Everyone else took a knee while Mike and I crawled to the lead. Mike was right alongside me as we prepared to set up shop.
“Let’s work outside-inside.”
“Got it.” Mike crawled a few yards off to my right.
Everybody was in position to do this by the book. My platoon sergeant, Mack, was right behind me, ready to give the fire order. The assault team leader was off to my left. Alongside Mack was our radio operator, Mackey, ready to call up the body count to those higher up in the chain of command. The assault leader was responsible for laying down cover in case the bad guys returned fire. With our sniper weapons there’d be a bit of lag time between shots, so if after we got the Hajis on the outside of the cluster the two inside guys were fast and disci- plined enough to turn on us, he’d distract them, or worse. We were about four hundred yards from the targets.
In training, we’d done three-hundred-yard targets with- out a scope, so this was a chip shot really, something well within easy range. I looked over at Mike and gave him a quick nod. He returned it. We were good to go. He’d take out the guy on the far right; I’d get the guy on the far left. We’d take the same sides on the two in the center.
Everything was so still that I could hear Mike take his weapon off safety. I heard the click of mine as I did the same. I eased my finger onto the trigger.
“Stand by,” Mack said, “Let’s get confirmation that we’re clear to go hot.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. What? Clear to go hot? These guys were armed to the teeth. They looked like Afghan Rambos with that ammo strapped around their shoulders. And we have to stand by for confirma- tion? Confirmation of what? Was somebody going to go up to them and say, “Excuse me, guys, but we were won- dering if you were planning to go out and kill anyone today? You are? Well, okay then, give us a sec and we’ll try to figure something out.”
In all fairness, Mack was doing the right thing by figuring out our options. Too often in Helmand Province we got into a run-and-gun cycle. By that I mean we’d go to one location and engage targets there, which would alert other bad guys in the area, so we’d have to engage again, and repeat that over and over throughout the duration of the operation. The more times you engaged the enemy, the more you were exposing your own guys to fire and increasing the chances of somebody getting hit. We were out there to get after some high-value targets—some key players in the Taliban. Maybe figur- ing out a way to go around these four guys would have made that simpler. Maybe if word came to these HVTs that Americans were nearby killing some of their troops, they’d decide to beat feet and leave their position (which we’d learned about through some hard and dangerous work) to live to fight another day.
I understood that, but I also understood this: If we let these guys go today, they’d live to fight another day. And that would maybe mean that they’d be part of some ambush on another unit, maybe one not as capable or as well armed or as well versed in this kind of fighting. Did it make sense, then, to give them a free pass today knowing that they could kill somebody else tomorrow? It was clear to me that they were prepared for a fight. Not just because of how they were kitted out, but based on the fact that they were standing in the open at an intersec- tion. How many times had we had this kind of opportu- nity?
I lay on my belly considering all of this and felt my heart rate and blood pressure skyrocketing. My heart- beats were so rapid it felt like I was rising up off the ground with each one of them. To ease the strain of looking through my scope, I lifted my head a bit. The four guys were still there talking, framed by a few low build- ings to either side of them.
I decided that I had to go back to basic sniper training principles, and focused on my breathing.
Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.
I could feel the effects, and now my heartbeats were still rapid, but I could feel the gaps in between them. That’s when you want to squeeze the trigger—between the beats. “You want to be dead meat behind the gun” was the way one instructor in Sniper School had put it, with the only thing alive your trigger finger. That’s kind of easy to do when you’re aiming at a target, but when you’re thinking that you’re about to take another human’s life—and you try really, really hard to not think about that at all—you add in another variable that gets your heart pumping and your mind unclear. You also can’t think about the fact that your firing of your weapon is another way of giving away your position and drawing the attention of your enemy to your location.
In a way, I was glad that we were waiting for confir- mation. It was helping me get my head, my heart, my lungs, and my eye together. I took the time to pull my scope all the way out to ten power, the highest magnifi- cation. I kept scanning the figure in front of me, relay- ing what I saw back to the platoon sergeant—the ammo belts, the sidearm, the AK47, the knife. I don’t have to use the comms because Mack was right behind me and it’s like I’m in an echo chamber, hearing him repeat what I said, vaguely hearing what’s coming back to him over his comms like a low buzz of static.
