Drone Warrior Read online

  He moved quickly and had the foresight to know that his families would be targets of ours at some point. At the same time, he hadn’t been afraid to get in the trenches, showing his face to the fighters he commanded. This was why he appealed to other fighters. He fought in both Fallujah battles in 2004, which were probably the bloodiest battles for American forces in Iraq. During the second battle, U.S. forces grabbed him and sent him to Camp Bucca, the largest prison run by the military.

  He was locked up there for years. That prison was a cauldron of hate. Many of the current leaders of ISIS spent time there, alongside Abu Dua. When he finally got out of prison, he seemed to largely go dark as he plotted attacks around the country and recruited soldiers. He was always on the go and we’d only hear about him occasionally from guys that we captured.

  Along with his favorite neighborhood ice cream shop, he stayed at a house in a wealthy part of the city and owned a small Islamic bookstore in downtown Baghdad, where we heard that he had begun conducting meetings. But even with our drones overhead day after day at each of these locations, we never saw him there. It was like he sensed us, knew our game. There was no doubt that word about our raids was getting back to him.

  Abu Dua really got to me. More than any other target, I felt something twisting inside me, eating at me, as we flew drones and looked for him over those days and weeks.

  The drone feeds of the places where we tracked him burned deeply in my mind: a crumbling tower in downtown Iraq; a mud hut in the north; a packed apartment building in the south; a white truck bumping across the desert, filled with explosives. The feed of Abu Dua churned through my head like a bad song I couldn’t shake.

  He was clever and cunning—part of me deep down probably had some begrudging respect for Abu Dua, even though he was so clearly one of the most evil men on earth. Competition with a guy like him was what I now lived for.

  There were nights where I sat up in my dust-covered bunk and stared at the knotty plywood ceiling, filled with anxiety. My body wouldn’t stop sweating. Is this air-conditioning even working? It surprised me that the wood and sweat smell of the tiny room hadn’t bothered me until now.

  I began to get this intense creeping fear that I was losing myself. That the hunt was slowly killing me. Why had I become so obsessed with this war?

  I remembered 9/11 and how that had sent me down this road, how I thought I could help the fight. Be a man. An American. And a warrior. Nothing else mattered then. Over the years a lot happened. I had done everything that I could do. And that made me proud, kept me going.

  But in those fleeting moments, I thought more and more about my future—something I hadn’t done in a long, long time. Ten years from now, I wondered, would I look back and say, where the fuck has my life gone? The questions bubbled up in my head. Who are my friends? Where’s my family? Who really cares about me? I had left a lot of people behind. Would anyone even remember me? This war had gone on too long.

  The Box was like being freeze-dried—as the rest of the world went on, built relationships, got married, had kids, had other adventures, other lives, all I had was the Box. All I had was my enemies, like Abu Dua. I loved the Box, loved what I could do in there. But it was still a box.

  The questions were starting to mess with my head, popping up sometimes and then burrowing back in like a temporary ache. It was easier to ignore it and go back to hunting.

  One night our team hopped in Black Hawks with our computers and guns and made an unusual trip up to a small outpost in Samarra. I had discovered a house belonging to Abu Dua’s brother Jawwad. Usually we would have done the operation from the Box, but Jason wanted to coordinate this one with the local security forces—a decision that would come back to bite us.

  Abu Dua had three brothers. All of them were linked to his terrorist activities. Like a mob king, he liked to keep the business close to his family. Along with Jawwad, there was Ahmed and Lafi.

  The outpost was a small Iraqi camp with a few metal trailers and old Iraqi military vehicles parked around it. There were concrete barriers and big mounds of dirt. It looked like a big sandbox, except with people living on it.

  We set up inside the trailers and got the bird up right away. In no time, the images were streaming back in black and white. The brother’s house was located on the southern end of the city, two stories tall with a small fenced-in yard pressed up against a dirt road.

  The images we saw over the days showed a house packed with people. About twenty were living there. We couldn’t figure out if Abu Dua was one of them, but we did identify Jawwad and Ahmed. That was all we needed to go in.

  But just as the assault team headed out that night to raid, something unexpected happened at the house. I watched a man climb into a car and drive away. Where was he going?

  We had only one drone up and had to make a choice, so we kept the bird on the house.

  It was the wrong move.

  When our guys arrived at the house, Jawwad was gone. We found many members of Abu Dua’s extended family there: his daughter, his uncles, aunts, cousins, and his ill grandfather. No Abu Dua.

  We found out later that the local Iraqi police forces working with us had tipped off the family, allowing Jawwad to escape minutes before. They had tribal ties, commonplace in the northern half of the country, and those ties always came before some greater notion of justice; it was why the Iraqis couldn’t come together as a country. Our only recourse was to compartmentalize our operations even more, keep the security forces in the dark about our next move. I had as much distaste for some of them as I did for the enemy. The thought that they didn’t want to protect their own didn’t sit well with me. At some point they needed to take control of their country. We couldn’t do it all for them. The security forces regularly chose the terrorists within their local districts over us; it was safer for them.

