Drone Warrior Read online

  The following week I returned to the office, needing a connection to war, and immediately pulled up the drone feeds and started sifting through reports. What could we do to keep pounding the enemy? I sifted through some of the dead guy photos from the replacement team’s recent missions and that helped pump me up. It was like hooking up to a feedbag, my blood flowing again.

  Still, no matter how much I tried to ignore it, the thought that had been simmering in me over the last few months started to heavily boil inside me again—that this job was slowly swallowing me, that it was turning me into someone else I didn’t recognize anymore. Watching those monitors day and night, the stress of the missions, the targets that we took out—all of it had gutted me, erased my emotions. People always thought of the operators when they thought about trauma in the field. I saw a lot through them and all that I saw was pushed down into some deep hole in me where it wasn’t thought about—until now.

  The key to a job like mine was dividing up my life into two neatly kept worlds: my world in the Box and my world at home. But part of what I found now was that I couldn’t separate the two anymore. One had started to bleed into the other and the bleeding felt like it was about to get worse.

  My family had no idea what I’d been doing the last few years . . . and they still don’t, really, years later. I tried calling my mother a few times, but decided against it, and then I avoided her calls. I knew my family wouldn’t be able to grasp the decisions I had to make overseas. How would they understand Dark Horse? Or Manhattan? Or any of them?

  One afternoon, I went to the funeral of a fellow soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. He’d died in Afghanistan during battle. It was a warm day, the wind blowing across the field. It was a big crowd, with lots of soldiers I knew from years of coming and going to war zones. He was young like me.

  As I looked around, I watched as most of the others bowed their heads and rubbed away tears. Jets flew overhead and soldiers fired guns in salute. As I stared at the American-flag-covered casket, I kept thinking, Why aren’t you feeling anything? What the hell is wrong with you, man? I didn’t shed a tear, no matter how hard I tried. I squeezed my eyes shut, but there was nothing. It was like dry heaving on the bathroom floor, badly wanting something to come out to relieve the pain but just feeling the insides of your body ripping apart.

  What I realized that day as I sat in my car long after the other mourners left was that death didn’t mean anything to me anymore, no matter who it was, even me. It was one thing to not care about the death of a terrorist who had killed thousands, but another not to think twice about the loss of a fellow soldier or a family member. All the death I’d witnessed through those flat-screen monitors had drained my emotions over hundreds of missions. In the pixels I’d become desensitized to death and, by extension, desensitized to everything around me back home. I lost my heart somewhere along the way. I had basically flatlined.

  On the screens my targets were glowing red. It wasn’t hard for me to know who they were. My mind was trained to know what the enemy thought and did every day, not what they felt. Feeling was irrelevant in the drone hunt. My life of watching people die behind a monitor changed how I viewed the world. I might as well have been dead.

  It’s hard to explain or even recall all the conversations that went on in my head. It wasn’t straightforward at all or easy to leave the unit. My enlistment was up and I had to make a decision to reenlist for another three years or not. I flip-flopped about it over a few weeks. One day I was staying, the next I was out. These were some of the hardest weeks for me.

  Around that time, I remembered a buddy who had left the unit close to when I’d joined years ago. “I want a dog. I want a wife,” he said to me on his last day. “I want something outside of this place.” I didn’t get it back then and simply shrugged it off. Why would he leave such a respected role? Who would ever give up this job?

  Now it made sense. He craved what I had forgotten—what it felt like to be normal. He no longer wanted to know about or experience the horrors of the world, the death and all the evil that existed in dark corners. He craved the simple decency that was home.

  Even though I felt a great purpose in what I was doing, I started to battle with the long-term value of my actions. When I’m gone from all this one day, the unit would forget about me, forget about all of these successes. They’d move on—and do just fine without me. As if I didn’t even exist. After a new generation of soldiers filled the ranks to help hunt down the next generation of terrorists, what would I be left with? No wife, no kids. Family and friends who moved on without me. Was this what really mattered most in life?

  When my cousin died, I didn’t go to his funeral. He was family. But he was also my friend. And I didn’t even say goodbye. I used to talk to my mother. Now I couldn’t even pick up the phone to call her. I couldn’t even remember the last time we talked. I had ruined relationships and been absent from those who actually cared about me, because of my own selfishness, because of this never-ending war. In the end, those people were the ones who would be around for me.

  One night I dreamed about my own funeral, looking down at it, as I lay in a shiny black casket. The pews were empty and there was no priest. The church was completely silent and I was all alone.

  For as long as I was on this earth, there would always be that next target, that next terrorist group that hated America for whatever reason they believed justified their atrocities. The war would never end.

  I knew it was time to go.

  When I finally brought it up with Jack and Bill, they seemed surprised. “What are you thinking? This is your home now,” they said.

  I tried to explain that I was gutted, that I needed something else. It was painful talking to them about it. It cut right into my heart. We were friends and brothers. I still remembered when I went through training with them. All those years in the Box. I felt like I was betraying my team, letting every single one of them down.

