It’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it, killin’ a man. You take everythin’ he’s got, an’ everythin’ he’s ever gonna have.
—Will Munny (Clint Eastwood), Unforgiven, by David Webb Peoples
The instructor leaned in close to his sniper student and pointed across the field toward the plywood hut. Guy sitting there, tied to a chair, trying to keep his face from fidgeting, clearly nervous as hell. Didn’t know what was about to happen to him. Or maybe he did.
Hence the anxiety.
“See that guy?”
The student nodded.
“The CIA gave us that guy. They were going to kill him.” The student shrugged. The instructor continued. “Why let a good kill go to waste, when it could have instructional value? So they’re letting us do it.”
He looked pointedly at the student.
“‘Us’ meaning you.” He nodded in the direction of the hut. “Shoot him.”
The student looked over at the hut, then back at the instructor. “Wait. Seriously?”
The instructor nodded. Seriously.
“Are you sure? ’Cause in five seconds, I’m pulling the trigger.”
The instructor’s face was passive. He just nodded again in the direction of the hut.
The student stared at the instructor for a few long seconds, then looked over at the man in the chair again. He took a long breath, and let it out. Then raised his sniper rifle, took aim, let his breath out slowly, and squeezed the trigger. A jet of flame spurted out the end of the barrel. The man in the chair grunted, spun, and toppled over. Lay motionless on the ground, still tethered to his chair.
The man was not dead, of course. As great a plot point as it might be for a paranoid-thriller Hollywood film, the CIA doesn’t actually turn over fresh-caught bad guys to military sniper courses for target practice. The “prisoner” was simply a projected image, albeit a damned realistic one. Whether or not the student realized that, I couldn’t say for sure. He probably did. Still, I could see that the realism of it freaked him out.
And that was exactly the point of the exercise: to give him the chance to experience how he would react in a situation where he was required to point his weapon at a live human being, another person of flesh and bone, blood and thought, a person with parents and friends and probably children, too, and snatch their breath away from them forever.
Nothing can prepare a student sniper for the cold reality of fixing a human target in the crosshairs and knowing that a light squeeze of the index finger will stop his heartbeat. Yet we have to prepare our students for exactly that reality.
That was the whole point of the rural-program hunting trips in our advanced sniper training, where we took our new graduates up into the mountains to hunt: it was so they would have the chance to genuinely kill something. No movie cameras, no projectors, no actors. They were by this time absolute masters of the rifle, experts of marksmanship—but they were not yet masters of killing. When you shoot a deer, gut it, and haul it out of the woods, getting blood and guts on your hands, it’s an experience that stays with you.
I remember the first time I cleaned a fish, when I was thirteen. It was a very weird experience. And I remember gutting that first deer I shot. Man, I thought, this is gnarly. But you do it a couple of times, and it becomes just something you now know how to do.
And killing other human beings? Yes, that’s different. Of course it is. But at the same time, it really isn’t. You do it a couple of times, and it becomes just something you now know how to do.
* * *
Not everyone can do it, no matter how good the training.
Nick Irving recalls the battery of strange questions he and his ranger colleagues had to answer just to qualify for sniper school. Two of those rangers didn’t make it through that test and were not even allowed into the course. Not because they were crazy or unstable. They just didn’t meet the profile.
To be a sniper, you have to have a certain psychological capacity. Lots of soldiers and sailors and airmen kill other people in war, but it’s different when you’re a sniper. When you’re tearing through a room at a dead sprint, and it’s pitch black, and someone suddenly pops up with a gun and you shoot him, it’s not really that big a deal. You shoot him and you move on.
As a sniper, you sit there and watch the person through a scope for anywhere from seconds to minutes to hours, and then calmly shoot him. It’s very conscious and deliberate. The psychologists testing Nick’s class wanted to make sure their snipers wouldn’t freak out or get scarred in some crazy way, that they weren’t going to end up on a bell tower somewhere eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and shooting people.
At Kandahar Airfield, before Rob Furlong and the other Canadian snipers flew up to Bagram to launch into Anaconda in March 2002, an American master sergeant named Cunningham came to have a talk with them. He took them privately, one at a time, probably so he could gauge the mind-set of each shooter he’d be working with. If he found anyone he judged as not ready to kill, or not to have that capacity at all, he was ready to yank him out then and there.
