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

by Nicholas Irving

  So, in between those hours of debate, I did what I needed to do—I cleaned my weapon. Just before lunch hour for the regular guys, I’d sit out on the balcony having a smoke and cleaning my weapon before going to bed. Despite what happened on the previous assignment with Pemberton’s weapon, I had to knock on Pemberton’s door and ask him to join me to do weapons maintenance. I never issued him a direct order or pulled rank on him. He was six years older than me, and at the age of twenty-three, I still wasn’t comfortable with outranking guys who were older than me. I believed that guys who were older and had more time in the army deserved respect, so I asked them not to call me “sergeant.” My attitude was this was a stressful enough environment and we should be trying to enjoy our deployment as best we could. No point in wasting your breath saying “sergeant” all the time. We were going out every day getting shot at and our compound came under rocket fire daily. You could die any time, so why stick with those regulations and formality? I was Irv to my friends, so why shouldn’t I be Irv to all these guys with whom I was sharing such an intense experience? I really believed in and tried to live the brothers-in-arms ideal.

  I can admit now that I was a bit immature in some ways when I joined the army and I did some things that I’m really not proud of. Same was true before I enlisted. My parents told me that I was always trying to act like I was really mature, but by trying to do that, I was actually being just the opposite. Maybe it was just teenage hormones and all the changes you go through with puberty and all that, but at sixteen, I was just into doing stupid stuff, mild by some standards, but still enough to make my mom and dad wonder just exactly who I was and what the hell was going on with me.

  I was on the Internet looking for ways to make weapons from household items and I came across instructions for a blowgun you could fashion out of a shoelace, a sewing needle, and a straw. I scavenged the supplies and spent a lot of time shooting that little dart around. Eventually, I got a bigger piece of pipe and a small nail and used that. I was surprised by how powerful the thing was. I shot a bottle of cologne I had and it started leaking. Then, I fired another shot and this one missed the target and hit my bedroom window. Andre was with me and he freaked out when he saw the glass shatter. It also tore up the outside screen pretty bad. I cleaned things up the best I could but my dad spotted the damage and asked me what happened. I was feeling pretty good about myself for coming up with what I thought was a great excuse (lie) that matched the laws of thermodynamics. It had gotten cold the night before and then the sun shining on the window heated up the glass again. I shut it and the glass broke.

  He seemed to believe me, and all he asked was that I patch up the screen. He’d take care of the glass. I had to get a ladder and deal with the second-story window—that’s when I discovered I was afraid of heights. I also discovered something else. My dad was a very cool guy and a very fair one. On the day I was to leave for basic he said to me, “Before you go, check your bank account’s balance.”

  I asked him why.

  “Because you’ll see you’ve got a few dollars less than you probably thought. I took out the money I spent to fix that window you broke with your blowgun.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “C’mon, son, what you told me made no sense. I could tell you were lying. I also found the dart out on the lawn.”

  “Wow. You’re good.”

  “And you better be. Own up to your mistakes and learn from them and you won’t have any trouble.”

  My mom didn’t have the same level of patience with me as my dad. That was especially true when, that same year as the dart incident, I got into a fight with my sister. The rule was ironclad. Keep your hands off her even if she came at you. I tried to push her out of my room, and before I knew it, my mom had burst out of the closet, and she was like a little Mike Tyson. She threw me out of the house immediately. It was cold and pouring down rain, and I wasn’t even given the opportunity to grab any of my stuff. Looking back on it, I don’t blame my mom at all for what she did, but at the time I was doing a little why-me whining as I wandered the neighborhood in bare feet.

  I hadn’t gotten very far before Dad’s pickup brake-squeaked to a stop beside me. I watched as he rolled down the window, counting the seconds until the reckoning. I knew not to lie about this one. I told him that Jasmine and I had gotten into a fight and that I’d been kicked out of the house. He nodded slowly and his head disappeared for a moment as he leaned all the way over to push the door open for me. I got back in the house then, but it was a long time before I got to get back out of the house for anything other than going to school.