  Jack and Bill tried to get me to stay and even offered some incentives, including time off and a break to finish college. They talked about this being the only life, that there was nothing outside of it. Jack told me how boring the civilian world was when he lived it for a few years. And a piece of me knew that was true. The war, wherever it went, was a life. A good and honorable one that most guys stuck to until they retired. There was no better place to work in the Army. Jack was like that. So was Bill. It was one of the few places in the Army where it happened.

  But in the end, I didn’t reenlist. I was out. It was the winter of 2010. I was twenty-six years old and I felt two things that day: one great world had now been shut off, and another world was suddenly wide open.

  The last day I walked out of the office, I climbed into my car and drove home the usual route, out the backside and the secret way through the woods. I didn’t want to see anyone. I walked into my condo and sat on the couch with the TV off and the living room quieter than I ever remembered it being. And that’s when it hit me: This was real. I was out. All of these questions started to bubble up in my head. What will I do with the rest of my life? I’d always had the Army as my purpose. It defined me. Now what?

  CIVILIAN LIFE CAN BE A DIFFICULT CHOICE FOR ANY SOLDIER. IT’S A SCARY THING. Like walking to the edge of a cliff and wondering what’s below and if your parachute will work. A lot of guys avoid the uncertainty of the change, enlisting over and over all the way to retirement. Some soldiers find comfort in stability and always following a daily regimen. Other soldiers get out only to realize that they don’t belong in the real world and so reenlist. Then there are those who fight the harsh realities of a world that doesn’t understand them. Fighting a new battle internally to figure out their place and purpose—until they emerge victorious. It’s impossible for the public to grasp the realities of war let alone the loneliness that soldiers face while deployed, whether they see daily combat or not.

  For me, there was no direct line between coming home from war, leaving the unit, and what
came next. It was messy and I didn’t experience one big revelation or lightbulb moment where I changed from one thing to another or looked in the mirror and knew exactly what I was going to do. It took a long time to figure things out and if there was one way to describe the next year or so it was anxiousness.

  As a transition out, I moved to Washington, D.C., where the unit hooked me up with a contracting job for a special operations organization, working with different intelligence agencies on the war on terror. I wore a suit and tie every day, and it came with a cushy six-figure salary. I sat at a large circular desk in a secured room and managed a team of guys within the Beltway. Our job was more strategically focused, like briefing other intelligence and law enforcement agencies on how special ops did business and convincing seniors in big government positions who knew nothing about terrorism that there was still a war going on. It was a lot of handshaking, patting each other on the back for, say, a great video teleconference or a meeting with federal agency X where nothing truly got accomplished. I mostly dealt with the bureaucracy that is D.C.

  When I wasn’t in meetings, I sat behind my desk, watching emails come in, one after another, piling up. What amazed me was how many of them said absolutely nothing at all or were about setting up more meetings.

  This was a big change for me. In the Box, time didn’t exist. It blurred out of shape because there was always something going on, pulling you one way or the other. We weren’t just talking, we were doing. Now I felt every single minute of the day. As if there was a seconds hand in my head, ticking loudly to remind me how slow time was going. I started feeling like I needed to find something to get my heart beating again.

  Those first weeks, I didn’t sleep much. I came home and lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. My new apartment had little in it yet, just a bed, some furniture, a computer, and bags of clothes. Nothing on the walls. Anyone could have lived there, like a hotel, for someone passing through, with no intention of staying.

  ONE WEEK MY MOTHER CAME TO TOWN TO SEE HOW I WAS DOING. I HADN’T SPOKEN to her much since I had gotten back and left the unit for a new life in D.C. She wanted to catch up and I was suddenly looking forward to it. But when I walked through the door that night, I found a complete mess.

  Tears were streaming down her face as she sat on the couch.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

  “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

  “About all these medals and awards.”

  She pointed at a cardboard box on the floor. It was filled with a bunch of the military awards that I’d received over the years. Usually I kept the box hidden in the closet, except when I wanted to remember things about those days. Recently I had been pulling the box out a lot.

  “You earned a Bronze Star,” she said, picking up one plaque.

  “Yeah, so?” I said.

  She turned it over in her hands and then just stared at it.

  “It reads here that you were directly responsible for arguably the most devastating blow to the enemy since the insurgency began in 2003.”

  I nodded.

  She had this look of pride on her face behind the tears running down. It was as if all these years she knew deep inside I was doing something important, but never really knew for sure until now.

  It validated pride she’d held on faith. This was the proof for her after all the years wondering where I had been.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  She shook her head and wiped away a tear with her sleeve.

  “It’s just a piece of paper,” I said. “The memories are worth more to me.”

  “It’s much more than that,” she said. “Don’t you see that?”

  I didn’t.

  “This is your life,” she said.

  That’s what was killing me.

