The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers

by Nicholas Irving

  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.

  I also think that part of what contributed to that jump accident was my eagerness to deploy for the first time. I’d wanted to be a soldier for so long and the initial training phases seemed to drag on for so long. I enjoyed learning as much as I did, but I was tired of practicing all the time—I wanted to be doing it for real.

  I can’t say that there was a single incident that transformed me from fearful to eager. Over time, doing all the training, receiving guidance from fellow soldiers and higher-ups made me more and more certain that I was doing what I wanted and was meant to do. I laugh now thinking of it, but when I went to the army recruiting station, I asked for a twenty-year contract.

  The recruiter looked at me and said, “I’m impressed by your willingness to commit, but you should think about that for a bit. Twenty years is a very long time.”

  “I know that, but I’m sure that I’ll be good to go for all that time.”

  Eventually he talked me down a bit. Quite a bit, actually. I signed for a guaranteed six and a half years. I told my recruiter that it didn’t matter, I was going to do the full twenty anyway.

  I’m sure that if you talked to the men and women who work in those recruitment positions, they’ll have plenty of other stories about overeager and gung-ho types like me. Reality sets in quickly, and some people it frightens away and other people it hardens to the task at hand. Sometimes hardness makes you brittle and more likely to crack.

  Sometimes what you need is somebody to help you push through to find out that the limits you thought you had were just a little beyond your expectations of yourself. Sometimes you fall short of what you thought you were capable of, but then someone gives you the push you need to accept that limitations are temporary things.

  My leg issues—the stress fractures—almost proved to be too much for me. The last evolution in basic was an FTX or field exercise. A guy by the name of Lloyd came to my aid and helped me on the l
ast bit of the fourteen-mile road march. He knew I was struggling and took some of the stuff out of my rucksack and carried it the rest of the way to the finish line. In some ways, I was like this bike we had back in the neighborhood. We lived on a cul-de-sac and we used to race this bike around that circle. It was the fastest bike out there it seemed like, no matter who was riding it. But it didn’t have brakes. A couple of buddies from the street got hit while riding Speedy Gonzales because they couldn’t slow down when a car was coming. I guess that was kind of what I was like, only I got lucky and never got hit.

  I was also fortunate that I struck up a relationship with a guy named Mark Cunningham. When I was still waiting for my first overseas deployment, he was already into his second and then third tour in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was only a year older than I was, but he was a pretty seasoned veteran in terms of his experience. I had taken advantage of my squad leader’s experience and asked all kinds of questions about what to expect and what it was like over there. However, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome with him, so to speak, and Cunningham always seemed fine with talking to me. He was from Tennessee, and a lot of times when guys told me they were from someplace other than the Northeast, I had a hard time picturing where that was. He was a good guy, had an ever-present dip of Copenhagen behind his lip, and was always patient with me.

  What I knew about the war was what I’d seen on CNN or wherever. I was thinking we’d go over there and live in tents. I told the guys that and they all laughed at me. Cunningham always set me straight. He’d give me crap, but at least he’d laugh and tell me it was okay to ask and to not know things. Our informal briefings and debriefings helped me prepare for what really was unimaginable in so many ways.

  That’s not to say that all my various training schools and activities were horrible. I loved firing the rocket launchers. Getting qualified on them was fun. By the time I did so, I’d been in the army for a couple of years. I’d also gained a bunch of weight. Mom was a great cook but with four mouths to feed and not a whole lot of income, things got spread pretty thin. I was one of those guys in basic and after who seldom complained about the chow. It was a good thing I put on those twenty to twenty-five pounds, because the recoils of the 203 and M240B were so powerful, it would have bucked that skinnier me back into basic.

  I never got to fire them in actual combat, but spending all day on the range watching those things spiral and twist downrange until they impacted was about as relaxing as anything I ever did. Seeing those eighteen-wheeler trucks roll up with thousands and thousands of rounds of ammo ready to be offloaded and fired was like Christmas Day for me.

  Still, I made my share of mistakes early on and even later. Those bumps in the road were good to experience, even when one of those bumps was an M1-Abrams reinforcement tank of ours that I nearly fired on mistakenly during my first deployment in Iraq.

  * * *

  I guess you can say that trusting my gut wasn’t something that came natural to me. But in this case, on that third night operation, maybe if I did trust my gut, I’d have thought to make sure that Pemberton and his weapon were truly squared away.

  Even though we only had those two missions under our belt, things had gone so smoothly everybody’s morale seemed to be up. Just walking around our area within the compound, you could sense that people were really into it in a different way. It’s hard to say exactly how things were different, but people seemed to be moving at a different pace for one thing. It was like everybody had a designated time and location in mind. Instead of just killing time, we were moving around knowing that something was going to be up that night and we’d better be prepared for it.

  * * *

  Even in my earlier deployments, before becoming a sniper team leader, I’d gotten into the habit of hanging back when it was time to load up. That wasn’t because I didn’t like flying in the helicopters. Instead, it was a part of my desire to get out there. If I hung back on load-up, that meant I was going to be among the first out when we landed. I wasn’t troubled by visions of us being ambushed and trapped inside that fuel-filled bird. I just knew that given my role as a sniper attached to this unit, if anything was going to go down early on, I wanted to be out there firing as close to on point as I could be. With our night-vision and thermal-imaging scopes, we were the eyes of the platoon, and there was no sense in having them be in the back of our heads—let alone the back of the bird.

