The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  Paradoxically, the only skill my father had was shooting, and unsurprisingly, he loved it. He was short, bow-legged, and what you’d call “barrel-chested,” barely resembling me except his eyes were grey too. He was taciturn and aloof, but sometimes when he drank or felt low he would tell me that grey eyes were the sign of a marksman. He worked part-time and managed to make ends meet, but there was a stubborn core that prevented him from seeing himself subordinated to anyone. There was a kind of dam inside my father, a stoppage that kept him from taking risks or going beyond himself. If you didn’t know any better, you’d say he was calm and collected.

  So money was always tight. My father couldn’t afford to buy a television, and starting when I was young, maybe five or six, he’d take me hunting. He taught me the proper way to take aimed shots, to squeeze the trigger during a long deliberate exhale, not knowing the precise moment the rifle would fire, teaching me that expectation ruins accuracy. After, he’d put me to work disassembling and cleaning his rifle, shotguns, and pistols. It’s not that he was a gun nut—quite the contrary. He tried to share the one thing he loved with me, and I suppose I felt lucky. Many people had it worse. I wasn’t particularly popular then, and didn’t have many friends, so physical labor helped keep me busy.

  When I go home now, people love my war stories. Guys I barely knew in high school ask about how many terrorists I killed (fifty-seven), and all about the Navy SEALs. For some reason people are interested in mundane biographical details about SEALs that weren’t relevant or significant before, like how I’m six feet one with light blond hair and grey eyes, or how I have long arms and narrow shoulders, and bent, powerful legs. I can climb a twenty-five-foot rope in five seconds. I’ve died underwater before, part of S.C.U.B.A. training. I’m a fast runner, and I can do more push-ups or pull-ups than you’d think.

  In high school I hated class and homework but I was good at sports. The humanities were my worst subjects. Usually I’d read a book and just not understand what was going on. Freshman year I almost failed English. Math and science were strong subjects for me, but the humanities really tripped me up. It seemed like I was the only kid in class who couldn’t figure out what was happening in a book, no matter how hard I tried. My advisor tried to help, and said something I’ll never forget: that reading was about what called out to you. A great book showed you something true about yourself. It helped, some, to hear that. Even so, in English I’d think I understood a book or a story, saw something true in it, but then in class I’d raise my hand and it’d turn out that I was wrong.

  Right before freshman year, an important event helped define my adolescence. Our neighbors, an elderly couple, died. The estate sold their house to Mr. and Mrs. Erik Ruhr and their daughter, Angela. Angela Ruhr was a senior, and her curly blond hair demanded and received the attention of all who regarded it. She was a terrific athlete, and had the kind of body every high school boy coveted. Her father was a banking executive.

  By happy coincidence, her second-story bedroom room was adjacent to mine. Most nights she remembered to pull the blinds shut. There were weekends, especially the summer after her graduation, where she did not remember . . . I was able to observe her, on dates with one boy or another, drinking, smoking cigarettes, and, on several occasions, having enthusiastic sex. Her parents spent a good deal of time away on vacation or for professional reasons, and often left Angela to her own devices.

  I did not have a girlfriend and developed what in retrospect I can admit was an obsession with Angela’s sexual habits. Quite apart from the objective fact that watching an attractive woman have sex is engaging (pornographic films and strip clubs attest to this), my own life then was drab and boring by comparison, and static.

  One morning that July I walked out back. Dad was gone, and there was nothing to do around the house. The weather was comfortable. I could smell the cut grass and fully bloomed trees. Insects buzzed. The air was still, not yet humid, blasted with life and fecundity. I looked up to find Angela watching from her back porch. She pointed her index finger and pretended to shoot me, like it was a pistol, then smiled, waved, and walked inside. I raised my hand, which is to say, I did nothing.

  As an introvert, I honed extraordinary powers of patience and endurance those July and August evenings waiting by my window for Angela to return from dates with boys from my high school, as well as those from other high schools. I did not film or record these sexual acts, and understood that my observing them was intrusive. But I could not stop, nor could I furnish a reasonable explanation to myself for doing so beyond fascination.

