The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (26 page)

The whole experience just put me in a bad place mentally. I watched as the assaulters rounded up the women and children. Some of the women they had to zip-tie and fingerprint, and who knew if they were sympathizers of the Taliban, whether they were there out of fear or having no other options. I don’t use the word “hate” very often or experience that feeling, but looking at those kids, I thought of my sister’s kids, my nieces and nephews, and I almost broke down, thinking about what those Afghan kids and those women’s lives were like. How the hell could those “fighters,” and I had to question my use of that word to describe these guys, use women and children like that?

I wasn’t a father, but I’d seen how some of the guys with kids reacted. Once, in Iraq, a man had held up a child as a shield, clutched it to his chest as a way to keep from getting fired on. One of the assaulters I was working with had come into the room, saw the man, saw the baby, saw the man’s AK tucked in the crook of his arm and still pointing at us, and he put two in the guy’s face. I could see the anger and the hatred in my fellow soldier’s eyes, and I couldn’t judge him or his actions.

That night, I saw Brent, the big prankster hard-ass, walking among the women and children. The kids crying and the women wailing and rocking just tore at your soul. Mentally, I understood their response. We had just come into where they lived and had shot some of the men they knew and loved. I wished that they could have understood why we were doing the things we were doing. We all wanted them to not be afraid of us, but how could they be anything but afraid? One kid was inconsolable. His mother was shielding him, and I could tell she was even more afraid of what we might do if she couldn’t get this kid to stop crying. He was maybe two or three years old tops, and Brent walked up to him. He knelt down and reached into his pocket and took out a chem light. He showed it to the kid who turned away and kept screaming. Brent cracked the light stick and it started to glow. He waved it around in the air and the kid saw the light and turned toward it.

A few seconds later, with a stick in his hands, that kid wasn’t crying anymore. I didn’t know that kid’s whole story; maybe he’d lost a father that night and a chem light was a poor substitute for what he might have lost. It definitely couldn’t make up for the impoverished conditions in which he lived. But for at least a few moments he was calm. I’d seen guys do things like that all the time. We all did it at one time or another, and knowing how horrible it all was and how confusing and frustrating just made the job so much tougher.

Once, in Iraq, one of my buddies had had to shoot an older woman. It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. He knew what he was doing, but he had no choice. He saw her inside a building, moving around with several AK-47s going into and out of several rooms. We were taking heavy fire, and she got killed. What’s worse, we took several captives and one of the guys confessed to being her son. He told the interrogators that he was the one who was supposed to be helping supply the shooters, but he asked her to do it, figuring that we wouldn’t shoot her. He’d been hiding inside the house, under a bed, while his mom did his job for him.

There was one young male, we couldn’t determine exactly how old he was, but we decided to let him go rather than detain him. He looked like he was maybe fourteen or so, beardless and with these eyes that gave him a dazed expression like he was in a total state of disbelief. We told the other women to get him out of there, and that they should all go to the next village or wherever but to stay the hell away from this place. I was hoping that giving that kid a chance and treating him with some respect might make him think twice about us and about Al Qaeda and about the whole messy situation.

At that point, we knew that we had to destroy that weapons cache. When we discovered a small one, it was no big deal for us to dispose of it. Given how large that supply was, we called it in and the command ordered in an F-16 to drop a five-hundred-pounder on top of that cache. We had to get out of there, but we all wanted to see that bomb go off. The Chinooks had been able to make it within three hundred meters of our location, so I didn’t have as far to walk. I sat down and instantly smelled my own clammy funk. Whatever toxins were in my system, they seemed to be leaching out of me. I sat down and lifted off my night vision and took off my helmet and just cradled my head in my hands and tried to breathe deep.

I don’t know how much time elapsed, but I was jostled awake. I could hear over my earpiece that the F-16s were coming in. I shuffled to the end of the craft, trying to get a glimpse of the impact over the gray outlines of my guys. All of us craned our necks for the light show that was just about to take place. The F-16 came in afterburners going and dropped down. We could see the bomb and by the time it made contact with the ground, the F-16 was already winging away. We started a countdown in synch with the pilots.