Rob waited while Sergeant Cunningham talked to McMeekin. Then it was Rob’s turn.
Cunningham didn’t waste a lot of time with pleasantries.
“Furlong,” he said, “you ever kill anyone before?”
Nope, replied Rob, he hadn’t.
“Well, when you do, you’re going to have a reaction. And exactly what reaction you have is going to determine how you handle it.”
This is a weird conversation, thought Rob. Nobody had ever spoken to him about this aspect of military life before—not in basic, not in battle school, not in airborne, not in recce, not in any of his sniper school training. Hell, Canada hadn’t even been to war since Korea, and that was a quarter century before Rob was born. So far, he didn’t think he’d ever actually talked to anyone in his entire military career who had killed people in combat.
Cunningham had.
“You may feel something,” he went on. “Emotionally, mentally. Some guys go into, I guess you’d say, almost a kind of shock. Where this strange feeling’ll come over you.”
He paused, his eyes never leaving Rob’s face.
“Or,” he said, “you can look past it, and just keep doing your job.”
He looked at Rob as if he’d asked a question, so Rob nodded, like he got it. Which, he supposed, he did.
A few days later he was lying prone on a mountainside at nine thousand feet peering through his scope, watching his .50 cal bullet slam into a man’s back. Watching him die.
The fact that he’d just killed another human being had no noticeable impact on him, not at the time. When you’re engaged in contact there’s no time for reflection. You’re so switched on while you’re in the middle of it, your level of alertness is so high, that your mind doesn’t want to go anywhere but into the intense focus on what you’re doing. Especially when you’ve spent years training and honing that focus to a laser point.
Although one thought did briefly pass through his mind as he watched his killing shot find its target: he thought of September 11, of the thousands of innocent people going about their mundane lives when those hijacked planes crashed into the towers. The thought flickered for a moment, then was gone. Rob was busy looking for the next target.
It was only later, that night, when he started thinking about the day, that it began to sink in. Lying on his back on the mountainside, wrapped in his ranger blanket with the custom zipper, he thought, I killed a man.
Yes. Yes he did. And he would kill more men the next day, and the day after that. And he would look past it. Just keep doing his job.
When I described that early morning skirmish a few of us had in Zhawar Kili in January 2002, a few months prior to Anaconda, the one where we called in a JDAM drop on that little knot of fighters, there was one detail I didn’t mention: in the last few seconds before the bomb fell that obliterated them all, we heard the last thing anyone would have expected in that situation: the sound of a baby crying.
Those fuckers, I thought. They had brought family there with them. They had brought babies onto the battlefield. I had just called out coordinates for dropping a five-hundred-pound bomb … on a baby. Any illusions I had about the nobility of armed battle, of Hector and Achilles duking it out under the hot sun for the honor of their countries, evaporated. War isn’t noble, it’s brutal and it’s ugly.
But when it’s there, it has to be done, and done well, or your people die.
It was not a good moment. I lived with it by doing what military fighters have done for millennia: I compartmentalized it. You could say, I put it in perspective. My first son had just been born; in fact, I hadn’t even met him yet. I had deployed before having that opportunity. And I was going to do whatever the fuck it took to do my job, protect my brothers, and get my ass safely home to meet my little boy. If I had to kill two people, twenty people, or two hundred people to achieve that, so be it. Stack up the bodies. And if they brought their own families onto the battlefield with them? I sure as shit wasn’t happy about it, but it was their call. I had a job to do: stay alive and get my brothers home.
A few days later while patrolling out in the valley we came upon a small convoy of fighters and captured them. A big discussion followed: what do we do with them?
We were already many days into a mission that was supposed to be no more than twenty-four hours and, just like Furlong’s experience in Anaconda, with no idea how long we would still be out there. We were stretched thin just feeding ourselves. And now we had prisoners we would have to feed, watch carefully, and take with us back to Kandahar. Some of us, frankly, were quite prepared to take these guys out into the bush and take care of them. By which I mean, terminally.
I know that sounds cold and brutal, and I might feel differently about it today. But you get in a certain frame of mind when you’re in a situation like this. You become hardened. It’s war; it’s kill or be killed. And these guys were seriously bad dudes who had a lot of killing of innocent people on their agenda. I am a certified California surfer, son of two hippie children of the sixties—and I would not have hesitated to waste these guys where they stood. Would have done it and slept well that night, in fact.
