Drone Warrior Page 24

  I told her stories, not all at once, but in pieces. She was always saying, tell me more. She wasn’t from a military family and the stories might as well have been out of a movie. I told her about the missile strike where I’d almost died. I told her about the Pizza Hut in Baghdad.

  Those sixteen months at school with her were like an island that appeared out of nowhere. The more time I spent with her, the less I felt disconnected from reality. There were even times when my past slipped away like a great big balloon let go into the sky and I hoped it would never come back.

  “WE ARE JUST WAITING TO BE CLEARED HOT,” THE WOMAN CHATTED OVER THE computer.

  My tie hurt my neck. I loosened it and undid a button on my shirt but kept my eyes glued to the drone feed in my D.C. office.

  I felt my heartbeat click up a few notches as the Reaper’s camera suddenly zoomed on top of the motorcycle, giving us the point of view of riding with them.

  When a target was on the move in the desert, a strike sometimes made the most sense. It meant less collateral damage because these dirt roads were miles away from the city centers and the target was largely out in the open.

  Now, as the Reaper circled around the target, like a hawk eyeing its prey, it turned into its attack orbit. It was time. It headed straight for the two men on the motorcycle.

  “Ten seconds time on target.”

  Those seconds between a Hellfire launch and the impact on target always slowed down. The men on that motorbike had no idea they were about to die.

  But just before the Hellfire hit, the motorbike did something unexpected. The men started following a small curve in the road that took it around a four-story building that appeared to rise out of nowhere.

  Boom.

  I couldn’t tell what type of building it was, maybe residential, possibly abandoned. It had been hit along with the motorcycle. Civilians soon began appearing in the road from around the corner, cautious at first, looking into the sky, before a few men finally dragged the bodies away.

  I turned my screen off that morning and just sat there for what seemed like hours as the day went on around me. Emails coming in as usual. Meetings taking place. I didn’t move and left the office early in a bit of a trance.

  That afternoon I got a call from a close friend, Mike Stock, who owned Bancroft, a nonprofit involved in military training. He was working with African troops to fight the Al Qaeda–affiliated terrorist group al-Shabaab. After just returning stateside, he had filled me in on some of his work in Mogadishu, Somalia. His stories of their progress pushing al-Shabaab fighters farther outside the city and the rampant war in the region was starting to get my interest again.

  “It’s no-man’s-land out there, just enough danger to get your heart beating again. You should come out and see it for yourself sometime.”

  I talked to Joyce at dinner. I didn’t tell her about the strike days before. It wasn’t about that anyway. It was everything leading up to it. The strike probably just brought clarity: I couldn’t figure out life outside of the Box. My mind was racing thinking about the possibility of going back. What purpose do we have sitting back here when there is so much evil out there? It’s like people here have forgotten how lucky we all are to live this way. Fighting for something greater was my world. I couldn’t take it anymore and had already convinced myself I needed to be there.

  “I need to go back,” I said. “They need my help.” We were sitting at the kitchen table. We’d grown even closer over the last few months and I trusted her. She’d told me before that she never wanted me to return to war. But I couldn’t shake it.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m going to Somalia,” I said, making the decision right then and there.

  “What?” It was like she’d eaten something radioactive. Her mouth curled up.

  “It’s not a big deal. It’s a secure base.”

  Joyce stood up and walked across the room and then looked back at me. “Do you even love me?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Say it then.”

  “Of course I love you.”

  “Would you cry if I died?”

  “What?” I laughed this off. She’d brought this up before and I’d done the same thing.

  “You don’t tell me things,” she said. She was from a big, emotional family that shared everything. “You don’t hug me. You don’t tell me ‘I love you.’ It’s like you’re cut off.”

  I tried to tell her that wasn’t true, but she wasn’t hearing it.

  “Would you cry if I died?” she asked again.

  “Oh babe, I’d cry.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like sometimes I wonder if you feel anything.”

  In a corner, she noticed my old black bag—the one I took around with me before. On it was my bulletproof vest.

  “And you need that for a secure base?”

  She resented that I chose another war over her. I tried to explain that this was who I was. That I needed it. I had a hunger that wouldn’t quit. I had been through a lot and saw a lot and I was better. “You don’t understand,” I said.

  But it was me who didn’t understand. That reckoning wouldn’t come until later.

  DAYS LATER IN THE SPRING OF 2013, I WAS ON A PLANE TO NAIROBI, KENYA. THERE I crammed into a chartered Cessna on my way to Mogadishu, the bullet- and IED-riddled capital of Somalia—another front on the war on terror.

  One of the first things I did was take a walk. I ended up on the beach at the edge of the airport, looking down a cliff at the blue crashing water. In the distance, Mogadishu rose up in a jumble, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. The only thing separating us from all the forces fighting al-Shabaab was a chain-link fence.

