The Reaper

by Irving, Nicholas; Brozek, Gary;

  McDonald kept going with his upside-down play-by-play describing how the wounded man started staggering and his comrade took off his turban and put a tourniquet around the dude’s shoulder. Pemberton and I crawled back into the hole on top of Derek. It took a few seconds for us to disentangle.

  Intermittently I could still hear the transmissions indicating that we weren’t going to get any assist. The team leader yelled to us and said, “I have one grenade and one smoke grenade. I can either pop smoke and we try to bound our way out or we can take this grenade and hug it.”

  At that moment, I think we were all feeling the same way. I could hear it in the voices of the guys over the radios and see it in the vacant looks I got from Pemberton and Derek. This was it. We were going to die. The Taliban forces were pinching in. Either we give them a fight or we hug the grenade.

  Pemberton’s face was inches from mine. I nodded at him, and we both smiled, wordlessly letting each other know how we felt. We bumped fists, and I felt this knot in my throat choking me.

  Pemberton’s expression hardened and he stared at me, as bullets smacked nearby.

  “No, man. Fuck that. We’re getting out of here. No way I’m facing your wife and tellin’ her you died. I’m scared of her. She’d kick my ass, dude, and I can’t let that happen.”

  I shrugged and said, “Roger that, man.”

  We formulated a plan. We’d use the smoke grenade as cover for us as we bounded back toward the road and a ditch that ran alongside it at our six. We’d do that in pairs. Pemberton and I would be the last to go, so that we could continue to lay down some precision cover fire.

  Just before we set the plan in motion, I did up the chinstrap of my helmet. Normally, I used to do what I called the “John Wayne” because I didn’t like how the chinstrap irritated my skin. I was waiting for the countdown to when we’d pop smoke when I saw some movement over my left shoulder. I could see a small group of Rangers coming toward our position. I was able to identify one of them because of his football running style—Benjamin Kopp. He was a buddy of mine and the machine gun team leader. He was joined by a few other guys who were heavily armed with .48s and M4s. I was looking at them and had another out-of-body experience.

  I watched as they came gliding in, kind of like geese in formation, and did a perfect baseball-slide landing simultaneously and took up a position. Above the sound of all the other gunfire, I could hear those machine guns pounding away. They were interlocking sectors of fire and laying waste to anything and everything in that zone, traversing those guns six inches off the ground.

  I sat there listening to that sweet zinging song as the rounds passed right over our heads. I remembered as a kid we’d toss rocks at the high-tension power lines that ran through an easement in our neighborhood, and that sound like an electric guitar’s D string being plucked buzzing in our bellies.

  They were putting down so much gunfire, as we lay there pressed to the earth, I felt that same vibration coming up out of the ground.

  “Hell, yeah!”

  “Get some!”

  Derek threw the smoke grenade, but of course, the wind was against us, and it didn’t do much to cover our bound back. Pemberton and I waited a bit.

  “Let’s do this, man.”

  We bumped fists and took off, running our zigzag pattern as fast as our tired legs could go. I had the sensation that I was like those kids in E.T. I felt like my feet weren’t even touching the ground and I was rising up. Usually, with all the irrigation ditches, the rocks, and everything else, I’m pretty much a stumble-freak and fall down. Pemberton was right behind me, running half hunched over, and we slid into that ditch, me doing my best imitation of Troy Aikman sliding for a first down.

  Members of the second platoon were in that ditch with us, and while I was thanking them for saving our asses, they were telling us about the grenade-tossing party they had going on.

  “Dudes were picking ours up and tossing them back at us. It was nuts.”

  “Got to the point, we’d toss them a few feet in front of our position and hope like hell we didn’t get blown up.”

  I could barely talk. My cheeks felt glued to my teeth and my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

  I barely managed to squeak a request for water. I drank half the bottle and tossed the rest to Pemberton. After that, I told the guys that we needed to pick it up and get to a safe house. We formed up with Pemberton and me at the rear. Suddenly it went all quiet.

