Drone Warrior Read online

  My diet was MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat—aka field rations), along with the one Hickory Farms sausage and cheese box my aunt Linda had sent from New Jersey. I bathed using water bottles because we had no showers. Going to the bathroom was a struggle. We had a row of porta-potties just outside the building, but we had to wear full body armor and a helmet to get there. I always had my gun locked and loaded. Every soldier’s worst fear was getting killed by a mortar in the john, pants around his ankles.

  When the mortars slowed down, other threats replaced them: snipers, stray rounds, car bombs. Even the sheik from the local mosque was against us. He used the loudspeakers in the city to instruct the people to attack all Westerners, which became a nightmare soundtrack that you couldn’t turn off.

  I’d been told that my deployment was only going to be six months, but that turned into a year and then fifteen months, a kind of low-grade fever that I couldn’t kick. “Welcome to hell” was how others greeted new soldiers when they came in. This was the beginning of the Surge, the strategy whereby President George W. Bush shipped over thirty thousand more U.S. troops at the request of General David Petraeus and other senior military strategists back home, keeping their fingers crossed that the chaos would end.

  SADR CITY WAS THE MOST DENSELY POPULATED SLUM IN THE COUNTRY, WITH SOME two million people jammed into eight square miles. The streets were rubble, streaming with sewage and crammed with two-and three-story buildings that all seemed to be falling down.

  A Shia cleric named Muqtada al-Sadr ran the slum. Being in this area meant that we weren’t just fighting Shia extremists. We were also fighting Iran, which was using trained locals who shared similar religious ideology and goals to wage a proxy war against us.

  The Surge was initiated earlier in the year as Iraq slid deeper into violence, with different armed groups fighting each other and U.S. troops. The monthly body count of U.S. soldiers killed in battle was at its highest level in the Iraq War. The new prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, hadn’t worked out as planned. As a Shia, he had quickly shut out most of the other religious groups. And the U.S. troops had largely spent their time at big protected bases across the country, making little meaningful interaction with the local population. The Surge was meant to change that.

  Most of the thirty thousand new soldiers were deployed deep within neighborhoods around Baghdad. Our mission was basically to clean up the neighborhoods and make them safer. Clear out the guns and root out the extremists.

  At combat outpost Callahan, I was one of about eight intelligence analysts. We spent our days in a small, windowless room behind computers, putting together intelligence packets on the local bad guys, a kind of who’s who of the neighborhood. The information came in bits and pieces from the field, mostly from people we’d interviewed or taken prisoner, but it tended to be unreliable or hard to verify.

  Soon our walls were covered with targets, lines drawn showing how each was connected to the other, like one expansive planetary system. The main boss of our unit’s assigned neighborhood was an old bastard named Hajji Jawad, part of a Shia group called the Jaysh al-Mahdi, or Mahdi’s Army.

  Hundreds of men reported to him. He ran extortion rackets. Many in the neighborhood, including the market, paid his men protection money. His men’s singular objective was simple: to kill us. Every bomb that hit our building came because of him.

  Early on, I went on a patrol with infantry guys to get a lay of the land. I was curious in particular about the main market, where Hajji Jawad’s militias plotted, traded weapons, and extorted money. We drove in a convoy, eyeing the road for improvised explosives in the piles of garbage. The crowds swelled around us as we passed, like something pulsing in a blender.

  At the market, the carts and storefronts were suffocatingly close and trafficked in everything from electronics and housewares to kebobs. Sewage and meat and something rancid hung in the air. Men with guns sat in a Toyota pickup, keeping a close watch on us as we stopped and climbed out of our Humvees. We knew about these guys from our intelligence reports. They were the eyes of the market.

  I took photos and walked around, taking note of stores that our intelligence reports had connected to Hajji Jawad. I had imagined him hanging out with his guys, plotting attacks like Tony Soprano and his men at their meat market. But it was strangely ordinary, calm even. Despite the crowds and the Toyota, the market was just a market like any other.

  When we got intel on his men, we passed it along to the infantry guys who conducted raids. But those raids were never very precise and rarely ended with us getting our target. We seldom had specific houses, which led to a lot of mistakes. The worthless sources within the city usually gave us two or three addresses at a time, so we raided all of them. If we thought a militant was located in one house, the infantry guys would raid not only that house, but also the places on either side. And when the soldiers arrived in their convoy, many times the enemy was ready. They saw us coming from miles away, their intel better than ours. Other times, the men inside didn’t turn out to be the targets we believed we were going after. In one raid, the man firing on us turned out to be just a homeowner protecting his house—he’d thought he was being robbed by local thugs. Civilians were dying partly because of our mistakes, the fog of war at its worst.

  Over those months near Sadr City, we just didn’t have enough information and know-how to target the enemy embedded among the populace with pinpoint accuracy. We trusted the wrong sources, who turned out to be giving us fake information for the money, no doubt some even working directly for the enemy to gather information on us. We also detained local citizens in the area when they probably shouldn’t have been detained. We were imprecise. It was either us or them and I think it pissed off everyone involved.

