The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (21 page)

At that point, after the last of those howitzer rounds had cleared, the Chinooks came back in to extract us. When we got back to the airfield, I saw a few of the CSAR guys sitting around on a pickup truck. They waved me over, and I sat on the tailgate.

“How the hell is that guy still alive?” one of them asked.

“I have no idea. What do you mean?”

“I went down in there,” another of them said. “There’s no way he scraped the sides of that hole. He fell straight down into that thing. I was eighty feet down. I saw him and he was conscious. He was doing little flutter kicks and other stuff to stay afloat. How long was he down there?”

I shrugged and said, “I don’t know exactly, a couple of hours.”

“Freakin’ amazing.”

“What was weird,” one of Pemberton’s rescuers said, “was that there was an old ladder down there. A wood ladder floating around. He said he hit that. That was what fractured his tibia.”

“That’s all that happened?” I asked. “A busted bone in his leg?”

“He hit his head on a rock. His helmet stayed on though. Good thing. He said other stuff kept falling on him.”

We all laughed.

“He said it was ten feet. Fifteen feet.”

“And you’re a sniper? Can’t judge distance without a scope?”

“Not without depth perception and night visit. “I said, and we all laughed.

I had to admit it all seemed ridiculous. Pemberton and I had walked away without a scratch from a twenty-four-hour firefight and had escaped from a deadly sniper, and now he was seriously injured walking on an operation that, otherwise, went off without a hitch.

I kept thinking about that helmet and asked what happened to it. No one knew but they said that based on how it looked, it wasn’t going to do anybody any good anymore. The conversation went on with these air force guys echoing what we’d all been saying. This was the most bizarre thing we’d seen. None of us could figure out what the purpose of that hole was. The diver guessed that it went down for another sixty to eighty feet. All I could think of was a missile silo or something, but even that made no sense at all. Thank goodness it wasn’t a dry hole.

I wanted to see Pemberton, so one of the drivers took me over to a hospital in Kandahar to see him. When I walked into his room, Mike was sitting up, propped up by pillows. He had a huge grin on his face.

“I’m so sorry, man,” he said.

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“I missed out. I wasn’t there to back you up.”

“Forget about that. You just survived a HALO jump into the center of the earth. You’re a superhero. Holeman or something.”

“It was freaking scary, Irv.”

He described what it was like, telling me how as he was falling, he twisted in the air and lost his rifle, but he unholstered his pistol on the way down.

“Are you kidding me? You told me you were only down there ten or fifteen feet.”

“Didn’t matter. I thought I’d stepped through a doorway. All you guys ahead of me had disappeared in the dark and I figured you’d gone through a doorway. I thought maybe I’d tripped and I was going into the middle of a courtyard, and I’d need my weapon. Guys were coming after me.”

“You were tripping all right.” I wasn’t sure how much of this was what Pemberton really remembered, the effects of his knock on the head, or if it was the drugs they’d given him for the pain.

“You mean you had the presence of mind, as you were falling,” I continued, “to take out your weapon and aim?”

“Yes.”

“Did you not feel or hear the wind whistling past your ears?”

“I didn’t feel any wind. None at all. I didn’t feel anything as I was falling. I was weightless.”

“What happened when you hit?”

“Felt nothing at all. I was like a sack of shit. I must have been all loose.” He paused for a second. “I don’t remember much, but I think that my leg hit first.” He screwed his face up in pain.

“You okay?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea. Everything just seems so strange right now.”

“The water?”

“Yeah, I think maybe that snapped me out of it. I don’t remember hitting my head, but they told me about my helmet. Maybe I was out. I remember trying to stay afloat, kicking every once in a while.”

Everything had worked out perfectly for him. The cold water had numbed him so that his leg pain wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t move it. He remembered holding on to that ladder with one hand, the pistol in the other, and using his arm to tread water a bit.

“The worst thing was how dark it was. I couldn’t see a thing. That freaked me out. Until that PJ came down to get me I felt so alone.”

“You couldn’t hear me?”

“I could. But there was this weird echo. I knew it was you and I understood some of what you were saying.”

