Drone Warrior Page 6

  The new drone strategy worked as well as it could. The soldiers suddenly had visibility on whatever house they were raiding, whether there were any gunmen perched on rooftops, suspicious lurkers, and how many people might be waiting inside the house. There were always firefights when our guys took to the streets inside Sadr City and the drone helped become their extra eyes in the sky.

  It was hard to actually quantify the shift. But the advantage felt like it mattered. And we started bringing in more militants, with fewer soldiers in our outpost getting killed. The new targeting also seemed to scare Hajji Jawad some. One day we got intelligence that he’d moved deeper into the slum and had stopped moving around as much, fearing that we were getting closer. I didn’t see him for a long time after that. Years later, the Seals would send me a picture of him rotting in a Baghdad jail.

  IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME, FROM OUT OF NOWHERE ONE NIGHT, THAT I RECEIVED A cell phone call.

  “Hello,” the voice said.

  “Who’s this?”

  “This is Mr. White.”

  7

  THE DOOR AT THE

  END OF THE HALL

  Mr. White never told me his first name. It was only Mr. White. On the phone, he said that he’d heard a lot about me, but he didn’t say what he’d heard or who had told him anything. He wanted me to try out for a new job.

  What was it? He wouldn’t say. I flew home anyway.

  The command at 82nd didn’t like it at all. They had tried to stop me from going, but the top brass told them they couldn’t get in the way, and everyone quickly fell in line.

  I traveled to an undisclosed location in the United States in early 2007 and met Mr. White for the first time. He was waiting for me the morning after I arrived.

  There was something about him that made me feel anxious whenever we crossed paths. Like he already knew the answer to all the questions he asked me. I got the sense right away that asking too many questions of anyone when I got there would get me into trouble—an uneasiness no doubt by design. This was part of the selection process.

  About that: the U.S. government won’t let me say much about how I was recruited into the unit or the gauntlet of mental tests that only a few pass to gain entry into what is hands-down the most elite organization in the military.

  I can’t tell you about where I went, the people there, or what went on. I can’t tell you any more about Mr. White, though there is more to say about him. Most of what I wrote about the process in an earlier version of the book was completely redacted and blacked out. The government wants to keep it that way.

  Very few in the military ever get a shot at the experience. But without the selection process, elite special missions units wouldn’t be as badass as they are, or as legendary. Every member knows that they’re working with the best and brightest in their craft.

  It has to be that way. If you can’t trust that the man or woman next to you is operating at the same elite level, everyone is in big trouble. Even the cooks go through their own gauntlet. It’s like having a bunch of Gordon Ramsays who can serve you dinner and pick someone off in a crowd with an assault rifle.

  What I can say about what I went through without getting into trouble is this: it was one big mindfuck from start to finish. And it was my first true introduction to the world of black ops, what we refer to in our club as “the dark side.”

  Because I was intel, my selection experience was different than a typical “operator.” How operators get picked and the physical hell they go through has been detailed in numerous books. They make most of the military look like Girl Scouts.

  For me, imagine the hardest job interview you can think of—over many days. Now multiply that by ten. Intellectual, psychological, and—maybe most important—emotional stresses that are unrelenting. You have no idea what’s going on, and the only thing you know—and which many people take—is that there’s an exit if you need it.

  Most civilians would give up after the first few hours, the unknown too hard for most to cope. That uncertainty of what I was getting into was what fueled me. There were a gazillion tests right away. Tests for my character, intelligence, and capacity to mentally deal with the high-stress world to come.

  They needed to know I could handle being put in situations by myself, with little or no information, and figure things out, no questions asked.

  From the moment I arrived at the classified facility, I was watched and assessed by a handful of different people. I passed others sometimes in the hallways of different buildings. No one talked. No names were ever exchanged. We hardly even looked at one another, maybe just a split-second peek to get a glimpse at the competition.

  At night I lay on my bed, the crickets screaming outside, and thought about what was next and where things could be headed. I never knew.

  The absence of information made me feel at sea. There were times as I fought through the physical and mental tests and jousted with psychologists about my past and future that I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be there.

  Days of this ended when someone told me to drive to an unmarked building deep in the woods.

  When I arrived, the one-story building couldn’t have been bigger than a local fast-food joint. Two guards were waiting. They escorted me into a dimly lit hallway with only a few chairs pushed up against the wall. I walked in and was told to sit down and wait for further instructions.

