The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (17 page)

It wasn’t water; it was blood.

The PL sank from my grasp and into the water, screaming, “I’m hit, I’m hit!” A single round had struck the PL in the upper chest, just above his body armor. I was so stunned by the fact that a bullet had just missed me and struck the PL that I could barely move. Pemberton immediately fell on the PL and placed his finger in the bullet hole while I turned back to my rear and emptied half a magazine toward the enemy. A medic from my recon team ran over to assist the PL. The damned sniper had strategically taken out key members of our team and was still focusing in on Pemberton and me.

Something clicked in me, and I got up onto level ground and just started firing every time I saw a head come up. I saw one split in two. I was doing nothing but engaging and engaging until I had to reload. I sank back down and the medic had a compress on the PL’s wound and an IV stuck in his arm.

“Get that son of a bitch. Get that son of a bitch,” the PL kept saying to me, looking glassy-eyed but determined.

“I’m trying. I’m trying.” More rounds seemed targeted at me and were smacking into the back of the embankment.

“Everybody else okay? You got to get out of here.”

I saw Derek and he lifted his chin, signaling me to come closer to him. I low-crawled toward him and he said, “I’m not taking any fire at all.”

As soon as I raised myself up a bit, a bullet flew between us.

Derek’s eyes grew wide. “He’s locked in on you. Get down. Get down.”

I worked back to my previous spot while Derek fired.

We all knew we had to get out of there.

Another of the team leaders asked Melvin how much more time he needed to stabilize Kopp.

Melvin didn’t turn toward us for a full five to ten seconds. When he did, he didn’t need to say a word. We all knew that his expression was telling us that it wasn’t going to matter how much time he spent. Things weren’t looking too good for Kopp.

By that time, Kopp had stopped his screaming and was lying there shaking his head slowly from side to side. Guys were telling him, “Hey dude, you’re doing okay. You’re doing okay.”

I looked down and I could see two blood-soaked gauze pads floating in the water like little square life rafts. Melvin had already applied two tourniquets and was pressing a third gauze pad to the wound. It was like watching a paper towel soaking up a red spill.

Guys came up with a makeshift litter and placed Kopp in it. He was likely bleeding out, but we had to get him to a field hospital somehow and hope for the best.

The team leader shook his head.

“Let’s go. Screw it. Right now.”

The PL no longer had his shirt on and had his body armor draped over him like a cape. He was holding the gauze to Kopp’s chest. And he started slogging through the water with the rest of us. Pemberton and I volunteered to grab Kopp’s gear to make carrying him easier. Pemberton stuck with me, and we leaned back as Kopp was carried past us. The water varied in depth quite a bit, and just as he got even with us, Kopp’s face disappeared under the water for a moment and then rose again. He’d gone bone-white pale and his face was now slack, but I could see his chest rising and falling in small spasms of breath. We were still taking fire, and the guys carrying him had to keep low.

Finally, Pemberton and I started half swimming, half low-crawling out of that ditch. I could barely move. I kept waiting for some Taliban guy to jump into the ditch and strafe us all. I was kind of wishing that would happen. My legs and arms were cramping so bad, I just wanted to lie down in that water or have someone shoot me. I kept thinking of Kopp being dunked like that and the calm expression on his face.

Pemberton sensed that something had changed in me. I felt as if the mud that was sucking my boots and caking on my skin was stealing the life out of me. I knew that Kopp’s chances weren’t good, and we’d been close. None of this seemed worth it. Pemberton was a few meters ahead of me, and he turned and said, “Suck it up. You’re a Ranger. Let’s finish this thing.”

No sooner had we gotten near the safe house than we were instructed to move to the front of the line. We needed to lay down suppressive fire while the wounded were placed inside. My clothes were now so heavy and stiff all I could do was a Frankenstein shuffle into position. My rifle looked like it had been dipped in chocolate and left to harden. I searched my pockets and found a kaffiyeh, a scarf that I’d picked up in Iraq, and used it to clean my optics as best I could. I also realized that I was down to my last two mags of ammo, and one of them was caked in mud.

“Here we go,” I said to Pemberton. “This is going to suck.”