  You’d think I’d learned my lesson, but I snuck out of the house a few weeks later and stole a neighbor’s car. Well, “stole” is kind of a strong word because the owner was this young girl who didn’t mind it when we took her car out for joyrides. She’d leave the keys where we could find them, and then we’d go for a drive around the neighborhood. This time, something possessed me, and instead of just leisurely touring the nearby streets, I decided to really gun it. I was going way too fast on roads that were way too tight, and eventually ventured out of our area onto a two-lane highway and nearly flipped it. I heard the police coming and tried to evade them. I drove the car back to the girl’s house, tires squealing around the corners, and went flying up her driveway before slamming to a stop.

  There, a couple of doors down, was my dad standing in the driveway. He didn’t look too pleased.

  Today, I know that a lot of young people, boys especially, suffer from what is now called a lack of impulse control. I didn’t have a name for it back then, but I can see how that diagnosis fits. If I wanted to do something, I did it regardless of the consequences. I don’t know if enlisting in the army immediately transformed me, but I know that I started to think about my decisions with more care after going through basic. When my stress fractures kept me from moving on to airborne school immediately after basic, I think I finally started to show some sense. One of the instructors kept encouraging me to go despite the fact that my shins were so bad. I wanted to go. I’d made some buddies and wanted to stick with them and I didn’t want to feel like I’d somehow failed.

  I resisted the temptation, and spent a few weeks putting myself through some physical therapy. If I wasn’t in the gym working on my fitness using low- to no-impact devices like the elliptical trainer, I was doing what my doctors had told me. I don’t know why the RICE acronym stuck with me. Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation. I performed each of those religiously, substituting my low-impact work for complete rest.

  I did all the physical training tests and was worried about the two-mile run, but I managed to get through it basically pain-free in thirteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. I’m glad I didn’t cave in to the pressure, otherwise I would have just continued to do damage to my body, and who knows what might have happened if my shins hadn’t gotten better. Airborne school, of course, meant facing my biggest fear. Even though the mock AC-130 tower was only forty feet high and you’re in a harness and all, letting go and getting into that tucked-in position was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do. I got a bad case of the shakes but I’d gotten up there by not looking down and just staring at the back of the guy in front of me.

  That’s a principle that I followed through most of my training. Don’t think. Do as you’re told. Eventually fear gives way. I was fortunate in that high winds were whipping up for the whole three weeks of airborne so we never went up on the two-hundred-fifty-foot tower, just the mock-up.

  Be careful what you wish for. Not going through that next phase meant that the next time we jumped, it was going to be for real.

  I’m trying to think of a word for how terrible it was. It was intense. I was a big adrenaline junkie, or at least I thought I was until that day. We got rigged up, and my parachute was good. My reserve parachute was fine. My helmet was fine. Going to the aircraft, the AC-130, I was walking out to the airfield, we were in two lines. I was in the first chalk an
d the second chalk was off to my right. I was walking up in the line when one of the airborne instructors, a female, pulled me off to the side. I thought I was in trouble or something. I was sitting there thinking, What’s going on? Then I heard the words I was dreading.

  “You’re going to be the first one to exit.”

  She put me at the end of the line. I think she knew I had a fear of heights because she was with me on the tower and she saw the way I was acting. She put me at the very back of the line, the rest all filed in, and there I was, the first guy.

  We got the one-minute call, the door came up, and we were already hooked up to the cable that stretched inside the length of the plane. This woman stood there, looked out, inspected everything on the outside of the aircraft, made sure there was nothing beneath us, the walkway was clear, all that good stuff. She pulled me up and handed me over to another airborne instructor, a guy. He held onto my back and he tiptoed me to the very, very edge of the aircraft.

