For so long, we both had been committed to taking care of each other. Now that he could no longer do it, when he spoke the words “take care of yourself,” they took on a meaning that neither of us liked.
Of course, we couldn’t let that moment linger too long. “Just so you know, the nurse that traveled with me was smoking hot.”
Once Mike was back in the States, I called him. The first thing he told me was that he was sitting at home enjoying some good homemade chocolate chip cookies.
“I always knew you’d turn out to be the master of E and E,” I told him, finally resorting to tech-speak with him, using the shorthand for evasion and escape, “but I never figured you’d find a hole that would take you all the way back to Georgia.”
Through a mouthful of crumbs, he said, “I gotta tell you, it’s a whole lot easier indexing targets when they’re in a Tupperware bowl, my friend, a whole lot easier.”
“Well, you keep enjoying life there on Sesame Street.”
“Roger that. This one’s for you,” he said, as the sounds of another cookie being crammed into his face crackled over the line.
8. Rumble in the Rubble
As much as I was going to miss having Mike around, we all knew that he was—as far as him being a part of sniper team—replaceable. In fact, well before Mike was back home playing Cookie Monster, I was paired with another sniper. Brent had been working out of Camp Bastion and flew in two days after what I had named in my mind the “Longest Day.” I was just coming out of my hibernation, when I received word that he was arriving. I knew Brent by reputation. He’d been in the sniper platoon for a while, and the funny thing was, any time we got a new guy coming in, it was cause for a kind of celebration. We were glad to touch base with somebody from outside the group we’d been deployed with. They could fill us in on news of the rest of the platoon, let us know that everybody, hopefully, was okay. If not, then at least we’d know what to expect when we got back home.
The army had its own way of setting up sniper teams. Frequently, the spotter was a guy who was senior to the shooter. That was the case with Brent. I wasn’t sure how old he was, but rumor had it that he’d been around in the sniper section for quite a while. He was a really good competitive shooter, and I’d heard that he’d won a few of them, and competed in the International Sniper Competition held at Fort Benning. As its name says, the ISC includes snipers from different parts of the world as well as the U.S. military. Civilian teams, and police Special Tactics and Weapons, also compete.
When I was in sniper school there, I’d heard about the event, but hadn’t participated in it. (Eventually, in 2009, I competed shortly after returning Stateside and placed in the top five.) I thought it was cool that for basically seventy-two hours straight this competition went on with stalking, urban shooting and orienteering, and what was called “shooting under stressful conditions.” Now that I’d been downrange and operational as a sniper, and I’d been doing these things for real, the idea of a competition didn’t quite have the same mystique that it once did. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have any respect for the guys who competed in them. It was all about honing your skills and preparing yourself for the real thing and there was a whole lot of pride at stake. Whether it was guys from the Tenth Mountain Division, the Third Infantry Division, or especially the marines’ Scout Sniper School, or one of the international SWAT teams, bragging rights were on the line.
As soon as I saw Brent come into our compound I had a better recollection of who he was. Brent was a smaller guy like me, only five five or five six, but he packed a lot more muscle on that small frame. He looked like a wrestler or a football player, with his thick neck and torso. He was so ripped that his arms didn’t fall naturally to his sides, but stuck out a bit. He had a big old grin on his face, too. That’s when I remembered a few of the pranks he’d pulled on guys over time. He was into shaving cream and loved hitting guys in the face with “whipped cream” pies as a way of honoring them when they’d received some kind of citation or otherwise done well. He was also pretty good at imitating people’s voices, and more than one guy in the sniper section got all worked up by a voice mail message from one of our “commanders” who’d asked to see us immediately.
Brent was from New Jersey and I was disappointed that he didn’t have that wise-guy fuggedaboutit accent. We met in the TOC and he walked in with his stout shoulders loaded with bags. He set them down and shook my hand.
“Sergeant Irving,” he said, sounding like a butler out of an English movie. He cleared his throat and then said in his normal voice, “Hey, Irv. Or should I say Reaper? Or is it Mr. Reaper?”
The English accent was a reminder that he’d been at Bastion, a British military base that was right next to our marines’ Camp Leatherneck. Neither of us could have known this then, but Britain’s Prince Harry would one day be stationed at Bastion.
We talked for a bit, catching up on some of the guys and what we’d both been up to.
“I’d heard you guys were getting some, but I thought some of it was just—” He stopped and shrugged. “You know.”
“No. It’s been for real.”
“Nice. That’s what I was hoping to hear. Can’t believe I haven’t had any trigger time. Unless you count those streetlights and stuff.”
Brent had been deployed multiple times and he’d yet to fire on a human target. That just pointed out again how unusual my experience had been, how much trigger time Pemberton and I had had in so short a period. We were just six weeks shy of ending our hundred-plus-days rotation in country, and Pemberton had left with fourteen confirmed kills. When I told Brent that, he tipped back in his chair and whistled. “H-o-l-y s-h-i-t,” he said.
“And what about you?”
“Twenty six.”
“Wow. A dozen more.”
