The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Prologue

  1. They Call Me the Reaper

  2. A Near and Colorful Miss

  3. Misfires, Malfunctions, and Misery

  4. A Ranger in the Making

  5. A Long Day of Reckoning

  6. The Chechen Comes Calling

  7. A Whole ’Nother Danger

  8. Rumble in the Rubble

  9. Ninja Wife and the Big Bomb

  10. Winding Up and Winding Down

  11. Things That Go Hump in the Night

  Afterword

  Photos

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Prologue

  The sound of my pager cut through the fog of my sleep. I sat up, bone weary and achy, and slipped into my combat precision pants, adjusting the kneepads as I hopped toward my boots and other gear. Grabbing my rigger’s belt with one hand and shrugging into my combat shirt with the opposite arm, I felt for the magazine pouches I’d clipped on. As the rest of the members of my Third Ranger Battalion squad made their way down the hallway for the mission brief, I felt the fog lifting. It was go time, and the adrenaline rush cascaded down my legs, making them hum with low-voltage electricity.

  I took my usual spot in the ready room, second row to the right of the screens, and adjusted my elbow pads. My spotter, Pemberton, took his place beside me. We nodded at one another and smiled, acknowledging an unstated fact of our current life in Helmand Province. This was shaping up to be as up-tempo as it gets.

  “Groundhog Day, man. It’s like freakin’ Groundhog Day.”

  The old movie that Bill Murray was in about being caught in a time warp. Waking up every day to the same thing over and over again. I was more of a fan of Stripes, but I knew what Pemberton was going on about.

  Call it the luck of the draw, good timing (or bad timing, depending on your perspective), but three days in, this was definitely shaping up not to be one of those usual deployments where you spend your time going to the gym three times a day, hanging out with the guys, and thinking about all the things you’re missing out on back home. We had no time for that kind of overthinking. Even in that first week, we’d gotten into a good rhythm. We’d get back inside the wire just as the rest of the guys were getting up, prep and clean, and then sleep the day away before getting the call for that night’s operation.

  That early into a three-and-a-half-month deployment, our minds had adjusted but our bodies hadn’t. I sat there waiting for the team leader to start the briefing. I rubbed the flat of my palms into my eye sockets, hoping to clear my vision and produce some kind of moisture that would prevent my lids from scraping my eyeballs every time I blinked. Vision, for a sniper especially, was crucial, particularly since we were continually operating at night. Utilizing the cover of darkness did more than help us evade the Taliban; it helped us avoid the punishment the heat and the altitude handed out. Still, the body has its rhythms and cycles, and being active during the night still had us slightly off balance.

  Fortunately, the briefing lived up to its name—it was over in a matter of minutes. We went over the terrain—we’d be operating in fairly open and level ground. We also got a capsule summary of the target—a high-value member of the Taliban who was instrumental in supplying a nearby bomb- and improvised explosive device (IED)-making depot. In order to hit this objective, we were going to have to insert on an offset—about five clicks to the north of the village where our intel told us the target was hiding out.

  What no one had to tell Pemberton and me was that we were riding a bit of a winning streak. With the exception of one, the rest of the operations had gone off without a hitch, and though we were the only sniper pair among the forty men in the platoon, we were proving our value. The atmosphere in the ready room reminded me of my days in high school playing football back home in Maryland. Even then I was kind of a secret weapon. I was no monster standing over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds—neither then nor now. I was a little guy, a speedster to an extent, but someone whose primary skills were stealth and the ability to stay cool when the shit hit the fan. This was war, of course, and not a game, but the parallels were there in my mind and in that room. We were meshing as a team. The early-season jitters had been reduced if not entirely eliminated. We wanted to see action, and we’d proved ourselves capable of taking it to the enemy with precision. Confidence is one thing; cockiness is another. No one in that room crossed the line beyond a quiet assurance that we were going to get this done, and we were all going to be back in a half-dozen or so hours, joining the nonsleepers in watching a movie or playing some Xbox games.

  I can’t say that the same we-got-this-no-need-to-worry-’bout-it attitude existed with the short-timers. When you could count your days left in-country on two hands, when the countdown was real and not just something that floated ahead of you like some fuzzy ghost of an object in your night vision, that’s when your thoughts were like those proverbial cats that avoided being herded.

  Also, I never expected to become the Third Ranger Battalion’s deadliest sniper when that three-and-a-half-month tour of duty ended. All my life I’d dreamed of one day joining the military and fighting to defend my country. That I achieved some notoriety is partly due to luck and timing, but it is mostly due to the fact that I received extraordinarily good training.

  In a lot of ways, I was the least likely candidate to become the guy who became known as “the Reaper.” I heard a lot of stories about me and my exploits. As is true in lots of branches of the military, myths and legends grow. I had to laugh the time I heard that someone had attributed more than seven hundred kills to me. Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to have made that kind of contribution to helping keep my comrades-in-arms safe, but it’s important to keep things real. Thirty-three is real.