  I remember watching movies as a kid. I always thought that when you opened the door on an aircraft while it’s up in the sky, you’d get sucked out. Not the case. It was extremely loud. The wind was howling. I was getting thrown around. The aircraft was shaking somewhat. And it was kind of hard to keep my balance. That’s why there’s a grip on the back of your parachute. The instructor was holding me there and I was partially hanging out of the aircraft and we were going maybe a hundred fifty to two hundred miles an hour. And that wind was just pushing me, pushing me, pushing me, and I was standing there with nearly every one of my muscles in spasm, and the instructors say, “Don’t look down, just keep your eyes on the horizon.”

  I started getting weak in the knees again and I remember thinking, What did I sign up for? This is ridiculous. I’m jumping out of an aircraft for no reason at all.

  As I stood there, from my peripheral vision I could see to my right a red light, a yellow light, and a green light. The red light was holding steady. They called thirty seconds when the yellow light came on. And that’s when I thought, Oh, my gosh. This is really happening. The green light came on and the instructor smacked me on my ass and that’s all I remember of the first few seconds. I jumped out and I remember feeling almost like getting hit by a truck, I guess, this wall of wind, just pushing me. I kept my eyes open and I was screaming out what I learned in Airborne school, counting out 1000, 2000, 3000, and on 4000 my parachute opened, I could hear the rubber bands that keep the static line held together just starting to pop.

  And then I heard this boom, this push, this jolt that slowed me down. I looked up. My blood was pumping so hard at this point. I was huffing and puffing, screaming a little bit just out of excitement. I looked up, checked my parachute, and as I was coming down I completely forgot everything I’d learned: don’t look down, keep your eyes on the horizon so you don’t anticipate the fall and overextend your legs and they break on landing. So, I was coming down and I could hear the wind blowing, and I was going pretty fast and landed exactly the way we weren’t supposed to. I fell. I hit my feet, went straight to my ass, and tumbled on my head. I started getting dragged by my parachute. I took it off and looked up at the plane and was, like, Wow. I just jumped out of that thing.

  That was an amazing feeling. Scared and excited. It was the whole mixture of feelings, just overwhelming. It was crazy. I couldn’t wait to go back up and do it again as long as I was not the first guy.

  That excitement didn’t last long. The second jump was cool. After my third jump, I got worried about how many times a human could do this repeatedly before something bad happened. That’s when the fear factor set in and I’ve hated jumping ever since.

  I can reveal that now, but at the time I had to keep those feelings hidden from the other guys. Airborne school was interesting because you had people from all the branches, different special operations people, all there to qualify. There were a few other Ranger candidates in my chalk but we didn’t really speak to each other much. We sized each other up, but even then I sensed that there was no point in being too friendly with them. First, you would most likely end up in different units, and second, this was wartime and people were getting killed. If you didn’t get too close to anybody, you wouldn’t hurt as much if something bad happened to them.

  It’s funny now to think that after Airborne, I was sent to Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP). At the time “indoctrination” didn’t mean much to me, but later I thought about how that word can mean something kind of like being brainwashed. Now it’s called Ranger Assessment and Selection Program (RASP), and that’s more fitting, I think. There wasn’t much brainwashing going on when I went through it. It was mostly just a physical beating—long, long runs and marches of up to fifteen miles, three to four days without sleep, very little food. It’s that crucible moment when you find out for yourself if you’ve got what it takes. My dad always used to say that the truth will out—in other words, you can’t hide from who you really are and you will at some point reveal yourself.

  And from the first moment you enter RIP, you’re being tested. That first day I had to run a half mile carrying all my gear, a hundred pounds of it, and knowing that if I fell behind even just a bit I might be bounced out of the program. I looked like a soup sandwich at the end, but I wasn’t one of the 60 or so guys out of our class of 180 who didn’t make it to the end of day two. I don’t know where I found the strength, but I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to quit. If my shins flared up or my body otherwise broke down and they tossed me out, that was one thing. Quitting was not an option.

  I knew that even though I was lagging behind a lot of guys in running, since my short legs weren’t meant for the distance thing, I was confident that I had other skills.