  As the movement began, I saw out of my peripheral vision a man in white clothing peeking from behind a corner of a nearby hut. I called Pemberton over to me and laid my rifle on his shoulder. I told him to inhale and then exhale, timing my breaths with his, making sure that I could compensate for the rising and falling of the gun’s barrel. As soon as my eye focused on the scope reticule, the man popped out pointing an AK-47 barrel in our direction. I squeezed the trigger immediately as the center of my crosshairs landed on his chest. His body crumpled under his dead weight, partially exposing his head from the corner of the building, with the AK-47 lying underneath him. Pemberton jumped when I fired, and who could blame him with my weapon being so close to his ear.

  “Got him, dude. Let’s go.”

  We made our way to the front by doing something stupid. We took a route right up against the tree line. All it did was silhouette us against that backdrop. I didn’t know what the Chechen was up to, but I’d given him a huge opportunity. I guess we were more interested in speed than safety at that point, so I relied on the old geometry lesson about the shortest distance between two points. I wanted to get over to help the guys in second platoon since they’d bailed us out. Gunfire, from maybe fifty meters away, was coming in on us. Another ambush. We made a left turn and I could see, all along my left side, heads popping out of the ground. Vietnam. These guys had freakin’ fighting tunnels.

  To our right was a ditch, and I cartwheeled headfirst into the muddy water. I came up spluttering in the chest-deep water, while all around me guys were returning fire helter-skelter in the direction we thought the shots had come in from. I put my rifle up on the embankment and looked through the scope. It was coated with mud, I was dripping wet, and now, my intermittent radio was completely dead due to drowning. I cleaned the sight as best I could and began scanning.

  I heard the report of a rifle and a snapping sound right next to me. I thought whoever was next to me was way too close, but I looked over, no one was there. The sounds coming from my left were the supersonic snaps passing close to my ear and impacting the mud wall behind me. I now knew for sure the Chechen was still out there, and as I moved to my right, each of his shots grew closer and closer to hitting me.

  Firing off another shot and hitting an enemy Taliban in the face, I looked back to my left and prepared to move away from my targeted location. I saw Kopp, half in and half out of the ditch, his right foot up on the embankment, and he was firing away. I heard another strange sound, but not the sound of a bullet snapping overhead; this was a different sound, like someone slapping a ruler against a pillow. That was followed by a loud scream. Kopp, one of the men who came in to save us just a few minutes ago, had been struck in the thigh. A stream of blood sprayed out from his leg and into the water. He was screaming that he was hit and cursing. A couple of guys dove on top of him and then began applying pressure on his wound. Blood quickly filled the stagnant water that we were in, turning the water a dark, reddish brown. Pemberton and I and a few M4 and machine gunners raised ourselves out of the water and emptied our magazines on the partially obscured enemy.

  While we were engaging, one of our medics, Melvin, a big black guy, ran under heavy incoming fire and through waist-deep water to reach Kopp. Upon reaching him, Melvin tossed his medical bag into the water, opened it and proceeded to provide care. I was in complete awe watching the medic go to work with his medical bag floating in the ravine and bullets impacting all around him.

  We had to get the hell out of there. I turned around and the platoon leader (PL
) was behind me. I shouted, “Do you want us to move up and secure your entry to the Alamo?” I was referring to the name of the safe house. He couldn’t hear me, so I pulled him close. Then, I felt what seemed to be water smack the side of my face.

  It wasn’t water; it was blood.

  The PL sank from my grasp and into the water, screaming, “I’m hit, I’m hit!” A single round had struck the PL in the upper chest, just above his body armor. I was so stunned by the fact that a bullet had just missed me and struck the PL that I could barely move. Pemberton immediately fell on the PL and placed his finger in the bullet hole while I turned back to my rear and emptied half a magazine toward the enemy. A medic from my recon team ran over to assist the PL. The damned sniper had strategically taken out key members of our team and was still focusing in on Pemberton and me.

  Something clicked in me, and I got up onto level ground and just started firing every time I saw a head come up. I saw one split in two. I was doing nothing but engaging and engaging until I had to reload. I sank back down and the medic had a compress on the PL’s wound and an IV stuck in his arm.