That led to a discussion about how Mike and I had been operating and that I didn’t believe that the by-the-books sniper/shooter relationship really worked given the specifics of our operations. He needed to do more than just select targets and assist in aiming and all of that. It would have been even weirder for me to have Brent be that kind of caddy for me when he already had so many years in the section.
“You tell me what you want, and I’m there,” he said. He bent down and unlocked one of his hard cases. Inside was a .50 caliber Barrett with Leupold Mark 4 scope. The M82 was, and is, the only semiautomatic .50 cal in the world. It was a great SASR (special application scoped rifle), but I told him it was one that he’d probably want to leave at home when we went out. The same was true for his Win Mag. Fortunately, he was an SR-25 guy.
While I was giving him the rundown on what we’d been doing and what we found effective in terms of appearance of objects and the different measurements of things in our area of operation, how the enemy was responding to contact, Sergeant Peters joined us.
Brent and Peters shook hands. No sooner had Peters told him that he hoped he was ready for a good four to six weeks, all our pagers went off. It was interesting to see how different Brent’s response was to ours. His eyes lit up. I knew better than to be too excited. Things had had a way of evolving that didn’t always play out the way we’d planned. I still had visions of Pemberton dropping down into that hole. For that reason, and a few others, I was glad that we weren’t going to be heading out toward Marjah or any of the other more rural areas. Our objective was right in the middle of Kandahar itself.
I felt more comfortable in the urban environment than I did out in the country. We had encountered much less contact in Kandahar than anywhere else. I didn’t know if it was because the coalition forces were a much more obvious and larger presence in the city, but I guess that was true. The Taliban had, for the most part, fled the city. That made sense. Why would they stay where they had the greatest chance of being tracked down? It also seemed like the people in Kandahar, the Afghan civilians, were more likely to provide us with human intel on these guys. It was easier for informants to be anonymous in the city, and in terms of
sheer numbers, you had more people and therefore a greater chance of finding someone willing to cooperate with us. In the small villages, those residents had no place to go, really. If the Taliban found out you’d ratted them out, they could easily track you down.
It was hard for me to understand the mentality of the Afghan people. I didn’t really try to figure them out, but there were times when I was really surprised at their behavior. I had to get it out of my head that they were like us. I don’t mean that in terms of culture or religion, but there were times when I was thinking about how my family, friends, neighbors, and I myself would have reacted if some foreign military were in the area and conducting the kinds of operations we were.
It seemed strange to me that you could get so used to combat operations being conducted nearby that you’d be able to sleep while huge helicopters thundered overhead. I knew that we landed a safe distance from our objectives, but I kept thinking that the sound of our arrival must have carried to the location where our targets were. I don’t know if they understood what kind of surveillance they were under, or if the Taliban members we were after knew that they’d be tracked if they ran, but I still thought it strange that we could arrest and neutralize so many of our targets right in the buildings. I knew that they weren’t a regular army so to speak, but why weren’t there defensive perimeters, guards and watches? I knew that it was an unfair assumption to make, but especially out in the middle of nowhere, which seemed to be most places, it seemed like we were dealing with people who had a limited understanding of what was really going on in what we all knew to be a war on terror.
Since I’d never been through anything like what they’d experienced, it was hard to imagine what it would be like to go through your day-to-day routine while a war was going on in your country, in your village, in a house in a nearby compound. I knew some people who lived in D.C. and in New York, and immediately after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, there was a military presence around. They talked about how weird it was to see men in uniform with weapons on them patrolling around. That didn’t last for very long, but they said that they still never got used to the sight of someone standing there in the place they lived with a rifle slung across their chest. Maybe over time they would have adjusted to it, it would have blended into the background, just like the rest of the guys and I got used to moving around and among the Afghan people.
I’d been in Baghdad, Tikrit, and Mosul, so I knew what it was like to be on operations in the middle of a city’s commotion. Even though they were all undertaken at night, there was still a fair amount of street activity. But when you were operating in the rural areas where a few mopeds or people on bikes was the extent of the traffic, it felt weird to be out there. I knew that at night most people were asleep, so it made sense that not a whole lot of activity was going on, but it seemed more dreamlike, like something out of a postapocalypse movie.
In the city, things felt more real, more familiar, and that, combined with encountering less enemy contact, made it seem safer.
That wasn’t true, however, for this first operation with Brent as my partner. That had nothing to do with him. He clearly had a lot of experience, and before we gave a full brief, I said to him, “Hey, do you want to do this? Do you want command of the element?”
“Thanks. No. I’m in your territory. I have no real idea how you guys like to do things.”
“We can adapt. We’re flexible.”
“Whatever you’re doing seems to be working. Keep at it.”
I was glad that the mission seemed relatively routine and would be in an area where we might encounter only light contact if any at all. I knew what Brent was going through. He’d just come in, hadn’t gotten settled at all, and now he was planning to go out with us. I’d been in his shoes just a month and a half earlier. Our target was the head of a suicide-bomb cell. It was impossible for me to imagine how someone could recruit me to do what these bombers did. I know that I’d signed up for a dangerous duty, and I was willing to die for my country, but there was nothing as absolute as the certainty of death these men and women faced. The people who did the recruiting and training, the individuals who sourced the bomb-making materials and then built them, were about as despicable as it gets.