At that point, I’d had enough. One of the guys moved and I was certain they were getting ready to leave, all four of them. I wasn’t going to let them get away. I started to pull some slack out of the trigger. The higher- ups could do what they wanted to me, but I wasn’t going to wake up in a few days and hear about how we’d lost one of our guys or some other guy and be left wonder- ing if the guy who took him out was one of these four. I couldn’t live with that.
“I’m going. I’m going,” I whisper-hissed to Mike. I heard him make some indistinct sound of agreement, a kind of mhmmnm grunt.
Above that, I heard Mike’s weapon creaking against
the bipod as he pushed down on the Win Mag to ab- sorb some of the recoil he knew he was about to feel.
“Hell yeah,” I thought, “we are ready to rock and roll.” I had the slide almost out and was about to squeeze when I heard the first sounds of the word “clear” com- ing from Mack and I sent that round and watched as my guy collapsed. An instant later, just as planned, Mike’s guy bit the dust.
Instinct and learning combined in those instants. When I was a kid, because my dad was in the military, I’d gotten ahold of a copy of the book The Ultimate Sniper, by John Plaster. At the time, and still today in some people’s minds, it is the bible of sniping. Plaster stressed the idea of not becoming too target-fixated: Don’t think of what you see in the scope as a full human body. Pick out something on that target—a button, a tear in the coat, or anything else that you see—as your aiming point. I picked out a bullet on his left-side bandolier above the crux of the X—essentially, where his heart was located. That was what I hit: that exact bullet.
The two survivors took off running, my guy on the left racing toward a ditch. From behind, I heard the radio operator reporting in, “One down. Two down.”
“Two to go,” I thought.
Suddenly that number changed a bit. From the right a white car came screaming into the intersection, then turned right.
“Car! Car! Car!” I screamed. “Roger. Tracking!” he shouted back.
That left me to take out the bad guy heading toward the ditch. With him running to my left and away from me, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to take a bead on him. I just centered on his body and fired. He threw his hands up in the air kind of like he was signaling a touchdown and spun a bit before going down that shal- low incline and out of sight.
From my right, I could hear Mike’s Win Mag thun- dering as he went after the guy who’d jumped into the car. There was no way Mike could hear me, but my mind was full of instructions for him. He was just firing away, and I wanted him to take his time, to have some purpose for those shots. To go after the tires or the headrest.
I started to fire as well, but the car kept moving away.
Then I remembered the cars there have the driver’s controls on the right and not the left. How stupid am I? Mike must have done some damage to the vehicle or the driver, because it slowed and then came to a complete stop, its brake lights flashing on and then off and then on.
We started to push up this narrow alleyway, so nar- row that we had to stay single file. I was out front, Mike behind me, an assaulter behind him. I had visions of us getting to the end of the alleyway and being spit out of some kind of pneumatic tube and being laid into by the guy who’d escaped, the one I’d wounded. Freaking scary.
Fortunately, our eyes in the sky were up and function- ing, and they told us that nobody was out there waiting. We continued to walk and eventually made our way toward where the car had come to a stop. The vehicle was still running, but no driver seemed to be behind the wheel. The windshield was intact, though darkened by blood and viscera. As I got closer, I could see that the driver was slumped over. I knew he wasn’t playing pos- sum, because so much of him was spread across that glass. I could see a large impact wound, the white bone of his shoulder blade exposed and pointing like a turn signal. I’d seen a lot of dead guys in my years, but the amount of blood spattered inside that car’s interior made me think that Mike had taken out ten guys, not just one. I guess the adrenaline had drained out of me. A few minutes ago I was superhyped and eager. Now I was feeling kind of down about the whole thing. Not that I’d missed, but that this guy was dead. The other two, and possibly a third one as well, were also dead. We’d done that to them.
