The Reaper

by Irving, Nicholas; Brozek, Gary;

  Even in my sick fog, I knew that something was up. Normally, they would have kept up that high pace right to the objective. The whole surprise, speed, and violence of action thing was now out of sorts. They began signaling back to us that they had their eyes on somebody and he was very, very close. We kept advancing, and as I got past the corner of a building that was on the far outside part of the lower leg of the L, I could see the assaulters within ten feet of the man. He turned around, and then after we tried a few words of Pashto, he sprinted off shouting at the top of his lungs. That was followed by a tracer round going from the center of the compound straight up into the night sky, a clear signal to other bad guys that something was up.

  Something definitely was up. Armed fighters streamed out of that building and suddenly things were in total chaos. Women, children, and men were all running around screaming. It was impossible to sort and track who was who. Shots were being fired, and as we’d always said, once the first bullets fly, that plan you had goes to shit.

  I made my way to the building I’d targeted and rested my ladder against it. I saw Brent flying at a dead sprint before pulling up at his structure and mounting his ladder. We both took our positions. I saw him peering over the edge. He had his Glock out and I watched him as he scanned his roof, checking to be sure no one was up there, doing exactly what the manuals state you should be doing.

  Brent, despite his being a joker, was generally a real by-the-book kind of guy. In one of our first balcony meetings, he told me about an operation that really reinforced for him the idea that rules are rules and shouldn’t be broken unless absolutely no other option exists. His spotter had climbed onto a roof and didn’t execute the scan and check the way he should have. As it turned out, he made contact with the enemy and was shot in the eye. Fortunately, he survived and was even able to take the shooter out. Brent was amazed, as was I, by that spotter’s calm. He came down off the roof, walked over to some of the other team members and said, “Hey, guys, I got shot in the face. I need some help.” He got the help he needed and recovered well enough to stick around in the army for another three years.

  Unlike Brent, I didn’t like using my pistol after a climb. I was interested in getting up there as fast as I could, and I wasn’t as agile as the Ninja, who could climb with that pistol in his hand faster than me without one. I always thought that if I got to the point where I could see someone on the roof I was about to mount, I’d push the ladder back and fall to the ground. Better to get that kind of minor injury than to get shot.

  On this trip to the top, I saw what appeared to be a pile of black clothes but nothing else. I got on the roof, dropped into a low-crawl position, and made a hard right to the far side of the building. From there, I spotted a man in the courtyard of the compound. He was peering around a corner of one of the buildings. The courtyard itself was muddy, looking like it had been freshly watered—soaked is more like it. He was looking toward our main objective, the main house where the assaulters had planned to be. I knew they were in proximity to that location because I could hear the nine-bangers and one-bangers going off, serving as a distraction to the enemy. Those devices sound like a weapon’s discharge, but they have the added element of flashing lights.

  I heard the sound of an AK going off, and looked down to see the guy I’d spotted firing randomly into the air, either to gain attention to his position or who knows what. I zoomed my scope all the way out, wanting to keep as close to him as possible while still being able to make out the environment around him. He was about eighty meters away. At that distance, I’d normally have the zoom all the way in, tight enough that I could make out fine detail on him like a button on his shirt. In this case, that wouldn’t be effective because I wanted to be able to track the position of the women and children in the courtyard. I also backed the elevation on the scope all the way out.

  At this point, he was behind the building, just sticking the muzzle of the rifle out and firing randomly. I remember seeing that in the movie Black Hawk Down, and thinking it was a stupid tactic, that by firing all those rounds he could have possibly hit someone. I eased the safety off on my rifle, and fired at him, hitting him square in the chest. He dropped but then he raised his head and started screaming. Then I saw blood spurting into the air. I didn’t wait to see him bleed out, but it was clear he no longer posed a threat.