“Five.”

“Four.”

“Three.”

“Two.”

Before we got to one, the bunker buster connected and dirt rose up in the sky like a geyser and then we faintly heard and then felt the concussion as the bomb and that cache exploded. Over the comms I heard the F-16 crew laugh and ask, “What the hell did you guys find down there?”

I was wrong about my estimate of how many explosives and bomb-making materials there were in that cache. I was later told that it was likely we’d hit on a major supply depot for all of southern Helmand Province. It had been operational for a number of years. All I could do was hope that it was out of commission for good, that we’d put a serious dent in the Taliban’s capabilities.

I had no idea what the value of the heroin we destroyed was. I knew that the money would have been used for more supplies to make more IEDs and HMEs. And I knew that there weren’t enough bunker busters in the world to take out all those fields of poppies.

To say that I was starting to feel disillusioned is pretty accurate. I still believed that we were doing the right thing by being there and taking on these forces, but the toll was climbing. I’d lost some good friends, and I knew that it wasn’t just the fact that my resistance was low due to the food poisoning that had me thinking that there was something rotting away in that country. I’d felt the same way in Iraq, had begun to question why we were putting in so much blood, sweat, and tears in a place where people didn’t seem to want our help or care that we were losing lives in the process. I think that for most of us, you could only go out there and put your head down and just do your job and not question anything for only so long. It seemed like more than in Iraq, the strangeness of my experiences in Afghanistan threw questions into my face so that I couldn’t ignore them anymore.

A few days after we destroyed that weapons cache, we were out on another operation. Brent and I were on the outside of a compound, placing our ladders to climb over a fifteen-foot-high wall. Our ladders were extended, and we each had our pistols out—I’d followed through on my promise to do that—and we were just about to start our climb when a black-clad somebody or something came flying over the wall. I could hear the wind snapping the fabric of the black burqa that flapped around what I had to assume was her. She landed with her feet spread and her body turned sideways, looking like she was a skateboarder steadying herself and then she did a combat roll and got to her feet. She turned toward us and I could see the veil and the mesh she wore to cover her face and eyes that sure looked to me like a woman’s. She sprinted off into the field and disappeared down an embankment.

I looked at Brent and he looked at me.

“What the fuck is going on?” he whispered.

I climbed up the ladder and looked over the other side, hoping to see another ladder, some stacked lumber, something that woman could have used to get over that wall.

Nothing.

After the mission was over, we checked with the ISR guys, and they confirmed that what we’d seen was caught on a drone’s camera. Someone had come up and over that wall and then disappeared into the terrain.

I kidded Brent. “It had to be your future ninja wife.”

“Figures. She got one look at me and she ran off.”

“Thermal couldn’t pick her up either.”

“Cold. Cold bitch of a woman. I’m better off.”

10. Winding Up and Winding Down

Just as happened when I was working with Pemberton, Brent and I went out on other operations besides the more eventful ones I’ve described. By the time the end of July rolled around, I’d reached a total of more than twenty-five kills. Given that I was on short time at that point, the number that was most on my mind was how many days I had left before I would return to the States. I don’t think I can begin to describe the grinding nature of the work, how it seemed like the sun and the sand infiltrated all your gear, took the shine off what was new, and made every movable part of your body and soul more resistant to its natural fluidity.

To offset that, as the days for our departure fell into the single digits, guys’ spirits seemed to lift. Sure, that short-timer’s mentality that I mentioned earlier was a part of it as well—the dread feeling that you were this close to getting out of the country and how much of a shame it would be if something happened that close to the finish line. If we said that this sucks, this really sucks, and this really, really sucks, then to get killed or wounded when you could measure time within the expiration date on a carton of milk would suck exponentially.

