The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (3 page)

Along with that thought, another one joined the party. Every time I was about to set out on an operation my mind turned back to the guys I knew at home, some of my teammates on the football team, other buddies. I wondered what they were doing just then. I knew that I was doing something totally cool. Something few people ever have the opportunity to do. Not only that, I was a leader now, and I was responsible for the safety of other grown men. How cool was that?

Of course, I also thought of my family. I knew they were all proud of me and how I’d risen through the ranks. My parents had never put pressure on me to join, but my dad had definitely been influential in my interest in warfare and weaponry. He fully supported my paperback book habit and let me raid his library. I’d always been interested in the Special Forces and read a lot of Vietnam-era memoirs by guys who were part of the LRRPs, MACV SOGs, SEALs, and Green Berets. I thought that their jungle cammies were so cool and loved how they’d darken their faces to blend into that densely foliaged environment. Living in Maryland, I could kind of sense what it would have been like to live in that hot and humid environment. My previous tours in Iraq and Afghanistan had exposed me to another kind of hostile environment entirely. Now, in the helicopter, I got to experience a bit of what Vietnam might have been like. The smell of the guys, gun oil, and the chopper’s hydraulics and engine fluids were all superheated. I also thought I could smell everyone’s excitement, and I looked around at their amped-up eyes, wondering if they were thinking what I was thinking.

Not all our talk was about warfare. For the first few minutes of the flight, the chatter was at its usual level. Over the sound of the rotors and the engine, I could hear a few guys talking about their picks. The NFL season had just ended in February 2009, with the Steelers beating the Cardinals, but the diehards were already talking about their fantasy draft picks.

“I’m going to grab my Holmes boy, and that’s the end of the discussion.”

“Cardinals can’t win the big one. You saw what Roethelisberger did. Piles up the numbers.”

“You don’t know jack about anything.”

After a while their voices became as much white noise as the helicopter’s sounds. I sat there and ran my hands along the stock of my weapon. Pemberton spotted me and smirked. “A little foreplay with Dirty Diana?”

I’d named my SR-25 a while ago and even that early into the deployment, thanks to Pemberton, everyone in the platoon knew it. He also knew that I didn’t like his Win Mag at all. I was okay with bolt-action rifles like his, but I preferred the semiautomatic and felt like I shot so much better with my SR.

“Mike,” I said, using Pemberton’s first name as a way to let him know I wasn’t messing around. “Show some respect for my girl. Just because you’re stuck with that butt-ugly green Win Mag doesn’t mean you have to be all up and jealous. You already turned that thing green with envy, so don’t look to drag us down.”

I really did hate how Pemberton’s weapon looked. It was just a dull green. It had no personality whatsoever. In a way it was kind of like Pemberton. Quiet and no-nonsense, nothing that was going to attract anybody’s attention. That was the initial impression Pemberton gave off, but there was a lot more to him than that.

“Dude.” Pemberton just shook his head slowly. “You’ve got some issues.”

I wouldn’t have called my treatment of my weapon an issue. Jessica might have if I’d told her that the reason why I’d sometimes stay late after work was because I’d applied a new coat of paint to it. I would stay at work for three, four, or five extra hours just painting various colors and patterns on this rifle. I wanted every little piece to look perfect. If there was an edge that was not painted correctly or crooked, I’d start the whole thing over again. I had to have had at least thirty coats of paint on this gun by that point. It was thick. I didn’t want it to bang up on something, so that it would go back to its original, all-black color. If it did get chipped a little bit, there would still be a little bit of paint underneath it, so I could easily fix it. I would change the pattern at least once every two weeks.

Pemberton, on the other hand, needed nearly constant reminding that he needed to clean his gun.

I ran my finger along the brown and black tiger stripes that were Dirty Diana’s present outfit. I figured I was going to have plenty of time for the gun’s care and feeding since this was most likely going to be one of those deployments where I’d be looking for ways to pass the time.

