on the helicopters, which squads are bringing what equipment. A few minutes after we were done, the battalion commander came down the stairs and handed us each a disk with all the intel on the mission, including maps and photos of the area of operation (AO).

  “This is a TST [time sensitive target], men. You’re out in thirty minutes.”

  That gave us just enough time to coordinate with the pilots and get our kit squared away and do a briefing.

  Before the brief, I ran upstairs to the freaks and geeks center. That’s what I called the room where our computer operations were located. Though I had done some rough figuring myself, I wanted to confirm how environmental factors were going to play into my initial positioning plan. I was glad I wasn’t a member of the freaks and geeks squad. I mean no disrespect by calling those guys by that name. They performed an invaluable service, one that I wouldn’t have been able to do. If this FOB were a school, well, the freaks and geeks were in study hall all day while I was out at recess. They had to sit there in a darkened room for their entire shift, staring at a screen that was projecting satellite imagery.

  I sat down near one of the analysts, a Hispanic guy by the name of Hernandez. I knew that he was the best down-and-distance guy up there—he specialized in being able to determine the height of a building based on the shadow it cast and other means.

  “Hernandez, I’m wondering if I need the ten-footer or the twenty to get up on there.”

  I put my finger on the screen, showing him which building I was referring to. As soon as my finger touched down, I could feel Tony cringing.

  “My bad,” I said, apologizing for the smudge.

  He squinted for a minute and then said, “That’s plus or minus twenty-five.”

  I figured we could use the aluminum collapsible ladder instead of the folding one.

  “And what’s the difference in height between this outer perimeter wall and this objective?”

  A few seconds later I had my answer and knew that plan A wasn’t going to work out. There was no way we could shoot over that wall. We wouldn’t be able to see into that doorway from ground level. Tony ran me a bunch of other numbers and brought up several different views on screen.

  He pointed at the screen, careful not to touch it, and said, “This building gives you the optimal sight picture of that doorway. If your focus is that objective in that part of the compound, then that’s your spot.”

  I nodded and bumped fists with him. “Thanks so much.”

  I felt goose bumps prickling my skin as I made my way into the briefing room. I shook my head. I knew I wasn’t fully dressed, but damn, that room was always so cold. Somebody kept the AC blasting in there, maybe because they figured once the room was filled with, say, forty guys, the body heat would build up. True to its name, the briefing was brief, just the squad leaders telling each of their guys, and the larger group, what their roles were going to be and what they’d be carrying. Just as important, we gave our call signs, the identifying names we’d use during our radio transmissions.

  Weapons squad was going to be carrying the Carl Gustav recoilless rifl
e, basically a bazooka normally used to fire antitank missiles. I thought they were cool because they could fire nearly anything. Hell, you could shove a Crock-Pot in there and turn it into a deadly projectile.

  I quickly filled the guys in on my call sign, where we were going to position ourselves, and when I was likely to break off from their element. Timing was critical but things seldom went exactly as planned. Still, it was important to keep that time factor in mind.

  I love the sound of Velcro. I don’t know what the military did before it was invented. Hearing thirty-five or so guys strapping stuff on with that simple hook and loop mechanism, the sound of tape being unrolled as guys secure things to keep as silent as possible, was like the music we’d play in the locker room before a game to get pumped up. That collective sound signaled that we all had each other’s back. It wasn’t the same strapping on your kit when you were alone; somehow that song came out tinny and uninspired.

  The last little ritual was the burn barrel—a literal metal barrel where we destroyed any sensitive documents. No way we were going to risk letting any intel or operational directives fall into enemy hands. After the comms check was complete and the tech squared away anybody who was having trouble, it was go time. Pardon the pun, but radio failures happened with alarming frequency. You could use a radio one day set to a specific frequency and have no problems, and in the next operation, using the same frequency settings, it was like that radio forgot how to be a radio. The techs did the best they could, but as advanced as our technology was, what seemed a simple device often created problems and frustrations.