The Reaper Read online

  That night, maintaining radio discipline was almost impossible. Almost as soon as we were inserted, we started taking gunfire.

  We’d been inserted via helicopter about two clicks from our objective. We walked along what I came to think of as waffle roads—narrow strips of packed dirt with ditches on each side, some of them intersecting at right angles. But instead of butter and maple syrup in those low-lying zones, raw sewage trickled and pooled. I clenched my teeth and hoped that I could control my gag reflex.

  After what seemed like just a couple of minutes into the march toward the objective, we took enemy fire coming at us from eleven o’clock. They were laying down what should have been suppressive fire, but it was too scattered to really call it that. They’d fire a few bursts, we’d drop down into those divots and ditches, and then move on. We repeated that pattern four more times, each time dealing with slightly more intense fire, but in my mind it was like hiking through the woods and being swarmed by no-see-ums, those little bugs that irritated but didn’t do any real damage.

  The point guy was doing his thing, using his GPS to guide us through the dark. I was always amazed that the point man would walk with his eyes glued to his device, making sure that he was getting good updates from the GPS. The other guys around him were his eyes, helping him to navigate around, over, and through things that he could see only on his display.

  By the time we got to the compound, I was ready for this one to be over. I liked being the shooter, but I hated being the target. Fortunately, we hadn’t taken any casualties except for some shattered nerves. Once inside the wall, Pemberton and I broke off. I would have had to be blind to not spot the building Hernandez and I had discussed. It was the tallest in the village, and once I got up to it, I realized it was also one of the more impressive structures I’d come across in my desert deployments.

  So many of the structures in Iraq and Afghanistan, unless you were in a major city, appeared to be hastily built, like they were sandcastles that could easily crumble when a ladder was leaned against their flanks. In this case, I heard a deep and satisfying thud when I placed my ladder. I looked up, and through my night vision the ladder seemed to glow, like highway lane dividers on a dark stretch of interstate.

  Hernandez had been right about the building. It was about twenty-five feet tall, and that meant my ladder was nearly vertical. If I shifted my weight backward at all, I’d come flying down onto my back. That would not be good at all. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to climb back down, but as long as I got myself up there, that was all that mattered.

  Once on top of the building, I checked in with Pemberton. I’d sent him over to another building so he could watch our six. I figured that the Taliban guys were going to come after us harder once they figured out that we were stationary.

  Before he could reply, I heard a few pops from the line guys. I couldn’t figure out what they were shooting at. I ran to the ledge and turned on my PVS-26 night-vision optics and my lasers. Beneath me was a thick canopy of trees, making it hard to get a good visual on the whole compound. Off comms, I could hear Pemberton yelling something, but I couldn’t make him out clearly. After a few seconds, that didn’t matter. Below me, I saw a man wearing a long blue shirt, white pants, and sandals, his long hair and beard black against the rest of his body. He was zigzagging along, taking cover in various places, moving with a sureness in the dark that made it seem like he’d preplanned every move on this chessboard.

  The sound of Pemberton’s Win Mag thundered and echoed and my vision went fuzzy, like the whole place had been shaken. The man froze in his tracks and I could see bark and tree shrapnel flying, just inches in front of the guy. If Pemberton was firing a warning shot, he just released a damn good one.

  I looked to my three o’clock where the weapons squad had set up a blocking position. The man was running toward them, and it seemed like every one of his steps was punctuated by the sound of the M4s going after him. When the guy reached for his chest, my worst suspicions were confirmed. The guy was a suicide bomber and he was reaching to detonate his vest. Then he dashed into some heavy brush, and I knew at that point Pemberton wouldn’t have eyes on him anymore. No way he could burn through that thick brush no matter how good his scope was.

  The line guys had fired a bunch of rounds, but the man was still ticking. I could hear rounds rustling the branches and leaves, a stuttering weed-whacking kind of sound. No shouts from the Taliban guy, no sound that he’d been hit.

