Jake Wood’s platoon was given a day off after Nathan Windsor was killed at the intersection of Angels and Pirates, just outside Fallujah, in February 2007. The next day was to be a light one, too—one of the squads would go out on a routine patrol. A coin was flipped. Clay Hunt’s squad lost; Jeff Muir and Jake Wood got to spend another day hanging around FOB Viking. Jeff, Jake, and Clay were watching a season of 24, the Kiefer Sutherland spy series, and Jeff told Clay, “Don’t worry, bro, we’ll hold the next episode until you get back.”
An hour or so later, Jeff went to take a shower. He had just finished brushing his teeth and was walking back to his hooch when a Marine he barely knew came walking in the opposite direction and said, “Hey, Muir, you know anyone named Hunt?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“He got shot.”
Muir grabbed the guy. “How bad?” He didn’t know. Jeff ran back toward his hooch and saw that everyone was getting their stuff together, mounting up, going out to Route Lincoln where the attack had taken place. He ran to his bunk and was gathering his gear when Jake came in and said, “Hey, Clay got shot.”
“How bad?” Jeff asked, knowing from the tone of Jake’s voice that it wasn’t terrible.
“He got shot in the wrist . . . He’s out there, over by the CP. He wants to see you.”
Jeff dropped everything and ran to the command post, where Clay was sitting on the front of his Humvee, all bandaged up and high as a kite on morphine. “Hey, man,” he said when Muir approached. “Can you get me a beer?”
There was no beer downrange, no drugs or alcoholic beverages permitted. Muir began to laugh.
“C’mon, bro, get me a beer. I love you, man.”
Ahhh, the morphine, Jeff thought: everybody loves everybody on morphine.
“You’ll be drinking beer before I will,” Jeff said. “You’re out of here. What happened?”
“I was prone, on the SAW,” he said. “Fucker shot me through the wrist. He missed me by six inches.”
“You okay?”
Clay shrugged. And then they took him to the hospital in Fallujah. Within a week, he was back in California.
“Mom, I should have been dead,” Clay said, when his parents visited him at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. “Two seconds earlier, I would have been dead. I was prone, with the machine gun, but I lifted up. I used my left arm to lift up, so my left wrist was down where my head had just been.”
There had been an AQI sniper in their area of operations, a magic sniper, very talented. The theory was that he had nailed Windsor in the neck, which was a great shot. He’d also nailed another Marine they didn’t know, from a moving car, and that guy had been walking—it was nearly impossible to make that shot. Clay believed the magic sniper had shot him, too. (Back in Iraq, Jake and Jeff came to the same conclusion.) Clay had certainly been lucky: the round had gone straight through, with minimal damage. Still, his wrist would never be quite the same. He would no longer be able to push open a door with his flat palm—he could only use his fist. He would have to do push-ups with his left fist and right palm on the ground in perpetuity. It wasn’t so bad.
“Well, that’s over now,” Clay’s dad said. “You’ve got a million-dollar wound. You don’t have to go back.”
“I’m going back,” Clay said.
“They might not let you.”
“I need to go back,” Clay said. “They need me.”
Stacy Hunt knew better than to argue with his son. When Clay got an idea in his head, that was pretty much it. The boy ran at two speeds, obsessed or scattered. There had been an official diagnosis for this: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Clay had been born early, tiny. He had always been . . . a challenge, different, a bundle of real talents and vexing deficits. Stacy didn’t always handle this as well as he could have—certainly not as well as Clay’s mother, Susan, who had more patience and more time for her son and could express her love for him far more easily than Stacy could. Susan seemed focused on Clay’s strengths; Stacy worried about his weaknesses.
The Hunts had met at the University of Texas and done very well for themselves. Stacy was in a boom market in Houston, a city that exploded in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century. They weren’t exactly wealthy, but they were certainly comfortable, living in the western suburbs in a development called Rustling Pines. Their older child, a daughter, was a straight-ahead success in high school. She was a cheerleader with very good grades, a real go-getter. Clay had the makings to be all that, too—a normal kid, a better than normal kid. He was very smart, ticketed for the Advanced Placement track in school and—to Stacy’s delight—a fine athlete, even though he was small; in football, he made up for his size with toughness. He was a very good kid, too, in his way: he loved going on church service projects, thought hard about the deep things—like God—and never was mischievous in an evil way. But he sometimes would drift into trouble—a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Stacy believed. Or he was just oblivious, off in his own world.