  The first time I fired a weapon, I was eight years old. I was down in the country with my dad and my grandfather. They did a lot of rabbit and deer hunting, and I was in a clearing with them, a bottom land and a few stands of trees. At one point, my dad handed me the gun. It felt solid but not heavy. My dad stood behind me, helped me level the gun, and then with his finger over mine, he helped me squeeze the trigger, real slow. The recoil knocked me back but my dad held me up.

  I liked the sensation of firing a gun, immediately and intensely. Part of it was power, but part of it was also about control. As impulsive as I was with my homemade weapons, I was somehow able to respect what a real weapon could do and keep myself under control and eventually fire with real precision. I didn’t like school, and a lot of stuff seemed really complicated to me, but what my dad taught me, sight and squeeze, seemed really simple. The simplicity of it made it fun for me. This wasn’t like doing problems in math class or memorizing the Constitution’s amendments, or reading a story and trying to find a theme. Sight and squeeze.

  I also know that I was really angry as a kid, even until I was through with high school. I’m not really sure how firing a weapon figured into that, because I know I wasn’t one of those sociopathic kids who love torturing animals. I did hunt, but I was very squeamish when it came to handling the carcasses of the rabbits and squirrels I shot. I’d ask someone else to pick them up for me. I wasn’t into blood and gore, but I did get a great deal of satisfaction from mastering something. My dad would take me to the shooting range, and I developed more mental and emotional discipline there than I did anywhere else. I knew that I could never fire a weapon in anger at someone. That would mess too much with the simplicity of sight and squeeze. Sure, I felt a thrill when I was successful while hunting or hitting a target, and first going to the range, some of my anger and aggression came out. Later, precision shooting became like chess, a game that I enjoyed playing, because in order to hit a bull’s-eye a lot of planning and execution had to take place.

  Before I was a teenager, I had a .22 rifle with a scope and I tried to shoot a cigarette in half from a hundred yards. When I got to high school, and after spending all those hours at the range with my dad, I was able to do that regularly.

  But I didn’t improv
e just because of target practice. I also had to do some studying. When I was starting out and shooting outside, I had no clue how wind could affect a bullet’s path. I figured I was only fifty to a hundred meters away from a target and a bullet traveled so fast, how could wind do anything? And the effects of gravity? Didn’t even consider them.

  Finally I went to the library and got a book on long-range shooting and sniping. I learned a whole lot and realized that I needed to understand better some of the math principles that I’d hated dealing with in school. I remember getting a book called Fundamentals of Math. It was a sixth-grade textbook, and I would sneak it home because I was in high school by that time and I knew I’d get all kinds of crap from kids at school for having it. I studied and studied that book in a way that I would never have done in a classroom. It’s funny, but I was one of those kids who constantly complained that the stuff I was being forced to learn in school had nothing to do with real life. If someone had told me that math would apply to sniping, I might have paid more attention.

  The more I read about sniping, the more I made the connection between chess and shooting. Anticipation, analysis, and prediction based on evidence are pretty high-level thinking skills, and I started to develop them, but if you were to ask any of my teachers if I was capable of that kind of thinking, they would have probably said no. By all outward appearances, or outside of a shooting range, I probably looked like I didn’t understand the principles of cause and effect, actions and consequences.

  In the army, I had to learn a lot about navigation and orienteering. It’s funny to think about how I was finding my way in life as much as I was finding my way through the woods.

  The Cole Range is the Rangers’ version of the SEAL teams’ Hell Week. That was the point at which I really learned about camaraderie and teamwork. We started out with a group of eighty or so, and by the end we were whittled down to about a dozen. The thing that kept me going was that if you decided to drop out, you had to stand there in front of everyone and say those words. I was empowered by that. Every time another guy stopped during the middle of a march or whatever and said, “I quit,” I grew more determined to make it. Hearing “I quit” twenty, thirty, forty, fifty times over a four-day period can really boost your confidence when you’re the one hearing it and not saying it.