  Unlike Angela’s parents, it seemed like my father was always home. We lived in closer quarters than the Ruhrs. My father was no banking executive, and privacy was difficult to come by. One had to be furtive. So in addition to powers of patience, I also developed methods for gratifying my sexual urges without arousing the suspicions of those around me. Nevertheless, my father seemed to have a sixth sense for my masturbation, and while he never caught me in the act, he seemed especially intrusive during those times when I would have preferred to be alone, banging on my locked door, calling out about dinner, asking what I was up to. Achieving climax involved a delicate triangulation of the following variables: Angela’s sexual life, my father’s intrusiveness, and my ability both to secure my privacy in physical terms as well as psychologically to feel comfortable and safe. Practically speaking, this was quite difficult. For what it’s worth, I do believe that this all helped me cultivate the skills that ultimately led to my success as a sniper.

  After high school most people went to college. Angela attended Duke. I didn’t have the grades or interest. In 2002, war was the only thing that “called out” to me after high school. Putting my father’s hypothesis about grey eyes to the test, I joined the Navy SEALs and the rest, as they say, is history.

  Occasionally I wonder where Angela Ruhr ended up. She never appeared on social media—not everyone does. For a while I checked Facebook and Twitter, as I checked MySpace and Friendster when those were active. I’d Google her name—you’d think one of the friends we had in common would bring her up—nothing. After leaving for college, it’s like she dropped off the face of the earth.

  Sniping comes down to (1) patience, (2) procedures that if you do them right it will give you the same result, and (3) luck, because even the best sniper can miss shots at greater distances. After Ramadi and the tank I had the most trouble reconciling myself with (3), but Chuck helped get me past that anxiety. He pointed out—and I can’t disagree with him—that you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.

  Now, when there’s a shot, I don’t hesitate. I don’t think about whether or not I’ll be ready to fire. Whether the bullet might pull left or right. What the shot “means”—its significance, my surroundings, the architectural composition of the neighborhood and likely historical ramifications of that architecture, as well as my embeddedness in the consequences that will spiderweb out unpredictably into the future like cracks in a window punctured by 7.62 caliber bullets. Now, I bed down and take the shot.

  I like to think of myself as a scientist, tending to the various parts of my laboratory. Twisting dials, pulling levers. That’s all there is to it, it’s simple. When the conditions align, I make the shot. No hesitation, and to hell with luck, like Chuck said. When everything is done scientifically and objectively, according to routine, that’s all you can do. I’ve made the shot about seventy-five times, taken targets down, fifty-nine of them permanently.

  As I mentioned earlier, Chuck and I couldn’t have been more different. We were partners on five consecutive deployments. He’d get emotional on mission. When I made my longest shot (over 1.5 kilometers, through a building, RPG gunner) he jumped and yelled. The war meant something to him that I never understood. I joined because I wanted to learn about my family, and I thought I might have a talent for shooting targets at long distances. Chuck had joined, I think, because he hated Muslims. When I dropped the RPG gunner, for example, afte
r jumping to his feet he, yelled, “Fuck you, haji,” then swung his hips in a circle while playing the air guitar, like David Lee Roth in “Jump,” smiling down at me and nodding to a beat I couldn’t hear. I was impressed with the shot as well. There had been a stiff cross-breeze, burning with dust, and thinking about it afterward, I was surprised it hit target.

  Me and Chuck were together so long our luck became one person’s luck instead of two, which is to say, it ran out.

  Chuck looked out for me in more ways than one. In addition to guaranteeing our safety on mission, he could talk our superiors into giving us autonomy. Our lieutenant who didn’t care for me—reminded me a bit of my father, always checking up on my room, always around when I wanted to be alone, never a kind word. Chuck understood how to deal with guys like that.

