Drone Warrior Read online

  Every week there was another class on a new intelligence subject, but most of the material felt outdated. They were literally still training us to fight the Russians and communists in big battlefield situations, with tank battalions and thousands of men. Morse code was still being taught. Some days we all crowded around a table map, where we placed pieces on the board, our army versus the Russians. We’d talk about how we would maneuver around them like it was a game of Risk.

  There was absolutely no training in counterterrorism techniques or how to target terrorist networks and small, compartmentalized terror cells. Nothing about unconventional warfare, which was what war was these days—not massive battlefield showdowns. When I asked about it, the instructors just said this was standard training.

  The one thing I learned very well was how to read a map, use a compass, and quickly get coordinates for a certain area. If I got lost in a jungle, I could find my way out faster than others. I also had a knack for picking out anomalies in intelligence reports, pinpointing the details necessary to destroy hidden enemy formations in our made-up war scenarios.

  On one of my last nights of intel school, I met a pilot learning how to fly drones. He was part of a brand-new training course in the military’s broader drone program, which had hardly gotten off the ground at the time, 2003. I was intrigued by drones but knew very little about them. Few did. Drones were still a very minor part of the military. I had read recently about one of the first drone strikes in Yemen in late 2001, targeting Al Qaeda leader Qaed Senyan Abu Ali al-Harithi, who was behind the USS Cole bombing. Al-Harithi had disintegrated after the missile from the drone penetrated the four-door sedan he was driving through the countryside; he and the other terrorists in the car with him never knew what hit them.

  The first armed drones had only started to hit the skies in Iraq and Afghanistan and their actions were more rumor than real, which got me curious. I was fascinated by the possibilities of unmanned aircraft. Still, it seemed light-years away. The pilot lamented that he was one of only a very few training to fly drones at Fort Huachuca at the time. To him it felt unimportant among the other programs ramping up for battle. He wanted to fly Apache helicopters. Because of the limited drone fleet, the pilot said he didn’t even know if there was going to be enough work for him. “Who knows what I’ll end up doing,” he said, a little hopelessly. “I probably won’t even get to the war.”

  I got my deployment orders shortly after graduating with about forty others who made the cut; I was one of only three soldiers selected from the group to support the special forces because of the high scores I obtained at the school. While the rest of them shipped off to Alaska to form a new Army brigade and freeze their asses off, I was headed to Afghanistan. My official orders said I was to report to the 3rd Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, a unit of the Green Berets stationed in Washington State.

  Before leaving, I did a three-week stint at the Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where I parachuted out of airplanes—and then had a bit of a reckoning. In all the time I’d spent training, I hadn’t actually been able to think much about what I’d gotten myself into.

  3

  NEW GUY

  Am I going to have to run out of this helicopter shooting? Are there going to be Taliban everywhere trying to shoot at me when I land? Fuck, I had less than a week of training on old M-16 assault rifles in intel school. No place for a laptop in a war zone. I’m not ready for this.

  I sat alone on a helicopter transport heading straight to the front lines.

  The Chinook was flying me to my new home, a camp outside Jalalabad, in the very eastern part of Afghanistan. It was 2005, after about two years of training and bureaucratic delays.

  I was twenty years old and this is where I would begin my first deployment. It also happened to be one of the most treacherous places in the world: the last place Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been spotted before he disappeared after 9/11. The news channels had made it sound savage—heads being lopped off, women stoned to death, children raped by their own parents. I didn’t know what to expect when I landed. I just assumed there were Taliban everywhere.

  Afghanistan is a beautiful country when you forget about all the death and destruction. I was used to big cities back home, nice houses with rooftops. There was little of that here. It was mostly windswept ridgelines, mountains with occasional mud huts. I could see people being pulled on carts by donkeys along the main road, families bathing in the small rivers, chickens and cattle scattering across the countryside as the Chinook whipped past.

  We flew over high mountains and threaded valleys, the pilots and crew keeping watch for Taliban or signs of surface-to-air missiles. Even with the earplugs I had been given, the thump of the Chinook’s rotors kept me from hearing my own thoughts. The door gunner sat on the edge looking out into the barren landscape as we edged around hilltops. I turned to my right and peered out the small circular window inside the helo as we flew over a group of sheep herders walking alongside their flock, in what seemed like miles from any form of civilization, and who no doubt heard us soaring in their direction from miles away. I watched the land zip past, one finger on my rifle trigger. I wondered if my old friends would even believe that I was seeing this. This was a long way from Katy.

  As an intel analyst, I would work closely with the Green Beret team deployed in the area. I was meant to be their eyes on the ground, analyzing and collecting whatever intelligence I could about threats to our small team, making sure they knew anything that was going on. I would help build their understanding of the human terrain by collecting intelligence reports from spies operating through the countryside and formulating recommendations about where our team needed to go. I spoke to the local tribes, making sure I understood everything about them before our larger group sat down with their elders. The tribes were also my sources on the movements of Taliban we were hunting. Mainly we were there to win hearts and minds, which meant making friends with the elders who were the keys to it all.