I saw Pemberton take his helmet off and run his fingers through his hair. The first time I saw the guy back in garrison, the thing that struck me was his long hair. It gave him the air of a lady’s man, which he was, and a kind of sophistication that a lot of the other guys lacked. Part of that came from him being a prior service guy. He’d been in the navy and toured around the world basically. He hadn’t seen any kind of combat, but traveling to all those places, experiencing all different kinds of cultures, made him worldly in ways that neither I nor many of the other guys were.

Pemberton was older than me and, though I outranked him and he was my spotter, we didn’t have that kind of strict top-dog pilot/copilot relationship. We were more or less equals, not like the golfer/caddy situation that marks how some sniper teams operate. He would take shots just as much as I did. The unusual thing about battalion snipers and spec ops snipers was the fact that we really don’t have the traditional spotter, where he knows everything there is to know about the environment, the gun, the bullet, and everything, and all the sniper has to do is listen to him and then pull the trigger. We had to be a spotter and sniper all in one, big ball. Sometimes, we’d have to split off and each operate on our own. I knew that there’d be times when we’d have an objective and we’d have to hit two buildings at once, or we’d go out in support of two assault teams. Pemberton and I would then split off, and I had to trust that he’d get the job done, and he’d have to trust me as well.

I did trust Mike and he was a good guy. A couple of days before we left for this deployment, he was over at our place. He was talking with Jessica and he said to her, “I’ve got your man covered. He’s going to come back.”

Jessica wrinkled her nose and said, “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

Mike ran his hand over his chin. I could hear his skin rustling through his two-day bristle. “Well, I’m afraid of you, so I’ll do anything to keep from having to experience your Latina wrath coming down on my head if I come back without him.”

He’d only known Jessica for a relatively brief time, but he’d picked up on the fact that she was fiery as habañero chili. He didn’t have to say it, but I knew that he’d literally take a bullet for me. I wouldn’t tell him this, but I was really glad when the sniper platoon sergeant, a guy named Pacchini, had paired the two of us up back at Fort Benning. At the time, I didn’t know Mike at all, except that he was the hair guy who drove a bright green Mustang, the kind of car only a single guy like him could afford. After that, we spent hundreds and hundreds of hours together and a bond had formed.

Stateside, you’re always looking at other guys and evaluating them, trying to figure out how they’re going to act overseas. If you’re out at a bar and something comes up and a guy jumps up to either watch your back or to hustle you out of there, you know that they’re going to be good to go when deployed. Mike was that kind of shirt-off-his-back guy. I also liked that he wasn’t afraid to ask questions. A lot of guys don’t want to appear stupid or uninformed or whatever, and they’d rather keep quiet and pretend they understand when they don’t. I guess that was a part of Mike’s maturity. Twenty-seven didn’t make him ancient and wise, but it did give him some advantages over the rest of us.

When he’d talked to Jessica, he’d confirmed something that I’d been telling her all along, “The guy is loyal. He’s like a German shepherd or a pit bull. He’d do anything for me.”

Part of the reason why trust and loyalty built up between us was that I have enormous respect for my elders. Mom and Dad always preached that lesson and spending time in South Carolina with my grandparents and aunts and uncles reinforced that. They knew a hell of a lot more about life than I did. All of my male relatives were hunters and crack shots. They all contributed to teaching me weapon safety and respect for the power that guns had.

Because Pemberton was older than me, I had a hard time with the idea that I outranked him. At one point, early on in our pairing as a team, Pemberton said to me, “Hey, Sergeant, can you remind me again of the recommended lead for fast walkers at eight hundred meters?”

“I can, but only if you don’t call me ‘Sergeant’ anymore. Call me ‘Irv,’ or call me by my first name. We’re going to be together in the crap a lot over there. We’re going to be hanging out together. I don’t want to have this I-outrank-you kind of attitude. We’re going to be friends.”

