Drone Warrior Read online

  It was always a tough call not to hit a target, because the target would live another day to plan or conduct attacks. And there was always a chance that we might never see the target again. But the cold-shift call still had to be made if the situation demanded it.

  I never personally witnessed any military commanders make a call to strike knowing that women or children would be harmed. Innocent civilians did get hurt and killed. This was a war we were fighting, after all. And these were men who didn’t think twice about unleashing violence on innocents. Of course, sometimes the drone feed didn’t catch everything before the assault team went out. It happened.

  One time, a team of operators cut off a fleeing truck and the target started firing at them. As far as the team knew from the drone, the target and the other passengers in the truck were all fighters. The slant count had called for three men, no women or children. From a chopper, an assault team fired back in force, taking out everyone in the truck in a matter of seconds. When they landed, the team learned that things weren’t as they had seemed on the drone feed: they had accidentally just killed a woman and a child, along with the main target.

  A mistake like this was horribly tragic, and took a devastating mental toll on the team, who was ultimately responsible. Incidents like these weren’t passed over lightly as simple errors, either. Unwarranted deaths haunted the operators at night. Deaths like these haunted me.

  IN THE BOX, WE BEGAN DISCUSSING WHAT TO DO NEXT. WE SPOKE IN FAST, CLIPPED conversations, sentences sometimes not finished because we knew each other like brothers.

  “Have we been here before?”

  “Check the logs.”

  “Roger.”

  “Photos?”

  “Wait.”

  “I need callouts of all the entry and exit points.”

  “Is NSA picking up anything on their phones?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How much longer is the Pred on station?”

  “Strike?”

  We could take him out now and immediately put an end to his work. But then we also gave up the chance to gather more information about the larger ISI network, while others in his group could just as easily carry out the same attack on a U.S. base.

  The thing that made a strike against Scarface an especially difficult decision was that capturing him didn’t necessarily have an upside. He was a hard-liner and the odds were that he knew our systems well enough to withstand interrogations before he gave us anything actionable. Plus, once word got out that we’d grabbed him, his people would burn everything and go deeper underground.

  There was one other option: keep tracking him with the drone, sucking up more information about him and his people, especially since he was so close to the top of the network. There were only so many high-level leaders like Scarface. If we followed him for even one more week, he could take us to terrorist safe houses, weapon caches, and more associates, helping us to further map out the world of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Our drone would be there watching when he turned off all the lights in his house and went to sleep. The drone would be there as the sun rose, capturing and recording every single move. All we had to do was just sit back and watch—a movie unfolding in an array of highly defined pixels right in front of us.

  I made the call. “Let’s stick with him,” I said.

  But that’s not how it went down.

  A RANGER TEAM OPERATING IN THE SAME AREA HAPPENED TO BE WATCHING OUR live drone feed. We had a vast interconnected network across the battlefield, and it was necessary to collaborate. That they were watching was no secret. They didn’t hear our conversations or know many of the details about our operations. Usually they just monitored our feeds for situational awareness and in case one of their aircraft needed to cross into our drone’s airspace.

  Most times this interconnectedness worked.

  Our special ops group didn’t often hold specific territory. We went wherever we wanted—unlike the Rangers, who were responsible for specific swaths of terrain.

  Just to eliminate any problems, Max, the assault commander, had gotten the Ranger commander on the line to tell him that we’d located Scarface in their operating area and that they should stand down.

  “We’re good to go,” Max had said to me. “They’re aligned with us.”

  On our monitors, the entire compound was now in view. Everyone had gone inside. The sun was out and there were no heavy winds or clouds on the horizon. Beautiful drone-flying weather. We were all set for a typical follow and began to wait it out.

  I wondered if we should bring in another asset just in case the one drone wasn’t enough. Do we need a backup plan?

  Another ten minutes went by, just waiting, the drone circling the compound as I skimmed through old files we had on Nasir, looking for anything.

  Then Jake saw something flash out of the corner of the screen.

  “Multiple vehicles are approaching the compound from the main road,” he called out.

  “What?”

  “They’re coming fast.”

  “Shit, those vehicles look large. Zoom in to see what kind of vehicles they are.”

  The camera operator took us in.

  What the fuck is this? Those are American Strikers. What’s going on?

  Strikers were very distinct: eight big wheels, a rocket launcher, a manned turret. They were almost as large as tanks and built to carry troops into combat zones. Now there were four of them barreling toward the compound, speeding like they were going to conquer the territory, huge dust clouds rising in their wakes. One crashed right through the gate, while the other three followed behind and lined up in formation parallel to the house.

  Who the hell were these guys?

  In the Box, we stared in disbelief as the scene played out. Suddenly I had no control. It was scary. Not a situation anyone wants to be in. We watched as the Strikers’ rear door ramps dropped open and soldiers in full camouflaged combat gear jumped out, automatic weapons leveled at the compound and pressed up against the vehicles for cover.

  Army Rangers.

  The Predator camera operator confirmed: “U.S. forces in the picture.”

  “Son of a . . .” someone yelled next to me.