  I was still breathing hard from the climb up to my position, so I went down to one knee. I detected movement; the target was now weaving among the trees again. I was able to put my crosshairs on him right in the center of his back as he moved away from me. I cranked my elevation knob down to one for a hundred-yard shot. I approximated that I’d be shooting from about a thirty-five-degree angle. I did some other quick calculations while tracking the guy. He was in a pretty good sprint, so I was holding about a half-mil distance in front of him to allow for that. I squeezed off a round. Because I wasn’t a stable platform while being on one knee, the gun rose up and then settled back down so that I could see through the scope again.

  “Crap. I missed,” I muttered.

  The man stopped and I immediately knew that he’d felt that bullet go by him. Most likely, I’d over-led him by a fraction. I backed off the lead some, my scope’s crosshairs tattooing him on his right shoulder blade. I figured he was now about fifty meters away from the weapons squad, close enough to do some damage to them if he blew himself up.

  I took a long, deep breath, easing out every bit of tension and oxygen in my body. As the gun settled back in, I shut my eyes for an instant. When I opened them again, the sight was right where I wanted it to be. I squeezed the trigger and the man disappeared from my view.

  In an instant all the other gunfire fell silent.

  I heard a high-pitched ecstatic voice come over the comms. “You got him! You got him!”

  The weapons squad leader reported that they were going to search the man, strip him, and do the other assessments.

  My heart was racing and I lowered the weapon and then sat down fully on the roof. Over the comms, I heard the weapons squad guys.

  “Holy shit,” somebody muttered.

  I wondered what the hell was going on, what they’d found.

  The weapons squad leader called me up on the comms. “Roger that, Irv. You got him. He had a Russian grenade on him. I guess he was trying to get as close to us as he could.”

  I got back into position, knowing that the area wasn’t fully secure, all the time thinking, “Thank God I got him with that second shot.”

  Later, once the area was secure, I climbed down. A cluster of weapons squad guys were looking at the back of a digital camera.

  Calvert, a tall, wiry E5 with a gap-toothed grin and a movie-trailer narrator’s voice, came up to me and offered his hand. “Damn. What a shot. When we walked up on the guy, I thought he was pissing the bushes. We knew the guy was hit, we heard the impact and him grunting and then going down, so we were all, like, what was that?”

  The squad leader came over. “The bullet impacted him just below the shoulder, slightly off center middle back. The hollow point expanded and pushed everything up and out of his chest. His heart was hanging there on the outside of his body cavity, still pumping a couple of times, spraying the trees and leaves.”

  He offered me the camera he was carrying. I immediately fixated on the man’s eyes, how glazed over they seemed and how his mouth hung open in surprise, like he understood what had just happened to him. I didn’t want to deal with my thoughts about what I’d just done, so I immediately turned to Pemberton on the extraction.

  “Dude, you suck so bad. A .300 Win Mag, a straight shot, and you missed?”

  “Yeah, right. I had him nailed. Hit a frickin’ tree limb and it deflected an inch.”

  I knew what he was saying was true. His round did have to penetrate some thick brush and trees.

  “You
don’t hear me talking about being on one knee, in the dark, on a roof.”

  We continued like that even after we’d boarded the helicopter.

  Over the open comms I heard several of the commanders say, “Good job, Irv. You’re batting a thousand.”

  I said thanks, but later that night, just before racking out, I said to Pemberton, “What does batting a thousand mean?”

  Pemberton gave me that dog look, cocking his head and staring at me. “You serious, dude? Baseball. Every time up you get a hit, you’re batting a thousand. This is unbelievable. Two for two, well, really three for three since you got two the first night. This doesn’t happen very often. Hell, maybe not ever.”

  I didn’t realize it was such a big deal until the next day when we went to grab some chow midday. Perkins and Julian, another spotter-sniper pair, came up to us. They asked about whether it was true.

  I showed them the photo.

  “Man, this is stupid,” Perkins said, running his hand through his hair. The veins in his forehead were standing out like rivers on a relief map.