Of course, that didn’t happen. Protocol and rule of law outweighed battlefield pragmatism. But it could have.
Hunters are used to getting their hands bloody.
It becomes just part of your job, like dressing out a deer. You’re a professional, and you do the job.
* * *
Which is not to say it doesn’t have an impact. Does killing change you? It does. Of course it does. How could it not?
Nick Irving, who earned the nickname The Reaper for his exceptionally lethal record overseas, recalls how weird it was to be surrounded by killing.
“I was raised in a Christian family,” he says, “where we learned Thou Shall Not Kill, and here I was, with an awful lot of killing going on. In a way you get used to it; you have to. But in another way, you never get used to it.”
In 2005 Nick Irving was a brand-new gunner serving his first deployment in Tikrit. No ranger tab yet, no sniper training, no experience in the field, that terrible jump when his chute dragged him down the airstrip and shredded his uniform just a few months behind him. He wasn’t The Reaper yet; he was just Nick Irving, the warfighter formerly known as Stick Figure.
His job at the time was to man the remote weapons system (RWS) for one of his unit’s six Strykers. The Stryker is a light tank (if you want to call forty tons “light”), designed as a more maneuverable and easily deployable armored vehicle than tanks like the Abrams or Bradley. The RWS operator sits inside a little pod, staring at a video display and working a joystick. You are playing, in other words, a videogame. Except that your joystick is operating a very real and very big gun. Some of the rangers’ Strykers sported a 105mm or 20 mic-mic (20mm) cannon. Nick’s system worked a .50 cal.
As a trained Stryker driver and RWS operator, Nick had learned all about how to maintain this system, connect the .50 cal to all the electronics, and operate it with all the proficiency of Jason Delgado’s PIGs playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on their Xboxes. The zoom on that video display was insane; you could see a fly on a wall a mile away. It was extremely accurate.
But so far he had not yet fired it at another human being.
Until one morning, when he happened to be the RWS operator in the lead Stryker in his convoy, and a guy in a car came charging straight at them. Was the car wired to explode? Was it a suicide run? No way of knowing, but Nick had seen the look in the guy’s eyes with that uncannily accurate zoom, and whatever he was doing, it was deliberate as hell and dangerous as hell, and Nick got the order to shoot, and he did, fired off a burst of .50 cal rounds and watched on his screen as they stitched up the front of the car, blasted out the windshield, and obliterated the man behind the wheel, vaporizing him into a sloppy mess of pink mist and chunks of bone.
The car, it turned out, was indeed loaded with munitions and primed to blow, which made the kill feel both justified and inevitable—but did not stop the dead man from haunting Nick’s dreams that night.
Irv had his own room, no roommate, which suited him fine. Growing up, he always tended to keep to himself. Other than his best friend, Andre, he was never much for socializing. Unlike most of the other guys in his unit, he didn’t bring over DVD players or Xboxes, had no television. In his room he kept just the bare minimum: a couple of uniforms, socks, T-shirts, and his thoughts. Downtime, for Nick, was lying on his cot, in the dark room.
That night he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and then there was a ceiling fan slowly turning up there, and then the fan’s four blades were the dead man’s arms and legs, and in the center those deliberate killing eyes, dead eyes, stared at him, and then the man’s mouth opened and he began to scream …
Nick didn’t sleep a lot after that.
Every day they rode out on the Strykers was pretty much similar to that day. He doesn’t even know how many men he killed with that joystick; he didn’t keep count. It was quite a few.
One day there was a guy who kept stalking them in his car. Finally he gunned it, heading in their direction. Nick was guarding over a unit of rangers who were inside a compound capturing a target, and this guy was now piling straight for them at high speed. Nick put a burst of .50 cal rounds into the driver’s side of the vehicle. This was the third or fourth time Nick had shot someone with his RWS and it was already second nature. The car swerved back and forth wildly and came to a stop when it hit a wall. One of the closest rangers to the scene went over and opened the driver’s-side door, and a stream of jellylike liquid poured out. The man’s body had been liquefied. Yet as vivid as it was, the image of that kill didn’t bother him, didn’t come back to him later, didn’t haunt his dreams.
It was that first one, always the first one.
The nightmare persisted for weeks, months. In fact it’s still a recurring dream he has, though now no more than once or twice a year.