IEDs were one thing on my mind. As much as they were part of a tactic we all hated, in some ways, they were a part of war. I didn’t see suicide bombers in the same way, mostly because the most frequent targets were civilians. The army eventually released a study that said there were 106 suicide-bombing attacks in Afghanistan in 2009, the year of this deployment, and that the chances of one inflicting casualties on NATO troops was very low. It would take more than three suicide bombers to cause harm to one member of the international force. That was good news, but not for the civilian population. Hundreds of people were dying in attacks that were coming on average once every three days. The attacks were of two kinds—explosives strapped to a person or a bomb placed in a vehicle that a terrorist drove.
With the population and vehicle density being greater in the city, it made sense that we had to be even more vigilant while moving around. Whenever we went on one of these types of missions, I was always more on edge. As the sniper team leader, I was responsible for selecting tactical positions for my guys. That meant I could be the one who put them in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, if we were going after one of these commanders, and they were involved with explosives, it stood to reason that explosives were going to be nearby. Putting ourselves in proximity to those materials heightened the risk. For the most part, the sniper team was a fairly good distance away from the targeted objective. I wanted to get the best shots at them or any other enemy that needed to be taken down, and that generally meant not being danger close to any explosives that might get detonated.
That wasn’t as true in the confines of the city. For this operation, we would be operating in a location about a mile or so from the Presidential Palace, the Ministry of Education, and several shopping centers and theaters. We were going to be almost exclusively operating at night, so there wouldn’t be a lot of people on the streets, if any at all, but with all those multistory buildings, we faced multiple points from which enemy fire might come.
Every sniper has his own preferences on gear, and though Pemberton and I didn’t agree on choice of weapons, we basically kitted ourselves in the same way. Brent came out, after having stashed his things in Pemberton’s old room, wearing his hard-plate in a Molle carrier. The Molle kit was very useful for the assaulters because it had many attachment points on it from which you could place items—flash bangs, grenades, multiple pouches, et cetera. Having all that extra equipment strapped to the front of that carrier made it easier to get snagged on a ladder’s steps and made lying prone for hours on end torturous. That’s why I went with the soft-plate carrier with a hard-plate inside it. I liked how the soft-plate conformed to my body, so I’d remove the softer material or plates, and replace them with the hard-plate that was stout enough to stop the 7.62 by 39 mm (used in the AK-47) the enemy used. I’d also put some cardboard in there and tape it all up to make up for the difference in thickness between the two kinds of material.
I felt a lot more streamlined that way and, for me, being comfortable and having maximum flexibility was important. The downside was that I couldn’t attach much other gear to it and especially not a pistol. That didn’t matter to me. Unlike Brent, who wanted his pistol front and center and within easy reach on his chest, I didn’t have much use for a sidearm. To that point in my deployment, I hadn’t had any use at all for one. Climbing up a building, you want to have your pistol at the ready in case you have to fire on the way up or once on top of the roof. To that point, I had met zero resistance while climbing or mounting a building.
The two of us eyed each other, not saying anything, but you could tell we were both assessing. We didn’t look like a team. Imagine two football players of the same size and one is wearing the type of shoulder pads that a lineman might u
se and the other wearing what a wide receiver does. Pemberton and I had been through a couple of sniper schools together and had been in Afghanistan for six weeks, and we’d hashed out all the details of our kit and our approach already. We were truly a team and looked it. I didn’t want to make any judgments about Brent’s ability based on his gear, but I did have some concern about how he was going to be able to maneuver quickly and easily over and around all the obstacles we were likely to encounter.
On the one hand, I knew that this was just a case of our appearances being different, but it served as a reminder that we were going to war together for the first time and that the kind of things that I took for granted with Pemberton weren’t going to be as easily understood and communicated with Brent. It was like Troy Aikman losing a guy like Michael Irvin and having to adjust to a Kelvin Martin-type guy. Both pros. Both great at what they do, but different in the sense of each knowing exactly what the other is going to do and where they’re going to be when a play gets busted or hasn’t developed yet.
Add up all these factors, and I was little bit uneasy, but a good uneasy, wanting to be extra vigilant. After we landed at a compound the Brits operated out of, some of that uneasiness grew stronger. We’re all creatures of habit, and this was a new experience for me, landing at someone else’s compound and then immediately going straight outside of the wire and into a crowded urban environment.
At least I could count on one thing. Wade Rice was part of my team, out in front with three other guys. Wade wanted to be a sniper very badly, so he was always eager to be attached to my sniper team and he frequently volunteered to carry my extra ammo, ladder, and things like that. He wasn’t being a suck-up or anything like that, he was just a really good teammate who was willing to lend a hand. Often, he’d go out with us and tail behind me and observe how we conducted ourselves during the operation. Behind me was Brent, and behind him, the rest of our small element.
The Reaper Page 17