I thought about how lucky we both were that I’d taken out my hearing protection. Normally, I waited until I’d reached the objective before doing that.

As I was sitting there considering that, Sergeant Casey came in. He had this superserious look on his face, and was walking with hands behind him. He stopped at the edge of the bed, on the opposite side of where I was standing.

“Michael Pemberton.” He produced a sheet of folded paper from behind him and set it down on Pemberton’s lap.

All was quiet while Mike unfolded it. A second later Pemberton started laughing. He set it down again, and I could see a Navy SEAL trident on the top of the paper, like it was official letterhead. It offered the congratulations of the entire SEAL team community, and he was awarded his fake SEAL trident and HALO wings. He’d just had the free fall and swim of his life, so it all seemed appropriate.

“Yeah. I’m just glad I was in the navy.” Mike had done six years of service with them before joining us.

I added that to my list of—call it what you want—coincidence, providence, whatever, that surrounded this man down situation.

A couple of days later, Pemberton was released from the hospital. I went to get him and he was in a wheelchair.

“Can you believe it? A frickin’ rolling cage. Like a circus animal on parade.”

I thought maybe he was kidding, but he wasn’t smiling.

“This sucks. I want to stay here with you guys, Irv.”

“I know. Don’t worry about it. I’d rather see you go home. We’ve only got a month left.”

I didn’t have to add anything more about how short time was stress time.

“Besides, you’d gotten a whole lot of kills. I’m the Reaper, remember.” By that point, his kill count was fourteen. He was damn good with that Win Mag.

We talked for a while longer, both of us knowing the complicated truth that we both wanted him to go and wanted him to stay, just like I wanted out of there and wanted to stick around. I also told him that as soon as he got back to the States I was going to be in touch. Finally I added, “But seriously, if you don’t want to go, I’ll take your place.”

He laughed and then reached over and pulled me into a hug.

“I’ll see you when you’re back,” he told me.

We received status updates on each of his flights when he e-mailed us while waiting for the next one to take off. Every time I responded by asking him if he’d gone down in any holes.

He kept telling me to be safe, and I think that now that he was out of the bubble, no longer under the influence of our collective disassociation with the very real possibilities we faced, I could sense that he was upset. That was especially true once he finally got back to Benning.

For so long, we both had been committed to taking care of each other. Now that he could no longer do it, when he spoke the words “take care of yourself,” they took on a meaning that neither of us liked.

Of course, we couldn’t let that moment linger too long. “Just so you know, the nurse that traveled with me was smoking hot.”

Once Mike was back in the States, I called him. The first thing he told me was that he was sitting at home enjoying some good homemade chocolate chip cookies.

“I always knew you’d turn out to be the master of E and E,” I told him, finally resorting to tech-speak with him, using the shorthand for evasion and escape, “but I never figured you’d find a hole that would take you all the way back to Georgia.”

Through a mouthful of crumbs, he said, “I gotta tell you, it’s a whole lot easier indexing targets when they’re in a Tupperware bowl, my friend, a whole lot easier.”

“Well, you keep enjoying life there on Sesame Street.”

“Roger that. This one’s for you,” he said, as the sounds of another cookie being crammed into his face crackled over the line.

8. Rumble in the Rubble

As much as I was going to miss having Mike around, we all knew that he was—as far as him being a part of sniper team—replaceable. In fact, well before Mike was back home playing Cookie Monster, I was paired with another sniper. Brent had been working out of Camp Bastion and flew in two days after what I had named in my mind the “Longest Day.” I was just coming out of my hibernation, when I received word that he was arriving. I knew Brent by reputation. He’d been in the sniper platoon for a while, and the funny thing was, any time we got a new guy coming in, it was cause for a kind of celebration. We were glad to touch base with somebody from outside the group we’d been deployed with. They could fill us in on news of the rest of the platoon, let us know that everybody, hopefully, was okay. If not, then at least we’d know what to expect when we got back home.

