The Reaper

by Irving, Nicholas; Brozek, Gary;

  Something didn’t feel right to me. We were advancing pretty easily. I started thinking about some of the old war movies I’d seen while also reviewing what was taking place. Three guys had taken us on, a unit of forty well-armed men. One of the guys was unaccounted for, but two of them were ahead of us in a fairly well protected area of heavy vegetation and trees. Normally, the Taliban we’d encountered wouldn’t flee. They’d stay there and put up a fight. Something wasn’t adding up.

  “Eyes open. Eyes open,” Sergeant Atkins ordered.

  He was thinking what I was. Brent and I dropped down but continued to advance through the heavy underbrush, angling off from the main element. The tree line was clearly visible and through the tangle of branches we could make out some shapes inconsistent with the terrain. The guys in the AC-130 and the guys back in the TOC watching the drone footage confirmed what we suspected. We were being led into a trap. They were informing us that a large element was gathered behind that tree line in a small clearing. With their thermal detection apparatus, they were able to confirm that approximately twenty to twenty-five fighters were gathered. Based on what I’d seen in the past, I knew what they were observing—a round ball of white with a long dark stick. The steel of their weapons would show up as that dark bit, while their bodies radiated heat. Based on the outlines of those dark shapes, they knew that the element we were encountering was armed with RPGs, AK-47s, and what appeared to be an RPK, a small machine gun.

  They were all trying to conceal themselves by wearing dark clothing, just as our multicam uniforms were giving us some protection.

  “Sergeant Atkins. We have eyes on them. Permission to engage?” I asked.

  “Acknowledged. Clear to engage.”

  Brent and I both began laying down fire into the tree line, raised up on one knee to get a better sight line and angle of fire. We knew that cutting through that underbrush and tree limbs was going to cause a lot of deflection, but we hoped to get lucky and take some guys out. Watching through my scope, I heard Brent’s rifle fire and I followed that up an instant later. Turned out we were going after the same target and the man fell before my round could arrive. Brent got that one, and then I got a couple of others while he wounded another, a guy who was gut shot and barely able to crawl away. Hitting a man on the move through thick brush while shooting from the knee in full kit wasn’t an easy task. We only had twenty rounds each and we’d already spent approximately fifteen for those three kills. We needed to turn that around somehow.

  I contacted the machine gun team. The squad leader, Jameson, was a guy I started out with back when I was a cherry new guy, an eighteen-year-old with a desire to move beyond that role.

  I said, “Bring your guys up.”

  I knew his guys were mostly about the age I was when I started. They made their way to our position and I looked each of them in the eye, and I could tell that there was a bit of fear there, but a whole lot more excitement and determination.

  “Night vision on, guys. I’m going to put my laser on them. Wherever it goes, you fire.”

  I got a few “roger that” and thumbs-up.

  The firefight was going on pretty heavy, but it seemed like, based on how far off target they were on us, they didn’t really know the exact coordinates of our location. That was fine with me. I put my laser on where I’d last seen signs of the enemy shooters and from where I’d seen faint muzzle flashes. With three gunners putting out two hundred rounds in six- to nine-round bursts, they didn’t have to be precision shooters.

  I could see the excitement in their faces. They reloaded and went at it again. It was a rare treat for them to do this kind of shooting in combat. Even with this being their first experience with hardcore shooting, their endless hours of training showed. They kept their eyes on targets, fired controlled bursts, and were taking guys out. They kept at it for several minutes, changing belts a second time. The noise was so loud that I didn’t really make out everything coming over the comms. After they’d emptied that third set, it got a little quieter. I heard what sounded like a lawn mower engine coming in from my right. I looked up and saw an A-10 coming in, its nose in a shroud of smoke. The tree line and the vegetation seemed to catch on fire, lit up in a hot white light as if thousands of Fourth of July sparklers were going. Those huge 20 millimeter rounds just shredded that area. The A-10 came in again, and I watched it dive, nearly vertical, toward that clearing, and it seemed as if the plane slowed in its descent from all that combined firepower coming out of its guns.

  The AC-130s also started firing off large explosive rounds and the ground beneath us went to jelly as the shells impacted and went off. I heard that the Chinooks were thirty seconds inbound and so we got ready to get the hell out of there, backing off and getting into our defensive posture prior to pickup. It was weird to think that this beautiful place, one of the few I’d seen that could be described that way, was being ripped up like that. Only a few hours before I was thinking that this was someplace that tourists would love to come and see. Brent and I decided to wait until everybody else was loaded before we ran. I could see Atkins in the rear on the ramp. He’d been doing a head count. He knew how many had come in and how many should be going out. If there was any kind of discrepancy in those numbers, the Chinook would be waved off. We weren’t ever going to leave anybody behind. Atkins looked our way and pumped his fist up and down, signaling us to hurry up.

  By making sure that everybody else was safely aboard, Brent and I had broken a rule—we should have mounted up immediately—but I did that sometimes either because I thought it was cool, I’d seen it in a movie, I was bored, or just got caught up in the moment. It was a stupid thing to do, but what the hell. By-the-book Brent felt the same way. We each squeezed off a few more rounds just for the hell of it.