  “Get that son of a bitch. Get that son of a bitch,” the PL kept saying to me, looking glassy-eyed but determined. “I’m trying. I’m trying.” More rounds seemed targeted at me and were smacking into the back of the embankment. “Everybody else okay? You got to get out of here.”

  I saw Derek and he lifted his chin, signaling me to come closer to him. I low-crawled toward him and he said, “I’m not taking any fire at all.”

  As soon as I raised myself up a bit, a bullet flew between us. Derek’s eyes grew wide. “He’s locked in on you. Get down. Get down.”

  I worked back to my previous spot while Derek fired.

  We all knew we had to get out of there.

  Another of the team leaders asked Melvin how much more time he needed to stabilize Kopp.

  Melvin didn’t turn toward us for a full five to ten seconds. When he did, he didn’t need to say a word. We all knew that his expression was telling us that it wasn’t going to matter how much time he spent. Things weren’t looking too good for Kopp.

  By that time, Kopp had stopped his screaming and was lying there shaking his head slowly from side to side. Guys were telling him, “Hey dude, you’re doing okay. You’re doing okay.”

  I looked down and I could see two blood-soaked gauze pads floating in the water like little square life rafts. Melvin had already applied two tourniquets and was pressing a third gauze pad to the wound. It was like watching a paper towel soaking up a red spill.

  Guys came up with a makeshift litter and placed Kopp in it. He was likely bleeding out, but we had to get him to a field hospital somehow and hope for the best.

  The team leader shook his head.

  “Let’s go. Screw it. Right now.”

  The PL no longer had his shirt on and had his body armor draped over him like a cape. He was holding the gauze to Kopp’s chest. And he started slogging through the water with the rest of us. Pemberton and I volunteered to grab Kopp’s gear to make carrying him easier. Pemberton stuck with me, and we leaned back as Kopp was carried past us. The water varied in depth quite a bit, and just as he got even with us, Kopp’s face disappeared under the water for a moment and then rose again. He’d gone bone-white pale and his face was now slack, but I could see his chest rising and falling in small spasms of breath. We were still taking fire, and the guys carrying him had to keep low.

  Finally, Pemberton and I started half swimming, half low-crawling out of that ditch. I could barely move. I kept waiting for some Taliban guy to jump into the ditch and strafe us all. I was kind of wishing that would happen. My legs and arms were cramping so bad, I just wanted to lie down in that water or have someone shoot me. I kept thinking of Kopp being dunked like that and the calm expression on his face.

  Pemberton sensed that something had changed in me. I felt as if the mud that was sucking my boots and caking on my skin was stealing the life out of me. I knew that Kopp’s chances weren’t good, and we’d been close. None of this seemed worth it. Pemberton was a few meters ahead of me, and he turned and said, “Suck it up. You’re a Ranger. Let’s finish this thing.”

  No sooner had we gotten near the safe house than we were instructed to move to the front of the line. We needed to lay down suppressive fire while the wounded were placed inside. My clothes were now so heavy and stiff all I could do was a Frankenstein shuffle into position. My rifle looked like it had been dipped in chocolate and left to harden. I searched my pockets and found a kaffiyeh, a scarf that I’d picked up in Iraq, and used it to clean my optics as best I could. I also realized that I was down to my last two mags of ammo, and one of them was caked in mud.

  “Here we go,” I said to Pemberton. “This is going to suck.”

  We had about fifty meters of open ground to cover before we could reach the building. We climbed up onto the top of the embankment and sat there for a second taking a tactical pause. I figured the sniper was nearby and this was going to be another chance to get shot at.

  I set out at a sprint, and about halfway home an outrageous burst of gunfire started going off. I dropped down to the ground, and a second later, Pemberton had grabbed me by the shoulders while kneeling beside me. Once he was sure I wasn’t hit, he finally responded to what I’d been saying, to get down, we were taking fire.

  “No. No. We’re not. Those are our guys.”

  I laughed a bit and we got up and started running. There were six Rangers from the assault force on a rooftop firing every gun they had in their arsenal. The sounds of 7.62 and 5.56 machine guns unleashing all at once no more than eight feet over our heads caused the ground to shake. I thought we had been ambushed by an army of Taliban.