  Julian just stood there staring at the picture, shaking his head. Finally he straightened and looked at the ceiling. “We haven’t gotten out once, and you—How are you getting trigger time every op?”

  “It’s only been two days. I have no idea,” I said. I was feeling pretty proud of getting the job done. I knew that it was luck of the draw, but still, these guys were really pissed off, just as I would have been if I was in their shoes. We were as competitive as could be, and I didn’t take their brotherly hatred personally.

  I wasn’t going to let them off the hook easily and say that things could change the next day. I had a feeling that a different tempo was being established. I told myself that I had to be prepared for what was going to come next.

  3. Misfires, Malfunctions, and Misery

  “You’ve got four hot bodies on a rooftop firing over a short ledge,” the third squad’s leader, Sergeant Brooks, said over the comms. He was receiving reports from the AC-130 Spectre gunship that was flying overhead.

  That explained why none of us had been shot to that point. We were basically in a shooting gallery. The bazaar in the center of the village was like an open tube preventing us from moving laterally. All the Taliban guys had to do was aim down the length of that tube and they could have shredded us. Instead, they were most likely just holding their guns over the lip of that low retaining wall on the rooftop, keeping their bodies behind it for protection, and essentially firing blind. Grateful that we weren’t facing anyone with more discipline than that, I continued to low-crawl past other elements of our platoon until Pemberton and I reached the lead squad. That small group of six all fixed their wide eyes on us, and their expressions said it all. We were pinned down, and the only way to get out of this mess was to take out those guys on the rooftop. Eventually one of those guys might get lucky and one of us would end up being unlucky.

  I looked back at Pemberton, and nodding to each side to indicate the rest of the guys, I said, “Roger that.”

  We lined up and got down in the lowest prone position we could and I turned on my flood. I adjusted my scope, cranking it all the way down until it bottomed out. I had a pretty close shot, about a hundred meters. So, after cranking it all the way down, I looked through it. I pulled my head back in disgust. All I saw was a bright white ball. Even though we were in the village, there was still a lot of vegetation and most of the infrared light I was shining was reflecting off it and back into my scope.

  “Oh, crap, I can’t see anything. Pemberton—I want you to use that .300 Win-Mag and I don’t care if you hit the very base of the ledge of the rooftop, that bullet will punch right through. Just start putting heavy rounds down there until I get up on a knee and sort things out.”

  He manipulated the bolt, chambered a round, and squeezed. Then I heard the loudest click I’ve ever heard. I call it the click of death.

  I looked at him, my expression asking him, Dude, how do you not have a round loaded in your gun? He looked up at me, nodding his head viciously, telling me, Yes I do.

  Frustrated and angry, I shouted, “Dude, you don’t have a round in there. What the f--k?”

  I could hear bullets whining past us and impacting on the stone walls.

  “I swear to freakin’ God, there’s one in there. I chambered and checked before.”

  Frustrated, angry, and a little bit scared that this mess-up could cause problems big-time, Pemberton and I continued fighting our own little verbal war while all hell was breaking loose around us. My mind was racing. Here we are, our third mission in with these guys, and we’ve suddenly gone from heroes to idiots.

  “For the last freaking time,” I yell at him, “load it back up.”

  He did as instructed and I watched a bullet pop out. Holy crap, he did have one in there. Maybe it was a dud or something. He went for it again and the same thing happened.

  We both looked at each other in disbelief. His gun was out of commission. It must’ve got banged up in the incoming. Who knows? A grain of sand could’ve got inside his bolt carrier and not allowed the firing pin to fully strike the tail end of the bullet.

  That’s why I didn’t like using bolt guns overseas. That kind of mechanical failure is pretty typical with bolt-action rifles because the bolt’s open for so long. A lot of stuff can get in it. You’ve got to be supervigilant about cleaning and maintaining it. It has a really fine trigger, too. If the smallest grain of dirt gets in there, it screws up the whole rifle.

  “Okay, roger that,” I think. Now what?

  When that beeper went off back at the base, I couldn’t have imagined we’d find ourselves in that situation.