  I stood there, taking in the sea as a plane landed, swooping right past me and dropping onto the tarmac—a drug delivery that happened once a day. It was a massive cargo plane filled floor to ceiling with khat—the drug chewed by the locals that made them high and took them away from their troubles. Which was disturbing when you realized that nearly every man walking around Mogadishu had an AK-47 strapped to his chest. It was a city where anything could happen, where violence could erupt at any moment. And yet, standing there, I felt calm and completely in control. Something about it all was simply beautiful.

  In Mogadishu, I slept in a converted trailer in the city’s heavily fortified airport and spent the next few weeks teaching the African Union what I knew about intelligence gathering and flying handheld drones like Ravens to locate targets. It was just like the old days. One week we located a suicide bomber looking to attack the main military base in the capital, another day we nailed a guy making IEDs to blow up convoys. Then we crashed a drone.

  I was working with a group who’d come into the country to provide local support to the Ugandan army fighting al-Shabaab. The drone went down in the middle of the night during a reconnaissance mission. We worried the drone was lost and that it would soon emerge on the black market—only to be used against us later.

  It was one of the handheld Puma drones, which were about a hundred grand a pop. At first the GPS locator pinged back but then it quickly went dead. It could have been anywhere.

  The group flying it weren’t legally allowed out of the airport so we took a team of Ugandan soldiers working with us, got suited up, and went to check out the last ping location we’d seen for the drone.

  We snuck out the backside of the airport. The streets were dead silent, only the sand and dirt crunching under our feet. We were in full body armor, MP5 submachine guns pointed outward with our flashlights, eyeing shadows for movement. The streets were a mix of falling-down shacks and buildings bullet-ridden or blown up from the war. This was the kind of situation that could go south fast.

  When we got to the ping location, about a quarter of a mile out, there was nothing there: the drone was gone.

  But in a few minutes, the Ugandans found three local men up late who had seen what had happened. They pointed at the sky,
mimicked a bird falling, and waved down the street, toward the sea. “The police took it,” the older one said. Now they could be anywhere.

  We retreated to the base but eventually got a tip from another source—the drone had been handed over to a Somali general within national intelligence. You’d think that would be good news for us, but it wasn’t.

  As we stepped into his compound in the middle of Mogadishu during daylight hours the next day, there was definitely a feeling in the air that we were out of our element. Somali soldiers gawked from the wall ledges as me and another guy from the airport walked in. It was rare for them to see Americans strolling around.

  The general greeted us at the end of a large stone courtyard and led us into his office. He was a fat man, with a gray mustache and a patch of hair covering his chin. He wore glasses with a bright gold watch.

  “So you men are here to talk about what exactly, some device that fell from the sky?” he said, leaning back in a wood chair, fan blowing nicely on his face. “I’m not sure what you are talking about.”

  No need for pleasantries.

  “The drone that crashed and was eventually picked up by your men, we know you have it,” I replied, not wanting to waste any time. It was never good to stay in a place too long in Mogadishu. Word quickly spread of your presence and the next thing you knew you were living out in the desert being ransomed off to the highest bidder.

  “Oh yes, that,” he said, as if he didn’t know exactly why we were there. “I have received numerous calls from different groups telling us it is theirs.”

  “Different groups?”

  Clearly he was lying. He leaned back and watched us squirm a little. “How do I believe it is yours?”

  I drew a diagram of it on a piece of paper on his desk. “It’s probably broken in a few pieces right now, isn’t it? You can’t turn it on, can you?”

  The general looked at his deputy in the corner of the room and then looked back at us, smiled. “I still don’t know if I believe this is yours. And even if it was, we don’t have it here.”

  The Somalis were experts at this game. But I had something up my sleeve.

  “General, can you come with me outside for a second?”

  He and his deputy looked at me skeptically, but then got up and followed me to the courtyard.

  As we walked into the courtyard, no translator was needed. I drew his attention to the sky.

  “Now do you believe me?” I said pointing to the exact same Puma drone hovering overhead. I had asked the group back at the airport to do a flyover with their backup.

  I’ll never forget the look on the general’s face. He could have dropped dead right there, his eyes popping out of his head with excitement. It was priceless as he and his deputy watched the drone glide just above us, about five hundred feet up. He was in awe, as if a magic trick had just changed what he believed to be true in the world.

  I radioed to the group that they could return the backup drone to the airport. When it disappeared, the general invited us back inside. We’d won. He told us he had the crashed drone. It was in a separate office, all the pieces there.

  But the general had one more card to play.

  He leaned forward and looked me right in the eye.

  “We should give a reward to the Somali local citizens who found it,” he said.

  “Of course, of course,” we said, laughing inside about this proposition. Obviously he was thinking of himself. “How much do you think is appropriate, General?”

  I could see the general’s lips curl upward, his eyes blinking dollar signs like a cartoon character thinking about a pot of gold.

  “Five thousand dollars U.S.,” was his quick response.

  “We’re only prepared to give you one thousand today,” we came back.

  “Fine,” he said, without blinking.

  We got $1,000 in hundred-dollar bills from the base and gave it to him in a brown paper bag—pennies considering what the drone was worth.

  Not everything was that exciting. Most wasn’t at all.