  Once inside the safe house, we came up to two fifteen-foot-tall French doors, blue with a white cow painted on them. The cow had a lei around its neck. I shouldered past the cow and there inside was the main element we’d started out with who knew how many hours before.

  We finally got some good news. They’d taken out the target we were initially after, a few other guys besides, and there in the middle of floor, flex-cuffed together, was a group of Taliban fighters and leaders. They looked up at me; I looked at them, and then I turned to the first sergeant.

  “Get high up. We need the snipers to pick these guys off!” he instructed us.

  These were the words I had been waiting to hear all day.

  Pemberton and I ran over to the nearby mud house and climbed a ladder on the rear side that one of the locals had left behind. The men who had lain down covering fire met us with smiling faces and a large pile of smoking-hot brass around them.

  “Dudes. That was unreal.”

  They all smiled and one said, “I’ve never fired that many rounds on target. It was awesome.”

  The sun had now reached its highest point and the temperature was above 120 degrees. The bottom of my combat boots started to torch my feet as I lay down behind my rifle, observing targets in the distance. As much as it burned, the overwhelming number of targets I was now able to see through my 10 power scope shut out all other feeling.

  I wasn’t sure what would happen if I shot my rifle after it had been submerged. Screw it, I thought. The first bullet I let out reminded me of firing a Super Soaker squirt gun. It didn’t leave a vapor trail so much as it let out a trail of water. The bullet hit a wall, nowhere near where I was aiming. Pemberton was sitting on the ground spitting on bullets and wiping them off on his shirt.

  I focused in on a target almost half a mile from our position, carrying an AK-47, with ammo draped over his shoulder. I wasn’t sure how much I had to lead him with my scope because I wasn’t sure how fast he was running. Pemberton was busy working on a target with his .300 Win Mag and I didn’t want to bother him.

  I figured I would lead my target by 3.5 mils to start off with, and watch the impact of the bullet as it hit the ground, which would allow me to make a correction. I reached up and dialed 23 minutes of ang
le on the elevation of the scope. With each click I made on the scope, the target began to slow down. As his pace came to a halt, a slight grin grew on my face. “I got you now,” I thought out loud. Slowly pulling the trigger back as the center of my reticule lay on the center of his chest, I noticed the heat mirage pick up at a steep angle. Before the shot broke, I adjusted for the wind indicated by the mirage.

  As the shot broke, I saw the tail end of the vapor trail from the bullet fly downrange and sink into the target’s upper chest cavity. The bullet hit him with such force it caused his man dress to fly open, exposing the bullet wound. The impact looked like an eighteen-wheeler truck going a hundred miles an hour had hit him. His rifle flew from his hands as he fell backward into the powdery dirt.

  As fast as he hit the dirt, two of his friends came in to retrieve his body and drag it off behind a small mud hut. I didn’t engage the men. Instead I shifted my scope to the left, focusing at a long road. I could see groups of men exiting a white vehicle, all carrying AK-47s. The distance was too far for me to engage them so I shouted over to Pemberton, “Hey, hit the guys in the white car!”

  I knew that the shot would be a tough one. It was over a kilometer, but I figured the sound of a .300, 190 grain bullet snapping in their direction would keep them out of the fight.

  “Medevac is in route!” someone shouted to us. The army’s best helicopter pilots were coming in to extract the wounded. My team on the roof continued to engage the enemy to the best of our abilities for hours, at most utilizing suppressive fire. We had to keep focus on the amount of ammo we had with each shot we put downrange. It got to the point where I asked one of the machine gunners to take off a strip of ten rounds from his belt of ammo hanging from his MK-48. The rounds were becoming scarce, and a whole new fear set in.

  I wanted to see the guys before they were medevaced out of there. Wilkins, a sniper team leader from 2nd platoon, was up against a wall with his wounded leg out in front of him. The PL was getting treatment, and I saw the stretcher that Kopp had been carried in on. He wasn’t in it, but I could see that it was soaked with blood. I stood there staring at that, and one of the guys nodded toward a back room. I didn’t want to go back there. I’d seen how Kopp had looked and I preferred carrying that image with me to what I might see. I took a few sips of water, and headed back out onto the roof of the far building.