  Brent and I got into the Chinook, and the pilot got us out of there making all kinds of evasive moves to avoid gunfire and an RPG. I was scared and thrilled at the same time, watching the tail gunner jump back from his gun a moment after a long white trail of smoke flew past his position. He got back on his gun, and angling it hard and downward, opened up on the source of that smoke. I knew it was an RPG, and for some reason, I kind of half stood, half squatted, with my hands on the fuselage and my feet pressed into the floor, clenching my butt cheeks and squinting my eyes shut as hard as I could, foolishly thinking that if I braced myself that hard, the impact won’t be so bad. Only no impact came. I opened my eyes and the gunner gave us a thumbs-up. That RPG had come within feet of the blades, and I knew there was no way that we would have survived a hit like that. Our luck was still running pretty good.

  I’d only been with Brent for a few weeks, but he’d seen some pretty crazy stuff, and he’d more than stood up to the challenge. I guess we all wanted to go to war to test ourselves, and Brent’s “don’t hesitate, do my job right, and do it right away” attitude was more than admirable. The crazy thing was, as soon as we got back to the TOC, we downloaded our kit in the ready room and that was it for him. He had to hustle out and pack and get on the next plane out of there that same day.

  We stood there, kind of awkwardly for a minute, neither of us saying much.

  “That was my last one, man,” Brent said. I couldn’t really read his expression or his tone. The words came out almost like a question but not quite.

  “Yeah. Unless you want to trade places.”

  “No. I need to get back. I’ve got a ton of paperwork to do and get everything situated. I’m going to be out for good in a month or so. I’ve got to get paperwork filed to get into school—”

  I held up my hand to stop him. “I know all that. You told me a bunch of times. I was kidding.”

  “That’s right. You’re right.”

  He walked away, and I was left there wondering if he was having second thoughts; hell, it could have been ninth or tenth thoughts. I knew that he was going to miss it. I think that’s why we both hung back there, why we didn’t want to get aboard the Chinook.

  I thoug
ht that was true until about a half hour later. The AC-130 pilot and the Chinook pilot were in the ready room hanging around. They wanted to show me the footage, so I sat with them for a while watching all the different images and feeds coming into the TOC. I was struck by the enemies’ response to us bringing in that much firepower on top of them—from the air, from the machine guns. Guys just broke their discipline and were running around, looking for some route of escape. I kind of knew the feeling, on multiple levels and in multiple ways.

  At the end, they showed us the footage of that RPG that whistled just past us.

  “Too close for comfort,” the Chinook pilot said.

  The AC-130 guy just raised his eyebrows and cocked his head. “If you’d taken off half a minute or so before that—”

  “Can’t play what if in this game.” The Chinook pilot’s voice was hard and definitive. “Drive yourself nuts doing that.” He paused and then laughed. “A buddy of mine back home used to say, ‘If your aunt Agnes had balls, she’d be your uncle.’ I never used to understand exactly what that meant.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking about why Brent and I had delayed. I think we’d done it for the thrill, the rush, the smell of gunpowder in combat, the feeling of shooting in anger at an enemy bent on destroying us. It wasn’t a conscious decision, really. I grew up in a family environment in which I heard over and over that everything happens for a reason. I didn’t have an Aunt Agnes, and I did play the what if game a lot.

  I got to say a brief good-bye to Brent before he dashed out to catch the van to the airfield and home. Just before turning in, I went to my locker. Taped to the top shelf was a picture that Brent had printed out. It was from the night we’d climbed those three different levels and he’d taken all those photos. Since he’d taken those images through his night vision, the picture was a bit hazy, like it was taken on a foggy night instead of the crystal-clear one I remembered. I appreciated the gesture, and I still have the photograph. I don’t look at it at all. My memories of that night are sharper, better focused, and offer me more comfort. It may or may not be my imagination, but in my mind’s eye, I remember seeing Brent standing on that roof, a line of stars above him, and a faint glint off his night vision lens completing the constellation.

  11. Things That Go Hump in the Night

  With Brent gone and the deployment winding down, the pace of our operations picked up a bit. With fewer snipers to cover the operations, I was kept on my toes. I picked up a few more kills, but we didn’t engage in any major firefights. I was still hearing that I had as many as seventy kills, that I was this “little guy” who was on a crazy roll racking up kills. It would take some time after I returned for an accurate accounting, after all the AARs were reviewed and the other documentary evidence examined. I wasn’t that into the number. Of course, I kept a mental tally, but I wasn’t completely obsessed with it. It wasn’t like the more enemies I took down the greater my chances of getting home safely increased. I was still working hard to do my job, but to be honest, that was getting increasingly difficult.

  It was like the end of the school year. Some students were already done with their finals and had gone home. The instructors were all packing their things up, and so were we. I was back to living by myself, which was fine. I’d taken to storing all my ammo and weapons and other gear in my room. I wanted to cut down on the amount of prep time I needed to go out. I’d had to do a couple of back-to-backs and wanted as much downtime as I could possibly squeeze in. I also knew that based on how things had happened with Brent’s departure, I could be out on an operation and come back and have little or no time to pack to get out of there for good.

