The Reaper

by Irving, Nicholas; Brozek, Gary;

  I didn’t respond, but I kept thinking, this is going to be really bad.

  I don’t know how, but Derek seemed to pick up the same vibe as me. A minute after first saying that we should let it ride, he said, “I got a bad juju about this. Let’s get down. Let’s really hunker down. I think an ambush is coming our way.”

  He was right. A few seconds later, they opened up on us from what seemed to be every direction, a 360-degree spray of AK, RPK machine gun, and pistol fire. They let loose with a few RPGs. I remembered that hole we’d seen, and so did Pemberton. We jumped up and headed toward it and Derek followed us. We managed to get into that hole. The rest of the RECCE guys, including McDonald, were pinned down around the hole. There was no way we could all fit. They’d plastered themselves as low as they could get and rounds were whizzing by our heads, so there was no way those guys could return fire. I’d gotten to the hole first, so I was at the bottom, with Pemberton and Derek both on top of me, one to my left and one to my right. They were able to lay down a few bursts of suppressive fire, but the enemy definitely had fire superiority at that moment.

  I couldn’t really get a fix on where the rounds were coming from. It was like we were in a blender and everything was circling around us and at some indeterminate distance. Worse, being on the bottom like that, I couldn’t really see, and suddenly I felt an excruciating pain in my neck and then down toward my shoulder. At first I thought I was hit, but the pain began to dissipate and was nothing more severe than a burn. I knew then that hot brass from my guys’ weapons had gotten inside my shirt.

  “Let me up top! Let me up top!”

  We were all in a fetal position, clustered like puppies, and were screaming at each other to see if anybody was hit. Derek was the only guy who had somewhat active comms, but with all the chaos around us, he was having a hard time getting through. I finally managed to crawl my way to the top, and Pemberton and I were up there with Derek underneath us. I could now see, and I wished that I wasn’t able to. The main unit was also coming under heavy fire. I don’t know if it was ours or the Taliban’s, but the sound of multiple grenades going off thumped above the main beat of our weapons. I kept thinking that we shouldn’t have been doing this during the day, and I felt really bad for the second platoon guys. They were just two weeks away from being out of there and now they were caught up in this shit storm.

  Even from up top I couldn’t spot any targets while scanning. The stalks of native grass were being mowed down and dirt was flying all around us and that rich loamy smell of fresh earth mixed with the smell of gunpowder. About five hundred meters away, I caught some motion on top of one of the buildings. Three guys were carrying a machine gun and they were working to set it up. The firing had subsided a bit. I stuck my head up a bit higher, exposing my entire face, and a loud crack sounded. I ducked back down and Pemberton and Derek were screaming at me asking me if I was hit. I told them I was good. Another crack echoed and then the dirt right in front of Pemberton’s face exploded.

  “It’s a sniper! It’s a sniper!”

  I immediately flashed back to a conversation we’d had with the marines while we were playing poker. They knew roughly where we were going and said we’d better be on our game.

  “The Chechen. Watch out for that dude,” one of the guys told us.

  “He operates in that area. Has like three hundred kills or something.”

  Since I had just been Reapered and credited with that crazy number of kills, I was a little bit skeptical. The marines added that the Chechen sniper had been around since the Soviet/Afghan days.

  “The dude has mad skills and a lot of kills,” a marine said, setting off a round of high fives.

  As I lay there in the hole with Pemberton and Derek, I remembered that line and how we’d all laughed. I wasn’t laughing now. But I knew that I couldn’t let that get to me.

  “Pemberton, I’ve got three guys on top of that building setting up a machine gun nest. We’ve got to get some rounds on that target. I’m going after them.”

  “Do it. Just do it.” Pemberton’s voice was high-pitched and it was like you could see a cloud of adrenaline coming out of his mouth as he spoke.

  We were all freaking out.

  “Can you spot me?”