  On our side of it, the consequence was that a lot of our men died along the way. They were shot up in the streets or hit by IEDs on patrol. For a stretch, it seemed like we lost a man every week. One afternoon I looked through the camera that faced out our front gate as a small convoy of vehicles transporting our infantrymen returned from patrol, only to see a massive explosion erupt from a telephone pole as they drove by. The battered vehicle stopped right in its tracks. That year was one of the deadliest of the war for U.S. troops. There were nights when I wondered if I might be next.

  It’s hard to shake that feeling when it hits you—that you could die at any moment and don’t have any choice in the matter. Being in a constant state of danger gets to you, a compulsive thought you can’t stop. It’s one thing to feel fear for a few minutes, maybe when you’re walking through a tough neighborhood late at night or for a few hours after a terrible car accident. But it’s another thing entirely to feel that fear for weeks, months, and even years at a time.

  Every soldier feels this way at some point, whether they admit it or not. You either go crazy thinking about it all day long or you just accept the fact that when your time is up, it’s up. Maybe a higher power has a plan for you, which is a nice way to deal with that fear, and there is nothing else left to do. But the soldiers who learn to push the fear way down inside and cover it up are the ones who get by best.

  I began to feel an extreme hatred for the locals and the Iraqi people, even for those in the country who didn’t mean us harm. It wasn’t like me to hate so much and so broadly. It wasn’t the way my mother raised me. I began hating these people whom I didn’t even know because they clearly had so much hate for me. That hate started to manifest itself, slowly taking me over.

  “What the fuck are we doing here?” I said one night to Jay, the analyst next to me at our bay of computers, as we scrolled through a list of shitheads that just kept getting longer and longer.

  “This is bullshit.”

  “Just sitting behind these damn computers, and for what? It’s not like the intelligence is going anywhere.”

  “We can’t even leave this damn building.”

  We had a version of this conversation regularly. All of us did.

  “They’
re just firing at us,” he said.

  “We’re sitting ducks.”

  MY ONLY REFUGE WAS THE DRONE ROOM. I WENT THERE DURING BREAKS. IT WAS A tiny office—basically a closet—on the second floor, with one small laptop that streamed footage of the Army’s Predator RQ-1 drone that orbited the city day and night, its pinlike camera capturing the hundreds of thousands of people on the streets. Someone had told us how to log into the system and the guys had set up the room to watch for our entertainment.

  There were no chairs, so we sat on piles of MRE boxes—and hours passed there. It was my first real taste of a drone in action since my fuckup in Afghanistan with Garth, and my first education in how it was being used the wrong way.

  The big Army HQ in the Green Zone controlled it. Because it was only being used to collect information, it wasn’t armed. But we were lucky to even have it flying over our area for the few hours a day that it did. There were so few Predators operating at the time, and even fewer military units with the power to control them. It flew along roads that our convoys traveled but mostly it did route scans and searched the city streets for pieces of trash that might be roadside bombs.

  The hope was that the drone’s thermal sensors would pick out improvised explosive devices radiating heat in a pile of trash. But the scans were completely ridiculous. The street trash was oceanic. Parts of Baghdad felt like a giant Dumpster—the garbage was all over—and the drones never, in all the hours I spent watching, found an IED.

  Sometimes I’d open up the chat function on the monitor streaming the live video feed as the drone looked at a pile of rocks or some paper in the road and I’d see the pilots chatting back and forth. The conversations were always the same.

  “Hey, I think we got something hot here,” one chatted to another. I could see the camera on the drone from 4,000 feet up staring down at a white plastic bag in the road that looked no different than the sea of other white plastic bags floating through the garbage-laden streets like giant jellyfish.

  The drone circled the plastic bag for thirty minutes, sniffing out an angle that might give light to what was hidden under it. Soon the pilot looped in the infantry commander of the unit in the area. “We got something,” the pilot messaged to him. “It’s hot!”

  Hot garbage was dangerous garbage.

  Soon after, the commander would send out a convoy with ordnance soldiers to dismantle the IED. I watched the camera feed as the convoy slowly approached the bag and then a soldier in a big, bomb-protective suit that looked like the Michelin Man climbed out and went to examine it.

  “There they go again,” I said to Jay.

  “Garbage patrol,” he said.

  Sure enough, when the ordnance soldier turned over the bag, there was nothing there.

  The thing is, even if the drone ever did spot an IED during a convoy, the pilot didn’t have the ability to talk directly to the 82nd Airborne convoy commander in the field. His warning would have to go through multiple channels before it even got to him. And by that time, it would likely be too late.

  “Burning holes in the sky,” I said to Jay. “That’s all these drones do.”

  It sounded like a song. But it was a sad song. The military was using multimillion-dollar machines to hunt for garbage, while we were dying.

  DURING THOSE MONTHS THERE WERE SO MANY EXTREMIST GROUPS IN THE CITY VYING to get their licks in. We were simply target practice for them.

  The worst I can recall came around four o’clock one morning, and I was starting to drift off at my computer in the back corner of our office. I had been clicking through different enemy photos and reading intelligence reports for the last couple hours. It was turning into another all-nighter. The whole outpost was nearly pitch-black and unusually silent, except for the standing fan rattling through the dusty air.