  Although the raid on Abu Dua’s extended family’s home didn’t net him, we did arrest his brother Ahmed that night and kept him in a Baghdad prison for months after, hoping that he would tell us something about Abu Dua that we could use. But he gave us nothing.

  Abu Dua was actually one of the reasons that we were able to track down and kill the original leaders of the Islamic State—he personally set up the courier network that we used to find Manhattan and Brooklyn. He’d handpicked each of the couriers and switched them out every three months. I spoke to some of these couriers personally after we’d captured them and they genuinely didn’t have any idea about the other couriers in the network—the only link between all of them was the man himself.

  We found out later that we’d actually almost gotten Abu Dua when we raided Uncle’s house. He had spent three hours there writing the letter that was meant to go to Manhattan and Brooklyn in the flowerpot but had slipped out just before we arrived. Uncle told us that we’d missed him by only ten minutes. Knowing that Abu Dua was there inside the same house only a few minutes before the raid would always haunt me.

  I spent the last few weeks of my deployment poring over files, talking to sources, turning over everything that might give up a lead.

  Part of my obsession for Abu Dua now is due to the fact that we never found him. Because he got away. We wouldn’t even realize how truly important he was until years later.

  After the deaths of Manhattan and Brooklyn, Abu Dua vanished for a long stretch. Rumors came to us that he’d died. But we knew better. I’m almost positive he went to Syria during this time to get away from the stress of always being targeted by our teams and to rally the troops for a new war.

  We knew that he told his fighters to “lay low and wait for the U.S. to leave.” And that’s what they did. He returned to Iraq in early 2011, as U.S. forces pulled out, and our powers to hunt him dwindled.

  By then Abu Dua had taken on his role as the leader of ISIS and had begun stringing together territories in Iraq and Syria. Bin Laden had been killed and tens of thousands of fighters were joining his ranks.

  One of my mentors, Jack, and his team h
ad him in their sights at a house in Baghdad in 2011. As most of the troops got on transport planes out of the country, they’d stayed behind, partly to make one last-ditch effort to knock out Abu Dua.

  They had information suggesting that Abu Dua was in the city for an important meeting at a house we had visited previously. Jack’s plan was to take him out that night, but the State Department had changed the rules for raids and a planned raid on the target was delayed.

  Jack’s team was now operating under different authorities of law than the year before, because the war had officially come to a close. Before a raid could happen, multiple levels of suits from Washington had to sign off. Days passed by, often weeks, before a raid could be put into action. Lawyers were now running the unofficial war.

  Jack tasked a drone over the house and watched as a man, exhibiting the exact signature and description we always had for Abu Dua, arrived in a vehicle and proceeded inside.

  When they zoomed in on him, there was no doubt in Jack’s mind. It was Abu Dua.

  Jack told me about it months later, after I’d left the unit. “The suits screwed us,” he said. “I had the guy that night, and still have the old drone feed to prove it.”

  Few knew the story. It certainly was never made public. No one wanted to talk about it. The world’s most wanted terrorist could have very well met his maker that night before he truly took the reins of ISIS years later.

  Except there was a problem. This time around Jack didn’t have his assault team. The operators had gone home, too. In their place, he relied on a local hit squad—a group of local Iraqis trained by a special branch within the agency. Which wasn’t saying much.

  Jack’s drone team now fell under the suits at the agency and State Department instead of the Department of Defense. So he had to convince them to move on the target. But his request to strike that night passed from empty suit to suit as he watched Abu Dua at the house.

  He called his bosses multiple times, pressing them to make a move, knowing that Abu Dua was in the house at that very moment.

  But it was a week before they approved the mission. By that time it didn’t matter.

  Who did the Iraqis get that night when they finally went in? They grabbed up a gang of ISIS members. And guess what those fighters confirmed? Abu Dua had been there—seven days before.

  Guys from our team talked about it for months after. How could the suits fuck up like that?

  After that night in 2011, Abu Dua disappeared for months and then years again—when he came back, he was leading the charge across a broken Iraq—and ISIS was the new Al Qaeda, version 2.0. He had established an Islamic terror state and the United States was still trying to track him down.

  “We were so close, man, I can’t believe we missed him out of all the people we went after,” Jack said over drinks one night.

  “It’s a new kind of war,” Jack lamented. “The rules have changed. Our hands have gotten more and more tied by the damn suits.”

  23

  GONE

  I left Iraq in late July 2010. When the other team arrived to replace us, it was a quick handoff, as always. “Did you leave anyone for us?” one of them joked as we gathered our gear. Word of our exploits had spread fast back home.

  Collectively over those four months, our teams across the country had taken out 14 of the 20 targets on the kill list. We’d conducted over 160 raids, captured more than 400 enemy leaders, and killed more than 20. Tens of thousands of flight time hours had been logged. The team who replaced us would kill another four from the list and the last two guys, one being Abu Dua, would vanish. ISI was on the run—for now.

  It felt pretty good. Iraq was getting better. Civilian and military casualties were at the lowest point they’d been in years. The drone teams helped. But it was also a testament to the sacrifice and persistence of the greater military.

  Still I worried that important targets lurked out there. The enemy could easily regroup and come back with double the force.