  It was a pretty monumental task considering we were a team of fifteen Americans surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Afghans. We were on our own, the nearest big military base hundreds of miles away.

  An hour before Jalalabad came into view, the Chinook flew over the city and then descended miles outside in an empty field, with nothing around it except a crush of mud huts and buildings, with patches of farm, and big towering mountains of snow in the background. Jalalabad proper had more civilization than other parts of the country; some called it the Palm Springs of Afghanistan. I never imagined Palm Springs to be anything like this.

  Two desert-camouflaged Humvees, no doors or windshields, skidded to a stop when I stepped out of the helo. A team of ten Green Berets jumped out. There was a force of another twenty or so locals wearing Afghani garb, gray beards, packed into two Toyota Hilux 4x4 trucks, all armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs)—extra security.

  The Green Berets looked like badasses, huge muj beards, like they’d just survived a Taliban prison. Some wore NYPD ball caps. They were armed to the teeth, guns painted different colors of camouflage, with scopes. The only thing missing was the horses I heard they rode to help them blend in with the locals. Look tougher and less like a nerdy intel guy . . . everyone is staring at you, I thought.

  One of the guys ran over and asked, “You the intel guy?”

  “Yeah,” I yelled over the departing Chinook.

  I stuck out: clean-shaven, fresh haircut, brand-new fatigues, packing grease still on my new gun.

  “Welcome to the team, we’re happy to have you,” he said. Then with a big smile, “Start growing your hair out. This isn’t basic training.”

  Along with the fifteen of us, there were about eighty Afghan security guards. We were one of the first to occupy the Jalalabad airfield, which was littered with blown-up Russian tanks and planes from decades before. They lined the main airstrip. Rocks painted red—signifying live mine fields—were still everywhere around us.


  I thought it was a joke when the guys introduced me to my new home, an underground prison that had once been home to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It was hidden under the old airfield terminal. My jail room? Made of concrete, yellow paint peeling, with a flimsy plywood door and claw marks still on the wall, somewhere you’d imagine many had lost their minds.

  Over the next few months I began to learn what it meant to be an intelligence specialist. I grew out my beard, and ditched my uniform for a shalwar kameez and a kufi skullcap. We traveled to remote villages, meeting with locals and tribal leaders while gathering intelligence. Sometimes the people couldn’t distinguish us from themselves. It felt a little like being an explorer, going places few if any Americans had ever been before. Some areas of Afghanistan had been so cut off from the world that the people thought the Russians still controlled parts of the country. For the first time during these travels and seeing how others lived, I realized how fortunate I was to be an American.

  I turned twenty-one in Afghanistan. The team celebrated with me and in my honor chugged a few “near beers,” basically drinks that gave you the taste of Bud Light but without the alcohol (it was illegal for U.S. troops to consume). Other friends my age back home couldn’t have imagined the feeling of turning twenty-one without an epic drunken night on the town to commemorate the occasion. Maybe it was better they didn’t know the feeling. Maybe this was the reason that soldiers like me and others were out fighting a war on the other side of the world: so they didn’t have to feel that.

  IT WAS THE FIRST TIME I EVER ENCOUNTERED A DRONE. I’D NEVER SEEN ANYTHING like it. The “Raven” was lightweight and designed to launch by hand and get a quick view of what’s over the horizon. It had roughly a sixty- to ninety-minute flight time, a typical operating altitude of anywhere from one to five hundred feet, and couldn’t travel much more than six miles out. The price tag was more than a couple years’ worth of my Army salary.

  “Want to see something cool?” asked Garth, the Green Beret who’d brought the drone to our camp. That day our team had all decided to take a break and grill out.

  Garth threw it up and it started buzzing off into the bright sky. The one thing that caught my attention right away was how loud it was, really loud, like a swarm of bees in my ear. No way this thing was sneaking up on the enemy. Even when it disappeared into the horizon, I could still hear it.

  Like a video game, he worked the drone with a remote control. It reminded me of an old-school, handheld Sega Genesis with the video screen in the middle and two joysticks on either side, one for the drone camera, the other to adjust altitude.

  I was in awe.

  “Can you guys see it? I can hear it, but I can’t tell where it is.”

  Garth laughed. “I’m flying it up and down the airstrip. Look on the map.”

  On the ground there was a small laptop, with mapping software that showed the location of the aircraft over the terrain below. It was turning back to us now.

  As he flew it over where we were standing, I could see us on the drone camera on his handheld remote. I waved at the drone.

  “Want to try it?” he asked.

  Of course I did. I grabbed the controls and he gave me a few pointers about how to turn it: very slow with the joystick, don’t do many big movements with your thumbs or it could lose altitude, just be easy with it.

  Around the screen there was a small flap that protected the screen from any glare from the sunlight, so you basically had to stick your face right up into the screen, like you might do when you are looking through binoculars.

  I looked into it and started watching the feed of the ground below and moving the joysticks on either side of the screen with my thumbs.

