Drone Warrior Read online

  We took out the worst of the worst. But we had a broader mission in Iraq: attacking and destroying Al Qaeda in Iraq and its predecessor, the Islamic State of Iraq. We became one of the deadliest drone targeting teams in the military. Within the terrorist network, my focus was on taking out critical nodes—senior members who played key command and support roles that allowed the organization to function. Taking down one member led us to another, like one big puzzle, as we methodically connected the dots and made our way to the top.

  At the time, AQI was morphing into the Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI, which would later become the ISIS we know today after the group moved its operations into Syria due to increased U.S. pressure. We used the names AQI and ISI interchangeably at the time. Few in the public knew the group yet, but we’d been watching them closely for years. They were the biggest threat to the Iraqi government and stability in the region—and to the United States, as we’d soon find out.

  “Page Max in now,” I said.

  Max was the assault team commander for our task force—the stealth ground soldier, the finishing half of our special ops group. When things got bad, or when we wanted to grab our target, Max and his team of soldiers headed for the choppers stationed outside our door.

  Less than a minute later, he swooped into the room, already kitted up with body armor. He had a dip packed in his lip, as usual. He was tall and ripped, what you expected these legendary operators to look like.

  “We gotta shut these guys down now,” I told him, pointing to the bongo on the big screen.

  On the monitors, Abu Bashir’s bongo with all the explosives was now speeding southeast in the desert, while the other vehicle had departed in the opposite direction.

  Time was not on our side. Bashir was traveling fast toward the large city of Tikrit. Camp Speicher was there, with thousands of American forces and even more Iraqi civilians.

  “Max, my assumption is he’s either moving a large amount of explosives to be used for an attack or he’s going to use that bongo itself as the detonation device.”

  We had about twenty minutes now before Bashir reached Tikrit with the explosives. At that point he’d be too close for us to do anything if he decided to immediately detonate.

  “Good,” he said, “we’re going.”

  He paged the rest of his team to get ready.

  Our fleet of helicopters was warming up, their blades thrumming the hot air. According to standard operating procedure for our outfit, there were two MH-60s—we called them Little Birds—along with a few Black Hawks, all fully armed with machine guns and missiles. These weren’t simply some usual military aircraft. They were designed just for our kill/capture missions.

  Missions are about options—we’d make the decision about whether to strike Bashir with a missile or try to grab him on the ground on the scene.

  When the drone was armed, our screens turned into one red crosshair. Hellfire missiles are powerful and extremely precise. We could hit a car in traffic without scuffing the paint off any of the other cars.

  I briefed Max on the target’s current status and gave him an intelligence packet with printed photos of the target and interrogation cards with questions to ask anyone captured alive.

  Minutes later, Max and his team, dressed in desert-colored camouflage, armed to the teeth with Heckler & Koch 416 automatic assault rifles and customized sidearms, were flying away in the helos.

  As everything spun up, I began to worry that Bashir would get away. I also worried about the assault team. What if they tried to intersect and the bomber exploded just as they came into contact? What if I was wrong?

  There was no turning back now. I played out the various scenarios in my head. Did I miss something?

  Bashir was responsible for murdering hundreds of civilians with his explosives. He had brought into Iraq foreign fighters who blew themselves up in market centers, killing kids, families, and U.S. soldiers. I kept that in the back of my mind. I knew what was about to happen to him was just a matter of how.

  Did we need to kill him?

  This was always the question that came up in the last seconds. Sometimes there was no choice.

  I sent the file of Abu Bashir to my superior, who was at an interagency command center away from the kill zone to get his read on the situation.

  His opinion came back in seconds. He wanted to hold off on a Hellfire strike and see how it played out on the ground. We could use this guy alive, if he wanted to stay alive.

  “Your assault team is en route to the target and has an opportunity for possible capture,” he said on the chat.

  “Roger,” I shot back.

  The drone was to keep watch, playing cover, if anything went wrong.

  C’mon guys, get there.