  Another thing that happened to me at war was I started getting off on the more difficult shots at night. Sexually. We’d be on a mission, waiting for the target to appear or for some variable in the environment to change and I’d know Chuck was out there keeping watch—it made me feel really comfortable, knowing we were the ones with the power to kill. I’d see the target as a white blob, engaged in all kinds of personal and intimate acts, and it reminded me—there was no helping it—of Angela, of my childhood window. Except nobody could interrupt us, the only thing that would break the spell would be the crack of my rifle spitting out someone’s judgment. In that darkness, I figured out how to stimulate myself. At least, until Chuck bought the farm, at which point, it didn’t.

  Here’s what happened. As spotter, it was Chuck’s job to pull security and help maintain our situational awareness. One mission in Iraq he was covering our six from the roof while I pulled overwatch on an Al Qaeda organizer. One of Zarqawi’s acolytes, this guy wasn’t holding the drill, as it were, wasn’t using the calipers himself, but he was definitely green lighting the monsters who were. We were waiting for him to come home, and he did, and right when I had my shot and started to squeeze the trigger Chuck said “abort, abort” over the radio.

  He’d seen the target’s security detail one rooftop over from ours and was assessing the situation, probably thinking there was no way to do the mission. All of that was irrelevant because I’d been thinking about Angela and getting ready for the shot. Physically I couldn’t control it, even if I’d wanted to. I let myself go, and took the shot, and capped the poor bastard.

  Chuck nailed the first couple ragheads but (and I don’t even know where it came from, we were taking fire from all over) someone shot him dead through his helmet, bang. I bustled him over my shoulders and ran, as Chuck’s blood poured over my shoulders and arms and pants, dousing everything. I made it back through a mysterious blur of jumping and firing without shooting at anything, and at some point a helicopter was landing and grabbing me and Chuck—Chuck’s body. Then it was over.

  Nobody asked how the mission had gone down, and I didn’t tell, I just slowly went to shit as a sniper, unable to shoot, unable to gratify myself as my sexual frustration built.

  I was back in rotation the next day. They assigned me a few spotters but none of them worked out. In the military, you bond with someone or you don’t, and I’d gotten too content with Chuck—I’d stopped being flexible enough to adapt. My habits, with which Chuck was familiar, grated on the other spotters. Didn’t matter that I had a solid reputation, everyone with experience has a way of doing things and I couldn’t seem to find anyone who gelled with my particular needs. One spotter would get too close, always set up next to me. Another was too far, I couldn’t tell if I was safe or not. Missions went badly and sometimes not at all, sometimes targets would escape without getting shot. This went on for a couple weeks.

  One evening I was going half crazy lying in my room, thinking that something had to give, when a distinctive rapping at my door brought me to attention—the lieutenant. I popped out of bed, anxious and on edge.

  “Sir?” I said, but flat, so he understood that I didn’t really care. He was in full battle rattle, helmet, body armor, rifle, all of it, which meant something dangerous was imminent.

  “Just got back from a recon—we’re heading out tonight. Got a target. Come with me to CHOPs for briefing.”

  I didn’t understand at first. All the spotters were out, or, all the spotters who might still work with me.

  “I’m going to be your spotter. Heard you have constipation when it comes to getting your shot off. I’m the laxative.”

  He was tall, and older—twenty-nine or thirty. He’d been a soldier like myself at some point, and done the whole green to gold officer transition at Georgetown. Got an undergraduate degree in business—not exactly the “tactical” type, more comfortable signing paperwork than spending a night outside staring at targets. I was surprised he’d decided to join me and said so.

  “Don’t worry if this idea is good or not, it’s happening. Come with me, I’m not going to say it a third time.”

  I did as instructed, pulling on my boots and body armor. The lieutenant was already walking down the hall, toward “operations,” the office where high-level briefings occurred. I hurried to catch up. We pulled even as he reached the door, and he turned before opening it.

  “The target is special. It’s a female. Can’t afford to have you fuck this one up. Got it?”