  That’s why I wanted to write this book and to share with readers my experiences. The first time I heard myself referred to as the Reaper was after an operation not so different from the one that I just described. I liked the name and took pride in it, but in the late hours after first hearing that name, I thought about some of the things I’d done and experienced that brought me to the point where I’d earned that recognition. As I said, I was in many ways both the least likely and someone who seemed destined to make it as a sniper. I come from a military family, I’d read books and watched films that celebrated the exploits of past military heroes, could name every weapon used in our country’s wars, yet I struggled with some physical limitations that nearly saw me not get out of basic training. I also made my share of newbie mistakes—including nearly taking on a U.S. tank that I mistakenly thought was an enemy Iraqi vehicle, and pushing the magazine release instead of the trigger the first time I fired a weapon in anger on the battlefield. I also sometimes struggled with the authoritarian nature of military life and committed a few youthful indiscretions.

  As a young person I’d romanticized war and as a young adult I’d witnessed its harsher realities. In the pages to come I share stories that reveal that the Reaper is far more complicated than a name and a number. In doing so, I hope that I can pay tribute to the men I knew who lost
their lives and the countless others who made the ultimate sacrifice. As I said, I was fortunate that my time deployed to Iraq and more especially in Afghanistan in 2009 coincided with a period of heightened activity. Success is a matter of opportunity being seized. Though I’ve been credited with those kills, I know that I wouldn’t have a story to tell if it weren’t for a whole bunch of other people who made sure that when I was placed in that situation, I could perform. To them and to so many others who came before and whose contributions I have no way of knowing, all I can say is thank you.

  1. They Call Me the Reaper

  The test we faced that third night working in support of Charlie Company, First Platoon, in Kandahar was not the first one and it wasn’t going to be the last. In fact, long before I rose through the army’s ranks to become a direct action sniper, I was constantly faced with challenges. To one degree or another, that’s probably true of most people in just about any walk of life. Except that for me, so much of it took place in a short period of time. I enlisted right of out of high school in 2004 and then served in various capacities with the Third Ranger Battalion after getting through the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP)—machine gunner, machine gun team leader, grenadier, team leader, designated marksman, sniper, sniper team leader, and master sniper.

  During the three-and-a-half-month period from May of 2009 through August of that year, when I tallied more than thirty-three kills, I was about three months shy of turning twenty-four years old. On and off, I’d been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2005; I married in 2007; and I’d gone through more schools and training programs than somebody who’d gone the other route and attended college as an undergraduate and then as a graduate. I like to think that I learned a whole lot, and I’m sure I did, but while it was all going on, I felt like I was a rock rolling downhill, gathering momentum, tearing up a few things around me, and accumulating a few things that stuck to me. Some of it was painful; some of it was fun; and like anybody who’d been rolling along like that, I was feeling a bit dizzy.

  As you can imagine, especially during that period that earned me the nickname “the Reaper,” I didn’t have a whole lot of time to sit back and reflect on everything that had happened to me that put me in that hot zone. I knew that it was the luck of the draw that had us seeing so much action.

  A lot of guys at Fort Benning told us when they learned that we were being deployed to Kandahar that we needed to be prepared to be bored out of our minds. I was also fortunate that I was with Charlie Company, First Platoon. After all, that was the unit that I grew up with in battalion. I knew most of the guys I was going to be assigned with. We’d been deployed together before, and they were really, really good guys, squared away. In some ways this was going to be different. I had rank now and I’d be one of the men planning missions, giving briefings. I felt prepared for that, but I also knew that with leadership came responsibility. You don’t serve in the armed forces without having a sense of responsibility for your fellow soldiers, but this was going to be at a different level. I wasn’t always the most responsible kid and I liked to have a good time still, and I told myself that I wasn’t going to change too much.

  You’re always on edge predeployment. When word came down that we were going to Kandahar, we all met the news with a mixture of relief and curiosity. The Second Ranger Battalion was currently over there, and their guys were reporting back that things were very quiet. A few missions. Not really getting shot at.

  I should clarify something. The sense of relief I mentioned. That was mostly what we told our wives and girlfriends. I told my wife, Jessica, that this was going to be a boring deployment, probably my last one. I’d be away just a few months and then we’d figure out the next steps. Afghanistan sucks. You hardly ever see anybody; they all live hidden in the mountains. Kandahar is a city. Don’t worry.

  In truth, I was pissed for all the reasons stated above. I wanted to get into as much stuff as possible. That’s what I’d been spending all these years busting my ass off preparing to do. You become a sniper; you want to shoot. You want to do your job. So, along with the anxiety I was feeling, there was some disappointment and frustration. It didn’t help that all around the base we’re hearing from some other guys who’d been assigned to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Wilson as well as others in Kandahar that we better take our Xboxes and our PlayStations, and we’d better load every hard drive, zip drive, and any other kind of digital storage device we had with plenty of movies.