  Besides, I liked riding along with the dog and the dog handler. If we were the eyes of the platoon, those guys were the nose and whatever other sense it is that those dogs possess that tips them off that something could potentially go upside down before we even had a clue. Something in my gut told me that as by the book as this operation seemed during our briefing, something was going to disrupt those plans. I trusted my instincts as much as I trusted the animal’s.

  Forty-five minutes later, we touched down and offloaded. My earlier feelings about this not being a run-of-the-mill operation were confirmed. As soon as my feet hit the ground, I noticed two things. First, the full moon painted every bit of the location in a kind of primer-gray light. Our night-vision gear was going to be even more effective as a result. Second, we weren’t going to be sneaking up on anybody. For the first time in my four deployments, the enemy was firing tracer rounds at us. Their green glow against the ash-gray backdrop reminded me of flickering Christmas lights. It was a surreal scene to have what seemed the entire galaxy above us bathing us in light while those tracers arced and flared in the distance.

  We formed up and set off with the dog Bruno and his handler, Sergeant Val, on point. About a click or so in, we came on another small village, and we could make out a circle of bodies lying outside. We could hear some heavy breathing and snoring and saw a few of the bodies rising and falling as they breathed in their sleep. I felt bad for Sergeant Val and even worse for Bruno. Bruno was trained to go after the bad guys and bite them to bring them under control, and his every instinct and training was telling him to seek and bite. Collectively, we made our way through the sleepers, figuring that the direct route was best. We entered the village marketplace. Bazaar was a good name for that location since I was always freaked out about moving along and through them at night. The small buildings all had garage door–like entrances, and they were recessed just enough to resemble cave entrances, providing who knows who with a good hiding place.

  Besides Taliban fighters, the doorways could also be hiding IEDs. The dog led the way, his tail high and twitching, his snout high and sniffing. Eventually, I lost sight of him. The first and second squads moved ahead of Pemberton and me to do the clearing.

  We had gone about thirty-five of the fifty meters we had to navigate to reach our destination when a green tracer round appeared ahead of me. I ducked and heard it sizzle past, like a bottle rocket the kids in the neighborhood used to fire at one another. It seems like a cliché to say this, but I saw all this happening in slow motion—the light wobbling as it fireballed toward me, giving off sparks of light. It was almost pretty the way it lit up the gray night. Fortunately, my brain wasn’t working in slo-mo, and I dropped to one knee and a few more tracers went over my head. Pemberton was just behind and flanking me and we both dropped to our bellies.

  In our earpieces, we were getting transmissions from the AC-130 gunships patrolling above us. Ignoring their words for a moment, I told Pemberton, “Let’s go,” and we low-crawled. By this time, the rest of the guys in the platoon had opened fire; the Taliban’s tracers were originating from a rooftop between one hundred fifty and two hundred meters away.

  We continued our low crawl to the front of the formation. The rest of the guys were laying down a lot of lead, but they weren’t hitting any of the targets. From experience, I knew that using a laser and an M4, trying to hit targets that were popping up just barely high enough that their eyeballs were visible for only an instant was going to make for a very difficult shot. Shortly after that, we discovered that Pemberton’s gun wasn’t going to be able to
get it done either. I thought for a few seconds and then spoke to Mike.

  “Put your flood on the target and I’ll turn mine off.”

  “Roger that.”

  I knew I needed illumination, but I didn’t need to have my scope refracting and reflecting all that light directly back into my eye. With him flooding from a different angle, I should have been able to avoid that problem.

  When Pemberton’s light went on, I saw a circle of light nearly six feet around tracing the perimeter of the rooftop ledge. Through my scope I saw what I was hoping to see—the whites of the Taliban guys’ eyes glowing in the dark. If you’ve ever been near a dog and seen how a light reflects off their eyes, then you can imagine to some extent what I was seeing. As I was looking, the white-eye glow went off and on as the men blinked.

  They stopped firing at us. Thirty seconds to a minute passed. Blinking and silence.

  “Hold the light right there. I’m going to take that guy out first.”

  “Roger that.”

  “I’m going to keep moving to the right and work my way from left to right.”

  “Got it.”

  Pemberton knew what to do. As I fired each round, he was going to move the light along the row of eyeballs.

  I squeezed the trigger and saw a large puff of smoke through my scope. Low. I hit the wall and not the dude.

  I reached up on my elevation and went up two clicks on the gun, two minutes. That way I had given myself a bit of leeway. Either I was going to hit the very top of his head and crease his skull or hit him right between the eyes. I reset the trigger and felt and heard the little click. I wanted to reduce the pull. That was crucial for such a precise shot, particularly with the two-stage trigger my weapon employed.

  An instant after I squeezed the trigger, I saw the target’s eyes roll back just as his head first tilted straight back and then plunged forward like his head was on a spring.