We also found ourselves in a bit of an anticlimactic situation as well. We’d all come into the deployment together, but for various reasons we wouldn’t be leaving at the same time. A few guys left to attend to family matters. Davis and Johnson, two key members of the assaulters, both were scheduled to be married and got permission to go home early. Brent had been in country for two weeks before us, so he was going to leave before us by that same time span. He was excited about leaving, but the curse kind of hung over his head, and he kept telling me that he wasn’t going to take the kinds of chances that he’d taken early on when we were first teamed.

I didn’t spend nearly as much time with him as I had Pemberton, and we were so different temperamentally that we didn’t get that close as friends, but I had a lot of respect for him. I admired how dedicated he was, and even if his downtime goofiness and his obsession with the video game the World of Warcraft sometimes mystified me, he was an outstanding teammate and someone from whom I learned a great deal.

I can’t say that I had compiled a list of things I wanted to do before leaving Afghanistan, but one operation did stand out as a break from the usual routine. I’d heard about and seen photographs of the northern part of Afghanistan, its eastern border with Pakistan. Being from the East Coast and doing nearly all my training in Georgia, I hadn’t seen real high-altitude areas and massive mountain ranges. I wouldn’t get that chance, but on Brent’s last mission with us, we did travel to a part of southern Afghanistan.

I also got to work with Rice one last time. He was still really into his role, and I admired him for that. He never complained about doing any of the grunt work he did in support of us. He’d already more than proved that he was a courageous guy, and it was no wonder really. I first met him when I deployed to Iraq for my initial overseas deployment. He was a door kicker back then and remained one for another year. We served in the same assault team back in Battalion. Breaching a door and being one of the first in on an assault team was pretty damn stressful. We all faced the unknown from time to time, but these guys’ work role defined surprise, speed, and violence of action in a very real way.

He was along with us when we flew deep into the southern portion of Helmand Province the last week of July 2009. Because of the difficult terrain, we had landed five kilometers from the objective. Good thing Rice was along. He carried one of our ladders and an extra box of ammo each for Brent and me. Instead of desert or arid fields, we walked through an area of rocky outcroppings, first making our way along a trail that was defined by a sheer rock wall on one side and a hundred-foot drop on the other. A creek ran at the bottom of that ravine, and it was hard to imagine how it had carved and polished that wall, and how many eons it must have taken for it to do so.

With such a long walk ahead of us, I had the time to contemplate such things. I also did it to take my mind off the cold. It might sound funny to say that a temperature in the low seventies is cold, but considering that even during our nighttime operations we were moving around loaded with gear when it was ninety-five, the difference was substantial. I could feel the cool air rising up from the ravine and figured the water had to be very cold runoff from some mountains very far from where we were.

I was also thinking that we were very exposed. If we got ambushed, we were in a terrible fighting position. Our backs would literally be up against a wall, and the sides of that ravine were nearly perpendicular to the trail. There was no way we’d be able to gain any kind of handhold or foothold to keep from plunging into that rocky creek below. The trail had a few blind curves and switchbacks, and a few times, my heart rate picked up when I thought about what was just around that bend. Doing all this at night also complicated matters. I thought of Pemberton and his fall, and I wanted no part of that scenario again.

I was curious to see our objective in person. In the photos we’d viewed, it was by far the most substantial residence I’d seen there. It wasn’t that large, only one story, and it sat on a rectangular foundation of one thousand to fifteen hundred square feet. What impressed me about its construction was its roof. It had semicircular clay tiles like I’d seen some homes in California had. It had a finished look and attention to detail that you’d expect of houses in the West, but didn’t ever really see in Afghanistan where most of the houses had a do-it-yourself kind of vibe. I thought that it was the kind of place that I could see myself having as a getaway someday. We’d been operating in Kandahar for a while, and the smell and the cramped streets and the dirt and disarray were getting to me. Out there, the air reminded me of Georgia when we were out in the woods during our sniper school.