  I don’t know a whole lot about baseball, but when Pemberton explained to me what batting a thousand meant, I immediately thought that it was impossible to go a whole season never making an out. Call me a pessimist, though most likely I’m just a realist, but I knew that our run of good fortune wasn’t likely to continue. I had a sense that we were going to see a lot of action, and as much as I was confident in our abilities, there are too many variables that go into successful sniping to think that we could continue to have the kind of takeout rate we were enjoying. Besides, I’d reasoned, two nights was too small of a sample to draw any real conclusions from.

  Having my spotter, a good shooter as well, go down with a weapon malfunction was just the war gods’ way of telling us not to get too comfortable.

  In the immediate, I was really pissed at Pemberton, though later on I’d come to my senses and realize that stuff like that happens. It wasn’t a human-error failure, not directly, but a mechanical one. Stuff breaks down. Iraq and Afghanistan are harsh environments in which to operate. I had to remind myself that getting pissed off and losing focus wasn’t going to help the situation one bit.

  Besides, I’d had my share of times when I was the one who had screwed up, or narrowly escaped a screwup. Things have a way of evening themselves out.

  Late in 2005, just before my first deployment, I had one of the worst training cycles I’ve ever had and maybe any Ranger has ever had. We were at Fort Benning training to do an airport seizure. We were in a C-17, packed in there in total darkness along with some Humvees, some little birds, and a few of the minimotorcycles that Chuck Norris had used in the movie Delta Force. I thought those were so cool.

  I sat there with my rucksack, assault pack, and my 203 grenade launcher. When the time came to go, I stood up, hooked into the overhead cables, and waited in line. After I jumped, I did my four count. Nothing. Five count. Nothing still. I looked up and could see my parachute was in a cigarette roll—just a long, slim strand of fabric. That’s what we call a partial malfunction. I’m hurtling along, the wind screaming in my ears, flying past guys who’ve had successful deployments.

  They were screaming at me, “Pull your reserve! Pull your reserve!”

  I did exactly that, and the reserve billowed out. Somehow, though, my leg got caught underneath the ri
ser, so I was coming down in this funky position. My left foot was up near my helmet and it was like I was doing the splits. I was trying to steer the reserve—which was impossible since the reserve is a nonsteerable device—and I looked down and saw I was maybe a hundred fifty to two hundred feet above the concrete runway. I knew I was descending too rapidly, and I was only going to have just a single leg to land on, but there wasn’t much I could do at that point.

  I hit the ground hard and rolled over while being dragged along the ground by the chute. My equipment was being thrown off me, I could smell rubber from the soles of my boot dragging along, and I finally came to rest. I tried to hop up immediately. This was my first jump in battalion, and I’d managed to make it into a what-not-to-do film.

  Truth is, the first thought I had right before impact was, “My mom’s going to kill me.”

  The rest of my guys came running over to me to make sure that I was okay. I didn’t want to let on that my knee hurt like hell. I told everybody I was okay and drove on. Later, after the exercise was over, I was taken to the medical center and, fortunately, everything checked out. I had a badly swollen knee, a few bumps and bruises, but I was okay.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have done this, but I called my mom and told her about what happened. Despite her army background she said, “Why in the world do they have you jumping out of airplanes anyway? That makes no sense. That’s not a very safe job for you.”

  Funny thing was, she seemed better about me being deployed—a few tears and hugs and requests that I call whenever possible, that was about it. Every time she knew that I had a jump on my schedule, she’d always call to check in, telling me how nervous she’d been all day worrying about me.

  I have to admit that even though that incident sounds a lot like Pemberton’s—an equipment failure—I was responsible for what happened.

  I have a huge fear of heights. I was able to overcome it in jump school to some extent, but my nerves got the best of me that night. I was heavily loaded with gear, and I wondered how that was going to affect my aerodynamics and everything else. I was thinking too much, so when it came time to jump, I kind of tumbled out and the extra weight and my poor jump combined to have me rolling from the start. I got all tangled up in the risers as I was tumbling in the air.