When Clay was four years old, Stacy took him to the country club and began to teach him golf, which, along with football, was an iconic Texas sport. Much to his delight, the kid wasn’t bad. He bought Clay a mini-set of golf clubs, and Clay was knocking the ball around—hitting it very well for his size—by age five. Stacy knew that Clay didn’t have the patience for more than four or five holes, but he expected that limit would expand over time. No doubt they’d be playing full rounds before long—but the opposite happened. The golf course featured several water hazards, and on sunny days turtles would bask on the banks. Clay was far more interested in the turtles than he was in golf. He would abandon his clubs mid-hole, run down to the water, and try to capture the turtles. Stacy couldn’t pull him away. There were times Clay would arrive home in tears. He desperately wanted to please his father, but the turtles . . . He couldn’t stay away from them.
Soon Clay was organizing his friends to go over to a nearby bayou on turtle-hunting expeditions. He brought his captures home, and Susan set out a washtub on the back patio—within weeks, the washtub was crammed with seventeen red-eared slider turtles, which stank to high heaven. But Susan tolerated it because Clay had taken his obsession to his fourth grade classroom. He read everything he could about turtles and was going to write a report. But he just couldn’t get it out. He had physical trouble writing—he’d had, from birth, a fine-motor-skills deficit. And now it was driving him crazy. “Mom, I know everything there is to know about turtles. Why can’t I write it all down?” So Susan negotiated a deal with the teacher. Clay would tape-record his paper, and Susan would write it out.
Not all of Clay’s classroom problems were so easily solved, especially as he moved into middle school, where the teachers weren’t as interested in nurturing a rambunctious kid, no matter how intelligent. He would bounce and chatter in the classroom, disturbing the other students. If he was interested in something—anything that involved the natural world, for example—he would be intense to the point of disruption; if he was bored by a subject, he would make that obvious, too. The Hunts were told that their son would have to be medicated. Ritalin helped, and Adderall helped more, but sometimes Clay seemed dulled to the point of witlessness. Stacy had very mixed feelings about this: drugs for a kid so young? It wasn’t until Clay went off to summer camp in central Texas without his medication—the doctor had said Ritalin wasn’t required in the summer—that Stacy was entirely convinced that all this stuff was necessary.
Four days after Clay left home, the Hunts received a call from his camp counselor. “Listen,” he said, “I’m not sure this is going to work for another three weeks for Clay. He’s bouncing all over the place.”
Susan said, “Okay, we’ll get his medicine to you as soon as possible,” and she began to cry. Stacy felt terrible, but he didn’t know what to say. There was no way of escaping this thing.
Life was no easier when Clay returned from camp. His football jersey read “C. Hunt” on the back, and some of the other players made the “H” silent; that would be his nickname. He hated being picked on; he internalized every harsh judgment and was unable to distinguish between good-natured ribbing and serious personal attack. Even when he knew the teasing was benign, he found it hard to come up with the quick riposte. Any sort of jibe was like oil-spill petroleum on a duck’s back.
He was a good little football player, but again, prone to screw up. In one junior high school game, Clay’s team was leading a local rival 7–6 late in the fourth quarter. Their opponents were driving toward the goal line. Clay, playing defensive back, intercepted a pass in the end zone. If he had just dropped down and taken a knee, the ball game would have been over. But he decided to run the ball out and fumbled it to the other team on the 4-yard line. Clay’s team won, so it wasn’t a total disaster, but Stacy wondered: Why were things like that always happening to Clay? Why couldn’t he make clear decisions? He knew rationally that the ADHD had something to do with it, but he was—and this was hard to admit—worried about his son at times. Susan, watching Clay struggle for his father’s approval, was growing impatient with Stacy, drifting away.