Nick also describes often feeling an odd sense of connection to the target he was about to shoot.
“I became, for that split second, very attached to that person, and when I shot him, it’s almost like you watch the soul just go away and leave behind this body. I would feel a coppery, metallic taste in my mouth, like when you suck on a penny, followed immediately by a strange hollow feeling, as if I’d been kind of emptied out a little bit. Like a part of me had left, too.
“I know it sounds weird. But that’s how it feels to me. I don’t know what it’s like for other guys. Some will probably tell you they don’t feel anything at all, but I would call bullshit on that. You feel something.”
* * *
In the summer of 2009, about the time Nick Irving and his spotter, Pemberton, were fighting their way out of a 360-degree ambush in Helmand Province, Alex Morrison and about sixty other SEALs slipped into nearby Marjah with an Army Green Beret unit.
Their target was an area of four square blocks, centered around the intersection of two main thoroughfares. The place was laid out like a gigantic plus sign, with its two streets, running north-to-south and west-to-east, lined with buildings. Just beyond the streets the place opened out immediately into wide-open fields, with acres and acres of crops—wheat, barley, mungbeans, melons … and poppies. Lots of poppies.
Marjah was the focal point of the Taliban’s heroin economy and considered the heart of darkness in Helmand. As far as the rest of the world knew, no U.S. or other Coalition forces had been there (the world didn’t know Irving and Pemberton had already inserted numerous times, lancing pockets of Taliban leadership like a hot needle). Which was an advantage, in one major way: it gave them the element of total surprise. They went in fast and hard and the Taliban never saw it coming.
They inserted at night by helo. Alex’s element made their way to their preplanned blocking position, in a large compound located to the west of the plus sign’s center, on the east-bound route in. They cleared the compound, kicked out everyone who was in there, got set up, and waited. The moment the sun came up, they started taking small arms fire—typical for Afghanistan.
Meanwhile another element had landed near them and gone in the opposite direction, clearing to the center of the intersection and then turning to the north, heading for their own designated blocking position. They were using hand grenades to clear buildings. It was full-out urban warfare.
As that team continued northward, Alex caught a glimpse of an Afghan out in the fields with an AK-47, maneuvering his way toward the Americans. Helmand Province is heavily forested, and even in the open fields there were ample trees to provide concealment—and this guy knew what he was doing. As he moved, he kept slipping into dead space, in classic stalk fashion, so that he would be visible for a few seconds, then disappear, then appear again, then disappear.
Alex ranged him. About three hundred yards away. Okay, he thought, I have got to zap this fucker.
As he worked to get the man on sights, suddenly a younger guy appeared from the west, running up to the guy with the AK. The second guy looked to be about fifteen years old. As he got closer, the older man turned around and started shooing the kid away.
It didn’t take more than a second to figure out what was going on. This was the man’s son, and the AK guy was yelling at him the Afghan equivalent of, “Go! Get the fuck out of here!”
He chased his son away, then turned back and started heading east again to get within shooting distance of the Americans—but his son came back again. Once more, he stopped and waved the boy off. This time he got the son to back up maybe twenty yards, at which point the boy stopped and refused to budge further.
Now the guy headed east again, again appearing and disappearing behind the landscape features. Then he popped up in a spot dangerously close to the thoroughfare. Finally Alex got a clear view as the man shouldered his AK and started shooting.
Alex already had his .30 cal sniper rifle up and ready. Three hundred yards: not a difficult shot. He quickly got the man in his crosshairs and BOOM, rolled him up. Hit him high in the shoulders and knocked him off his feet.
One shot, one kill.
Except that the scene didn’t end there. As Alex continued watching through his scope he saw the son come running toward the downed fighter, screaming what Alex assumed was his father’s name. Alex couldn’t tear himself away; his right eye and scope were glued to the spot. He couldn’t stop watching the man’s son standing there, freaking out, wailing and screaming. Because Alex had just killed his dad.
When he described it to me, Alex got so choked up at this point that he had a hard time going on.
“It was intense,” he said. “You’ve got kids. You know what it’s like.”
I did.
The op escalated and ended up being a pretty intense firefight that stretched out over four days. When it was all over, the Americans had captured something in the neighborhood of eight thousand pounds of opium and eight hundred pounds of refined heroin, all packaged in vacuum-sealed bags with a scorpion logo printed on them. It was the biggest drug seizure to date, estimated at about $100 million. But the celebratory feeling barely touched Alex.