  I TRIED NOT TO THINK ABOUT THE BOX. I TRIED TO QUIET THE DEMONS OF THE screens that kept saying, Go back, you’re still needed out there. I went out at night, looking for something else, anything, to feel alive. First that meant getting in my car and driving fast and recklessly on the 495 interstate, which circled the city. I liked to drive alone late at night down long stretches of the freeway, weaving in and out of traffic, with no particular destination in sight.

  Later I started gambling online, thousands of dollars a night. The risk gave me the slight feeling I was back in the combat zone. On my home computer, I had two monitors flipped on, playing eight poker tables at once, just like all the screens in the Box. This time my targets were the other players. I would even research the players’ names, using poker analytic software to help understand my enemy better to try to turn the odds in my favor.

  I was taught to fight, not to show weakness. The U.S. military had spent millions of dollars teaching me how to deal with the anxiety of fighting. Being in the moment of a mission and knowing how to keep your head on straight. What it didn’t teach was how to keep your head straight after you left. That was hard for a lot of people. It was hard for me. I had no idea.

  Weeks passed and I began to feel a lot like the main character in the movie Crank, who has to keep his adrenaline going to stay alive. Even though I didn’t tell anyone about my night life I began to wonder if they could tell. I had gained some weight back and color had returned to my face after coming home from Iraq. But now I was losing weight again and going pale. Casper was creeping back.

  One day I left work and drove out to the countryside. I took the freeway heading toward West Virginia, well outside of D.C., and didn’t care about the speed limit or the cops who might have been waiting for a guy like me going 100, 110, 140. I was feeling reckless, like nothing could hurt me, like I couldn’t crash if I wanted to. I might have gone for hours if I hadn’t seen the sign that took me back to the Box in the nowhere hills of West Virginia: “Speed Limit Enforced by Aircraft.”

  I had to pull over. Open farm fields stretched forever on either side of my car. Immediately I thought of a Predator enforcing that speed limit with a Hellfire missile.

  Over the last few weeks, when I sat staring at my work computer screen, I’d called Jack and Bill to check in, but they were always too busy. It took them days to get back to me, even after a text message. I missed them.

  As I sat there on the side of the road now, I suddenly had this terrible feeling that hit me like a semi coming in at top speed from the other direction—that the life I wanted to live outside of the world of the unit might not be as good as I had imagined. Somehow I found myself falling deeper into a state of apathy. This was the low point of my confusion. What had I done? Where was I?

  THE ONE GOOD THING THAT CAME IN THIS TIME WAS JOYCE.

  I met her at Duke University’s business school, where I’d applied after getting my bachelor’s degree—done online over the years between deployments. The MBA program was internationally focused and involved studying abroad in the top financial hubs around the world. So we were in China one month, Russia the next.

  Business school was the first time since joining the unit that I interacted with anyone outside of drones and intelligence. I had been trained not to trust people. When you’d witnessed the worst of humanity, watching people do things when they thought no one was looking, you became out of touch with the real world. You lost trust in other humans.

  My initial conversations with classmates were short and generic. When we had class gatherings, I felt self-conscious, like I’d landed on another planet and everyone was wondering who I was, and what I wanted to do. I immediately went into my old mindset of being secretive about where I’d been. Most had come from corporate places, like Google or GE or Goldman. A part of me thought they wouldn’t understand me anyway. When I met a Muslim classmate, I fought off the battlefield instinct of thinking enemy. My world had been so blocked off and the first few weeks I worried that I wouldn’t fit in with these people who had grown up so differently, had not seen the things I’d seen. In a way, I felt like I’d lost my
identity somewhere over the past few years. I had no identity now and wasn’t sure how to relate to anyone.

  Joyce started to change all that a little. During orientation in Shanghai, China, in mid-2012, they’d sat us near each other in a large conference room because our last names were close in the alphabet. I remember sneaking peeks of her from the corner of my eye as the lectures began. She was beautiful and it was hard to concentrate even with the commotion onstage.

  When we had a break, I made my way over to her at the edge of the room where a few others had gathered. It was a big hotel ballroom, with more than 150 other students from all over the world. They were passing around trays of little bite-sized sandwiches and drinks. Even though she had a big name tag dangling around her neck that said Joyce, I said, “Hey, Julie.” She smiled at the mistake the first time. And gave me shit about it the second and third times I did it that night.

  I managed to collect that she was from Lexington, Kentucky, horse and bourbon country. She was smart, funny, and had a subtle southern accent that hit me right away. She also made me nervous—a feeling I hadn’t experienced since I was in the Box, tasking drones over a moving target. Sometimes that night I just didn’t know what to say to her and found myself searching for the right thing. I liked the nerves, an electric shock moving through me again. I needed more. I asked her out the next night. We went out until midnight—and pretty much every night after that for a week straight.

  Shanghai was just the beginning. We traveled the world together. Little by little over the school year, as we traveled to different countries, I let my walls down. Sharing things I normally wouldn’t talk about. After a few months, I told her my secret: the life I lived before. It was the first time I talked about it openly with someone outside my closed-up community.