There was one respite, one thing that not only seemed to calm Clay down but made him feel pretty good: he loved smoking marijuana. Somehow, he had a very good freshman year in high school, but things began to fall apart when he became a sophomore. He got his driver’s license and a certain amount of freedom—but freedom was the last thing he needed. And by spring break that year, Clay told his mom, “I need to get out of here. I’ve got to change schools.” Preempting her Why? he added, “I can’t go back to Stratford and stay away from the things I need to stay away from.”
Stacy’s reaction, privately, was negative. Why was Clay tossing this monkey wrench into the middle of a school year? Would he lose his credits? All his friends sent their kids to Stratford; it meant something in Houston.
“At a certain point, with a kid like this, you’ve got to quit worrying about what people think and just do what’s right for your kid,” Susan said.
In fact, she was proud of Clay. He knew he was in trouble and wanted to save himself. That took real guts. Susan and Clay visited Houston Christian High School, which was smaller and more structured than Stratford. They met with the principal and walked the grounds, and Clay said, “This feels good. This will work.”
It did work. Because it was a smaller school, he got to play a lot more football than at Stratford. He stayed on his meds and did well academically. He scored an impressive 1380 on the SAT and, just like Jake Wood, 32 on the ACT. He decided that he was strong enough to go back to Stratford for his senior year and graduate with his class.
To keep himself disciplined, Clay joined a church drug treatment program in Katy, Texas, which was about an hour west of Houston. The program—which met every Wednesday night and Saturday morning—had a family component, which Stacy found uncomfortable. Clay would go for group counseling, and the parents were expected to go to a group session of their own. Some of the other parents were rough, uneducated. They talked about their demolition-derby lives with an unembarrassed candor that seemed intrusive and undignified. “I can’t do this,” Stacy said after several sessions. His life wasn’t a demolition derby; he had a kid with a learning problem. “I just cannot relate to these people.”
One evening, around dinnertime, Clay received a phone call from one of his friends in the treatment program. He raced back into the dining room, a man on a mission. “Robbie’s in trouble out in Sealy,” he said. “He needs me to come help.”
“What about his parents?” Stacy asked. Susan was off at a meeting somewhere; he and Clay were alone.
“His parents suck. He wants me.”
“You’ve got school tomorrow,” Stacy said. “Sealy’s fifty miles away. You need to do your homework.”
“You need to move your car,” Clay said, resolute. Stacy had come in late and parked behind Clay’s pickup.
“Clay . . .”
“I need you to move your fucking car.” Clay was angry now, but Stacy wouldn’t budge, and soon they were toe-to-toe, Clay screaming, Stacy telling him to get a handle and do his homework . . . and Clay took a swing at him, hard, a right to Stacy’s left temple.
Stacy staggered, but he didn’t fall and didn’t swing back. He was stunned, furious, but mostly just shocked by the sudden violence. He wasn’t a violent man; he simply gathered himself and left the house. He took a long walk around the neighborhood, giving Clay time to calm down and himself time to think. This was pretty scary, and the worst thing, he realized, was that this was who Clay really was. He’d been desperate to help a friend, a fine impulse—Susan would be proud—but it was out of all proportion, out of all reason. Stacy now began to understand that all the usual upper-middle-class restraints—the need to study, go to college, control his impulses—were plastic Bubble Wrap to Clay. He would rip through and destroy it all, if it prevented him from doing the things he felt were important. Helping others was very important; loyalty to his friends was sacrosanct. But restlessness, disorganization, avoiding the hard work in subjects that bored him, and—this was now undeniable—lashing out, sometimes violently, when he was frustrated, those were part of the package, too.
Clay meandered around for the next three years. He went to Blinn Junior College, a Texas A&M feeder school, but he didn’t last there for very long. He went to the University of North Carolina at Asheville but he joined a fraternity, majored in partying, and didn’t last very long there either. He became a snowboarding bum and spent a season working at Winter Park, Colorado.
His parents separated, divorced, married other people. Susan Hunt was Susan Selke now, living near Lexington, Kentucky, married to a kind man who had ditched real estate to become a minister. And then one day, as she was shopping in Walmart, her phone rang.
“Hey, Mom, whatcha doin’?” Clay asked.
“Buying groceries, getting ready to head home,” she replied. “What’s up?”