We had about fifty meters of open ground to cover before we could reach the building. We climbed up onto the top of the embankment and sat there for a second taking a tactical pause. I figured the sniper was nearby and this was going to be another chance to get shot at.

I set out at a sprint, and about halfway home an outrageous burst of gunfire started going off. I dropped down to the ground, and a second later, Pemberton had grabbed me by the shoulders while kneeling beside me. Once he was sure I wasn’t hit, he finally responded to what I’d been saying, to get down, we were taking fire.

“No. No. We’re not. Those are our guys.”

I laughed a bit and we got up and started running. There were six Rangers from the assault force on a rooftop firing every gun they had in their arsenal. The sounds of 7.62 and 5.56 machine guns unleashing all at once no more than eight feet over our heads caused the ground to shake. I thought we had been ambushed by an army of Taliban.

Once inside the safe house, we came up to two fifteen-foot-tall French doors, blue with a white cow painted on them. The cow had a lei around its neck. I shouldered past the cow and there inside was the main element we’d started out with who knew how many hours before.

We finally got some good news. They’d taken out the target we were initially after, a few other guys besides, and there in the middle of floor, flex-cuffed together, was a group of Taliban fighters and leaders. They looked up at me; I looked at them, and then I turned to the first sergeant.

“Get high up. We need the snipers to pick these guys off!” he instructed us.

These were the words I had been waiting to hear all day.

Pemberton and I ran over to the nearby mud house and climbed a ladder on the rear side that one of the locals had left behind. The men who had lain down covering fire met us with smiling faces and a large pile of smoking-hot brass around them.

“Dudes. That was unreal.”

They all smiled and one said, “I’ve never fired that many rounds on target. It was awesome.”

The sun had now reached its highest point and the temperature was above 120 degrees. The bottom of my combat boots started to torch my feet as I lay down behind my rifle, observing targets in the distance. As much as it burned, the overwhelming number of targets I was now able to see through my 10 power scope shut out all other feeling.

I wasn’t sure what would happen if I shot my rifle after it had been submerged.
Screw it,
I thought. The first bullet I let out reminded me of firing a Super Soaker squirt gun. It didn’t leave a vapor trail so much as it let out a trail of water. The bullet hit a wall, nowhere near where I was aiming. Pemberton was sitting on the ground spitting on bullets and wiping them off on his shirt.

I focused in on a target almost half a mile from our position, carrying an AK-47, with ammo draped over his shoulder. I wasn’t sure how much I had to lead him with my scope because I wasn’t sure how fast he was running. Pemberton was busy working on a target with his .300 Win Mag and I didn’t want to bother him.

I figured I would lead my target by 3.5 mils to start off with, and watch the impact of the bullet as it hit the ground, which would allow me to make a correction. I reached up and dialed 23 minutes of angle on the elevation of the scope. With each click I made on the scope, the target began to slow down. As his pace came to a halt, a slight grin grew on my face. “I got you now,” I thought out loud. Slowly pulling the trigger back as the center of my reticule lay on the center of his chest, I noticed the heat mirage pick up at a steep angle. Before the shot broke, I adjusted for the wind indicated by the mirage.

As the shot broke, I saw the tail end of the vapor trail from the bullet fly downrange and sink into the target’s upper chest cavity. The bullet hit him with such force it caused his man dress to fly open, exposing the bullet wound. The impact looked like an eighteen-wheeler truck going a hundred miles an hour had hit him. His rifle flew from his hands as he fell backward into the powdery dirt.

As fast as he hit the dirt, two of his friends came in to retrieve his body and drag it off behind a small mud hut. I didn’t engage the men. Instead I shifted my scope to the left, focusing at a long road. I could see groups of men exiting a white vehicle, all carrying AK-47s. The distance was too far for me to engage them so I shouted over to Pemberton, “Hey, hit the guys in the white car!”

I knew that the shot would be a tough one. It was over a kilometer, but I figured the sound of a .300, 190 grain bullet snapping in their direction would keep them out of the fight.

“Medevac is in route!” someone shouted to us. The army’s best helicopter pilots were coming in to extract the wounded. My team on the roof continued to engage the enemy to the best of our abilities for hours, at most utilizing suppressive fire. We had to keep focus on the amount of ammo we had with each shot we put downrange. It got to the point where I asked one of the machine gunners to take off a strip of ten rounds from his belt of ammo hanging from his MK-48. The rounds were becoming scarce, and a whole new fear set in.

