The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (6 page)

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 rifle, 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.

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.