The Reaper

by Irving, Nicholas; Brozek, Gary;

  Without turning around, Brent said, “Cover me. Cover me.”

  I hadn’t gotten on the roof yet; I was still looking over the ledge. I slung my rifle around and scoped the guy, right in the middle of his forehead. Brent had his pistol drawn and it appeared that the man he was confronting was unarmed. At that point, another man came out onto the roof and he was speaking. Given how quiet the night was, it sounded like he was shouting, whether at Brent or to his buddy I couldn’t say. I wanted him to just shut the hell up. Who knew what he was saying; he could have been giving our position away to a sniper.

  Brent talked to them, and using sign language, he pointed his pistol at their faces and then down at their feet, got them both to lie facedown on the flat roof. He indicated that they should stay right where they were or they were going to get shot. We radioed security and a guy came up and detained them there for the duration of the mission.

  We were only on an intermediate roof at that point, roughly twenty feet in the air. A second part of the building rose approximately the same distance.

  “Get the ladder. We’re going all the way up,” Brent said.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’ve got a view from here. We need to keep an eye on these guys.” The last thing I wanted was for them to go back inside and return with weapons or reinforcements. I also didn’t want to tell Brent that I was not wild about heights. Rather than debate the issue, I leaned out over the edge and pulled the ladder up. We didn’t have too much room to extend the ladder’s base, so it was nearly vertical. All I could think of was leaning the wrong way and crashing down on my back or tumbling all the way over the edge to the street below.

  Stateside, we used to call Brent “Ninja.” On weekends, he’d be out drinking and come back dressed in this tight-fitting all-black polypropylene suit with a balaclava/hood on it. He’d wrap a rag around his face and run through the hallways doing back flips and other gymnastic stunts. One of his favorite pranks was to come into your room at night, dressed as a ninja, and simulate cutting your throat while you slept and then slip out of the room. In my mind, he kind of ninja-flew up that ladder with no problem at all. I followed him and we still had another ways to go. I started to retrieve the ladder and Brent stopped me.

  “No. We’ll free-climb from here.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can.” He pointed at a set of metal stairs that led up to the top of this section of roof.

  I looked back toward the objective and the assault team was just placing the C-4. Over comms I heard that they had a thirty-second count until they blasted it.

  “Take a picture.”

  “What?”

  Brent had his digital camera out.

  I could hear the count go down to twenty. Brent was waving his camera at me. “C’mon. Last deployment. I may never do any of this again. None of my buddies will believe I did this kind of crap.”

  I did as he asked, first checking to be sure the flash was off. He had already taped over it. I got him in various poses, thinking this is not how Pemberton and I would normally do things. We heard a sharp crack off in the distance, maybe four hundred meters away.

  Over the comms, I heard the leader of the assault team say, “Screw it. We’re breaching out. We’re breaching out.”

  The crack had been followed by a tracer round arcing over our heads. I knew that someone had spotted us. Inside the objective, loud pops and flashes were going off. Below me, in the direction where the tracer came from, I saw a low wall, maybe four to four and a half feet tall. A man was running back and forth. With trees in between his position and ours, I had a slightly difficult time sighting on him. Every few seconds, a round would come up from that location, making its way through the trees and near enough to us that we both were amazed.

  “How is he doing that?” Brent sounded more mystified than angry.

  “I don’t know, but we have to take a shot. Make sure he doesn’t go after the guys in the objective.”

  Since we’d been fired at, the ROEs (Rules of Engagement) were clear. We could defend ourselves.

  “I don’t think I can hit that.” Brent lowered his rifle.

  “I don’t either.”

  All that was visible from that height and angle, and with the wall, was the very top portion of the man’s head and a bit of his shoulders. He was basically sprinting and the trees would offer some protection. Eventually he slowed his pace, but he kept the muzzle of his AK on the top of the wall angled up toward us, holding steady while he fired a fairly steady stream of rounds our way.

  I knew he was getting more confident the longer he was down there and we weren’t returning fire in his direction. His shots were getting closer, more dialed in on us. Brent was old school. He had his laser range finder, his Mildot Master cards, and he was working his papers to get a calculation done. Then he got out a mini range finder and sent that laser out onto the wall.

  “I got 413. 4–1–3.”

  I dialed in to that distance. “Got it.”

  “Sounds about right to me,” he said, checking his papers. “I’m going to lead him 1.5 mil.”

  I squeezed as gently as I ever had, wanting to keep that Mildot right in the center of the top of his head. As I was squeezing, he was firing off a few more rounds at us. My bullet must have struck home because the AK flipped in the air and then clattered to the ground. The rounds stopped coming in on us.

  I shook my head in disbelief. “That was the luckiest shot of my life.”

  “Dude, you got him.”

  “Can’t believe it.”

  We called the kill in and we were glad that we’d eliminated one bit of danger. It sounded like they had their hands full inside the building. At least they knew that when they exited the building no AK rounds would be coming at them.