  “I can’t frickin’ move. Every time I do—” He didn’t have to finish the sentence. I knew that the sniper was on him.

  Keeping my body pressed as tight to the ground as I could, I lifted my weapon over the edge of the hole, pushing the suppressor through the earth. With my torso pressed to the wall of the hole and my legs on its bottom, I slithered up a few inches. I was wishing I could somehow burrow underneath the ground and emerge in a new location like a worm. The next best thing was to get the barrel of my weapon up and out of the ground. I could feel it poking out. I was able to see the top of the building in the scope. I didn’t have time to do any real calculations, but I guessed that they were about five hundred meters away. I squeezed off a round and it went high and right of the guy immediately behind the machine gun. I compensated for the elevation and windage and fired again. This one struck the dude right in the shoulder pocket and he went down. As soon as he did, a second Taliban fighter took up the same position, allowing me to fire again without any adjustment. He was easy, but the third guy, who had been moving forward so that he could help feed the ammo, seeing his other two guys shot dead, grabbed a few belts and took off running.

  On a normal day, a guy running presented no real difficulties, but with us taking fire and everything else, all I wanted to do, if I couldn’t hit him, was to get him away from that machine gun. I fired off six to eight rounds, but none of them ever struck home. Worse, as I was in that firing position, a round impacted between me and Derek. I could feel it reverberating through the ground. I rolled over toward Pemberton, and the two of us huddled together, offering whatever cover we could to each other.

  “Where’s he at?”

  Pemberton raised his head an inch or two and another round impacted danger close. He tried another few times, but the result was the same. “Motherf---er.”

  The fact that the sniper was missing us made me believe that he only had a partial fix on us. He could see a hand or a foot or something, but he wasn’t able to zone in on a body, otherwise one of us would have been hit.

  For the first time, I was at the other end of the scope, and I didn’t like it. It was driving me nuts knowing that some guy was able to fire so precisely on us. What that was doing to us mentally was pretty cruel.

  I said to Derek, “We need two sets of eyes. We’ve got to both go up there and check for this dude’s position. We both take a quick look. The machine gunners were at one o’clock. He wasn’t there. Let’s start there. I’ll look right of that, you look left.”

  Our helmets were no more than three inches apart. As we both nodded that we agreed on the plan, they clanked together. I made the count. One, two, three. We raised up and took a quick look and I could feel a bullet go right between our heads. We dove back down, both of us screaming. Derek’s shout was bloodcurdling and made me think he was hit. We’d made so much noise that a RECCE medic attached to us yelled in our direction, asking if we were okay. In the brief time we’d been looking for the sniper’s location, I was able to see that the remaining RECCE element was lying around that field in a kind of star pattern, all of them lying with their arms and legs spread.

  I looked at Derek and Pemberton and it was as if their heads had been turned inside out. It was like I could see every vein, every sinew, every tendon standing out. Their eyes were wide and their mouths hung open. Worse, I knew that what I was seeing of them was a reflection of what they were seeing in me. We were in that hole and the combined energy of our collective fear was radioactive. It was like we were in a horror movie where the nuclear fallout was peeling away our skin and revealing our insides. I tried not to think about my wife and my mom and dad, but of course, in telling myself not to think about them, I was thinking about them. I was rememb
ering all the times since getting to Afghanistan when I thought about how cool it was that we were doing the things we had been and what it felt like when I took a guy out, and how ludicrous that all seemed to me just then. I thought of that song I’d been singing in my head—“This—sucks. This—sucks”—the cadence of it and how now it was like those words were jamming through my mind like this: “Thissucksthissucksthissucksthissucksthis-sucksthissucksthissucks,” in one long continuous loop.

  I knew that if I didn’t flip that around, I was going to go nuts, and if I did, then what would that mean for the rest of the guys? I started saying to myself, “I got this.” Very slowly and deliberately, and over and over so many times that I started to calm down enough to halfway believe that I was speaking the truth.