  Thinking that I needed a walk to clear my mind, I got up and headed for the computer lab upstairs, where I could jump on Facebook and see what my friends were up to back home, in Katy, Texas. That’s what most of the guys did with downtime, anything to escape the prison of this place.

  Then it happened.

  Halfway down the hallway: a gigantic, blinding flash of light out of nowhere, like someone had suddenly hit the hall with a giant blowtorch, and then in the same second, while my eyes were burning and trying to adjust, boom! An object came crashing through the concrete right in front of me like the front end of an eighteen-wheeler, slamming into a sleeping area, where twenty or so soldiers were racked out.

  It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Concrete and rebar collapsed around me and the explosion threw me to the ground, the heat of it all over my body, like when the door to an incinerator is suddenly thrown open. Sparks were flying everywhere as small chunks of debris from the wall struck me. The ringing in my ears was in stereo. Then suddenly everything went dark and for a second it was just dust and smoke and then nothing at all. Was I dead? I tried to blink. I tried to look down the hall and get a view of what happened, but I couldn’t even tell if the building was still standing.

  I don’t know how long that lasted, but slowly my feeling came back. I had arms and legs again as I used the wall next to me to get up. A throbbing started in the deep part of my eardrums and it hurt like hell, like something burrowing in. The ringing, too, like a gun had gone off next to my face. Damn. I tried to blink it away. I squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them. My head felt like it was going to come off.

  I began to stagger around, trying to hold on to the wall. But the explosions came again, one and then two, and then another, like they were being dropped from directly above.

  I must have slipped into a haze again because at some point as I stood there, trying to hold on to whatever wasn’t falling around me, another soldier appeared.

  He shook me.

  “GET YOUR BODY ARMOR ON NOW!”

  “What?”

  “GET YOUR ARMOR NOW!”

  It took a second to snap back into reality. Patting myself down head to toe to see if my body was still whole, if I’d been hit.

  I was alive.

  I’d find out later that others weren’t as lucky that morning. Twenty Katyusha rockets had torn holes into the building. They’d been launched from a massive flatbed truck parked parallel to our building on the street out in front.

  Blood was everywhere, like many overturned paint buckets. I remember seeing a young soldier with his legs torn off, lying there in the mess, partly clothed in his uniform, as others yelled for medical help. Exactly how many people were hurt that day, I don’t remember. Maybe I blocked it out of my mind. But I would always remember that soldier. He came to represent how bad things had become. He made me want to raze the whole country, until there was nothing left. I never hated anything that much before. I wanted to kill every last one of them, but I was powerless.

  It was in the hours that followed that I learned how close others had come to dying. One soldier had been on the top floor quietly reading his Bible when two rockets blasted right past him, punching two big holes in the building, one hole on either side of where he sat. Miraculously, not a scratch on him. Just some dust on his clothes.

  Maybe he was lucky. Maybe that meant there was a God. I don’t know. I just knew that the war was at its worst and I was more afraid than I’d ever been before.

  I CALLED HOME AFTER THAT MORNING. THERE WAS A LINE OF US WAITING TO DO THE same. I hadn’t yet changed out of my dirty, ripped-up clothes. I needed to hear my mother’s voice. I needed to escape the war. Just talk about anything else.

  “Tell me about your day,” she said.

  I called her every couple months, just to check in. Usually I didn’t talk much about all the danger. I didn’t want her to worry. I didn’t want her to know that just a few more steps down that hall and I could have easily been killed. I asked about all the regular stuff—how the family was doing, what she was up to. I tried to keep it upbeat.

  But I felt myself cracking this time. I couldn’t muster the usual enthusiasm. “Things
are good,” I said. “The usual.”

  “What’s the usual?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Something happened, didn’t it?”

  There was a long silence. And then I broke. “I’m not sure if I’ll live through this,” I said, my voice stuttering as the fear I had kept inside took over. I told her about the missile attack. “It’s just a matter of time before it’s my turn.”

  I could tell she was taken aback because she didn’t say anything at first. She’d assumed life wasn’t that dangerous. That I was safe.

  She began to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, it’s bad here.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that,” she said. “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “Mom.”

  “Everything will be okay.”

  But we both knew we’d entered a place that neither of us had been before.

  NATURALLY, ALL THE ATTACKS MADE US ANGRIER AND MORE DRIVEN TO STRIKE back. Thoughts cycled through about what I could do differently, what power I had to change things, to fight back.

  I immediately thought of our sporadic Predator flights.

  I chatted up the drone pilot on daily garbage patrol and asked if he’d try a different route. Instead of a route scan, I asked him to fly over the houses that we’d targeted to raid. “We could use some support seeing what our infantry guys on the ground can’t before a raid,” I chatted him on the secure line. “We’re dying down here.”

  From then on, the drone group began supporting us once or twice a week for two-or three-hour stretches. Even as the military was starting to get more birds out to support missions, as part of a broader policy shift, they were still scarce in the skies—at least for us. We had to share one drone with three or four nearby Army units. Which still wasn’t very practical. But we made the most out of it.