That scene between the Tali fighter and his son kept echoing around the inside of his skull.
Alex had killed plenty of other people, going all the way back to his first kill on the Mogadishu Airport runway fourteen years earlier. But all those other times, says Alex, it was almost like a cartoon, and not truly real. “As a sniper, you get the luxury of killing people from a distance; you can keep that distance between yourself and the kill.”
But that moment in Marjah took away that distance. In that moment, he says, those people he killed became human beings to him.
“If I had to do it over,” he adds, “I would do it again—and again, and again, because I had buddies that guy was about to shoot. Hell, he was already shooting at them. But I’d never really stopped to consider that the guys I was shooting were people just like me, who had families just like I do. When we got back from that op, first thing I did was call my son and express to him how much I loved him, how much he meant to me.”
I told him his story reminded me of my experience in Zhawar Kili, when we heard a baby crying just before our bomb dropped.
“It was fucked up, man,” I told him. “It still haunts me.”
“Yeah,” he said. Then he added, “And you know what? It should. If it doesn’t haunt me and I just ‘deal with it,’ then I’m an asshole.”
I didn’t say anything. I guessed I could agree with that.
“But at the end of the day,” he went on, “this is what we do, that’s what they do, and that’s how it turns out. And it’s horrible, but it’s the law of the jungle, or the earth, or whatever it is. It’s just a cold, hard fact that has no emotion.
“But it does make you reassess things.”
* * *
As I said earlier, most snipers you talk to will say it’s not about the people they killed, it’s about the people they kept from being killed. Sometimes that happens in an extremely vivid way, and a sniper will find himself vested with an almost godlike power over life and death. To inflict a death; to prevent a death from being inflicted.
On April 6, 2003, as Jason Delgado and his fellow snipers provided overwatch from a small bell tower for a column from India Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Marines, approaching the Diyala River Bridge on the outskirts of Baghdad, someone fired an RPG at one of India’s vehicles. The grenade did not explode, but it touched off a sequence of events that led directly to one of the more tragic events of the invasion.
Evidently enemy forces, composed at this point of both Republican Guard and other, less readily identifiable fighters, had planned to wait until the company crossed the bridge, then blow the bridge with artillery, thereby separating the battalion’s forces, and ambush them on both sides. Their artillery was already in place on the far side of the river, aimed at the bridge, waiting for the right moment. But their timing was thrown off by one overeager soldier with a loaded tube on his shoulder.
When the RPG went off and firefights erupted, the Americans had not quite reached the bridge itself. As the skirmishes continued, though, someone in Saddam’s army must have realized their plan was out the window and given the signal to commence the attack.
The artillery went off, firing over the river onto the column of meched-up units and destroying an AAV. A handful of rounds fell short and hit the bridge itself, destroying one pylon and doing enough damage on the bridge’s roadway surface that it would now be impossible for the marines to cross by mech.
As the fighting continued, an order came down from Colonel McCoy, the battalion commander, sending two companies to cross the bridge on foot and secure the other side, so they could then send over engineers to set up a pontoon bridge that would allow them to get their armored vehicles across the river. McCoy would be damned if he was going to let the other side sabotage their passage by blowing a few holes in a bridge.
Jason and his fellow snipers were sent up on point, the first to cross the bridge, the line platoons of India Company on their heels and Kilo Company following them. As they ran they could look down through holes in the roadway and see bodies and body parts floating in the water—dead Iraqi civilians, blown to pieces by Iraqi artillery as they tried to escape the impending carnage by fleeing over the bridge.
Partway across the bridge the snipers were hit with mortar fire. Jason peeled off to the right into a small grove of palm trees. Dirt kicked up all around him as he ran into the trees, whether from further mortar fire or land mines, he didn’t know and didn’t stop to wonder.
He started yelling at his teammates. “Hey, this area may be booby-trapped. We gotta get out of the groves.”
They all ran out of the trees and into a nearby street to find a building where they could take cover. Most of India Company had now made it across the bridge and Kilo Company was just arriving. Kilo Company split off to the left, with a three-man sniper element. Jason and Jesse Davenport, his spotter, split to the right with India Company, all of them facing into Muaskar al Rashid Street, the main road that led all the way to Baghdad.