  One of the guards sat to the right of me while the other one waited outside. The white walls were chipping. As I sat there, I wondered if the lights were dim for a reason or if someone had just forgotten to replace the bulbs. The rusty metal chair felt like something given to prisoners in a holding cell.

  I couldn’t help but notice that the hallway led only to a single black door. And I could only make out the door because of a tiny sliver of light shining through a small crack at the bottom.

  What was behind that door? Part of me wondered if I’d have to shoot someone who’d been tied up and covered in a hood. I nervously laughed at my own paranoia.

  Hours passed, at least it felt like hours. I didn’t have a watch or a phone to know the time. It was hot and my back was soaked with sweat. My mind played tricks on me. The hallway began to close, feel cramped. The guard next to me just stared silently at the opposite wall as the few lights flickered on and off.

  Back then I was still wet behind the ears. I knew nothing, even with the years I had already spent in combat zones. What I know now was that this black door was everything: it was the potential of who I could become, it was the secretive group that few knew anything about.

  Finally, the door I had come in through swung open and Mr. White appeared. I had not seen him since the day I arrived. He sat in the chair to my left and gestured to the end of the hallway to the closed black door and told me to stand up and head that way. My heart was pounding. “When you get to that door, knock three times and wait until you are told to enter,” he said. I looked at him as if to ask, What’s in there? But he just gestured to the end of the hall until I started walking.

  One thing that I would understand after this day was that this process had started before I’d even gotten the call from Mr. White and arrived at this secret place. The men assessing me already knew everything there was to know about me: all that I’d done had been recorded and put away in files. Part of my top-secret clearance meant verifying my past.

  Everything I had learned up to that point, each combat zone, each piece of the intelligence puzzle that I had mastered in those earlier years, all of it was important. I finally understood why I had been put in the situations that led me here. Little did I know at the time, though, that I had so much more to learn, that I truly knew nothing. This was only the beginning.

  When I got close to the single door at the end of the hall, walking blindly into it without knowing exactly what I was getting into, I stopped and turned around, hoping to get one last nod of approval from Mr. White before I knocked and went in.

  But Mr. White was gone, and so was
my past. I never saw or heard from him again.

  What was behind the black door? Unfortunately, the government won’t let me tell you anything about that, or what ultimately happened after I knocked and a loud voice urged me in.

  But I can say this: since the moment that door opened and I walked in, nothing has ever been the same. I was Delta.

  8

  DAY ZERO

  I showed up at the unit’s U.S. base in early 2008.

  As I passed multiple security checkpoints, showing my badge and trying to keep it together, I was flooded with a feeling of pride.

  Am I really fucking here?

  The unit was legendary in the U.S. military. Much of what it did wasn’t even known to the outside world. It was off the books—and so were its people. Most only knew about the unit from what they saw in Chuck Norris movies. But that wasn’t the half of it.

  The organization had a lot of history and I learned it all. It was founded in 1977 after Special Forces operator Col. Charlie Beckwith spent some time with the British Special Air Service (SAS). Beckwith saw what the U.S. would come to know very well decades later: that terrorism would touch all of our lives at some point and there was a need for a specially equipped organization to take it on, no matter where it was in the world.

  People mix up the different special forces operators and units all the time. It was an easy thing to do. But each one was unique. SEAL Teams specialized in water, though they did land missions, too, many times at night and within the borders of countries with which the United States was not officially at war. Army Rangers were the military’s elite light infantry force. They went after large targets like enemy airfields and compounds with lightning speed. The Air Force also had the Pararescue, with guys who parachuted out of planes and helicopters on stealthy rescue missions.

  Our group did all that, among other things, but the primary mission over the last decade was direct action (DA). When a terrorist cell needed to be taken out, a hostage needed to be rescued, or a terrorist group needed to be taken down, the unit was called in. The government had a tier system to designate different special forces elements across the services; we were considered the highest, Tier 1, the national mission force.

  Every member was hand-selected, from the intelligence guys to the ground force operators, to the guys who serviced our customized weapons, even down to the doctors and dentists on our compound there to make sure we were ready to meet the demands of the mission.

  Most of the operators—the guys who kicked down doors—came out of the Green Berets and the Rangers. They were already rock stars and highly skilled, but Delta turned that up a notch, turning them into supersoldiers. It was taking the world’s best professionals, giving them the tools and technology they never had access to before, and then setting them free to do what they do best.