  When we heard the all clear, I sat down cross-legged on a heating and cooling duct with my rifle across my lap. Brent was lying on his back with one leg pretzeled and resting on the opposite knee. We both stayed there sky gazing and looking out over the Kandahar skyline. I could see a few flashes from tracer rounds, sparks catching all around the city. I remember being a kid and going down South to be with family, watching the fireflies, running all around trying to catch them and hold them. That night scene in Kandahar was almost as peaceful. It was strange to be above it all, knowing that firefights were going on all around. An occasional crump of an explosion disturbed the quiet. All I could think of was how good we had it Stateside. You could sit outside and admire the city lights and know that you weren’t blocking things out, that everything was good and quiet and that those lights going on and off were televisions flickering and not a tracer round.

  We made it back to the Brits’ compound without incident. I was asked about that shot again and again, and all I could repeat was that it was a lot of luck and a little bit of good timing. That was true of most sniping shots, and we used to say that you just had to know how to use your good luck. Brent was incredibly cool and collected. I thought he’d be on a bit of a high since this was his first time getting rounds on targets. If it weren’t for him constantly checking his camera to make sure his photos were still good to go, you wouldn’t have known what he’d just done.

  The Brits welcomed us back with some great show and they projected The 40-Year-Old Virgin on a screen inside the compound. We all laughed, and only when I thought about it later did it seem strange that the night ended like that, a bunch of guys eating and laughing. The only reminder of what we’d done was the odor. We’d tried to clean that foul-smelling muck out of the treads of our boots, but some of it had gotten inside our boots. The medics came around and made sure that we took our doxi and I wasn’t happy about it but I took my dosage. Nobody laughed when they were asked if they had swallowed. I knew firsthand what could happen if you accidentally ingested that kind of raw sewage. In Mosul, one of the troopers was running full out with his mouth open and ran through a cesspool. He was out of commission for
a month at first, and I watched his gradual decline, turning yellow and then walking with a cane. He eventually recovered, but with his kidneys taking such a hit, he had to leave the army for good on disability.

  One thing the guys said in Iraq was that they grew tired of getting what they called the “eat-shit-and-die” look we got all the time from the locals. Nobody ever acted on the hatred I was sure they felt, but that stare stuck with you. At least in Afghanistan, we weren’t moving around among the people too much. With the curfew in effect, most civilians stayed put. That was what surprised me about the two men on the roof. That could have turned out way bad for them or for us, I guess. But they kept their mouths shut and did what they were told.

  I’d soon have to do the same thing. Delta Force came in and Brent I were going to be roommates. I wondered how long it was going to be before the ninja struck again. Ours wasn’t going to be the only big brother/little brother relationship. We had a long-standing and cooperative thing going with the Delta guys. I was curious to see how that was going to play out operationally.

  9. Ninja Wife and the Big Bomb

  A week after the rubble-pile ambush, I learned why some people call it the runs. I woke in the middle of the night with a sharp pain running across my lower abdomen; what some of my aunts and uncles down South referred to as the call of nature was more like a bloodcurdling scream. I scrambled out of bed, ignored Brent who sat in the bluish light of his computer monitor, and sprinted for the facilities. There, my bloodcurdling scream could be heard all the way into the Hindu Kush. Later, after I’d been down and out for more than twenty-four hours, one of the medics described my body’s violent rejection of a seafood dinner as “violent diarrhea and explosive vomiting.” I was so weak and so cold that I lay in bed beneath my Arctic layer, rated for twenty-five to thirty degrees below zero, shivering and sweating at the same time.

  My teammates were less than sympathetic to my plight. I remember their puzzled expressions when I sat down at the table with that meal—I still can’t use the words to label what I ate without feeling queasy—and dug in. I was raised in Maryland, and seafood was something I really missed. So when the guys came to my room and saw me in such a sorry state, an IV dripping into my arm and me buried beneath every cover I could scrounge up, they fake-whispered to Brent things like, “Keep it down. You know he can’t.”

  “Hey, man, that’s not cool making him the butt of our jokes.”

  “Don’t be giving him any shit, he’s got enough, I mean he’s been through enough.”

  “Just let him know that this too shall pass, as my mom always says.”

  We’d not been out on an operation for a few days, so just as I was getting to the point when nothing else could leave my body, we got called in for a mission. Sergeant Atkins took one look at me as I dragged myself out into the hallway, and said, “I know you’re not up for it, but we need you.”

  With the arrival of the Delta Force guys, our operational tempo became very interesting. Things were so hot, Delta would pick up some of the hits for us, mostly during the day, while we hit targets at night. We’d been so busy that we couldn’t handle everything, so we were grateful for the help. Most of the Delta Force guys had been Rangers at one time, so we had a big brother/little brother type of relationship with another special forces group. It used to be, before the global war on terrorism (GWOT), that Rangers pulled security for them while they hit a target. With the changing nature of things, the war on terror, everyone was spread so thin that we took on a more direct-action role and often worked in cooperation with them. I’d been looking forward to doing that.