  I also realized that this wasn’t a situation we were going to be able to fight our way out of. Now wasn’t the time to be the kid who romanticized war and thought about how cool it would be to go balls out over the top in a gung ho charge at the enemy. Now was the time for me to be the calm and calculating chess player. I had a problem to solve, a big one, and I was going to have to think things through and be a thinker and a fighter.

  I accepted the fact that since I was the one who’d studied all the sniper tactics, I had to be the one to take this guy out. He was good, and what impressed me was that no one could get a fix on where he was firing from. Everything I knew about countersniping was running through my brain. This was a chess match and understanding your opponent’s position, putting yourself in his shoes, was essential for success.

  The army had taught us the Keep in Memory System (KIMS), and I was used to maintaining a high level of observation. I also knew that we absorbed some information subconsciously and it would come back to us if we were in a receptive state. So I was resting in that hole, closing my eyes, and alternately trying to bring back that entire scene of the village, while also thinking about where I would have chosen to position myself to do what he was attempting to do.

  I recalled a building that was to the left of where the machine gunners had been. I would have chosen that. It was offset from the center of that field by about two hundred meters. Any sniper would have chosen it.

  “He’s in a building off to the left, Derek.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Hold on. Let me wait for it.”

  The sniper let loose with another round and I started to count. I counted to five very quickly, but the bullet landed on four. Using the snap-bang theory, I figured he was at least four hundred meters away. I took another quick look and the building I’d thought of was within that range and a window was wide open.

  “That’s got to be it.”

  The plan I worked out with Pemberton was for him to roll out of the hole and get eyes on that target—the window—and open fire with that Win Mag. Either he’d move him away from that location or maybe get lucky and get him. While he was rolling out and firing, I would also fire at that location, or in its general direction, hoping to keep him pinned down. On the count of three, we executed the move, and I started shooting. I got off three rounds and was empty. As I was reloading, I could see rounds just missing Pemberton as he did his rolls, each time the bullet striking where he’d just been.

  I shook my head in admiration for the sniper. He was really good.

  Pemberton hadn’t been able to retrieve his weapon, but his eyesight was good enough that he reported to me that he’d seen the window and a black curtain. That had to be the location.

  I tossed him his weapon, and jumped a bit when another round came danger close to me. Another impact went off near Pemberton’s head. He covered his head with his arms, leaving his weapon lying nearby.

  “We can’t engage. We need air support.”

  Derek and McDonald were both feverishly working the comms to get the message out, but the second platoon was pinned down as well. They were danger close, sometimes in hand-to-hand or grenade range, depending on their location in the ravine or at the objective. They couldn’t assist us.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “This is bullshit.”

  All the guys were upset, but this was one of those situations. We could call in air support, and with a big-deal scenario like we were dealing with, we could get just about anything we needed, a B-2, an F-16 or F-15, anything at all. At least that was what I thought. One of the pilots let us know the deal.

  “We cannot accept anything less than point one collateral damage. We will not be able to assist. Repeat. No assist.”

  The situation had gone from bad to stupid bad in that instant.

  Simultaneously, the four RECCE guys with working radios were hammering the chain of command and the pilots, cursing them out and letting them know they had no idea how bad this situation was.

  “We are in the middle of an open field. Guys are about to start dying.”

  My radio kicked back in for a few moments, and I heard, “He’s hit. He’s hit. Sniper from platoon is hit.”

  I didn’t know Walkens all that well, but anytime a guy is hit you’re pissed off. Fortunately, he was struck in the foot and he was being tended to and assisted out of there. The guy was pretty salty and had been with the platoon for years; I knew that if he’d taken one, given his position, the rest of us were in deep shit.

  Finally, after I jumped on comms and just pleaded our case for something, the pilots agreed to do a show of force. They were going to do a relatively low-altitude flyover and hopefully scare the crap out of those other guys with flares. I wasn’t happy about that and told the team leader to just drop the bombs on us. We still had guys sprawled on the ground all around us. I could hear guys screaming, the sound of the enemy running nearby, and I knew we couldn’t last much longer. I had no idea how much time had elapsed, but when I took a quick look at my watch, we’d been pinned down for nearly two hours.