  On my headset, I heard the assault team over the radio. “Five minutes TOT [time on target].”

  My eyes were locked on the TV screens, looking for anything out of place, the drone camera with its day-TV lens switched on, watching the bongo move through the desert and waiting for the choppers to suddenly flash into view.

  I wondered what it must be like to be talking to the guy next to you in your car driving down the road, chatting about what you are going to do that weekend, and then, the next second—you’re gone.

  Our bird’s camera was showing the bongo about a minute away from the city’s perimeter. And I couldn’t tell if our team would get there in time.

  “Thirty seconds before the vehicle reaches the population center.”

  Then the bullets came.

  THE BULLETS RAINED DOWN ON THE DESERT FLOOR IN FRONT OF THE BONGO, SO close to the truck and with such intensity that sand was spraying up in clouds onto the bongo’s hood.

  A second later, two helicopters with the assault team came screaming across the hood of the truck, causing the vehicle to slam on the breaks and come to a full stop.

  The Black Hawks were a few seconds behind and things started to blur into violent action. We set the drone’s course to orbit the scene.

  “In the picture,” a radio operator said over the wires, notifying everyone that U.S. troops were now confirmed within view of the drone’s camera feed.

  The assault team dropped out of the choppers hovering over the ground, goggled and guns pointing at the target. Because the truck could be rigged to blow at any moment, the guys moved slowly, weapons ready.

  When the two men finally stepped out of the bongo, the assault team was locked in on them, ready to kill if either made a wrong move. The men were standing there in shock, sand swirling all around them from the rotary winds of the choppers nearby.

  My heart was blasting around in my chest. It hurt.

  Split seconds in these situations were not like other people’s split seconds. It was like a car accident when time slows down right before impact.

  I had done everything to make sure that one of the men in that truck was Abu Bashir, my target. But there’s always the gut check, and the reality wasn’t so clear-cut: in my world you can never be 100 percent sure.

  Second guesses always creeped up at the very end of every operation. What if it wasn’t him? What if those weren’t explosives in the back of his truck? What if we killed an innocent? What if troops were killed, too?

  Finally, the two men stepped away from the bongo and dropped to the desert floor. I could see their hands go behind their heads. And then a few seconds later the assault team commander’s voice came over the radio.

  “Romeo, zero one,” Max said. “We have confirmed Jackpot.”

  2

  WHERE WERE YOU

  WHEN THE WORLD

  STOPPED TURNING?

  I was in my college apartment, half-asleep, on September 11, 2001, with the windows shut tight. The air smelled of a mix of old milk and unwashed socks and the plastic fan made annoying clicking sounds as it wobbled on the table next to my head. I squinted back a cracking headache, my memory still fuzzy from the frat party the night before. The digital red glare of the clock: 7:54 A.M.


  Why the hell was I up so early? The floor was a mess of Keystone Light beer cans and Maxim magazines. I had given myself the day off from class. Maybe I’d take the rest of the week off just to be sure I fully recovered. The apartment was dead quiet, my two roommates out cold. In my head, I could still hear the thumping rap music. We had some of the guys over after the party for a late-night session: drinking, pounding away at Halo on Xbox, and talking about the hot girls we’d met the night before.

  I was a typical freshman at the University of Houston, figuring myself out, but mostly partying, drinking, pledging frats, and cramming in study sessions. I had grown up in a little town called Katy, Texas, and dreamed of trading stocks on Wall Street, working for a big finance firm like Goldman Sachs or becoming a lawyer like a lot of my pals were doing. All of my friends had their lives pretty much mapped out from start to finish, as if they were working from a blueprint. I was the same way, until things swerved. That morning.

  I didn’t understand any of it at first. I was too young and narrow-minded. I didn’t even know what the World Trade Center symbolized. I didn’t know anything about Muslims, the Middle East, or why Islamic radicals I’d never heard of had so much hate for us.

  Before 9/11, I thought my life was heading in a mostly straight line.