  For this one, though, it was just going to be our usual crew. As bad as I was feeling, after hearing that we were going to be dropped only two thousand meters from the objective, I figured I could suck it up and do this thing. If I needed to puke, I’d puke and then keep going. The medics had been overseeing my care and in addition to the IVs—I had three of them—they were giving me pills and an electrolyte fluid to get me rehydrated properly.

  Bending over to put my boots on, I nearly started to cry. My back hurt so bad, and putting my head below my waist to lace up my boots brought back some of the nausea and head-spinning that had had me flat on my back for more than twenty-four hours. I took a short walk outside. Normally, I hated the heat and kept my room at a very cool sixty degrees. With all the shivering and stuff I’d been doing, the late-afternoon 110 degrees felt great. I was starting to come around a bit more.

  Back inside, I looked at the big board and its maps and satellite feeds. This operation looked pretty straightforward. A small one-story building surrounded by three smaller huts, the compound itself shaped like an L. In all the images, though, we could see a large group of people, approximately twenty women and children and four or five males. I hated that. The Taliban fighters used women and kids as human shields. Taking guys out under those circumstances required precise shooting, and down in the mix of all that, an assaulter couldn’t fire with the kind of timing and precision needed to avoid collateral damage.

  Fortunately, there were several good positions from which Brent and I could fire, and the shots would only be in the seventy-five to ninety-five-yard range. Relatively easy shots with the only complicating factor being who else was going to be moving around and among the bad guys. A storage shed was nearby the main house and that was where I planned to set up. After a few more minutes of looking at all the images, I walked back upstairs to pack. I was so weak that I knew I’d have to travel light. Downgrading my ammo was one way to do that, and I chose to only take two magazines. If I needed more, Brent would be able to supply me. I loaded up on water and hydration packets, figuring that if I was out of commission healthwise, then no amount of ammo would matter.

  I sat through the mission brief slugging down canteens of water and hydration fluids, trying to stay focused. I knew I couldn’t make any kind of sense, so I had Brent do our part of the brief. I could barely get through the whole brief, and just after Brent finished up, the commander walked in. We all stood at attention, and I could sense that I was having a hard time not weaving. He looked over at me and said, “Are you all right, soldier?”

  “Yes, sir. Good to go, sir.”

  I knew my response didn’t have any of that gung ho snap that it was supposed to have, but it did get me through. The commander spoke to us, talking about the fact that we only had three weeks left in our deployment and we’d be done and needed to finish up strong. He pointed out that our target was a particularly important one—another suicide vest maker. I was having trouble focusing on his words, drifting on some random thought. But when he got to the part about the strong likelihood that the compound was heavily loaded with HME supplies (home made explosives) and that we needed to be extra vigilant, I was right back there with everybody. There’d been a recent incident during which the Taliban set off a cache of explosives in a similar kind of compound, killing and wounding many civilians and then claiming that the deaths and injuries were due to an American airstrike or a mortar round. That was upsetting the locals as well as the folks back home.

  Getting blown up was not the way I wanted to go out, and like most of the guys, the possibility of an IED or HME getting me was always in the back of my mind. I don’t know if it was my weakened physical state, but as I sat there listening to the commander, all I could think of was that I wanted to get the hell out of that country and go home. We’d taken a lot more casualties than I’d ever experienced on my previous deployments. As we walked out of the briefing room and made our way to the vans, Brent was beside me, muttering, “This sucks.”

  The prop blasts and the diesel exhaust made it feel like the already hot air was on fire. I was barely able to make it into the belly of the Chinook, the force of those winds so battered me. I sat down and closed my eyes, unable to battle my sleepiness. I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d gotten sick. The guys were amazed. My mom had just resupplied me with cans of ravioli and a five-pound bag of gummy bears. I u
sed to amaze everybody by going through that whole bag in a couple of days. I’d tried with the gummy bears, but they’d clawed their way back up and out of me.

  Brent sat down next to me. He wrapped his arms around me and hugged me, in a singsongy mom voice telling me, “There, there. It’s okay, baby.”

  “Dude, not right now. I don’t feel good and I don’t need this crap from you.”

  I must have sounded really pissed because Brent backed off. “If you need to, man, we’ll get you to stay on the helicopter. If things get bad, they’ll set you down.”

  “No. I’m good. I can do this.”

  “All right. Don’t slow me down though.”

  “Roger that.”

  Brent hit it on the head. I was torn because I didn’t want to let the guys down by not being there to help them out, but I also didn’t want to be a liability to any of them by not being able to perform at my best.

  They all knew that I was struggling and throughout the two-thousand-meter run to the objective they offered words of encouragement and support. I should have figured that, even though we were getting dropped off so near to the objective, the pace was going to be really high—especially with the presence of all those explosives. We had to get there before anybody could detonate the stuff. I ran with my head down the entire time, puking a little bit, a thin liquid, carrying my rifle like it was a suitcase. A hundred meters from the compound the lead element of the assault force came to a complete and sudden stop. All their lasers lit up and the guys began a slow creep toward the target building.