The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (22 page)

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 use 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.

As I was walking along, I remembered something Pemberton had said to me. “Where there’s people there’s shit. Where there’s lots of people, there’s lots of shit.”

We’d been operating out in the boonies exclusively, so I’d forgotten about the assault our senses would undertake. The smell of human feces, decaying flesh—I saw bodies of dogs in the ditches that ran on each side of the roads we patrolled along—was strong and I fought down my gag reflex.

The streets were empty, and the windows of a few homes were illuminated. Overhead, a rat’s nest of wires conducted the intermittent flow of electric current. Ahead of me, I’d see a light come on, flicker, die, and then revive. The wires were low enough that if you weren’t careful and carried your muzzle too high you could end up frying yourself. I felt comfortable having Bruno and Sergeant Val in front of us. We were about five hundred meters from our objective when we spotted a small structure on the ground, or at least from a distance it looked like a structure. A pile of rocks, maybe eight or nine feet high, a random pile of junk really, sat offset to the left of the center of the intersection we’d arrived at.

The lead was skirting around it, including Bruno and Sergeant Val, but the K9 hadn’t shown any signs of a detection. The guys in front had their weapons pointed at that pile as they made their tactical evasion. I halted my guys and we backed off a bit before spreading out. As the point guys approached, a bright white light passed by the head of one of the guys out front. They all immediately dropped to the ground, and then I heard a loud crack and its echoing report move through the streets.

With a few of the streetlights on, our night vision PVS-14 and 15 goggles were flaring out as the artificial light polluted the area, and for me, that lessened the feeling of a possible threat. We hadn’t received any intel about the possibility of a sniper attack. Until we’d gotten to that object in the street, everything had been proceeding so smoothly. I was now in a here-we-go-again mind-set. The lead group began taking fire and returning it, killing a couple of hostiles. Brent and I dropped down in the prone position, right in the middle of the street, in order to get a good visual on the enemy. Some of the guys in the element went to the sides of the narrow street. None of us wanted to get into those ditches if we could help it. Brent and I lay there scanning, getting a fix on the enemy, focusing in on their faces and heads.

I could see bullets passing over the heads of the guys in front of us, and then felt them going over our heads, dropping short of the rest of the guys, who were about twenty meters to our rear directly at our six. Finally, I could see where the shots were coming from—directly ahead of us and down our intended path of travel. That sucked. No one behind Brent and me could get off a shot. They had to be concerned about our position, whether or not we were going to stay at our level, stand up, or whatever. That meant they couldn’t safely fire over our heads. It would be too dangerous to just open up with an M4 or MK-48 machine gun over our heads as well as that of the lead element in front of us. Wade Rice had been able to lay down a few rounds of suppressive fire, but it was now down to him and the rest of us to get some precise rounds on target.