I watched as the K-9 handler and his dog came up and did a quick search of the car. The dog indicated the car by barking, so one of the explosives guys popped the trunk while another opened a rear door. The back- seat had been removed, making the car into a kind of makeshift pickup truck. In that flat space was an arse- nal of every kind of handheld weapon we faced over there—AKs, RPGs, sidearms. Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad anymore. These guys had something big planned, and we’d wrecked it for them. Good on us.
I also walked along one flank of the car, the driver’s side, the right side, and saw that it was dotted with exit and entrance holes. It was like Mike had been firing at it with magic bullets that wove in and out, trying to find the heart of the driver. That pattern was so un- usual we had the ID team take photos of it with their digitals.
We left all the weapons in the car and then torched it and tossed in a thermite grenade to make all of it use- less. Seeing all that go up in flames was as good as sitting around a fire with a bunch of guys drinking a few beers. We were all quiet as we stood there. Wasn’t much to say at that point. We’d gotten no reports of there being any squirters, so it was time to continue moving on. We altered our route, so we switched things up and put the dog and his handler on the lead. That made me feel a little more comfortable, knowing that the dog was good at sniffing out explosives like IEDs.
While we were waiting for the dog to get some water, I heard one of the guys ask, “What the hell is that?”
He pointed up toward the power lines that spider- webbed all over the village.
“Mother—”
“A goddamn IED,” one of the assaulters, Johnson, who had been with the unit since well before I’d joined it and had to be close to thirty-five or so, said with a mixture of appreciation and disgust.
“Somebody’s been paying attention in class,” Grimes added.
“Yeah, the Hajis have been,” Mack said. He under- stood that over time, the various kinds of contractors, mercenaries, advisers, and whoever else had been com- ing to Helmand to aid them had been teaching them some new techniques. IEDs didn’t have to be planted like mines; brush up against hanging ones and you got a similar effect. Hide them in the carcass of a dead ani- mal, use remote control, rig entire houses. The longer we were there, the more advanced their techniques and tactics seemed to get. You don’t want to wait too long to wipe them out.
For a long time guys worried about what it would be like to have something blow up beneath them. How aw- ful it would be to lose a foot, a leg, your junk. Now we had to wonder and worry about what it would be like to have shit come raining down from above. In a weird vari- ation on what kids used to ask about “which would be worse,” I’d heard guys talking about whether it would be better to be killed or really disabled. Messed up or dead? What about making it out alive and intact?
I stood there thinking about that for a few moments while the dog sat beneath that dangling IED and barked at it, alerting us, letting us all know that it was indeed an explosive device. I was used to seeing those dogs moving along with their noses to the ground; now were we going to have to train them to watch their twelve, to keep their heads up?
The call went out to the Explosive Ordnance Disposal crews to take care of it.
We still hadn’t reached our objective. As we moved out, we got an answer to one of the questions that I had. All the commotion we’d stirred up hadn’t, according to our command guys, alarmed our target enough for him to move. By this time we’d been out for more than six hours. The eastern horizon was beginning to grow light. We didn’t have a whole lot of time to get to the objective and bring in this HVT.
Good thing that we didn’t encounter anyone else as we made our way out of that first village or as we ap- proached the second. Approximately two hundred yards from the target, we split off to take our positions. Mike and I climbed a roof of a building just south of the main objective: a low-slung house that, instead of having sharp corners, was all rounded, as if it had been rolled out of Play-Doh. We set up for overwatch and for the first time that night, I felt a bit of relief. Maybe because we were no longer on the move, maybe because we didn’t encounter any bad guys on the way into the village, but I felt like I could just ease off the throttle a bit. I was eager for the assaulters to breach the door or do what- ever else it took to get inside so I could fully relax.