“Well, Mom, I wanted you to know that I just joined the Marines,” Clay said. She was in the kitchen and bath aisle. She sat down on a pile of towels.
“You know they’ll send you to Iraq,” she told her son.
“I know,” Clay replied. He sounded calm, he sounded . . . good. There had been enough blood under the bridge by now that Susan knew not to trust that completely.
She asked him to check in with a trusted psychologist who knew Clay before he did anything drastic, like actually join the Marines—but a part of her also was thinking: maybe the military would be good for Clay, maybe it would help him to organize himself. A few days later, the counselor called her in Kentucky. “I talked to Clay, and he really has thought it through,” he said. “I think Clay was made to do this.”
Stacy was surprised, but proud as well. He took Clay back to the recruiter to discuss what his MOS (military occupational specialty) would be. Clay was excellent at taking apart cars and putting them back together—it was one of the things he loved doing—and Stacy hoped that he’d get a billet in a tech specialty like aircraft mechanics. But Clay wanted the infantry.
“Well, if that’s what you want,” he said, frustrated. Yet again, Clay was going his own way.
Two months later, Stacy and Clay woke up well before dawn and went down to the central post office in Houston to meet the four thirty a.m. military van that would take Clay to the airport. Clay gave his father a big hug—Stacy was near tears—and said, with utter discipline and clarity, “Dad, this is what I want to do. Thanks for letting me get to this point.”
And he was an excellent Marine, honored as the second-best recruit in his boot camp class. Both Stacy and Susan attended Clay’s boot camp graduation at Camp Pendleton in California, and they saw a stunning transformation: he had put on some muscle, and Susan was struck by what a physical presence he seemed to be. More than that, he had lost his nervous, desperate edge. He was confident now, quietly confident, and he was calm. He had been selected for recon school—the Marine equivalent of special forces—which was a major achievement. He was very proud of himself, Stacy saw, and in a manly way. Susan had the exact same feeling. “My little boy is now a young man.”
Except that he was a young man going to war.
Clay survived his brief time in Iraq, but something about him had definitely changed. Both Jake and Jeff noticed it from the emails Clay sent after he was shot. They came in bunches, scorching the screen, fierce and desperate:
“Can’t wait for you to come home, so we can have a beer.”
“What’s happening? Has anyone been hurt?”
“I miss you guys so much.”
“I should be there with you.”
“I should be there with you.”
Jeff thought he understood Clay’s frustration. Blake Howey had been killed—and Clay hadn’t been there for him. Howey’s best friend, Nathan Windsor, had been shot by the magic sniper—and Clay had been stuck in his truck. There was real humiliation to that: The Humvee driver’s job was to stay behind the wheel, no matter what was going on outside—which was why drivers, in most cases, tended to be the guys you couldn’t trust to be outside in the fight. Or they were the guys you wanted to punish for mouthing off or generally being uncooperative, which was why Clay was driving. He had a big mouth and took orders reluctantly, if at all, from people he considered jerks.
And then three days after Windsor’s death, Clay had been shot—and before he came off his morphine high, he was gone: Baghdad, Germany, San Diego in a blur. His war was over, and he had barely fought it. And now he had to sit home—a REMF, a rear echelon motherfucker, doing REMFy crap back on post at 29 Palms—while Jeff and Jake went through all sorts of hairy shit. Jake was the best friend he’d ever had, he told his mom; Jeff was a brother. Nobody else in Third Platoon was killed during the five months that Clay wasn’t there, but plenty had been wounded—the spring of 2007 was the bloodiest period of the war in Iraq—and Clay felt like a slacker. He should have been there for them. And yet, when he’d been there, he’d been trapped, unable to help Howey, unable to help Windsor.
When Jake and Jeff came home from Iraq, Clay was waiting for them at the airport with their families. The three amigos, reunited, went on a mammoth road trip to Vegas and a Wisconsin football game. Clay seemed great at first, but it gradually became clear that something was off. It was especially clear to Jeff, who roomed with Clay at 29 Palms (Jake had been selected for a scout-sniper course and was being trained at Camp Pendleton). Clay seemed all tangled up in himself. He was trying to fight it, for sure. He had gone for help and been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The VA gave him its usual cocktail: Lexapro for anxiety, Valium for panic, and Ambien to get to sleep. But the drugs seemed to work at the wrong times or in the wrong ways, or perhaps they weren’t working at all. Clay would be up and hyper-hyper at eleven p.m. and then totally exhausted, unable to get off the couch at midday.