  I tried to skirmish my way up to Pemberton’s position so that we could start to take on targets. I wasn’t doing anybody any good being hunkered down in that hole. Simultaneously, our RECCE team leader rolled into the hole. I came up firing and Pemberton joined in, wearing out that building and the window we suspected the sniper fire was coming from. I told Pemberton to crank off an entire magazine, five rounds, at the window as fast as he could.

  He did as I asked. While he was firing, on the fourth round, I spotted a little bit of movement in the window; the curtain the sniper used shook as the bullet passed through it. Of course, he wasn’t at the window. He was somewhere back in the room firing through a small hole in the wall beneath the windowsill, doing something we called loop hold shooting. That was a tactic that had been used since the start of the war, and it was nearly impossible to counter. There was no way I could fit a round into a small space like that and hit anybody at that distance. At a hundred, two hundred, maybe three hundred meters, I had a decent chance.

  Rounds kept coming in and with that sinking feeling that came with my recognition that we weren’t going to be able to get him, I was just shouting blindly into my radio asking for anyone to come to our position to assist. The sniper fire had tailed off for a few minutes, and I figured he was either reloading or changing position. Didn’t matter. We started to come under heavy fire again, the same 360-degree deal we’d dealt with at the start.

  “Irv! Irv! I’ve got two guys running danger close at ten o’clock.” Pemberton’s voice sounded as if it was crackled with static as the sound of enemy fire snapped overhead.

  “Shoot. Shoot. Shoot,” was all I could manage. Then I thought I was hallucinating again. Something long and thin and black punctured the sky and came screaming overhead about five hundred feet off the ground. The shape didn’t register at first, and I was thinking, UFO. It wasn’t but it was close. A B-2 Stealth Bomber, with flares trailing off it, came through. It confused me, but it didn’t scare me, and I knew it didn’t scare our opponents. The firing never let up.

  Over the comms I heard our team leader asking for bombs and the same response about
point one percent collateral damage. It was starting to get comic except for the message being delivered: We don’t need a show of force. We need bombs. Guys are dying out here. Drop the bombs on us!

  I don’t know what kind of damage the five hundred-pound bombs would have done to the Taliban or to us, but it didn’t really matter. I wanted this thing to be over, however it ended. If nothing else, that flyover discouraged the runners, who were now veering away at six o’clock. I couldn’t move at all—if I did I was sure I was going to get nailed—but Pemberton had angled his rifle toward them. The sniper was keened in on me and was using another tactic to take me on. He’d clearly figured out who I was and now I was his priority target. When you’re in the situation the Chechen was in, you had a kind of checklist to go down: sniper, communications guy, medics, and so on down the line.

  “One hundred meters and closing, “ Pemberton said.

  “How fast?”

  “Jogging.”

  “What angle?”

  “Thirty-five”

  “Aim .5 mils in front of them. Hold .5 right and send it.”

  I heard his rifle emit its big boom.

  “Missed.”

  “Where?”

  “In front.”

  “Go to .2. Decrease to .2.”

  “Got one.”

  Then a moment later, Pemberton added, “I think.”

  “They’re just standing there. Checking to see where the shot came from,” McDonald added. I could see him. He’d rolled over onto his back and he was bridging his neck to look backward. “Oh, yeah, you got him.”

  “How can you tell?” Pemberton sounded pissed off.

  “Dude’s entire right side is red. That ain’t normal.”

  We all laughed.

  Pemberton fired again. “Jesus Christ on two sticks,” he muttered.

  “Dude,” I said, “I could have hit that guy with a rock.” I hoped that would ease some of the tension.

  The wounded guy still hadn’t gone down, and he and his buddy were walking back toward the village.