  Then my mother called me frantic after the second tower fell. I told her not to worry. I was, after all, nowhere near New York.

  Days after the attack I started to digest things. The event seemed to wake me up, jolt me. The world I lived in suddenly seemed offensively superficial, the path I was on too safe. My life was a college apartment, frat parties, the drinking, the drugs, the girls. Over and over the same scenario played out nightly, and now it was a broken record that wouldn’t have had any meaning even if it played.

  I was missing something. That’s the best way I can put it. A lot of people came to the same conclusion in those months.

  The confusion of it all led me to the campus library, a little cubicle on the top floor, far away from anyone, where I pored over a mountain of books about terrorism, Islam, Al Qaeda. Stories of these pockets of groups who were forming around the world, intent on killing Americans.

  The stories of terrorism sucked me in, wouldn’t let me alone: One about the October 2000 bombing attack on the USS Cole in a harbor in Yemen, which killed seventeen American sailors; another about the truck bomb blasts against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in August 1998, which killed more than two hundred innocent people. I skipped hanging out with my friends and drinking at the frat. I made excuses not to party, embarrassed a bit, instead returning to the cubicle stinking of dust and old books. This wasn’t me. Something nagged inside, like a mysterious tap on the shoulder. When I finished one book, I went back for another.

  Weeks passed like this. Soon I was reading about all the intelligence services, what they did, which ones were in charge of finding terrorists. I read about the first drone strike the CIA did in Afghanistan that same November. I became obsessed with the Office of Strategic Services—the World War II group, led by the famous Wild Bill Donovan, that would later become the CIA. I spent weeks in the book stacks. One night I got locked in the library. I became enamored with the sacrifices that Army soldiers had made and the early intelligence networks that disrupted plots against the United States. A lightbulb turned on and I knew what I needed to do.

  It went fast. By late November, I was standing in front of an Army recruiter at a nearby strip mall, explaining that I wanted in. I wanted to be in the military intelligence corps. I told him that college and everywhere it led to felt meaningless. Everyone around me in school was doing the same thing, trying to go after the same degrees, that same boring life. The 9/11 attack opened me up and made me see for the first time just how small my life had been. I wanted something larger than myself, something outside of Texas. I wanted to serve my country and I wanted to be in the world of intelligence. This rushed out of me like I had been holding it inside for years.

  “I want to go to war,” I said.

  “I DON’T SEE WHY YOU’RE DOING THIS,” MY MOM SAID, ANGRY AS I WALKED THROUGH the front door. It was mid-2002 and months had passed since I entered the recruiter’s office. At first I didn’t know what she was talking about and started to say, what? But she cut me off.

  “An Army recruiter came looking for you,” she said. I could tell by the look on her face that all kinds of horrid thoughts of war swirled in her head. The recruiter had told her everything, that I had enlisted, that I was going into the Army. “Is it true?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Don’t worry,” I told her, as she began to cry.

  I hated anything that hurt her. I tried to tell her that people in Army intelligence never went to the front lines. That there was no way I was going to war. But none of it seemed to make sense. She kept shaking her head, as the tears rolled down her face, as if all she could ask was why. Why would someone who never talked about the military suddenly join—and not even tell her?

  We were close. My mom brought me up alone in Katy, Texas, a tiny town not far from Houston. Few ever strayed very far and the town was obsessed with only two things: guns and football. The pride of the place was the Katy High School football team, which won the state championship almost every year that I was there. The Tigers. Our stadium was nearly as big as some professional teams’.

  My dad split when I was three. Who knows where he went. He’d call in every once in a while but then disappear for years at a time. He spoke five languages and constantly traveled around the world, and for a long time I thought he was a spy. Maybe a part of me hoped he was something more than a father who cared only about himself, more like what the other families had around me. Maybe his wandering vagabond thing was somewhere deep inside me.

  We lived in a one-story house in a small suburb of Katy. Mom had been proud to take me out of the small apartments we’d bounced around as she chased jobs. The backyard felt like a football field and the front yard had a single tree, about six feet tall, put in the day we moved there. That tree never grew any taller in all the years I lived there, like it was just wasting away its life, praying for some water to rescue it.