  I nodded. I’d done females before, older women who were acting as go-betweens for AQ leaders, pulling important financial strings. Didn’t bother me, really. If the generals and admirals in the head-shed wanted some lady taken out, that meant the target deserved it. The lieutenant, though, he bothered me, with his cheerful eyes and empty, authoritative manner, like he knew the score.

  Objective Redskins was the name higher assigned, in keeping with their convention of designating targets with the names of football teams. It seemed appropriate: Redskins were what Army scouts killed on the prairie and in the American Southwest to stop settlers from losing their scalps. Savage people, in a lawless land. Removing Redskins would allow this particular city, and Iraq in general, to evolve into a place like Phoenix, or Des Moines. Or Philadelphia.

  At the briefing, we reviewed the hide site our scouts had selected. It didn’t look promising—even under normal conditions, it looked like a tough shot. Corner building, angled fire, two-floor differential from four hundred meters away—but there was no other option. I would’ve rather taken a longer shot from an equal elevation and clear line of sight, but Redskins had selected quarters masked by two tall, intervening factories. Unlike Angela, Redskins had thought about who might be observing. I kept snapping in and out of the actual brief, instead scanning the photos, memorizing the physical details of the area.

  “Medevac plan is—primary, create improvised Helicopter Landing Zone on the roof marked using flares and smoke. Alternate will be in the courtyard to south of hide sight, marking same as for primary.” The lieutenant hurried through the briefing in a monotone, shifting from foot to foot and frequently sneaking his eyes to the right, affecting the speech patterns of a seasoned combat veteran, like he had the whole thing figured out. He didn’t fool me, I could tell he’d never been in the shit. Nobody ever tagged a rooftop as primary evacuation, that was movie-time cowboy crap. What it really meant was that a bureaucrat was coming out with me—that the mission was my last chance to make good. I picked up the packet to review the details, not wanting to get anything wrong, and left to finish prepping.

  “See you in three hours outside your hooch,” the lieutenant said as I left. “Zero one hundred hours, we link up with our infil. Don’t be late.”

  I rezeroed my rifle and double-checked the equipment. I was still jittery, full of pent-up fury that bounced my legs when I sat, and propelled me down empty hallways when I stood. I hit the gym briefly, but that just got my heart rate up. With nothing left to do but wait for a half hour, I decided to loiter, see if I could endure nothing. Took my stuff outside my quarters and waited.

  Outside, the night reminded me of childhood Halloween—chilly and d
ark, with a vivid moon, yellow in the squat Iraqi sky. Smells sharpened in the autumn air, and I felt the tainted Euphrates reeking like an ache, from the back of my skull down to my throbbing pelvis. Dogs barked desperately off to the East in Sadr City. Somewhere outside the wire, a man yelled in Arabic. The call to prayer wasn’t playing, but I knew it would, again, soon.

  The lieutenant found me there. I grabbed my rifle and pack and we linked up with a group of Army infantrymen heading out to our sector in Strykers—whisper-quiet armored vehicles. We rode in their red-lit troop compartments for hours, doing false inserts around the city, setting up snap traffic checkpoints with the infantry, pretending that our purpose was tactical, quotidian. When we finally reached the drop point it was early morning. Our infiltration went off without a hitch. We exited the back of a slow-rolling Stryker as we passed an alley three hundred meters away from the apartment building that held our hide location, and humped it the rest of the way, dogs barking at the vehicles, at us, at each other.

  Usually, the topographical setup of a fight is worse on the ground than on the maps they use during briefs. The hill where you want to put a sniper or machine gun ends up being a mountain. An open space through which one is supposed to shoot is actually an apple orchard, or a children’s playground. Sometimes, though, if intel is sparse, you catch a break, and the setup is better than you feared. As it turned out, the room where I’d take my shot wasn’t as bad as it looked in the mission brief—very doable, with a great egress route for after. I took a moment to marvel at how the lieutenant and I were, shortly, to transform this humble apartment, guarded by a cheap metal door, into a workshop. The concrete walls were weak and chipped, the furniture shabby but maintained in a way that reminded me of my own impoverished upbringing. I felt a momentary surge of welcome familiarity.