  I don’t know why, but our final operations seemed to all be taking place in and around Kandahar City, near what I had described as that vacationland. I enjoyed that setting a lot. I’d never been to a tropical island or anything like that, and this was as close as I was going to get. The tall grasses, the few trees that reminded me of palms, and the less intense heat without the sun’s rays reflecting off the desert sand, so different from the other parts of Helmand, all put me in a good frame of mind.

  The first week of August 2009 was my last in country, and with most of my other teammates gone, I was eating lunch with the rest of the squad leaders when all our pagers went off. The sun wasn’t close to setting at that point, and I wondered how time sensitive this target was going to be. I had a sense of what we were going to be tasked with. All that day, a Thursday, we’d been tracking the movement of a group of Taliban fighters. When we got the call and reported to the TOC, we watched the surveillance footage. Since there was still daylight, the images were in color and very sharp. We tracked their movements, noted the clothing they were wearing as identifying features of each member of the unit, and wondered again why it was that these guys were so lacking in discipline.

  We knew that they understood that they were being observed from above. We had seen lots of footage of troop movements being halted and the men all gathering under blankets and clothing to avoid being detected from above.

  Why this group didn’t stay under the canopy of trees and vegetation more consistently surprised me. For a while they would, then they’d wander into the open for a bit, then duck back into the brush seemingly without rhyme or reason. Well, mostly without rhyme or reason.

  I’d learned a few things about Afghan culture, and some of what was revealed took some getting used to, to be completely honest. There men interacted with one another in ways that would raise eyebrows here. They would walk along holding hands, would kiss one another as a greeting or as a good-bye. Sometimes those physical exchanges were more than just casual contact. At that point in the fighting, the U.S. military was working, advising, and training members of the Afghan National Army and Afghan Special Forces. Some of these guys had been around during the Taliban rule when the Pakistanis aided them, but most were recruited during the post-Taliban era and had first been trained by the British and now mostly by the U.S.

  I had experienced working with the Afghan Special Forces units over the course of a month and even lived near them. Then slept in tents just outside my building, but we had limited contact with them so they couldn’t get any valuable intel from us. I also had some experience in Iraq in operating with Iraqi Special Forces, so I was accustomed to seeing locals in uniform. We also had to get used to another idea, what we came to think of as Man Love Thursday. We never talked about it much, but it seemed that pretty regularly on Thursdays, some of the Afghan army guys would engage in sexual activity with one another. We were used to the idea of “don’t ask, don’t tell” within our own military, so the only thing that made us really curious was, why Thursday?

  I knew that in Islam Friday was the holy day of the week, and wondered if that had anything to do with it. Not that the Qur’an decreed it, but Thursday night was the equivalent of our Friday night, the last night of the work week, the night when you let loose in anticipation of the weekend. So, once we detected this pattern among those army guys, we basically steered clear of their residence area and gave them their privacy.

  None of that would be noteworthy in regard to this mission, except that on several occasions our drone footage captured Afghan men in the field engaging in the same kind of activity.

  As the squad leaders gathered to watch the videos, we talked about how most of us enjoyed fighting in the rural environments much more than in the urban ones. I was in total agreement with that. We trained heavily for urban combat, but I felt more like a real soldier out there in the fields and in the underbrush. Maybe it was all that reading about Vietnam that influenced me, but I also felt far less exposed out in the country than I did in the city. It seemed like in the city it was easy to find yourself cornered in some position. Out in the fields and even in what passed for forests, you always had multiple escape routes, or so it seemed.

  We were told that one of the men in that group of twenty or so was a person of interest. To be honest, that was all I needed to
know. I seldom paid close attention to the names and other brief histories we got about the guys we were going after. If the higher-ups said to bring him in, then that’s what we were going to do. The rest was just clutter in my brain. I did want to know other details, like finding out if these guys were armed. As far as we were able to determine, they only had AKs. That was a good thing. I didn’t want any more high-explosives drama in my life.

  Once again, our battalion commander joined us before we went outside the wire, reminding us that this was one of the last missions we’d be going on and warning us against getting too complacent. That statement was unnecessary, but it struck me funny when we arrived at Kandahar Air Base. There were crowds of regular army, navy, marines, and air force guys all walking around the place. We sat there in the van looking out at them.

  “I don’t think it’s Toby Keith again,” someone said.

  “He wouldn’t come back so soon.”

  With the exception of all those guys being armed, we could have been at any concert venue anywhere in the U.S. Except sirens wouldn’t go off and you’d have to take cover because some local was lobbing mortar rounds on you. It would have been nice to have been going to see some group playing, but at that point we were on a pretty tight leash. At one time or another, and with greater and lesser frequency, almost all the guys had snuck out of the compound. The one time I did, it was because a few of our guys had been KIA or WIA and command shut down our personal communications access, the MWR (morale, welfare, and recreation). I hadn’t talked to my mom and dad or Jessica for a while, and given how bad everybody was feeling, our morale and welfare weren’t going to get better by being further isolated. I burned through a bunch of calling cards but felt a hell of a lot better for having done that.