  I continued to scan, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw that black pile of clothing move. I figured it was the wind or maybe my fever delirium had me seeing things. Someone from our team had cleared the body I’d shot, and I knew that nobody had thrown anything up on that roof either. I looked back and that pile started quaking again. I’d been down on my belly in a good firing position, so I rose to one knee to get a better look at what was going on. I thought maybe a chicken was up there. I’d seen different fowl on top of these low roofs a bunch of times before and a few cats as well. I edged closer to the pile and then I really thought I was seeing something. I was five feet from the pile when a human figure emerged, did a kind of cartwheel, got to its feet, and then sprinted across the roof before diving over the edge.

  I hustled over to the edge. I couldn’t tell if he was armed or if he had a bomb vest on or what, but I didn’t want to shoot him, just get him to stop. I was pretty good at placing rounds right past someone’s ear to let them know that they’d better freeze. This time, though, because of the downward angle from which I was firing, the bullet impacted just in front of him as he ran, kicking up a spray of dust and some clods of mud. He stopped in his tracks. I called the guys in and watched as they grabbed him, zip tied him, and herded him off.

  I tried to calm down. I was breathing pretty heavily and was also pissed at myself for not having cleared that roof. Right where the pile had been, where that body emerged, was an AK. I could have easily bought it for not following procedures, but I once again got lucky. I have no idea why he didn’t take me out. That didn’t factor into my not shooting him, but I still wondered what the hell was going on. I picked up the AK and inspected it. A round was chambered so he could have easily fired it on me.

  I called it up over the comms, letting the guys know that I was going to toss down that AK so they could collect it. That got the chatter going about a guy being up there, armed, and me not shooting him. A few guys commented on how lucky I was and how it could have gone really bad, really fast for me. I agreed and thanked my lucky stars and everything else that contributed to my heart still pumping blood.

  I resumed my prone position as the guys did their investigation, making sure no one else was coming to join the fight. All the dead were collected in one spot, being photographed. Their weapons were checked, and photos of the magazines to show that rounds had been fired were taken, all to prove that we had been engaged by the enemy. A small team broke off and entered the building I was on top of. Sergeant Val brought Bruno in a few seconds later, and that dog started going nuts, barking and snarling. Everybody came running out of the building, coughing and screaming up at me, “Irv! Jump! Irv! Get off that thing!”

  I was so out of it that I knew even that short jump could mess me up, so I got down the ladder as fast as I could, grabbed it, and got fifty feet away as fast as my rubbery legs could carry me.

  Simmons, one of the assaulters, came up to me, shaking his head. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in close, his face distorting in my vision.

  “You were sitting right on top of a cache of IEDs, explosives, and a bunch of chemicals and fertilizer.”

  Dorsey, who frequently worked with the C-4 we used, added, “Highly, and I mean highly, unstable compounds. Fire a shot into there and the whole thing goes—” He lifted his eyebrows and put his hands together in front of him and then lifted them toward the sky like a mushroom cloud.

  I shook my head, not wanting to believe what they were saying. “No way.”

  “See for yourself—” Dorsey stood sideways and swept his arm in the direction of the hut.

  I peered inside and it
was mind-blowing to see all that stuff in there. Grenades, RPGs, stacks of fertilizer bags, jars and boxes of chemicals, buckets of nails and screws and other scrap metal all stacked and piled from floor to ceiling.

  I stepped away and stood off staring into the sky. Twice in one day. First the cartwheel man, as I called him, hadn’t shot me in the back when he’d had the chance, and there I was on top of thousands of pounds of explosives and none of these guys had detonated them. I didn’t want to think about it anymore, but everybody else did. I couldn’t blame them.

  I heard a bunch of voices, but couldn’t keep track of who was speaking.

  “Wait a minute, the dude on the roof—”

  “The one who jumped off—”

  “The route he was taking could have put him right in that doorway.”

  “Why’d he stop?”

  “That warning shot. What would have happened if—”

  I came to the conclusion that the guy wanted to take out more than just me. He could have shot me, but if he’d gotten off the roof and back into the building, he could have done a whole lot more damage.

