The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (11 page)

It’s funny now to think that after Airborne, I was sent to Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP). At the time “indoctrination” didn’t mean much to me, but later I thought about how that word can mean something kind of like being brainwashed. Now it’s called Ranger Assessment and Selection Program (RASP), and that’s more fitting, I think. There wasn’t much brainwashing going on when I went through it. It was mostly just a physical beating—long, long runs and marches of up to fifteen miles, three to four days without sleep, very little food. It’s that crucible moment when you find out for yourself if you’ve got what it takes. My dad always used to say that the truth will out—in other words, you can’t hide from who you really are and you will at some point reveal yourself.

And from the first moment you enter RIP, you’re being tested. That first day I had to run a half mile carrying all my gear, a hundred pounds of it, and knowing that if I fell behind even just a bit I might be bounced out of the program. I looked like a soup sandwich at the end, but I wasn’t one of the 60 or so guys out of our class of 180 who didn’t make it to the end of day two. I don’t know where I found the strength, but I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to quit. If my shins flared up or my body otherwise broke down and they tossed me out, that was one thing. Quitting was not an option.

I knew that even though I was lagging behind a lot of guys in running, since my short legs weren’t meant for the distance thing, I was confident that I had other skills.

The first time I fired a weapon, I was eight years old. I was down in the country with my dad and my grandfather. They did a lot of rabbit and deer hunting, and I was in a clearing with them, a bottom land and a few stands of trees. At one point, my dad handed me the gun. It felt solid but not heavy. My dad stood behind me, helped me level the gun, and then with his finger over mine, he helped me squeeze the trigger, real slow. The recoil knocked me back but my dad held me up.

I liked the sensation of firing a gun, immediately and intensely. Part of it was power, but part of it was also about control. As impulsive as I was with my homemade weapons, I was somehow able to respect what a real weapon could do and keep myself under control and eventually fire with real precision. I didn’t like school, and a lot of stuff seemed really complicated to me, but what my dad taught me, sight and squeeze, seemed really simple. The simplicity of it made it fun for me. This wasn’t like doing problems in math class or memorizing the Constitution’s amendments, or reading a story and trying to find a theme. Sight and squeeze.

I also know that I was really angry as a kid, even until I was through with high school. I’m not really sure how firing a weapon figured into that, because I know I wasn’t one of those sociopathic kids who love torturing animals. I did hunt, but I was very squeamish when it came to handling the carcasses of the rabbits and squirrels I shot. I’d ask someone else to pick them up for me. I wasn’t into blood and gore, but I did get a great deal of satisfaction from mastering something. My dad would take me to the shooting range, and I developed more mental and emotional discipline there than I did anywhere else. I knew that I could never fire a weapon in anger at someone. That would mess too much with the simplicity of sight and squeeze. Sure, I felt a thrill when I was successful while hunting or hitting a target, and first going to the range, some of my anger and aggression came out. Later, precision shooting became like chess, a game that I enjoyed playing, because in order to hit a bull’s-eye a lot of planning and execution had to take place.

Before I was a teenager, I had a .22 rifle with a scope and I tried to shoot a cigarette in half from a hundred yards. When I got to high school, and after spending all those hours at the range with my dad, I was able to do that regularly.

But I didn’t improve just because of target practice. I also had to do some studying. When I was starting out and shooting outside, I had no clue how wind could affect a bullet’s path. I figured I was only fifty to a hundred meters away from a target and a bullet traveled so fast, how could wind do anything? And the effects of gravity? Didn’t even consider them.

Finally I went to the library and got a book on long-range shooting and sniping. I learned a whole lot and realized that I needed to understand better some of the math principles that I’d hated dealing with in school. I remember getting a book called
Fundamentals of Math
. It was a sixth-grade textbook, and I would sneak it home because I was in high school by that time and I knew I’d get all kinds of crap from kids at school for having it. I studied and studied that book in a way that I would never have done in a classroom. It’s funny, but I was one of those kids who constantly complained that the stuff I was being forced to learn in school had nothing to do with real life. If someone had told me that math would apply to sniping, I might have paid more attention.