There were times, many times, when he was good old Clay—he had a girlfriend named Robin Becker, and they spent most weekends together—but he was kerblooey often enough to worry Jeff a lot.
Clay was intent on going back for another deployment, and he wanted to be with Jake. “That’s crazy,” Jeff told Jake. “I love Clay, but there’s something wrong with him. Believe me, I’m living with the dude. He can’t get to sleep. He can’t stay awake. Do you really think he can make it through sniper school?”
Jake wasn’t sure. Sniper school required fabulous discipline; the physical requirements were much tougher than boot camp had been—Jake was worried about his own ability to make it through, given the amount of running involved. The sand hills surrounding Camp Pendleton were brutal, especially without the benefit of combat adrenaline. There were days when Jake wanted to cut his foot off; the pain was constant, withering. But he also felt responsible for Clay. He had a choice: he could go back to Golf Company and be a squad leader in Third Platoon, or he could bring Clay along to snipers.
“You can’t bring him along,” Jeff said. “He has P-T-S-fucking-D.”
“But he’s a good Marine,” Jake said. “You know that. He’s fit, he can run and swim, and you know he’s a PT nut. For Christ-fucking-sake, he would have made it through recon school, if he hadn’t screwed up.” This was a good argument: recon school was the toughest training there was.
“I don’t know, Jake,” Jeff said. “Do you really need this burden?”
No, he didn’t. But he had no choice: cutting off Clay would be like cutting off his arm—and a lot worse than amputating his foot.
“Will you vouch for him?” his scout-sniper platoon Sergeant had asked.
“Yes,” Jake said. “Absolutely.”
“Then he’s your responsibility. If he doesn’t make it, you don’t either.”
And Clay did, indeed, make it. He handled all the physical parts easily; he’d always been an excellent shot. He had some tough moments—especially when he was being hazed, which was part of the drill—but everyone had their moments in sniper school. Jake had nearly gotten kicked out when his superiors found that he was still blogging; Jake’s Life had to be stowed for the next seven months. But this was Clay’s proudest time as a Marine; he was finally one of the elite.
Shawn Beidler, the Sergeant who had recruited Jake into snipers, thought this six-man sniper team was the best he’d ever had. Shawn was older, like Jake and Clay, and had been to college. He had worked with Jake in Iraq and loved the guy. He’d been skeptical about Clay—but found, as the training progressed, that he loved him, too. Shawn fell in easily with the three amigos when it came to partying in Manhattan Beach. He and Clay would have long, deep political conversations. They’d disagree at times, but that was okay. Clay knew stuff; he read a lot. He had real doubts about Iraq, but Afghanistan was supposed to be the good war—and they were all happy to learn in February 2008 that they were not going back to the sandbox, but heading to Afghanistan.
Their sniper team would be attached to Echo, Fox, and Golf companies of the 2/7 Marines, and that felt good, too. Golf had been their old company; as scout-snipers, they’d be out protecting their guys. They were ticketed for Helmand province, a dreadful, empty place in the far southwest of the country on the Pakistan border. The area would have been a complete wasteland if the Americans hadn’t built an elaborate irrigation system off the Helmand River in the 1950s. Wheat had been grown there in the past, but now the cash crop was poppies. It was the source of 90 percent of the world’s opium.
There were those who believed the Marines should never have gone to Helmand. They were needed elsewhere, especially in the mountainous east, where there was some tough fighting against the Taliban—or perhaps in Kandahar province, a major population center just east of Helmand, which was Taliban central, Mullah Omar’s home turf. But the Marine brass wanted their own area of operations—and the Brits, who’d been holding the fort in Helmand, needed help. Afghanistan was heating up; the Taliban had become a serious fighting force again after being nearly wiped out in 2001. The “good war” was becoming an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, and those poppies were funding the Taliban insurgency (as well as the corruption of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s regime). So in the spring of 2008, Jake and Clay’s sniper platoon was deployed to Helmand province.