  Fortunately, we had more work to do. We’d killed three of the MAMs (military-aged males) and captured another pair. One of them was our objective and he was fairly high ranking. I figured he had to be. We’d uncovered weapons and explosives caches before, most every time, in fact. But nothing compared to this. There was enough stuff there that they could have planted IEDs along every roadway and every doorway in Kandahar. We also found a burlap sack of heroin, little plastic bags of what looked like black tar.

  The whole experience just put me in a bad place mentally. I watched as the assaulters rounded up the women and children. Some of the women they had to zip-tie and fingerprint, and who knew if they were sympathizers of the Taliban, whether they were there out of fear or having no other options. I don’t use the word “hate” very often or experience that feeling, but looking at those kids, I thought of my sister’s kids, my nieces and nephews, and I almost broke down, thinking about what those Afghan kids and those women’s lives were like. How the hell could those “fighters,” and I had to question my use of that word to describe these guys, use women and children like that?

  I wasn’t a father, but I’d seen how some of the guys with kids reacted. Once, in Iraq, a man had held up a child as a shield, clutched it to his chest as a way to keep from getting fired on. One of the assaulters I was working with had come into the room, saw the man, saw the baby, saw the man’s AK tucked in the crook of his arm and still pointing at us, and he put two in the guy’s face. I could see the anger and the hatred in my fellow soldier’s eyes, and I couldn’t judge him or his actions.

  That night, I saw Brent, the big prankster hard-ass, walking among the women and children. The kids crying and the women wailing and rocking just tore at your soul. Mentally, I understood their response. We had just come into where they lived and had shot some of the men they knew and loved. I wished that they could have understood why we were doing the things we were doing. We all wanted them to not be afraid of us, but how could they be anything but afraid? One kid was inconsolable. His mother was shielding him, and I could tell she was even more afraid of what we might do if she couldn’t get this kid to stop crying. He was maybe two or three years old tops, and Brent walked up to him. He knelt down and reached into his pocket and took out a chem light. He showed it to the kid who turned away and kept screaming. Brent cracked the light stick and it started to glow. He waved it around in the air and the kid saw the light and turned toward it.

  A few seconds later, with a stick in his hands, that kid wasn’t crying anymore. I didn’t know that kid’s whole story; maybe he’d lost a father that night and a chem light was a poor substitute for what he might have lost. It definitely couldn’t make up for the impoverished conditions in which he lived. But for at least a few moments he was calm. I’d seen guys do things like that all the time. We all did it at one time or another, and knowing how horrible it all was and how confusing and frustrating just made the job so much tougher.

  Once, in Iraq, one of my buddies had had to shoot an older woman. It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. He knew what he was doing, but he had no choice. He saw her inside a building, moving around with several AK-47s going into and out of several rooms. We were taking heavy fire, and she got killed. What’s worse, we took several captives and one of the guys confessed to being her son. He told the interrogators that he was the one who was supposed to be helping supply the shooters, but he asked her to do it, figuring that we wouldn’t shoot her. He’d been hiding inside the house, under a bed, while his mom did his job for him.

  There was one young male, we couldn’t determine exactly how old he was, but we decided to let him go rather than detain him. He looked like he was maybe fourteen or so, beardless and with these eyes that gave him a dazed expression like he was in a total state of disbelief. We told the other women to get him out of there, and that they should all go to the next village or wherever but to stay the hell away from this place. I was hoping that giving that kid a chance and treating him with some respect might make him think twice about us and about Al Qaeda and about the whole messy situation.

  At that point, we knew that we had to destroy that weapons cache. When we discovered a small one, it was no big deal for us to dispose of it. Given how large that supply was, we called it in and the command ordered in an F-16 to drop a five-hundred-pounder on top of that cache. We had to get out of there, but we all wanted to see that bomb go off. The Chinooks had been able to make it within three hundred meters of our location, so I didn’t have as far to walk. I sat down and instantly smelled my own clammy funk. Whatever toxins were in my system, they seemed to be leaching out of me. I sat down and lifted off my night vision and took off my helmet and just cradled my head in my hands and tried to breathe deep.