Three hours into this operation, and I was really hurt- ing for a cigarette. I’d brought along a pack, in defiance of regulation, and I stood there fingering its cellophane wrapper. My mom and dad never smoked, and when I was downrange, I kept pleading with them to send me some. My mom was adamant in refusing, telling me that it was a filthy habit and that if I wanted to smoke, well then, I should just walk down to the gas station on the corner and get them myself. I’d laugh at that and try to explain to her that where I was in Afghanistan, there were no 7-Elevens, no corner gas stations, no Wal-Marts. She said that was good, then maybe I’d break the habit, and that if not, I guess I’d just have to find another way. I stood on the roof, smiling at the memory of the defiance in her voice. She was looking out for me and my best interests, and I was doing the same for the guys below me. They’d entered the building and all seemed quiet. A second later, I heard the blip–blip–blip of machine gun fire and saw muzzle flashes coming from inside a building adjacent to the objective. The third assault team was lighting some guy up and I could see the figure fleeing the house and entering a kind of courtyard and heading out into the fields surrounding the homes.
“Mike. Mike. Mike,” I shouted, alerting him to the squirter, who was moving diagonally away from Mike’s sector.
“I’m on him,” I added a second after the alert.
I heard Mike’s Win Mag fire and an instant after that I let a round go. The guy staggered a bit, from Mike’s leg shot, and then his head seemed to explode as my round impacted him. That was a one-in-a-million lucky shot on my part. I barely had time to aim, and if he hadn’t staggered I likely would have missed. I hadn’t calculated anything, hadn’t led him.
My attention returned to the squashed house. I could see flashes through the window, heard our guys yelling, “Get down! Get down!” in Pashto and a bunch of other people screaming, yelling, and crying. To my left, in the other building where the guy had come from, there was a second set of the same visuals and sounds. I then heard a bunch of dogs barking and out of the corner of my eye I saw some light glinting off of something. I turned and saw a woman come out of a house, and it was like she was wearing a sequined dress or something; light was catch- ing various facets of it and shimmering. She’s leading a kid by the hand, and the kid breaks free of her and starts to run. She didn’t go after him, but stood there with her hands on her hips, and above all this other racket, I heard the most piercing sound I’d ever heard in my life. The kid froze in his tracks at the sound of his mom’s voice.
The kid tentatively took a few steps back toward his mom, like he knew what was coming to him. Sure enough, she took him by one hand, and with the other swatted his backside till the kid was wailing. I started to laugh at the absurdity of all these goings-on. A simple in-and-out seizure of an HVT had turned into a kind of frantic three-ring circus. What was I supposed to look at? The dancing bears? The clowns? The lion tamer?
There was so much going on, but I had to do what I’d failed to do in taking out the guy I’d wounded—get back to the basics and focus.
The glittery lady reminded me of my mom and how she’d handle me like that when I was acting out.
My thoughts returned to the firefights. We were still in overwatch mode and I could see a bunch of activity in the town, shadows and figures heading our way. Mike was in contact with our ground force commander (GFC).
He was asking for permission to fire on a location. Don, the GFC, asked him about our range. Mike relayed his question: “He wants to know if we’re good to a grand.”
Even though it was growing lighter to the east, we were still in murky darkness. With night vision on we could see, at best, out to eight hundred yards and not the thousand yards Don was asking about. Given what we were dealing with, I thought six hundred was our max.
“Tell him we’re good to mile.” I was feeling cocky and added Don’s thousand to the more realistic estimate of six hundred. At a mile, everything you’d see through the scope and the night vision would be grainy at best. I could see shapes but nothing that I could clearly iden- tify as a weapon being carried or anything like that. At that point, I was really tired of the idea of requiring absolutely clear confirmation before firing. This whole place was filled with people trying to take us out and not asking questions; why should we?
Don appeared below us, “Anybody you see with a gun, out to a grand, a whole grid square, you take them out.”
He must have read my mind. I was good with the weapon sighting and even better with the idea that we no longer had to wait for permission or for the bad guys to be right up on us. This was more like long-distance sniping and not direct action. Cool. Add that to the mix for this bizarre night in Helmand.
I could see that Mike shared my excitement at the prospect of taking out a few more guys that night. This was a night of firsts—the Tier 1 guy being with us, the chaplain, and now a commander issuing as close to a fire- at-will order as I’d ever heard.