It was a mess from the start. They were stuck at Kandahar Air Field for a month. Then they were moved to Camp Bastion, a British fort near Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand. They sat at Bastion, too, even as Echo, Fox, and Golf deployed. “What the hell is going on?” Jake asked Beidler. “They don’t have enough ammo for us?”
“Helicopters, I think,” Shawn said. In truth, the Marines were still trying to figure out where everyone should go.
“We should be out there, protecting our guys,” Jake said.
Which was prescient: a few days later, word came back that Third Platoon of Golf Company—their old platoon—had been hit. A Humvee had been blown up by an IED; four had been killed. Jake and Clay were berserk, trying to find out the names, experiencing a combination of guilt, disgust, and anger.
The names were awful. Clay lost a fire-team buddy, Layton Crass. Jake thought, at first, that he’d also lost a beloved member of his fire-team, Kevin Colbert, a Choctaw Indian from Oklahoma. It turned out that Colbert was still alive, but he had been seriously injured in the blast, with burns over 90 percent of his body. But the worst loss was Sergeant Mike Washington, Jr., the squad leader who had been given the job that Jake had been asked to take. Jake loved Washington. He had come to the Marines directly from high school in Seattle, but somehow Mike could bridge the gap with the older guys like Jake and Clay. He was a tall, handsome black guy, an excellent Marine, smart and funny, able to handle the physical challenges with ease.
Jake had felt good when he learned that Washington had been selected for the squad leader’s job that he’d rejected; Mike would take care of the guys. He’d bring them home. And now, for the second time in two deployments, Jake was thinking: that should have been me in that fucking Humvee. When he heard the news, he rushed out to the edge of Camp Bastion, over to the sandblasted Hesco barriers, and wept. He gathered himself and went back to Beidler. “I want a fucking transfer,” he said. “If we’re not going to be in the fight, I want to go back to my squad and take Mike’s place.”
Shawn calmed him down. The sniper team was a unit; removing Jake would be like pulling the carburetor from an engine. “I know it’s fucked,” Beidler said. “But we’ll be out there soon enough.”
Jake and Clay talked about it that night. They wanted to get out there now. “I would really like to get out there and waste some of those assholes,” Jake said. He looked at Clay, at the calm fury in his eyes, and thought: my brother is right there with me.
They were deployed about a week later to the heavily contested town of Sangin, which sat on the east side of the Helmand River in the north of the province. Jake was amazed by how primitive it was compared to Iraq: there was no infrastructure, no literacy. The Afghan government had zero presence there; the local tribes provided what order there was—and there wasn’t very much. The Taliban were everywhere; IEDs were everywhere. Their battalion would suffer thirty amputations during the deployment.
The conditions for the sniper team were rudimentary as well. They lived in a corner of the British FOB, in tents, in the midst of a sea of gravel. There were no shower trailers, no Porta-Jons. The hygiene was atrocious. They bathed in the river, dumped in Wag Bags, and peed wherever. Jake contracted a MRSA staph infection there.
Much of their work was at night. They would go out in the darkness, establish an oversight position in advance of an American troop movement, and wait for the Taliban to come and try to plant IEDs. It was boring, frustrating work. Clay fell asleep on security watch in the field one night, a near-unpardonable offense. “It was my medications, man,” he said to Beidler.
That didn’t wash at all. “If you can’t handle your medications, bro, you shouldn’t be here,” Shawn said.
“I’ll be okay,” Clay said. “I promise.”
But he wasn’t okay. He wasn’t reliable. He had come to the conclusion that the whole deployment, the whole war, was bullshit. He would complain constantly—and while Jake and some of the other snipers thought Clay’s complaints were valid, he was bumming out the team, cratering morale. Beidler pulled Jake aside. “What’s going on with Clay?”
“He’s got some personal shit he’s working through,” Jake said. “He’ll be all right.”
“You’ve got to talk to Clay, bro. He’s got to get his act together.”