  “We just confirmed that they weren’t going to be there, right?”

  “Right?”

  Everyone was looking around the room in agreement.

  One of the soldiers had a loudspeaker pressed to his face and we could tell that he was yelling into it, probably calling for Scarface to come out.

  Knowing him, he was not going to step out with his hands up.

  Meanwhile, Max was on the phone with the Ranger commander again. He was pissed, spitting into the mouthpiece.

  “What the fuck, I thought we were on the same page with this? Why are your guys at the fucking compound?”

  After a brief, heated discussion, Max hung up. The Ranger commander blamed the whole thing on a breakdown of their comms system; he was unable to call his guys off before they showed up at the house.

  “That’s such bullshit,” I said. “I don’t believe it.” The comms systems don’t just go down. It was clearly a case of the Rangers wanting to take credit for a big target. We were on their turf and they didn’t want anyone showing them up, even if we’d found the guy.

  There was no time for bitching.

  “All right, guys, it is what it is, but we need to support them now. Switch the Predator to squirter control.”

  Squirters were people who scurried or “squirted” out the sides of a building or car or escaped an explosion.

  The Predator now had a completely new mission to perform: force protection of U.S. troops in the picture. We’d look for any threats to the Rangers and make sure no one escaped out the back.

  But the compound was still quiet. For a solid five minutes or so no one came out, despite the megaphone.

  Finally, a woman hesitantly walked out of the front door. She had three children by her side and her hands were full of something. The younger male w
alked out behind her. At the front of the house, the group came to a full stop.

  Typically, people were asked to stop moving in a situation like this to ensure they didn’t have any bombs or weapons.

  The woman and children started to walk very slowly and carefully toward the soldiers and were then guided to places behind the Strikers. After a pause, one male followed, leaving one inside.

  We all put our headsets on and switched to the Rangers’ radio frequency.

  One guy was in the middle of explaining what they found out.

  “The woman told us that the male in the house asked to have all the guns brought to him. He hugged them goodbye, gave them his phone and money, and told them to leave immediately. She said the man told her that he was not coming out.”

  That’s when the shots came.

  I could see the muzzle of an AK-47 sticking out of a high window, spraying the ground in front of the house, like he had just blown through a line of coke. The Rangers returned a blizzard of fire.

  In our camera, we could see hundreds of bullets like little flashes of light, streaking the air, pummeling the house.

  The barrage of bullets kept coming.

  But the guy wouldn’t die. The muzzle of his AK-47 still stuck out sporadically through different windows in the house, spraying rounds everywhere.

  Then, out of nowhere, the Striker launched a rocket, demolishing the top corner of the house and opening a huge hole in the roof.

  “Switch to infrared,” I said.

  Now the drone camera operator zoomed into the corner to see if we could get a glimpse inside the house.

  Within minutes another rocket hit the same top corner of the house, opening an even larger hole and damaging the complete exterior. That’s when we saw a body curled on the ground: lifeless and contorted in a way that a body should not be.

  The Rangers eventually stopped firing and a quiet settled over the scene. It seemed like hours had passed because of the chaos. After a long waiting period, the Rangers moved into the house.

  Was this Scarface? Or someone else? I worried that there were others in the building. But my biggest concern was that Scarface was wearing a suicide vest and was trying to draw them in.

  The drone continued to maintain a solid orbit around the compound, the camera still looking for other signs of life or squirters. It took a good five minutes for the all-clear but we finally heard it come over the radio.

  “We have confirmed jackpot, one enemy KIA.”

  In the Box, we were conflicted. We were of course happy that Scarface wouldn’t live to see through his attack on American forces. His death would be a blow to the network. All that was good. But a part of me couldn’t help but wish we’d followed him for a few days or weeks longer. Manhattan and Brooklyn were still lurking out there.

  Staring at the feed, I couldn’t take my eyes off the lifeless body. I’d found Scarface and brought the Rangers here. Intentionally or not, it was my first kill.

  12

  FINDING

  A GROOVE

  “You need to sleep,” Max said to me one morning when he came strolling into the Box. “You look like shit.”

  The guys had started calling me Casper because I’d become pale all over and was losing weight. My clothes hung off of me. I had lost nearly thirty pounds. The shirts ballooned, dwarfing my stature. I had to cinch my belt to the tightest hole to keep my pants up. It was October 2009 and by then I had logged thousands of hours of flight time in four months. Some days felt like I was living inside the screen, my eyes the unblinking drone camera, flying endlessly over deserts and cities.

  “You need to eat more than that damn cereal, Casper,” Max said, pointing at the mess of emptied-out Frosted Flakes bowls in front of me. A stack of empty Rip Its sat at my elbow.

  “Later,” I said. “I’ll eat and sleep later.”

  I just couldn’t take my eyes off the screens anymore. I got more and more sucked into the hunt, failing to grab regular meals at the mess hall, breaking for a piss only every four hours, stinking of body odor because I hadn’t showered in a week. As the weeks passed, the hunt had long started to feed me like a drug. One mission fueling the next. I sudied intelligence files, watched the drone camera scan, scrutinizing nearly every single pixel of the streaming images burning on the screen.