The more I read about sniping, the more I made the connection between chess and shooting. Anticipation, analysis, and prediction based on evidence are pretty high-level thinking skills, and I started to develop them, but if you were to ask any of my teachers if I was capable of that kind of thinking, they would have probably said no. By all outward appearances, or outside of a shooting range, I probably looked like I didn’t understand the principles of cause and effect, actions and consequences.

In the army, I had to learn a lot about navigation and orienteering. It’s funny to think about how I was finding my way in life as much as I was finding my way through the woods.

The Cole Range is the Rangers’ version of the SEAL teams’ Hell Week. That was the point at which I really learned about camaraderie and teamwork. We started out with a group of eighty or so, and by the end we were whittled down to about a dozen. The thing that kept me going was that if you decided to drop out, you had to stand there in front of everyone and say those words. I was empowered by that. Every time another guy stopped during the middle of a march or whatever and said, “I quit,” I grew more determined to make it. Hearing “I quit” twenty, thirty, forty, fifty times over a four-day period can really boost your confidence when you’re the one hearing it and not saying it.

I especially remember being sleep deprived and hungry as could be and being gathered near a bonfire. An instructor said, “If you just come up here, leave your team, I have a nice hot cup of coffee for you and a slice of pizza. You’ll be good to go, but you’ve got to leave your teammates.”

A few guys would go up there and take the offer, and the instructor would say, “Welcome to Korea” or “Welcome to Italy,” or something similar letting the guys know that they were bound for some kind of ordinary duty. They’d sold themselves short and now they were getting the short end of the deal.

I was one of seven guys who made it through to the end. I learned that my brain might shut down or quit, but my body could keep on going, and that was a lesson that served me well throughout the rest of my career.

I was enormously proud of joining the Third Ranger Battalion in October of 2005. I was now part of the group whose legacy included the operation in Somalia that became known as Black Hawk Down, going into Grenada, fighting in the first Gulf War, rescuing Jessica Lynch. Well, not quite part of it yet. I had to report to battalion to see what my assignment was going to be.

First, Second, and Third Battalions were each doing ninety-day rotations at that point in the conflict. When I arrived at Fort Benning, I have to admit, it was a bit of a letdown. Third Battalion was in Afghanistan at the time, but I was assigned to its Charlie Company, First Platoon. That meant there wasn’t a whole lot for me to do until the rest of the battalion got back. I definitely had new-kid-at-school nerves. I didn’t know what to expect now that I was a Ranger, and I really wanted to make a good impression. I was there with maybe twenty other guys and they hardly even talked to me, except to issue me some equipment. I didn’t have a TV or a radio, just a bed in the barracks and an iron and ironing board that I used almost constantly to press my BDUs. When I wasn’t doing that, I was polishing my boots, making sure that I was as squared away as possible. I was a nineteen-year-old kid, living his dream of being an army Ranger, and I had movie visions of how my life was going to play out.

I also had a bit of a nightmare running through my mind. I’d heard that the Rangers had their own indoctrination program for the cherry new guys. I’d been told that I could expect them to come busting into my room and take me out partying or to quiz me on some bit of Ranger Battalion history or do anything to test me. When I got word, after a week of mostly just waiting, that the Third Battalion was inbound and would be down in just about an hour, I sat on the edge of my bed nearly paralyzed. When the guys came back in, I could hear them running and shouting, asking where the new guy was.

What ensued was the consumption of more beer than I’d ever seen up to that point in my young life. I’d had a few beers before, but that night was the first time I was ever drunk. I didn’t want to show any kind of weakness, so I tried to keep up with them, but that wasn’t really possible. A few guys asked me about myself and my background and stuff, but nothing could distract them from the drinking and the loud music and the general air of relief they all felt. They were glad to be back home, glad that they’d sustained no casualties, and clearly, I was the only one who was thinking about the fact that we had to be up at 0600 hours for formation.