  I turned the Raven slowly and did a racetrack in the air a few times up and down the airfield, staying at the same altitude.

  The one thing that stood out was how wobbly the camera was. It was like a video taken while riding a horse. When you think of a 747, you think about how stable it is in the air. But because this was such a small plane and very light, the winds knocked it around and made the camera feed sway.

  The feed also wasn’t very clear, although I was still very impressed because it was the first drone footage I had ever seen. Years later I’d figure out that these camera optics were shit, like the difference between a digital camera and a Polaroid.

  This went on for only a short time before Garth wanted to call it quits and get to the grill.

  “Let’s bring it back down for a bit . . . just land it close to where we’re standing.”

  I had no fucking idea how to land this thing.

  I lowered the altitude and steered the Raven toward our location. My plan was to do a nice landing, just like any commercial airline pilot, but I lost control of it and the drone entered into a straight nosedive.

  The Raven slammed hard into the ground, breaking into several pieces. The nose cone broke apart from the base station and both wings went flying, along with the tail. I blinked hard to make sure this was happening. It was. The Raven lay scattered across the cement.

  Fuck, I’ve just destroyed government property worth tens of thousands of dollars.

  “Man,” said Garth. “This is not good. You fucked up my Raven!”

  I must have had a horrible look of discomfort on my face, like I was about to vomit. I thought I was going to have to pay for this.

  That’s when Garth broke out laughing. “Got you, man!”

  Turned out the Raven was created specifically to break apart in a bunch of pieces on impact so the enemy couldn’t get their hands on it. A built-in security mechanism to trick the unaware. It had worked at my expense.

  Garth continued to laugh hysterically as he picked up the pieces and walked back to the spot where the rest of the team was still grilling.

  Any opportunity to screw with the new guy.

  4

  CAMP

  PIZZA HUT

  “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.”

  I was bent down, barefoot. My hands, knees, and forehead were pressed against the small short-haired rug on the concrete floor.

  “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.”

  The sun was just creeping up over the horizon as I recited the Muslim prayer in Arabic, line after line. I continued to press my forehead against the rug and then stood, facing the direction of the holy city of Mecca, just as I was taught.

  Others prayed around me in the large empty room, voices echoing off the walls. My Koran lay on the ground behind me.

  After I finished praying, I planned to rejoin my group to begin laying out our attack on a convoy transporting a high-ranking VIP from the United States. My group was as extreme as they came. Other believers of Islam didn’t understand that we were the true descendants of Allah. The ones who didn’t understand us had to die.

  We only had a short window to get the attack right. Our brothers told us that the American VIP and his armed security escort would be traveling south along a dirt road close to our village. Our ambush had to be planned carefully.

  “You must understand the mindset of the terrorist,” an instructor said later, shaking me from a brainwashed daze. I’d been hearing this all week—this was mirror-image training in secret in the backwoods of North Carolina.

  I wore a full head scarf to protect my identity; others could only glimpse my eyes. This was terrorist training, designed specifically to teach a select few of us how to be just like the enemy, so that we could fight them.

  Every day started at dawn, running speed laps around the building and reciting verses from the Koran. The rest of the day we were Islamic terrorists planning attacks, praying, firing foreign weapons like AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, heavy shotguns. We conducted mock ambushes on convoys, planned kidnappings of high-ranking officials, and plotted our own suicide missions.

  One day we learned how to pack a suicide vest with ball bearings for maximum carnage against civilians in our path. When I picked it up, I was surprised by its lightness. It felt li
ke a hunting jacket. It would be easy to move around with the vest in a heavily populated area undetected and squeeze the trigger, maximizing the death toll.

  Sometimes it was easy to forget whose team you were on: the United States or Al Qaeda. The sleeplessness added to that. You spend enough time obsessively thinking and doing things like someone else and you become that someone else.

  The propaganda videos they made us watch only fuzzied that line more. These were videos found on YouTube and parts of the Dark Web. In them they made it seem like U.S. soldiers were personally going out and killing innocent civilians. I remembered one montage of a U.S. Army soldier shooting his M-16 that quickly cut to a clip of an injured child, making it look like the soldier had shot him.

  It was one of the strangest training camps I’d ever been to. In part, they were brainwashing us, just like Al Qaeda brainwashed its recruits in order to convince them it was their duty to kill as many Westerners as possible. Hearing enough of it myself day after day, I could see why a terrorist would think that way if an elder or religious figure they trusted fed them those lies. Those barbarians cursing our country had grown up unable to understand anything else.

  “Why do they hate us so much?” I asked one of the instructors.

  “Because they have a perverted view of Islam,” he said.

  I didn’t get it. I wasn’t taught to view others with so much hate. I hadn’t done anything to our enemies, quite the opposite in fact. When we were in Afghanistan, our special forces group brought food and medical supplies to families in need. Once we even called a helicopter with U.S. medics on board to our base to assist a little Afghani child who couldn’t walk.