  Day after day, night after night, we took the war to the enemy. At the same time, my body was fighting a war within itself, coping with the mental stress of it all and starting to show on the outside the health toll it was exacting, despite my trying to hide it from others. I didn’t want any of the team perceiving weakness on my part—physical or otherwise. They needed to trust me, and to have confidence every time I sent them out. But the reality was that I was wasting away at an unhealthy rate.

  There was no sense of time in the Box. It was always dark, with the monitors lit up on the wall, our laptops flashing with messages from other Boxes around the globe, and Washington, D.C., and updates on new targets. Our birds could stay airborne eighteen to twenty hours at a time so we tried to keep up with that, the technology driving us almost as much as knowing our targets were still out there plotting against us.

  The footage was at times mind-bendingly boring. Image after image of shitty trucks, empty rooftops, dusty compounds, and snaking desert roads. But I couldn’t look away, for fear of missing something.

  I fought to keep my eyes open and hated giving in to sleep. Every hour wasted was another hour the enemy had to plan, another hour it had to kill. There were hundreds of them out there and I had become addicted to finding them.

  When I wasn’t watching drone feeds, I looked over homemade terrorist videos and bloodstained documents recovered from our nightly raids. The things I saw were sickening, things no one should see in their lifetime. Our targets videotaping themselves slashing the throats of other Muslims like goats, or holding severed heads up in front of the camera. Burning children alive, raping women in their own homes.

  I saw the worst of humanity during those days. But I kept watching because some videos provided clues to help fill intel gaps in our larger puzzle. The barbarism my enemy displayed during these scenes only emboldened me more. My mission became more important than ever.

  When I slogged back to my trailer in the middle of the night or in the hazy early morning hours, I began to have problems sleeping, even though I was tired to the bone. I couldn’t switch off my brain.

  After one long day, I lay there on my stiff single bed, a paperlike sheet over me, while my mind played through different strategies, as if part of it were still back in the Box. What had we missed that day and how we might have done it better? I spent that night dreaming I was a camera in the sky, scanning a city I’d never seen before.

  With every target taken out, I gained more and more confidence. I refined my craft of puzzle making, one target after the other, got better at seeing things through the haze of repeated images, spotting the anomalies in the data, more adept at the endless circling and waiting involved in the lead-up to the perfect hit.

  The job was breaking me down, but the stakes were too large—I couldn’t give up.

  SOMETIMES BACK HOME, PEOPLE WOULD ASK ME, “HAVE YOU EVER KILLED ANYONE?” Usually I responded with a version of a quote from one of my favorite movies, True Lies. In the scene where Schwarzenegger’s character is asked about all the people he’s killed, he answers, “Yeah, but they were all bad.”

  In my mind, I don’t know that I can say I’ve actually killed anyone.

  I imagined a lot of military guys got that question from civilians who don’t know any better about what they are truly asking. I didn’t keep track of the dead as the months passed. Didn’t think about death in terms of numbers. That wasn’t the point.

  The point was to protect Americans and other innocent people who didn’t wield the same power I had now. I don’t want to disappoint people, but it’s really not much more complicated than that. We were after terrible people. End of story.

 
I remembered a guy we’d been after for months. One day he drove a car into the middle of a busy market in the Shaab neighborhood of Baghdad. He had a small boy and a small girl in the backseat. The kids couldn’t have been more than ten years old.

  Local civilians in the market watched as he left the kids in the car and disappeared into the shops nearby. A few minutes later, the car exploded. More than fifty people in that open market died—including those two children.

  The driver had rigged the entire vehicle to explode—and he’d used those children to make the parked car look harmless to security nearby. I wasn’t surprised. These people, but for biological technicality, were not human.

  And yes, we eventually tracked that guy down and killed him. That one didn’t get a choice.

  These atrocities were now becoming commonplace.

  BUT WHILE I MAY HAVE BEEN ISSUING ORDERS AS TO WHO LIVED OR DIED, VERY often it meant someone else had to pull the trigger.

  On a particular 2:30 A.M. assault, we sent the operators in—and it unfolded according to plan: the flicker of gunfire, followed by the assault team rushing the house, the man coming out with a gun, the man falling to the ground, and then Max, the commander, calling over the radio, “Jackpot.” The operators shot the target dead.

  Over the crackling radio, Max relayed that they were going to examine the site for any leads or material that could be used later. But they’d have to do it quickly, before the rest of the town woke up.

  Another day at the office.

  I always stayed up until the team returned home, so they’d know I wasn’t going to sleep until they were safe. Plus, those few late-night hours alone in the Box gave me more time to analyze new targets for the next day.

  The Box was as peaceful as it ever was at that time, hours past midnight now, most of the team asleep or on their way. It was the kind of calm that made every small sound louder in my head: the computer servers with all our intelligence whirring with activity, the occasional stutter of a radio comm from somewhere else, some machine beeping.