The army had its own way of setting up sniper teams. Frequently, the spotter was a guy who was senior to the shooter. That was the case with Brent. I wasn’t sure how old he was, but rumor had it that he’d been around in the sniper section for quite a while. He was a really good competitive shooter, and I’d heard that he’d won a few of them, and competed in the International Sniper Competition held at Fort Benning. As its name says, the ISC includes snipers from different parts of the world as well as the U.S. military. Civilian teams, and police Special Tactics and Weapons, also compete.

When I was in sniper school there, I’d heard about the event, but hadn’t participated in it. (Eventually, in 2009, I competed shortly after returning Stateside and placed in the top five.) I thought it was cool that for basically seventy-two hours straight this competition went on with stalking, urban shooting and orienteering, and what was called “shooting under stressful conditions.” Now that I’d been downrange and operational as a sniper, and I’d been doing these things for real, the idea of a competition didn’t quite have the same mystique that it once did. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have any respect for the guys who competed in them. It was all about honing your skills and preparing yourself for the real thing and there was a whole lot of pride at stake. Whether it was guys from the Tenth Mountain Division, the Third Infantry Division, or especially the marines’ Scout Sniper School, or one of the international SWAT teams, bragging rights were on the line.

As soon as I saw Brent come into our compound I had a better recollection of who he was. Brent was a smaller guy like me, only five five or five six, but he packed a lot more muscle on that small frame. He looked like a wrestler or a football player, with his thick neck and torso. He was so ripped that his arms didn’t fall naturally to his sides, but stuck out a bit. He had a big old grin on his face, too. That’s when I remembered a few of the pranks he’d pulled on guys over time. He was into shaving cream and loved hitting guys in the face with “whipped cream” pies as a way of honoring them when they’d received some kind of citation or otherwise done well. He was also pretty good at imitating people’s voices, and more than one guy in the sniper section got all worked up by a voice mail message from one of our “commanders” who’d asked to see us immediately.

Brent was from New Jersey and I was disappointed that he didn’t have that wise-guy fuggedaboutit accent. We met in the TOC and he walked in with his stout shoulders loaded with bags. He set them down and shook my hand.

“Sergeant Irving,” he said, sounding like a butler out of an English movie. He cleared his throat and then said in his normal voice, “Hey, Irv. Or should I say Reaper? Or is it Mr. Reaper?”

The English accent was a reminder that he’d been at Bastion, a British military base that was right next to our marines’ Camp Leatherneck. Neither of us could have known this then, but Britain’s Prince Harry would one day be stationed at Bastion.

We talked for a bit, catching up on some of the guys and what we’d both been up to.

“I’d heard you guys were getting some, but I thought some of it was just—” He stopped and shrugged. “You know.”

“No. It’s been for real.”

“Nice. That’s what I was hoping to hear. Can’t believe I haven’t had any trigger time. Unless you count those streetlights and stuff.”

Brent had been deployed multiple times and he’d yet to fire on a human target. That just pointed out again how unusual my experience had been, how much trigger time Pemberton and I had had in so short a period. We were just six weeks shy of ending our hundred-plus-days rotation in country, and Pemberton had left with fourteen confirmed kills. When I told Brent that, he tipped back in his chair and whistled. “H-o-l-y s-h-i-t,” he said.

“And what about you?”

“Twenty six.”

“Wow. A dozen more.”

That led to a discussion about how Mike and I had been operating and that I didn’t believe that the by-the-books sniper/shooter relationship really worked given the specifics of our operations. He needed to do more than just select targets and assist in aiming and all of that. It would have been even weirder for me to have Brent be that kind of caddy for me when he already had so many years in the section.

“You tell me what you want, and I’m there,” he said. He bent down and unlocked one of his hard cases. Inside was a .50 caliber Barrett with Leupold Mark 4 scope. The M82 was, and is, the only semiautomatic .50 cal in the world. It was a great SASR (special application scoped rifle), but I told him it was one that he’d probably want to leave at home when we went out. The same was true for his Win Mag. Fortunately, he was an SR-25 guy.

While I was giving him the rundown on what we’d been doing and what we found effective in terms of appearance of objects and the different measurements of things in our area of operation, how the enemy was responding to contact, Sergeant Peters joined us.