I scanned the area below us. To my far left, I saw a portion of our assault team zigzagging their way toward where I’d fired on that single squirter. They were enclos- ing on him, I figured. I shined my laser out there and something flashed. I focused on that flash and sure enough, there was a guy lying with his back against a low berm with his hands in the air. They were shaking and every few seconds when our lights caught his left arm at just the right angle, it was like his wrist sparked. I realized that the guy was wearing some kind of watch. I don’t know why, but that seemed odd to me. What was a Taliban guy doing with a watch?
I stayed focused on the downed and wounded guy, making sure that as the assaulters approached him, he didn’t do anything stupid. The handler and the dog came sprinting toward them. I thought the dog was in attack mode, but they both just sprinted past the soon-to-be- prisoner toward the main objective.
“Sniper One. Watch this guy. Watch this guy. Out in the field, far left.”
One of our guys had alerted me to something I hadn’t noticed. From out of the darkness, an Afghan farmer came strolling out like he’d heard the commotion and wanted to see what was up. That never failed to amaze.
I’d seen this so many times, people just coming out of their homes or walking in from some other part of town to watch the firefight or whatever. I’d even seen a few people walk through the middle of a firing zone, flinching sometimes when a round zinged right past them, but otherwise just moseying along. This guy wasn’t a moseyer but a spectator. He stopped on the road di- viding the field from the village and squatted down to observe. He wasn’t armed and seemed to pose no threat, so I fanned my vision away from him.
Our dog wasn’t barking, but I could hear another ca- nine going apeshit. I love dogs, but this dog’s barking was out of control and one of those piercing, ear-ringing kinds of barks that is just so annoying. It sounded like it was very close. I looked down and he (at least I think it was a “he”) stood with his head down and his butt in the air and his tail doing that cobra-like tail-twitching thing. I wanted to shoot that dog, and probably should have—he was giving away Mike’s and my position. But I didn’t have the heart to do that. I was looking for something to throw at him to scare him off. Also, the idea that he was alerting other people to our presence was kind of a joke. We’d had firing weapons and scream- ing and flash bombs and every other kind of noise for a while now. If you were sleeping through that, you prob- ably didn’t present any kind of threat.
At this point, in the small clearing between all the buildings, we’d started to round up a bunch of Hajis. I didn’t like that too much because when there’s a big cluster like that, you’ve got us and the bad guys all mixed in together. I wanted a clear line of sight and line of fire on the bad guys, obviously, but that wasn’t possi- ble. The guys knew where Mike and I were positioned, but in the heat of all that was going on, it was hard to remember that point.
“Guys, can you part the sea?”
That expression is just what you think. The assaulters are trained to make a more orderly configuration so that we can better identify who’s who, or who’s on what team, and clear some space. That separation makes it a lot easier for me. One of my pet peeves was when guys forgot to do that. I also hated it when somebody was hot-miking, and in all the confusion that night, a lot of that was going on. Guys left their microphones on and that meant that rest of us were hearing everything they said, their breathing, if they blew snot out of their noses, spit, chewed gum. All of it added to the chaos.
This time, though, I was glad that nobody had yelled at the guy to turn off his switch. I could hear our guys yelling at the prisoners, a group of a dozen or more, de- manding that they get down on their knees, their bel- lies, or their backs.
I recognized Ramirez’s voice. I picked him out of the crowd and saw that he was standing face-to-face with one the prisoners. I scoped them both and I could see the bad guy and he was smiling even as Ramirez shouted at him and gestured at the ground with his weapon, trying to get the guy to go down. I also watched as the guy started to take his left hand down from over his head toward his chest.
“Holy shit,” I thought, “the guy’s got on a suicide vest.”
I wasn’t the only one who thought so. One of the platoon leaders, named Adams, started yelling, “Hands up! Hands up!” He was gesturing what he wanted the guy to do, but the prisoner just kept smiling, and then he started to laugh.