  My mom was slim and athletic and her brown hair was always cut short. She worked as a computer programmer for big oil companies and had her own business on the side. I’m sure I didn’t appreciate all that she did at the time—her constant work put some distance between us—but I have a lot of admiration for her now. She always talked about the importance of respecting others, of having strong character and being a gentleman. Being a gentleman was an especially big deal to her. She made me read books about it and gave me gift certificates for classes on proper etiquette for when I would eventually meet a girl. Except that she always hated the girls I brought home. None of them ever seemed to live up to her standards. So at some point I just stopped bringing them around.

  I got a job at fifteen stocking shelves at a clothing store because my mom was laid up after a car accident and we needed money. But the good part was that I got my driver’s license, which meant I was cruising Katy’s main street for girls a year before my friends could get behind the wheel.

  During the times my mom had to play the dad, she knew how to lay down the law, even if it hurt. One time in ninth grade she caught me drinking beer and smoking cigarettes at a neighbor’s house and the belt came out. That was the kind of discipline she knew growing up while living on a farm outside Buffalo, New York. “Sorry,” I kept saying, to no effect. That evening I caught her crying in the bathroom.

  The day I told her that I was dropping out of college to join the Army, she cried for what seemed like hours. But she never tried to discourage me. Not that day or the days after, even though all of her friends told her she was crazy to let me go to war. The rest of the family told her she was a terrible mother for it and to let the degenerates of the country go risk their lives.

  My mom wasn’t alone in trying to figure me out. My friends didn’t know what to make
of it, either. One even said that I was too smart for it. “The Army is for people who have nothing better to do, who can’t get real jobs.” My other friends were never outright rude, but I knew they looked down on me for not finishing college and enlisting. I didn’t blame them—but I didn’t care.

  I WAS EIGHTEEN WHEN I SHIPPED OFF TO BASIC TRAINING AT FORT JACKSON, SOUTH Carolina, in 2002. We called it “Relaxin’ Jackson.” All veterans have their own basic training story—the push-ups, the running, all the shit-talking. It was a waste of time. I just wanted to go to war.

  Twelve weeks later I headed to intelligence school in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. It was January 2003, two months before the war started in Iraq. The invasion in March took us all by surprise. We thought Afghanistan was our focus, but recently things had shifted to Iraq and we heard only about Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. The night the Army invaded Iraq, everyone was called together and the head of the program told us to be prepared for what was to come. “Whether it’s Afghanistan or Iraq, be ready. You will all likely find yourselves in a combat zone soon.”

  Fort Huachuca was a huge place, high in elevation in the middle of what felt like a desert. We were close to the Mexican border, so close we could see the Customs and Border Patrol blimps always positioned high in the air watching for illegals. I thought Texas was hot, but Huachuca was a stifling furnace.

  I scored high enough on the Army entrance exams to qualify for any intelligence job I wanted—cyber, interrogation, source handler, signal intelligence, whatever. I chose intelligence analysis because they did it all.

  Intelligence school was like college at an accelerated pace, lots of studying and late-night cramming sessions. In order to qualify for a job I had to pass a bunch of tests along the way at a superior level or else risk getting washed out. I was in the analysis school but we shared the same dorms with the interrogation school, source handling, and electronic warfare.

  We got up as a class—sixty soldiers from various backgrounds—at 6 A.M. every weekday and worked out as a group, running miles through the desert trails that wrapped around the massive base, then headed to classes all day. Lights were out at 9 P.M. The ones who couldn’t cut it were quickly sent home in the first couple weeks. If you failed a test, which might happen simply if you missed one or two questions, you had one chance to learn the material and take a retest. If you failed again, you were gone, no exceptions. The trainers singled me out as a platoon leader. That meant leading early morning workout sessions, marching the soldiers to class, and leading intelligence meetings in class.