  I never had this grand view that we were going to take out all the top leaders, instantly solve everyone’s problems, and win the war. In the end, all drones really did was help us degrade the enemy and create the time and space for our allies—the Iraqis, especially—to gain the upper hand.

  U.S. forces handed Iraq to Maliki’s government on a silver platter. And the Obama administration did what they could to maintain a skeleton crew of forces in the country, to keep the heat on the network. Prime Minister Maliki thought his security forces could handle it alone.

  What a joke.

  As my team prepared to leave, Maliki was already screwing up. Word had begun to trickle down that he planned to release a large number of prisoners—many of the guys we’d captured—as a signal of good faith to the opposing religious sect. These weren’t just people who stole a pack of gum. These were some of the worst human beings on earth.

  There were arguments about it. But Maliki was committed and, days before we left the country, he asked us to come up with a list of the top fifty bad guys in prison. He’d be sure to keep them behind bars. But fifty was a ridiculous number. There were literally thousands of murderers, rapists, explosives experts, thieves, and failed suicide bombers that our teams had helped put away over the last decade.

  Good soldiers over the years had died locking these guys away and those fanatics were just going to be released? It made me sick to think about all the men and women who fought to make this country safe again only to see their efforts discarded for politics. Many of them would in fact eventually reappear in the ranks of ISIS. I couldn’t help thinking that we should have killed all of them, rather than letting them go free. But it didn’t matter, it wasn’t up to us anymore.

  On our last day, I ducked through the rotor wash and into the chopper. Running almost. It was around midnight and the Iraqi air was still baking hot. It felt like two hundred degrees. The summer was a killer and I was happy to be leaving the Box, its stink of sweat and wood and coffee, its boxed cereals, its energy drinks, all of that.

  The only memento I took from that deployment was the photograph of the kidnapped woman. I still thought about her. I’d heard she was back home and getting better. That kind of thing made me feel that we’d made a difference. It took the edge off the other uncertainties we were leaving behind.

  What I’d do next was less clear as the chopper lifted off into the Iraqi sky. The nagging of what the future held had picked up inside me the night before like a drumbeat in my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about what was on the other side of the world. What was at home? I hadn’t spoken to my mother in what seemed like months. I didn’t even know my girlfriend Sarah anymore. Our conversations by phone had basically stopped happening. We lived on different planets, had become different people. I both dreaded and wondered a lot about what I would say. Who did they even see these days when they looked at me? Was there any evidence of my old self anymore? That guy who came from Katy, Texas, and wanted to save the world? There were rumors of other deployments already. Maybe Afghanistan or Yemen, where a new front on the war was opening up, drawing the birds away from Iraq. Part of me wanted that right now. To get away from this sandbox and go somewhere else. A new adventure. The other part of me wasn’t sure what I wanted. That part of me felt like I was about to step off a cliff.

  The chopper landed at a large forward operating base and our C-17 cargo plane was waiting on the tarmac. Jack and Travis and their teams arrived on choppers around the same time. We’d all be on the same flight out.

  It was great to see everyone. We shook hands and patted each other on the backs without reliving too much of the last few months. Jack was especially happy. I had never seen him give praise before. He’d seen everything in his time so it took a lot for him to show emotion. “This was the greatest Iraq deployment in our history,” he said.

  As good as it was getting his approval, it also felt like the end of something.

  24

  LIFE OUTSIDE

  THE BOX


  As the tailgate ramp lowered, we all stepped out with our gear into the night. It was 3 A.M. A scattering of lights on the massive airfield showed the other military planes that had been locked up until morning, not many people around. As I looked across the open space, a feeling of loneliness came over me.

  I said goodbye to the team on that quiet, barely lit tarmac in North Carolina, grabbed my gear, and headed for the back lot. After sitting there for the last few months, my car was covered in a film of dust. I turned it on and drove through the midnight streets in a daze, the sleeping pills still in my head.

  When I got home, I stumbled in the door and dropped my two big black bags in a pile on the wood floor. I couldn’t lie still that night or the next night, either. My mind kept on swirling, thinking I was still in the Box, running through what seemed like hundreds of leads and strategizing about the hunt.

  It took me hours to fall asleep. For days I slept and woke and slept again. I lost track of time.

  One early morning, padding groggily to the fridge, I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror. It was terrible. I had dropped a bunch of weight, my face paler than ever. A few gray hairs had formed on my beard along the way. My eyes were bloodshot, like an addict’s. I looked like the worst kind of hell, like I’d been living in a crypt.

  I stumbled out the back door with a bucket of golf balls to the thirteenth hole on the golf course that my backyard bordered, and spent the next hour driving balls down the fairway. I hardly spoke to Sarah, who came and went from the condo and had begun to expect my post-deployment silence. I couldn’t get up the energy to feel for her or anyone else back home. I tried going out to dinner and eating everything that I had been dreaming of eating in the Box. But nothing had much taste this time. “You okay?” Sarah asked one night when we were eating burgers. “Just tired,” I said, having a hard time looking at her. It wasn’t long before our relationship would end.