“No! No! No!” Adams shouted at him.
The guy didn’t move but just kept smiling and then he said, as clear as anybody could have said it, “Fuck you.”
Our guys stepped back, clearing my lane even more, and I fired. The first round kind of deflated him, and he sagged a bit and went limp. At that, a bunch of our guys opened up on him from close range. He was lying on the ground and I could see dirt clods and dust be- ing kicked up all around him. I focused again and let the guys know that I was about to send another round into him, just to be sure. It found its home and the guys confirmed that he was dead with a couple of raised thumbs.
Only later did I really think about how much those guys trusted me. There was a four- to five-foot alley for me to shoot into. The guys just stood there and waited for me to deliver that killing round, trusting that I wouldn’t flinch or throw off the round some other way and take one of them out. Only an hour or so earlier, they’d been giving me crap about the one that got away. That’s the way it was with my brothers and me, kicking and scratch- ing and barking at each other like angry dogs, then a while later acting like nothing at all bad had gone down between us. If I could bottle that feeling of satisfaction and camaraderie and sell it, I’d be a very, very wealthy man and there’d be no need for anybody to ever stick a heroin needle in their arm.
All the craziness had settled down a bit, and we were back in our routine. Mack’s voice came over my comms, resuming his natural conversational tone, kind of like an airline pilot updating flight status: “I think we’ve got everything we needed here. Time for us to get up and go.” He relayed the new coordinates for our extraction point and I watched as the rest of the units all formed up for the walk out of there.
Mike and I continued our overwatch, waiting to see the backs of the last of our guys before dismounting that roof. From that vantage point, I could see the house we’d originally been sent to; there was still a bit of com- motion there. I could hear an Afghan guy screaming and crying. I wondered where the Tier 1 guy was. I hadn’t seen him for quite a while. I scanned the line of our guys heading to the extraction point, but didn’t see him anywhere.
I’d told Mike to let me know when the rest of the guys were about a hundred yards outside the village. He let out a short, sharp whistle to signal me, and we soon caught up with them. I was always aware of how vulner- able we were when we mounted up inside the helicopters, so Mike and I took positions on the far sides of the landing zone and waited for everybody but the com- mander and Mack to be aboard before we ran up the ramps ourselves.
You might expect that it might be like a victorious locker room after going through a hellish night like that.
It wasn’t.
We were all pretty tired and lost in our own thoughts, so it was quiet all the way back and even when we passed through that gates and inside the wire. As we were about to climb off the minibus, Mack stood up and said, “Team leaders in the debrief room now.”
We went through the usual routine of everybody re- porting back on what they saw and did, including list- ing the kills, so that the after action report could be compiled. I learned one thing that disturbed me. Some of the ruckus that had gone on inside the main objec- tive had to do with the military working dog (MWD) assigned to us. Panzer was a cool dog, a Belgian Mali- nois who, unlike some of the other MWDs I’d worked alongside, was pretty cool about letting people besides his handler interact with him. That dog was as lean and fit and ferocious on command as any of the rest of them, but he seemed kind of chill when not at work, as most of us were.
When Panzer went inside that building, he must have freaked out one of the residents, who cut him with a knife. To show you how well trained and cool that dog was, even though he was being attacked, he didn’t take that woman out. He was still on his leash and the handler and a couple of other guys were trying to dis- arm her. You have to remember that even though we all had our armor on and it could stop a bullet, it didn’t of- fer the same kind of protection from a blade. They kept trying to get her to drop the big old knife she had, but she was just so freaking out and so intent on doing more damage to the dog that she wouldn’t listen to any of us, the interpreter, or whatever common sense she might have had. None of the assaulters wanted to do it, but eventually someone had to put a round into her to end the threat and her life. I heard about that in the debrief, along with the fact that Panzer had to be taken to the medical unit to be stitched up but was otherwise going to be fine in a few days.