I wanted to see the guys before they were medevaced out of there. Wilkins, a sniper team leader from 2nd platoon, was up against a wall with his wounded leg out in front of him. The PL was getting treatment, and I saw the stretcher that Kopp had been carried in on. He wasn’t in it, but I could see that it was soaked with blood. I stood there staring at that, and one of the guys nodded toward a back room. I didn’t want to go back there. I’d seen how Kopp had looked and I preferred carrying that image with me to what I might see. I took a few sips of water, and headed back out onto the roof of the far building.

Over the tops of the trees in the distance, I could see the medevac hauling in. As the helicopter approached, we shifted fire to avoid sending a stray round in their direction. Even under the AK-47 fire, the helicopter landed in between our position and the enemy, absorbing any potential incoming rounds as a few men carried and assisted the three wounded rangers. As quickly as they came in, they were off, flying them to the nearest hospital. As for us, the fight continued.

“ALLAHU AKBAR!”

I quickly looked over my shoulder behind me and over the tall wall that surrounded the house. There were four men that had managed to get within a few feet from the outside of the wall. They were so close that I could see the features on their faces and the dirt smudged under their eyes. I got the attention of the guys on the roof and signaled to them that we would take them out all at once before they were able to gain entry. “I got the guy in the checkered shirt!” I yelled to my guys. They all quickly replied back to me, identifying which target they had.

“I got left.”

“I got right.”

“I got center.”

“Three, two, one…” With one loud
BOOM,
the targets crumbled and fell to the ground as they were all engaged. I remember the target being so close in my scope that I could see the detail in one of his buttons on his shirt as I squeezed the trigger.

“Immediate extract needed! Immediate extract needed our location!” came over the net, calling to a Marine FOB nearby.

“Negative. You guys have to come to us. We cannot go into that area with anything less than a brigade. We will position near your location south. Over,” the marines responded.

“Let’s get ready to move out, boys!”

I was in disbelief. We had been in the area with a small team of Rangers in a firefight from hell, surrounded, and at some points almost overrun. At times we were forty strong and at other times only six strong. Now they couldn’t come in there with less than a brigade?

The plan for our extraction was as simple as it could get. We had to run to the marines in Humvees waiting for us on a nearby hill overlooking our location almost a mile away! I remember thinking to myself in a sarcastic tone,
I swear I’ve seen this before … oh, yeah,
Black Hawk Down.”

As my team climbed down from the rooftop and gathered with the remaining Rangers on the ground, Pemberton and I checked our magazines to see how much ammo we had left. We were both down to our last mag. Pemberton had around twelve rounds left while I was down to my last ten out of the two hundred-plus rounds we each started off with. All I could imagine was running through the enemy, engaging them in hand-to-hand combat, stabbing them with the large six-inch Buck knife I carried on my hip.

“Irv, can you put your snipers in front and behind our formation?” the commander asked.

“Roger.”

Being the sniper squad/team leader, I wanted to take the front and have Pemberton pick up the six. I have to admit, I was a little nervous about what might lie in the open terrain leading to the marines. The pucker factor was maxed out.

The large blue doors opened and I started to run. My body was drained not only from the five-day operation but also the now half-day-long firefight we were in. Every time my boot hit the soft dirt, I would look at a different sector, observing where any potential enemy could be. With the sound of the bullets snapping overhead, my pace picked up. The vomit rising in my throat from overexertion was suppressed by the sight of the awaiting Humvees.

“Get in, get in, get in!” we shouted, arriving at the vehicles. The expressions the marines had on their faces were almost indescribable. It seemed as if they thought we were crazy for going into the area.

With the captured targets in hand, we packed ourselves in the Humvees like sardines. An entire Ranger assault force and recon/sniper team was stuffed in four Humvees already packed with marines. I had managed to cram myself under the feet of the marine .50 cal gunner with my head resting on my spotter’s knee and my body folding on Nate, another sniper. The pain I felt from being crushed didn’t bother me, I was just happy we were getting out.