  A few days later, I was sitting in our old Mercury Grand Marquis inside the brown gate that surrounded the Third Battalion’s secret compound at Benning. Jessica was in tears, just a river of them flowing. I felt helpless to really reassure her, and that made me mad at myself. Add that to being frazzled with all that comes with being deployed, all the worry and wonder I had about my new role, and our good-bye was not rom-com worthy. I cried a bit, and felt bad that the two of us had been Stateside together only a few months.

  I have to admit that I wasn’t always the most pleasant guy to be around when I came back from deployment. Prior to this upcoming deployment, my company and I had been working out of Baghram Air Force Base in support of SEAL Team Six. While at Baghram I’d worked with another Ranger sniper by the name of Pete who really showed me the ropes. He had been in the sniper section for some time and served as the sniper platoon sergeant.

  When I’d come back to Georgia, it was like I was in a new world. It always felt like that, but it didn’t help that while I was gone, Jessica had rearranged the whole house. I knew that I shouldn’t be pissed about that. After all, she was looking for ways to make things better, to help her pass the time waiting, but still. It’s hard to flip the switch back to being normal Nick after being downrange. Out in the field, you want to keep everything the same. Keep the routine going.

  I knew that I had to flip the switch again. Go back to being that other Nick, the guy who, to be honest, over the five-plus years I’d been in the army, was the easier one to be. So, as I’m standing outside the car hugging Jessica, it is like a scene from a sci-fi movie. She’s standing there holding on to me, and a faint, ghostlike image is separating himself from her, already with the other guys on the compound ripping and running around getting all their stuff together, hearing that C-17’s engines revving up and idling. Then I really did walk away, giving Jessica one more wave before immersing myself in my other life.

  An hour later, I’m settled in. The Ambien-induced sleep had a hold on me, and twenty-three hours later I was in Afghanistan. Bleary-eyed and dry mouthed, I stepped off the transport into a kind of heat that Georgia can’t produce—a dry, searing version in which every ounce of moisture has been wrung from the air.

  I liked that introduction to this other life. It signaled that the slate was wiped clean. This was not the States. When I looked around as we offloaded and then loaded to make our way to the FOB, nothing seemed at all familiar. Gone was the lush spring landscape of Georgia. No matter where I looked I wasn’t going to find a paved road, a white picket fence framing the driveway, and the cluster of mailboxes at our apartment complex, no whine and whirr of insects. Just the heat and the smell, a mixture of hay and manure. This is where the other Nick, the one who’d become the Reaper, could call home. I didn’t need reminders of my real home that would get my memory working. I was entering my workplace, and I didn’t need any more distractions.

  I also liked that Pemberton and I were being housed in an area that was fenced off from the rest of the base. All the troops were in our own kind of walled city, cement Jersey barriers, metal gates, shipping containers, what seemed miles of chain-link fence and concertina wire. If this was going to be a boring deployment, at least we had a nice setup. Pemberton and I found our private rooms in what resembled a simple aluminum two-story apartment building.

  “Not too bad,” I said to myself when I opened the door. I had a few storage-locker-type closets, a bed, a desk, and chairs in a room that was about twelve by fifteen feet. Even though I
was trying not to think about home, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the bedroom I’d had growing up as a kid in Maryland. My dad was an E6 stationed at Fort Meade. We lived in a modest house in Jessup, Maryland, where it was just my dad, my mom, and my sister, Jasmine. My parents had met in Augsburg, Germany, where they were both stationed. My mom was an E4, but I don’t remember her in uniform at all. By the time I was old enough to start school, she’d left the military to be a full-time mom. Money was always tight, so Mom worked for UPS and Burger King, among other jobs, to help make ends meet.

  Growing up on base and living in military housing didn’t seem at all unusual to me. It was what I grew up with and what most of the kids I hung around with as a preschooler knew. Some of my first memories are of being on that base and going to work with my dad sometimes. I didn’t know what he did, all I knew was that the American flag went up every morning and we’d salute it. I was taught to show respect to everyone and especially to the men and women in uniform and to that flag flying above our neighborhood. In a way it was like we lived in Major Roger’s neighborhood. Those preschool lessons were spoken but mostly unspoken. Only later, when I went to the local elementary school, middle school, and high school, would I realize that the air of respect that permeated the base wasn’t the same one that existed off base.

  As I stowed my gear at FOB Wilson, it was like I had to pack away some of those memories. Never the neatest kid in the world, I remember having my desk at school end up overflowing with homework papers, books, folders, and assorted junk. Not at home of course. That was the place that I had to keep squared away. Probably my greatest accomplishment in elementary school, besides advancing from grade to grade (barely), was meeting Jessica. I was one of the smaller kids in class, but I towered over her. Even at the age of six, as small as she was, Jessica was as energetic and vibrant as any of the kids in our class. She had an awesome smile that she flashed as she ran around the playground during recess, a tiny dynamo daring anybody to keep up with her.