A call came over their comms: battalion had intel that the enemy had hijacked an ambulance truck, recognizable by the crescent moon and star logo on its side, loaded it with explosives, and planned to drive it headlong into the Americans’ position.
This went out over battalion-wide comms, so everyone heard it.
A few days before, one of their tanks (an Abrams!) had been blown up by a suicide driver with a truck bomb. And ever since Beirut 1983, marines are very sensitive about being blown up by truck bombs. They had just been ambushed, had artillery fired on them, and lost some of their men. They had now pushed across a bridge on foot, their vehicles unable to follow. This was as desperate, as focused as combat gets. They were all in that bubble now, that zone, the infamous fog of war, that place that says Do not fuck with me, this is kill or be killed.
And in the chaos of the moment, “Possible ambulance coming toward you with explosives” became “Don’t let anyone come near you!”
Kilo Company was already dug in, their machine guns in place, ready for this fight. India followed suit.
Any vehicle that came in their direction got mowed down.
Jason saw a few uniformed soldiers approaching in the distance, saw their weapons, and BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! took them out. Jesse was acquiring targets as well. They were doing their job and doing it well. Protecting their boys and saving their own asses, too.
And then Jason noticed something. There were still a lot of civilians coming toward them, streaming out of the city, trying to get away from the war.
Shit!
Jason and Jesse and the other three snipers all had an advantage over their comrades from India and Kilo Company: they had good scopes. Jason was now on the M40, Jesse had his spotting scope out, and the three snipers on the other side of the thoroughfare had similar equipment. But all the rest of the marines were on M16s, equipped with nothing but iron sights. You look down the barrel of your rifle and see a 240 Golf coming toward you from four football fields away, and you’ve got nothing to look through but iron sights—your unaided eyesight, in other words—and you can’t tell a thing about who’s driving. All you know is, there’s a vehicle heading toward you, and you’ve just been told there are vehicles coming toward you with bombs. What do you do?
You shoot.
And the marines of Kilo Company did just that: they shot and they shot and they shot. Some of the people they shot were enemy fighters storming the bridge. Some were enemy fighters dressed as civilians. Some, as would later be claimed, may have been civilians coerced into storming the bridge. But an awful lot of them were simply people trying to get away, people caught in a tragically impossible situation.
All five snipers started shooting engine blocks and tires, doing their best to keep the trucks and cars from approaching the bridge and being shot at. It went on for hours. They didn’t dare stop to sleep, or even to rest. Jason started getting scope fatigue, his eye twitching out of control; they switched off on the long gun, and the same happened to Jesse. They pushed themselves and kept going anyway, staying up throughout the night and into the morning, shooting engine blocks and tires, keeping people away, or at least as many as they could.
It was only hours earlier that Jason and Jesse had both had their own very first kill shots. They had trained for years, and they were very good—marine good—at what they did. They were graduates of the Killing School, but they had not actually killed, not until that day. And now, just hours later, the meaning and impact of killing changed for them.
“Up until that point,” says Jason, “we were pretty savage. We were hungry. At that moment, though, we realized the humanity of what we were doing—or make that the inhumanity of it. That night-long battle was what turned us into experienced, responsible snipers.”
They started choosing their shots with great care. Now, instead of shooting to kill, they were shooting to prevent killing.
The battle continued well into the afternoon of the following day. They ran out of food; they ran out of water. With the exception of the marathon at Husaybah on April 17 and 18 a year later, it was the longest continuous firefight Jason ever experienced.
The morning after the shooting stopped, Jason was one of the first men privy to see the aftermath. Quite a few civilians’ lives were saved that day because of the snipers’ efforts. Many more were lost, as the stilled, bullet-ridden vehicles and scatter of corpses attested. The picture still sits in Delgado’s head; it’s something he struggles with to this day.
* * *
On July 18, 2009, a week after that endless firefight deep in Helmand Province, Nick Irving got the phone call he’d been dreading. “Ben Kopp didn’t make it.” Irving’s friend had survived long enough to get home and see his mom, and not much longer after that.
“That fucking hurts,” says Nick. “The only team that could come in and save us, and the guy ended up dying for it.”
People ask, what is it like to take another man’s life? They never ask, what is it like to lose another man’s life? To have the life of someone you know, someone you respect, admire, even love, ripped away and be powerless to prevent it from happening? Because you really can’t separate the two questions. In war you’re confronted with the brutal reality of sudden death, and death is not something you can bargain with or persuade to fight for your side.