I knew he appreciated that, and that the kind of kidding we did with one another, even when around the other guys, made us both feel more at ease. The closer we got to deployment, the more time we spent together. During training, the sniper/spotter teams worked mostly in isolation from the other five or six other pairings, so when you and your spotter are together that much of the day, you better get along well or you could have some really long and painful days. Snipers and spotters don’t have to be best buds, but too much tension can make you a hell of a lot less effective. You develop a relationship where you’re like brothers, and you know how that can sometimes go. But in the end, you always have each other’s backs.

We were competitive, of course, but early on it became clear why I was the sniper and he was the spotter. I’d always kid him about it, and he didn’t really like it, but the man had some issues of his own. Three hundred of them to be precise. For some reason, when we were training and out on the range, Pemberton could not hit a target that was three hundred meters away. He could nail something at a grand (one thousand meters) and every other distance with some accuracy, but the three hundred seemed to throw him off big-time. I can’t really blame his choice of weapon; after all, other guys used the Win Mag very, very effectively at that distance and others. To its credit, the Win Mag does shoot really tight groups, but for me, it was just too slow. I felt it was a nuisance to have to manually load it and run the bolt back and forth. I figured that there were going to be a lot of times when we’d have to go after multiple targets. Manually racking that bolt every time was going to give the bad guys enough time to go to ground. I wanted to be able to neutralize targets before they knew what hit them.

Even if it wasn’t for that issue he had, he knew that I was going to be the primary shooter. We both knew that, regardless of rank, I was the more accurate shot. He had his relationship with his weapon and I had mine. That might sound strange to someone who’s never been a sniper or a serious hunter or target marksman, but our guns are so important to us. I wasn’t the only one who had named his gun, but I might have been a little more over the top about care and maintenance of my weapon than most. I was very protective of her, and I didn’t like anybody messing around with it behind my back. To make sure they hadn’t, and I did this as we were flying to our insertion point, I inspected her again. I made sure that the scope ring was exactly as I left it. I also checked the stock to see if the spot of gun grease I’d put there was still intact. If it wasn’t I knew somebody’d touched it. I hated people touching her.

A lot like baseball players with their bats, a sniper and his weapon have a way of communicating. You develop a kind of ritual in the way that you handle it and treat it. You take care of it and it will take care of you. Of course, war is no game, and the consequences are more often than not deadly.

The last few minutes to the insertion point, I tried to just empty my mind. I was successful in eliminating any thoughts of home. When I felt us make contact with the ground and we wobbled a bit, it was like someone had given me smelling salts. I was very clear-minded and felt none of the fatigue that I expected I might. Our walk up to the objective was uneventful. When we got to the point where we split off so the assault team could do their thing, I was feeling hesitant. Part of that was due to the fact that even though I’d seen the topographical maps and the satellite images, everything looked slightly different from what I’d pictured. Night vision contributed to that a bit, but having boots on the ground and an eye-level perspective was very different from the intel we used. I wasn’t able to identify any of the features that I thought might distinguish one area from another, one building from another. To be honest, at the break-off point, I had no real idea at all where I was and where I was supposed to position myself.

I hope I don’t screw this up,
I thought. Then I checked myself and told myself to take a deep breath and play it cool. That seemed to help. I found the building Pemberton and I were supposed to utilize as a point from which we could cover the assaulters. Over the comms, I could hear the team members chatter and then the sound of explosives and the rattle of a metal gate.

I looked at Pemberton, my eyes wide to indicate my surprise.

“That was fast.”

We hadn’t even gotten our ladder secure.

A moment later, we heard that the target was secured. They’d snatched him up with no problem and were in the process of walking him out. Better to take them that way and get some intel off them than to neutralize them.

We got word from the platoon leader that we were still needed. We were so far ahead of schedule at that point that they were going to radio the helicopters to extract us. The ETA was about fifteen minutes. Pemberton took the ladder off his pack, and a few moments later, we were positioned on the flat roof of one of the houses. The building didn’t have a solid roof, just a few boards and slim tree trunks balanced between the exterior walls in a loose weave. The sun was starting to come up, and that had me on edge. Darkness was our friend and when it turned its back on us, that meant bad things could more easily come our way.