I wandered away from the action and got back to my room and began laying out what I thought I had to have organized for the next day. I showed up at 0600 in my starched and pressed uniform, my dazzle-shined boots, and felt like the guy who wears a shirt and tie to the first day of school while everybody else is in jeans and T-shirts. That’s mostly what the rest of the guys were wearing. I was the only one not in civilian clothes. I was escorted over to the Charlie Company CQ desk and was introduced to a very large and very forbidding looking first sergeant who I would later come to know as Black Rhino. The name fit. He was well over 220 pounds of rock-hard muscle, had a coal-black complexion, and a mouth with a missing front tooth that could make him appear either menacing or goofy.

That first time I met First Sergeant Seeley, he definitely was not goofy. He took me into a room and began his interrogation.

“Why do you want to be here? What makes you want to be a Ranger?” His voice definitely suited his body, it came out strong and deep.

I didn’t know what to say, and while I was standing there, the platoon sergeant came in and stood in the doorway. I could see a little bit of light behind him, but mostly just his body filling that space.

Finally, I said, “I just want to be part of the best fighting force that the military has to offer.”

The Black Rhino burst out laughing and then suddenly stopped. “No. I’ve heard that too many times before. I want your real answer.”

I shrugged. “I just want to fight, First Sergeant. I’m here to fight and go to war.”

“That’s what I want to hear.”

At that point, he informed me that I was going to be assigned to the Third Squad in Charlie Company as an assaulter. I was given my M4 rifle and a 203 grenade launcher. I was pretty much left on my own. There was distinct division between guys who earned their tabs—the ones who’d completed Ranger school—and the other guys like me. We were there on a trial basis, and I felt the pressure of believing that my every move was being closely monitored and evaluated. To that point, I’d not done a whole lot of specific training with weapons, and it was clear that we were being prepared for urban combat. Although I’d fired weapons before, it was a new experience to be in a small room with several other people, friendlies, knowing that you had to be very accurate.

Wearing night vision was also hard to adapt to. I don’t know if my color blindness had any effect on me, but I never really liked using that device. The first time I put on PVS-14s, I got to experience what it would be like to lose an eye. The device slides down and blocks the vision in one of your eyes, and that really messes with your depth perception. I probably spent as much time bumping into things as I did making forward progress. Later, when we got into small unit training and I had to combine night vision work with my infrared laser sighting on my weapons, I had a whole new level of respect for what these guys were capable of. It was so different from open sight in daylight. Point and squeeze became my new mantra. Put the laser on the target and squeeze. Eventually, spending enough time with the night vision, figuring out what magnification settings worked for me, made me more comfortable. Our brains eventually adjust and compensate for perceiving two different images simultaneously—a near one and a far one—but it did take a lot of time.

Physical training was still rigorous with the added dimension of P-Mask runs—when you wore your protective mask, what most people think of as gas masks. We were trying to simulate the high-altitude environment of Afghanistan.

During an airport seizure drill, I really got a sense that this was now big-boy stuff. Nighttime parachuting, hot-wiring vehicles to get them off the runway, lots of coordination among the various units and responsibilities.

I had never worked so hard in my life as I did in those six months prior to my first deployment. Twelve- to sixteen-hour days were the norm. Family life was nonexistent. Some of the guys told me that trying to maintain a working marriage was almost impossible, and the Ranger battalions had a really high divorce rate.

I don’t know if I would have done as well as I did if it weren’t for Mark Cunningham. He didn’t mind me asking all kinds of questions about what it was going to be like over there—the terrain, the people, our living quarters, and anything else I could think of. I also worked the chain of command properly and wasn’t afraid to ask my squad leader for clarification. I think that being the new guy and not being afraid to ask questions helped.

It was during that training cycle, during another of the many airport seizures, that I had that parachute incident when I could have easily died. I had one other near-fatal encounter, this time with a tin of Copenhagen. Mark was from Tennessee, and he said he’d been dipping tobacco since he was a pup, as he put it. One day, I was dragging, just having one of those low-energy days when I could barely keep my eyes open.