Jake tried to appeal to Clay’s sense of duty and integrity. “You’ve got a job to do,” he told Clay after the sleeping incident. “You signed up for this. You have to do it—because if you don’t, if you’re not out there doing your job well, some of your brothers are not going to make it home. Clay, you do not want to be responsible for that. You do not want to live with that.”
Clay knew Jake was right. He promised to get his shit together. “I definitely do not want to be the guy who gets someone killed.”
And he did try, very hard. That was one of the toughest things for Jake, watching Clay trying so hard and sometimes struggling. Clay was never asked to be a shooter when they were out on a mission, but he held positions of great responsibility. He was integral to the team’s first coordinated shot. Two shooters were trained on two men in a group of Taliban, several hundred yards away. Clay counted down: “I have control,” he said calmly. “I have control. Stand by. Firing on the T of two. Five . . . four . . . three . . . t”—two Taliban dropped in their tracks—“two.” There was immense technical satisfaction in this, and there was vengeance for all their comrades who’d been blown up by IEDs, but Clay remained troubled. What were they doing out there in Sangin? What was the point?
There were rumors that they were going to be pulled out of Sangin and moved into a major battalion-sized set-piece battle for control of the town of Nowzad. That would make sense: taking territory, rather than just sweeping it and watching the Taliban leak back in like dirty water. But it never happened.
As the weeks passed, there were days that Clay simply did not want to go out on missions. “I cannot fight this war,” he told Jake. The reaction from their superiors was sympathetic at first. Everyone was exhausted. It was high summer, scorching, damp from all the irrigation water and yet dusty, with no amenities. No computers, no electricity for nonessential business, like watching DVDs. So, sure, it made sense that Clay really did need a break—you certainly didn’t want him in the field if he thought he would be a liability. But the days Clay stayed in began to increase, and finally the platoon Sergeant said to him, “Hunt, you’re on tent watch until further notice.” And he spent several weeks hanging out at the FOB, while the rest of the team went out on an extended mission.
Jake continued to protect him as best he could; he remained loyal, defended Clay to the others—and the rest of his teammates understood what Jake was doing and why. Shawn Beidler felt terrible about it—he really liked Clay, and they would remain friends when they got home—but the guy just couldn’t hack it downrange.
On one of their last patrols, the sniper team took an overwatch position in an old stone house, one of the more prodigious structures in the area, providing security for an Echo Company sweep through the adjoining farmland. They stashed the owner and his family in the basement and, situated on the second floor, tried to pick off the Taliban who were attempting to pick off Echo. As the sun rose and a hot day began, they saw children running out to the Taliban positions, carrying things—ammo, food, water, it was hard to tell. It seemed an organized operation, and they tried to put eyes on the organizer. Wheeler went downstairs and thought he saw the guy, a religious sort with a long beard, wearing a dark djellaba (or “man dress,” as the Marines called it). But it was impossible to get a shot at him without blowing their position. There was some debate about shooting one of the kids, a girl with an RPG tube running out toward the Taliban, but nobody was really up for that either.
As the sun arced toward midday, the Taliban called it quits and retired from the field. Beidler’s sniper team received a radio message that it was cool to pack up and leave. Normally they would have waited till nightfall, but there was a Cobra gunship in the air, ready to escort them out.
Jake walked point. He took two steps out of the compound, with Beidler just behind him. “Wood, hold,” Shawn said. “Is that the motherfucker?” Jake followed the line of Beidler’s sniper rifle and saw a man with a long beard standing in front of a rude mud hut, proselytizing vehemently, waving his arms in front of five children. Wheeler confirmed it was the guy he’d seen before.
Jake looked at the man, who seemed to be angry with a very young boy, gesturing out to the field and then back to the mud hut and out to the field again. He didn’t feel good about shooting the guy in the midst of the kids, but he told Shawn, “If this is the guy, let’s smoke him.”
Jake would later write, “The man jerked as if punched in the chest, and behind him the drab wall exploded in color as his heart erupted out his back. In an instant the man dropped to the ground . . . the splotch of red slowly dripping down the tan mud wall. Nothingness was replaced with screaming, the terrified shrieks of five children who, after a moment of disbelief, fled in every direction from the confines of my scope. I blinked, and suddenly my scope was empty.”