Having to shoot a woman wasn’t any easy thing for anybody to do, and it was absolutely the last resort in that situation. We had to receive clearance in order to do it. I didn’t even want to know who the guy who had to do the shooting was, and nobody really ever talked about it except to say how fucked up that whole situa- tion was for everybody involved—the shooter, the vic- tim, her family, the dog.
One thing that troubled me was my thoughts about whether or not to take out that other dog, and also how in our debrief, the commander said something that he saw as being messed up. Our MWDs were considered to be like a piece of equipment—a weapon, a vehicle, somebody’s freaking office chair—and it had to be re- ported on as being damaged.
Not wounded. Not injured.
Damaged.
We all sat there shaking our heads. We all knew that a bunch of times, the dogs were the first ones inside an objective after an entrance had been briefed, risking taking fire. They’d detected a bunch of IEDs that saved lives or limbs. They were a big part of our unit and of our lives. Panzer and other dogs helped make us feel a little bit more like regular guys who had a dangerous job. We’d be out there killing bad guys and then come back inside the wire and laugh and joke around with Panzer, throw him a tennis ball, and ooh and aah as he jumped and twisted in the air to catch it. We’d give each other crap when we lost at tug-of-war to the furry dude.
We were all brothers in arms, the four-legged among us and the two-legged. I’ve heard people say that one of the great things about dogs is that they live in the mo- ment; they don’t think about the past or the future. I’m not so sure about that, because every dog I’ve had and known seems to understand when chow time is coming up. But you get the point.
It was weird to come back from an operation like the one we had and have guys split off to go to PT in the gym, some to shower, some to go eat, some to make phone calls home, or some to rack out. We treated what we did as just another day at the office, didn’t talk much about it after, and got ready the next day to do it all over again. We weren’t treated like a line item in a budget, but that’s how we had to look at the killing and the in- juring we did to the enemy.
Account for it. Note it.
Move on.
The other takeaway from that experience was simple. I was thinking so much about the Tier 1 guy and my “audition” that I lost my focus for a bit out there. In- stead of concentrating on the job that I had to do in taking out that bad guy who didn’t seem to want to die, I was thinking about the job that I wanted to have next. That wasn’t good. I got away with it, but I had to figure out a way to keep my desire to be perfect from getting in the way of me doing my job effectively. I was still learning and still growing. Funny thing is, in all the commotion that was going on, I, and everybody else, lost track of the Tier 1 guy. He just seemed to disappear. How cool was that?
WAY OF THE REAPER
My Greatest Untold Missions and the Art of Being a Sniper
By Nicholas Irving with Gary Brozek
At the onset of his military career, Nicholas Irving went from an unlikely candidate with the Army Rangers, to become one of the greatest snipers in Ranger history. The first African American to serve as a sniper in his battalion, Irving famously became known as “The Reaper,” and his astounding 33 kills over one four-month period in mid-2009, and his record for enemy kills on a single mission, cemented his reputation as one of the great warriors in modern US military history. His reputation as one of the all-time great snipers is such that he has an AR-15 rifle named after him. When his powerful memoir, The Reaper, was published in early 2015 it became a runaway New York Times bestseller. A five-part TV movie based on his life has been optioned by the Weinstein Group with NBC tabbed at a future date to air, and his one of the team leaders in the Fox TV spring hit series, American Grit. And there’s more to come. With the publication of his new book, WAY OF THE REAPER: My Greatest Untold Missions and the Art of Being a Sniper (St. Martin’s Press, on sale August 9, 2016, $27.99), with Gary Brozek, Irving takes the reader further in to his world as a Ranger sniper, recounting his 10 greatest sniper kill missions and providing insight into the art of being a sniper.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Irving spent six years in the Army’s Special Operations 3rd Ranger Battalion 75th Ranger Regiment, serving from demolition assaulter to Master Sniper. He was the first African American to serve as a sniper in his battalion and is now the owner of HardShoot, where he trains personnel in the art of long-range shooting, from Olympians to members of the Spec Ops community. He also appears as a mentor on the fox TV reality show American Grit. He lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Gary Brozek has co-authored nearly 20 books, including six New York Times bestsellers.