The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (7 page)

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 riser, 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.

The first sergeant and platoon sergeant were good about making sure I was okay, but the next day we had an incident review. They showed me the video of my exit and all that did was reinforce what I already knew. I essentially blacked out on the exit. If I had waited another few seconds before deploying the reserve, they would have had to use a shovel and a mop to clean me off the concrete.

I could have been reprimanded far worse than I was. Instead I was assigned extra jump training. I must have put my gear on and off dozens of time, doing practice exits over and over. I knew that the army didn’t want to see anyone fail, and it was better to get training than punishment.

Truth is, though, I should have never been in that position. I’d done my airborne school training, had done so many PLFs (parachute landing falls), and had spent so much time on the T-10 Delta parachutes working those risers that I began to wonder if maybe I was a puppet, that I should have performed better that first time with battalion.

One thing about all that training I went through, first at basic then at Airborne and later at RIP and beyond, it made me face reality. I’d fantasized about being a soldier for so long, and I’d built up this image of who I was and what I was capable of, but when faced with some of the tasks I had to complete, that image wasn’t as accurate as I’d hoped. I had always thought of myself as an adrenaline junkie/thrill seeker. However, standing on a tower nearly thirty-five feet or so up in the air and having to walk across a narrow balance beam to another tower that seemed to be a mile away was almost enough to get me to quit. Later, in Ranger school, the zip line over water also had me thinking that it would be better to just walk away and disqualify myself than give myself a heart attack or panic attack in the middle of the exercise.

I figured out pretty quickly that the reality of life in the military was tougher than I’d imagined. In basic, I saw a couple of guys run off and one guy who broke down so completely that he slit his wrists in a bathroom stall. He survived, as did the few other knuckleheads who tried to break their legs jumping off the top bunk. Getting through basic was easy physically, but mentally it was tough. We had fifty guys in a barracks and the rumors were constantly flying about what was going to happen to us. We had guys trying to hurt or kill themselves and it seemed like everyone we worked with was trying to break us down. We had to go through the “racetrack”—a chow line punishment where you had to eat as much as you could in the time it took to get food on your tray and walk the twenty feet to the garbage can—more times than I can remember.

In some ways, my eagerness to become a soldier ended up hurting me, literally, in the long run. I’d rented some Navy SEAL training DVDs and was doing a lot of running in boots—combat boots. Later, at the end of basic when it came time to do the running qualifications, I had developed such serious stress fractures that I was held back for a few weeks to heal up. We were a Christmas Exodus class, so we had two weeks off. I went home and woke up each morning with painfully swollen legs. I started to think that maybe I’d made a mistake in choosing the military as a career.

I also thought I could outsmart the system and that eventually backfired. My dad had taught me how to make my bed in the military style when I was in my early teens. By the time I got to basic, I was a master at it. The first time we ever had a bed inspection, I was singled out by the drill sergeant for my exemplary work. Figuring why mess with success, I decided not to sleep in the bed again. I’d sleep on top of the sheets and blanket, or I’d sleep under the bed frame on the floor, but I would not get
in
the bed. A few other guys saw what I was doing and copied my example.

That did not sit well with Sergeant Fredley, the scariest man I’d ever met. He was only about five three or five four. He never raised his voice, but he was a weird dude. He’d wake us up in the middle of the night, tell us what clothes to put on—sometimes our Class A shoes, a ball cap, a tie, and a T-shirt—and make us form up outside. We’d stand there for half an hour and then he’d say, “Okay. That’s it. Back to bed.” He reminded me in some ways of Hannibal Lecter, that eerie kind of in-control evil.

When he found out about guys not sleeping in their beds so they didn’t have to remake them every night, he put us through some hellacious PT, never once raising his voice, just giving us that weird glassy-eyed stare.

In truth, I probably tortured myself more than anyone else did. I had been dating a girl all of my senior year of high school. I was head over heels for her, and I thought she was for me. Jay was into me, but not that into me as it turned out. I think my parents cried tears of joy when I went off to basic and had to leave her. I had a part-time job working at a shoe store and every bit of money I earned went to the care and support of Jay. I didn’t know the expression “high maintenance” back then, but that was what Jay was. All through basic, I wrote her a letter every day, but I didn’t get a single one back. I was eighteen and fragile at that point. I came up with all kinds of reasons why I wasn’t getting any mail from her. The drill sergeants were stealing my letters was the final conclusion I came to. To support that idea, the drill sergeants used to sing this song. The lyrics went, “Jody’s got your girl back home.” The gist of the song was that you are away in basic and now someone else was taking care of her. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I had to fight back tears whenever I heard them singing that song.

Finally, when I got back home for Christmas, my best friend Andre and I went to her high school to surprise her. Of course, I saw her and she was holding some other guy’s hand, walking out to his car in the parking lot. I went nuts and ran up to her yelling at her. Andre, who was more like a brother than a friend, really went after her, defending me and telling her how she didn’t deserve a great guy like me.

Later, on the last day before I had to return to finish basic, Andre was in my room. I had my bags packed and he grabbed them and threw them around, telling me that I didn’t have to go back. He said that he didn’t want me to have to go to war. I told him not to worry about that, but I did have some serious second thoughts about what I was doing. I had a great family, a really good friend, and what was I giving all that up for? Obviously, I did go back, but five more guys out of our original fifty didn’t show up. Ultimately, my pride kicked in. I’d been telling people for so long that I wanted to be a soldier, that I couldn’t imagine going back home and having to live down that failure to follow through. It also helped that my dad was firm but sympathetic. He told me he understood how I felt and that he’d support me a hundred percent, but he’d hate to see me make a bad decision that I’d have to live with for the rest of my life. He told me that quitting is addictive and that it got easier and easier to do each time you made that decision. That was advice I was glad I took to heart.