Death is like the wind: it blows where it wants to blow.
Furlong thinks about the sight of that enemy fighter walking along the distant ridgeline wearing the dead American’s BDU and helmet. “I hope like hell we killed those guys,” he muses.
Just how many people did he and Tim kill out there in the Shahikot Valley? Thirty, maybe more? And if you include all the air strikes they glassed and called in? Who knows. He certainly doesn’t lie awake at night thinking about it. The number he thinks about, the number no one can quantify and he can only speculate on but which means a hell of a lot more to him, is the number of lives they saved.
To take just one example: that RPK gunner he and Tim took out with their historic 2,430-meter shot. How many wives would be widows today if they’d missed, and that gunner had continued on with his mission? How many kids would be fatherless?
“I don’t know,” says Rob to that question. “I know this. If we saved one, that was one guy who got home, who got to see his family again. If we saved one guy, then it was worth it.”
Delgado still thinks about Rick Gannon, the best CO he ever had. After the battle of April 17 and 18, Camp Husaybah was renamed Camp Gannon, and the captain was awarded a posthumous Silver Star and promoted to major. These are worthy honors and meaningful gestures. But they don’t make him any less dead. And Van Leuven, Gibson, Smith, and Valdez. Jason Dunham, who never came out of his coma. Jesus Medellin and Andrew Aviles, who both died in the attack over the Diyala River Bridge, and Mark Evnin, the sniper who was killed in Al Kut three days earlier. And so many others.
“With every good man you lose,” says Delgado, “you have people like us who assume the guilt of what happened, and the responsibility of knowing what these great men could have achieved if they were still here. That makes us driven. We’ll never rest until we achieve greatness. Gotta do it for your boys.”
Nick Irving says he was never quite the same person after his stint in Helmand Province. What plagues him, though, is less the people he killed, and more the people he could not prevent from being killed. He still thinks every day and dreams every night about what else he could have done to change the outcome of that terrible firefight. What else he might have done that would cause Ben Kopp to still be here today.
“Call it survivor’s guilt, if you want,” he says. “For me, it’s not guilt so much as memory. These aren’t things I can’t forget. They’re things I don’t want to forget. Things I choose to take with me until it’s my time to recover under the dirt.”
* * *
Rob Furlong left the service not long after Anaconda and served on the Canadian police force for a few years before joining the private sector. His longest-kill-shot record stood until 2009, when it was surpassed by a British sniper, Sergeant Craig Harrison, in Afghanistan. To this day the two small teams of Canadian snipers are respected and widely viewed by U.S. military as having played a strong role in the success of Anaconda. Today he runs his own training center in Alberta, Canada, Rob Furlong’s Marksmanship Academy.
Jason Delgado was in Husaybah for six months before returning to the States. After getting out of the service he went back to school, majoring in media technology, produced an award-winning film, did some private contract security work, and nearly joined the NYPD, but instead decided to pursue his passion for art. He started his own tattoo business, GunMetal Ink, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
“It was surreal, man, surreal,” he says. “To this day, I still can’t believe that was me over there, doing that shit.”
After leaving the army behind, Nick Irving did a few turns overseas as a private contractor before settling down for good in San Antonio with his childhood sweetheart, who is also his wife. He teaches precision shooting in South Texas and is founder of HardShoot.
Irving still has that snapshot his fellow ranger took of him and Pemberton standing in the Helmand Province safe house they called the Alamo, just after making their epic run from the ravine. In the photo you can see the stains on his and Pemberton’s uniforms, filthy ditch water mixed with the blood from two of their men. Whenever he’s in what feels like a difficult situation, whenever things seem a little tough, he thinks back to his time as a ranger, and especially to the day that picture was snapped.
* * *
In 2011, two years after that last deployment in Helmand Province, Nick was back in Iraq again, this time doing private contract work in Baghdad. One morning when he went to check his e-mail he found a message from a guy he’d known briefly in the Australian Special Air Service (SAS). It read:
“Hey, just to let you know, mate, we got that fucking Chechen for you.”
Nick wrote back: “Roger that.”
He never heard back from that SAS commando again, but that was okay with Nick; he didn’t need to. He’d already gotten the e-mail he’d hoped for.