Death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back.
—Marcus Aurelius
About six months after returning from Afghanistan, I went to my brother-in-law Wayne’s wedding. At the reception, I was seated at the same table with a woman with olive tan skin and piercing brown eyes. Both gorgeous and smart. A killer combination, in my book.
We got talking, the usual dinner-table talk. What do you do? and so forth. I told her I was in the service. That I was a sniper, recently back from Afghanistan. She, it turned out, was an air force pilot. “I fly an F-16,” she said. And nodded in answer to my unasked question: “Afghanistan.” We clinked glasses in a wordless toast. To making it back alive.
“You guys are amazing,” I said. “You’re like snipers in the sky. I had the chance to call in some air strikes with an F-16 and it blew me away how accurate you are.…”
We kept talking, but my attention split in two. Part of me was sitting in the chair in the California hotel ballroom, surrounded by champagne and good cheer. Another part of me was crouching in the low desert scrub of Zhawar Kili.
* * *
On our fifth day out my shooting partner, Toby, and I set off into the valley just before dawn to spend the day reconning the area. On our way in we come within a few yards of being badly ambushed. By pure providence, we missed a small pocket of armed Taliban (was there any other kind?) by a hairsbreadth. (If we’d hit our location there ten minutes later or ten minutes earlier, someone else would’ve had to write this book, because I’d be fourteen years dead now.)
By day six, we decide we need to do something.
We know there are plenty of fighters out there in the valley watching us. We’ve rounded up a bunch of them on the roads, confiscated their vehicles, taken them prisoner. But most of these guys are staying well off the roads. The two of us talk it over and decide we can’t take these people on our terms. We have to go hunt them on their terms.
We need to get outside the box.
We ask our CO, Lieutenant Chris Cassidy, if we can go out there, alone, and hunt these people, just the two of us, no support, no backup, no comms. He gives us the thumbs-up. We spend the night planning out the op.
We dress like locals. I have dark coloring and thick black eyebrows and could easily pass for Afghan; Toby is of Turkish descent, and looks it. At a distance or in poor light we could both pass for Taliban. (Maybe.) We take no ID with us. I bring my MK13 .30 cal bolt-action sniper rifle, Toby his SR-25 semiauto. Toby has his sidearm, and so do I: my Heckler & Koch, a USP (universal self-loading pistol) compact .45, with three mags of .45 rounds plus one chambered, and probably a hundred rounds for the .30 cal. And water. A small notebook to write in and a stub of pencil.
Water, paper, guns, bullets. That’s about it.
We set out before dawn, using the cover of darkness to slip unseen from our camp up on the mountain. It’s just one day from new moon; pitch black in the valley.
It takes us thirty minutes to get down the hill. At the bottom Toby and I look at each other and I whisper, “Did Jack notify the TOC about us?”
Jack, our comms guy, was given the task of notifying our tactical operations center as to what we’ll be doing. The area we’ll be operating in is a gunship kill box; air assets are free to shoot or bomb any heat signature that pops up in this grid. We’ve seen the videos, a blacked-out screen with tiny little green trails zipping around—people fleeing for their lives—and then disappearing in a blip. We call it Murder TV. Here we are, dressed in local garb, don’t even have IR glint tape on us, nothing whatsoever that identifies us. Jack has shown up as less than reliable in a few instances.
“Fuck it,” says Toby. “We’re not going back up this hill.” I agree. I just hope Jack has done his job.
We start out at the south end of the valley, find our way up to a goat trail that runs along about three quarters of the way up the mountain ridge. Our plan is to follow that trail as it winds its way roughly north-northeast up through the whole valley, and hunt.
We start tracking.
It sounds arcane and exotic, but it’s really pretty basic if you just pay attention. You look for any disturbed ground, broken twigs, anything out of place. It’s amazing how clumsy and sloppy human beings are, compared to animals. A guy will drop a shell casing out of his pouch, drop bits of paper, spit somewhere out in the open. You say, Oh, this guy stopped to take a piss here. You pretty quickly put together a picture: how many people there are, what direction they’re going, what they’re doing.
Of course, the people we’re tracking are not so lazy. They know the area really well, and they know how to hide. Still, we have no trouble finding trace. Our prey hides out and sleeps at night; when daybreak comes they roll up their stuff and stash it in the grass or the bushes. We find some bedrolls and simple camping gear. A teapot, still warm. We stop and glass, get out our binos, scan the area. Mark the position in our notebook.
Every now and then we stop and whisper back and forth. Mostly, though, we communicate with hand signals. We continue tracking, stopping, glassing.
I see a guy.
The valley population is in the hundreds, but by now the bombs have chased them all out. All the regular inhabitants are gone, for now. Any people we see are here for a reason, and it’s the same reason we’re here. We’re all on the hunt.
There is a mix of Taliban and Al Qaeda out here. It isn’t hard to tell them apart. The Talis are grizzled, hardened by the natural environment. The Arabs have a softness to them; a lot of them come from wealthy Saudi families and grew up in a fairly easy environment, and have only recently signed up to fight a jihad. The Taliban guys are as old as the mountains.
This guy is Taliban. I have him in my sights. He doesn’t know I’m here. I could shoot him. I could shoot him right now.
We are absolutely itching to take down some live targets. But if we start taking shots, this whole valley is going to know it.
I don’t shoot him. We mark the position and keep going. We trace a path throughout the valley, one full sweep up and one full sweep back down. We mark some six or seven positions. We leave virtually no trace. No one sees us.
We get back to camp that night, report in, meet up with our two air force combat control techs, CCTs. One of them says, “Hey, you want to do this yourself?”
Normally you would go to a JTAC (joint terminal air controller) training course to learn how to do this. But they train us up right on the spot: here’s how the nine-line works, here’s how you call in each one, and so on, and a few minutes later I am on the radio with an F-16.
A sniper in the sky.
“Reaper 1, this is Red Devil 1. I have multiple enemy in the vicinity, would like to request ordnance drops on all.”
The pilot responds with available resources.
“Roger that,” I continue. “First position, four enemy at…” and I read off the coordinates in latitude and longitude of the first position we marked in our notebook. “You are clear to fire. Fire when ready.”
I’m watching the valley below on my spotting scope. It is now dead-on new moon, total blackness out there, but here and there faint flickers betray hints of campsites being sparked to life. I know which one I’m looking at.
Then, BOOM! a brief fireball.
“That’s a direct hit,” I report to the pilot, and I call in the next set of coordinates.
And the next.
And the next.
We kill them all.
* * *
We ended a lot of lives that night. Toby and I and our faceless companion, the voice in the sky, the one who actually dropped those bombs and did our killing for us.
I’m back at the California table. Someone’s put a champagne glass in my hand. And then I remember one more detail from that night. The voice coming over the radio, the F-16 pilot’s voice—it was a woman.
I look at the woman sitting next to me. She smiles faintly, and nods again.
“Yeah,” she says. “That was me.”
We don’t say anything for a moment. Then both raise a glass to the bride and groom.
A toast to the living.