  I don’t know how much time elapsed, but I was jostled awake. I could hear over my earpiece that the F-16s were coming in. I shuffled to the end of the craft, trying to get a glimpse of the impact over the gray outlines of my guys. All of us craned our necks for the light show that was just about to take place. The F-16 came in afterburners going and dropped down. We could see the bomb and by the time it made contact with the ground, the F-16 was already winging away. We started a countdown in synch with the pilots.

  “Five.”

  “Four.”

  “Three.”

  “Two.”

  Before we got to one, the bunker buster connected and dirt rose up in the sky like a geyser and then we faintly heard and then felt the concussion as the bomb and that cache exploded. Over the comms I heard the F-16 crew laugh and ask, “What the hell did you guys find down there?”

  I was wrong about my estimate of how many explosives and bomb-making materials there were in that cache. I was later told that it was likely we’d hit on a major supply depot for all of southern Helmand Province. It had been operational for a number of years. All I could do was hope that it was out of commission for good, that we’d put a serious dent in the Taliban’s capabilities.

  I had no idea what the value of the heroin we destroyed was. I knew that the money would have been used for more supplies to make more IEDs and HMEs. And I knew that there weren’t enough bunker busters in the world to take out all those fields of poppies.

  To say that I was starting to feel disillusioned is pretty accurate. I still believed that we were doing the right thing by being there and taking on these forces, but the toll was climbing. I’d lost some good friends, and I knew that it wasn’t just the fact that my resistance was low due to the food poisoning that had me thinking that there was something rotting away in that country. I’d felt the same way in Iraq, had begun to question why we were putting in so much blood, sweat, and tears in a place where people didn’t seem to want our help or care that we were losing lives in the process. I think that for most of us, you could only go out there and put your head down and just do your job and not question anything for
only so long. It seemed like more than in Iraq, the strangeness of my experiences in Afghanistan threw questions into my face so that I couldn’t ignore them anymore.

  A few days after we destroyed that weapons cache, we were out on another operation. Brent and I were on the outside of a compound, placing our ladders to climb over a fifteen-foot-high wall. Our ladders were extended, and we each had our pistols out—I’d followed through on my promise to do that—and we were just about to start our climb when a black-clad somebody or something came flying over the wall. I could hear the wind snapping the fabric of the black burqa that flapped around what I had to assume was her. She landed with her feet spread and her body turned sideways, looking like she was a skateboarder steadying herself and then she did a combat roll and got to her feet. She turned toward us and I could see the veil and the mesh she wore to cover her face and eyes that sure looked to me like a woman’s. She sprinted off into the field and disappeared down an embankment.

  I looked at Brent and he looked at me.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he whispered.

  I climbed up the ladder and looked over the other side, hoping to see another ladder, some stacked lumber, something that woman could have used to get over that wall.

  Nothing.

  After the mission was over, we checked with the ISR guys, and they confirmed that what we’d seen was caught on a drone’s camera. Someone had come up and over that wall and then disappeared into the terrain.

  I kidded Brent. “It had to be your future ninja wife.”

  “Figures. She got one look at me and she ran off.”

  “Thermal couldn’t pick her up either.”

  “Cold. Cold bitch of a woman. I’m better off.”

  10. Winding Up and Winding Down

  Just as happened when I was working with Pemberton, Brent and I went out on other operations besides the more eventful ones I’ve described. By the time the end of July rolled around, I’d reached a total of more than twenty-five kills. Given that I was on short time at that point, the number that was most on my mind was how many days I had left before I would return to the States. I don’t think I can begin to describe the grinding nature of the work, how it seemed like the sun and the sand infiltrated all your gear, took the shine off what was new, and made every movable part of your body and soul more resistant to its natural fluidity.