  I stayed for three months in Somalia and the whole time I thought being there would feed my urge to be back in action and get my heart beating again. But it didn’t do that.

  When I was away before, I never thought much about home. It was just the mission around the clock. But in Somalia, things weren’t like that. I talked to Joyce more and more then. For hours at a time, I sat on my bed with my computer flipped open to Skype, her blurry image coming in.

  It was always after midnight, the air conditioner rumbling away in the window of the shipping container. We talked mostly about what she was up to, staying away from talk about the war that was going on a hundred yards or so over the wall. And she didn’t press me much—until one night she did.

  “I don’t understand it,” she said.

  She moved up close to the screen so I could see her hazel eyes clearly. They looked a little glassy. I could tell that she was upset.

  “What?”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Why does this make you happy,” she said, “being over there in such a dangerous place?”

  I tried to explain as best I could, but all that came out was “I needed to do this. It was important.”

  She let that sit between us and for a second I thought she’d drop it, but then she said, “I didn’t sign up for this, for your old life. You know that? I don’t want this kind of thing forever.” Then she turned away from the screen.

  It took a second for this to sink in and for a moment my stomach got this terrible pain. Like I’d been swung at. I hadn’t felt this feeling before.

  “It won’t—” I started to say before she cut me off.

  “I know others do this life.” Her voice was shaking a little. “They’re okay with going off and disappearing but I can’t.”

  She paused, as if she’d been planning this out. “I don’t want that life.”

  I let her finish and then waited for her to turn back to me. The conversation ended with both of us quiet with heavy hearts—both conflicted in a different way.

  In the weeks since I had left, I’d begun to realize that this war action fix just wasn’t enough for me anymore, Somalia wasn’t enough, no war zone would ever be enough.

  Days later, I had some time to digest our conversation. As I sat there looking at Joyce on Skype, I could see how this was affecting her. It was about more than just me now. I felt more than any other time that I needed her, I needed something more tangible, something that I could hold on to. This is why I originally left the Army; I asked for a normal life and now I was creating my own barriers keeping me from it. Being home, laying the foundations for a family and good friends—and not being in some distant place fighting an enemy that would always hate us.

  I tried to tell her some of that over Skype that night.

  “I heard what you said the other night and I’m sorry I made you feel that way. You’re right . . . it’s not fair.”

  She stayed quiet and let me go on. Probably because I was showing emotion and she knew I was trying.

  “I didn’t think I would ever say this, but the feeling of being here isn’t good—because I miss you. It’s weird for me. But I think I’m ready to come home.”

  Her face lit up just knowing she was missed and her words were heard.

  “Ready to come home?” she said with a confused look on her face. “Are you done with everything you have been working on?”

  “I am going to complete what I came out here to do. But I’m done.”

  Both of us were finally on the same page. It’s like the conversation bonded a new part of us. Though it was short, it was exactly what we both needed.

  Soon after, the connection went bad and I couldn’t get back online. The Internet sucked in Somalia. But one thing I knew as I sat there alone in the shipping container with the air conditioner fan beating back the sea’s humidity from outside: This was the woman I cared about. This was the woman I wanted t
o marry and I wasn’t going to lose her. I needed her.

  That could have been the end for me. I could have left drones and war behind once and for all and the story might have ended right there with Joyce and me living happily ever after. Except life is never that neat.

  I WAS SIPPING COFFEE ONE MORNING WHEN BRAD, AN AIR FORCE INTEL GUY, WALKED over to my corner desk and asked if I had a second to talk. “Can we do this privately?” he said.

  It was about a year after leaving Somalia—spring of 2014. For the last few months, I’d been working as a consultant for the Silicon Valley software company Palantir. They’d sent me to Stuttgart, Germany, to help implement new software at the main U.S. military command center that handled Africa.

  Months had passed and I had kept to myself. No one in the office except Brad knew what I’d done before. (We’d crossed paths in the intel world while I was running some drone missions.) Working there felt so far away from what I’d been doing before—like I’d gone to the other side of the moon. And I liked it that way. I was finally comfortable not needing that old adrenaline-fumed life.

  Joyce and I had grown even closer. There had been moments over the last few months since Somalia when I finally thought I had escaped my past. Joyce had come with me to Stuttgart and we had a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a new complex overlooking downtown. On the weekends, we traveled all over Europe, jumping in a car and not thinking about anything much, just enjoying the time away and being together. One weekend we would drive to Prague, the next to Milan or Zurich. It felt like one big vacation that I never wanted to end.

  But now that was all about to get upended.

  “Do you know the girls who were kidnapped in Nigeria?” Brad asked.

  Of course I did. It was all over the news in May. More than two hundred girls had been kidnapped from a school in Chibok, Borno State, Nigeria, by the terrorist group Boko Haram. #BringBackOurGirls was the headline on all the news channels. A search had been launched but the group and the girls seemed to have melted away into the dense jungle of the countryside without a trace. I didn’t pay too much attention to it. Worrying about those kinds of things wasn’t my job anymore.