  I would quickly learn that our core responsibility was very straightforward: hunting down the world’s most dangerous terrorists. To that end, I’d be provided with all the assets and gear I needed to take out the enemy, including the most sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the U.S. arsenal.

  The base was its own mini-campus, with large buildings housing personnel and equipment, medical bays, huge gyms with Olympic-sized swimming pools, multiple firing ranges, training grounds surrounding the main building that had mock-ups of Middle Eastern buildings found in war zones overseas. As I drove in I saw a bunch of guys in dune buggies and dirt bikes and armed to the teeth pull out in front of me and zoom off into a trail through the woods. This was a whole different world, sealed off from the rest of the Army.

  As I unpacked that first night, my mind was all over the place. The intelligence side of our unit was a tiny group, just under twenty, so everyone knew each other. You were known by your reputation. That was all that mattered. You earned it like stripes on your sleeve. Up until then, I had been used to large intelligence units. But these guys prided themselves on their small teams. Even though they’d looked at hundreds of candidates, I was one of only two recruits brought into the intel unit that year. My initial selection was just the beginning. I had six months to prove myself to other members of the unit; otherwise I was out. I had been tested before, but this was the ultimate test. You were either varsity or not. In this game, there was no JV. I learned this fact fast.

  On one of my first nights, I met the second recruit, Johnnie, who was on his fifth month of probation. It was late and we were all in the team room, which was part of the secure underground facility where I’d be working and training. He was a stocky guy, bald head with a trimmed mustache.

  Early on, some of the senior guys were around and Johnnie joked with them. When they left, I asked him how it was going. I wanted to know what to expect.

  His demeanor grew dark, as if a shadow had moved into the room, and he suddenly looked tired and beaten down. “I don’t know, man,” he said.

  “What do you mean? You got a month left and then you’re in.”

  “I can’t do anything right in their eyes. They’re riding me hard. Really fucking hard. You have no idea.”

  He sat down at a table and looked at his booted feet. We talked about the months he’d been there and it sounded rough. It got late. He said he was stressed and mentally broken and felt like no one liked him. “I don’t think they’re going to keep me around much longer.”

  I didn’t know what to say other than “Don’t worry, man. I’m sure it will all be fine.”

  He didn’t argue, but he warned me about what was to come. “Forget everything that you accomplished before. That means shit. You’re nothing now. You’re zero.”

  I WAS ON A TEAM WITH THREE OTHER SENIOR INTEL ANALYSTS. BILL WAS THE TEAM leader. At forty he was the oldest in the group—a kind of Yoda. War had ravaged him and he was graying, something the team gave him shit about. Bill was a legend, though. He was part of some of the first and most devastating Predator strikes overseas. He was most famous for tracking down a well-known dictator and kept a photo of the capture on his desk. Just the two of them sitting next to each other in chairs shortly after capture. That photo was a stark reminder that a few men had the ability to change the course of a war. When I asked him about it, I was surprised by his modesty. “I wasn’t responsible for that alone,” he said. “People think I’m good, but it’s really because I surround myself with great people.”

  This way of thinking and acting, I’d find out, was the unit’s way.

  “Nothing we accomplish here is done by just one person and nothing you do will be done alone,” Bill said.

  I liked him right away. He would become a mentor even though he’d probably never admit it. I would lean on him heavily, especially when I was uneasy about making tough calls. He didn’t always play by the rules when it came to targeting terrorist networks. He did whatever it took to take his targets out. Years later I would thank him for being such a big influence and going to bat for me even when I was wrong. “Stop stroking me,” he said, “and get back to finding terrorists.”

  Jack was the number two. He seemed to know everything about the guys we hunted. If you asked him about any senior-level terrorists around the world, he’d recite their biographies and then tick off a list of ways to take them out.

  Unlike Bill, there was no gray area for him: rules were black-and-white. Sometimes we’d find ourselves in tricky situations during a hunt, moral dilemmas that sometimes made me question what we were doing. Jack always knew what call to make.

  He pushed me to the point of exhaustion early on, and then pushed me some more. Once he got on me because I was only working eighteen-hour days. “What the hell are you doing with so much free time!” he yelled. “Maximum four hours of sleep a day or we’ll find someone else to do what you do.”

  At one point, Jack left the military for the private sector, but he nearly lost his mind. “Civilian life sucks,” he said.

  Mark was number three in our group. We called him “Angry One” because he hated pretty much everyone outside our inne
r circle, especially other U.S. intelligence agencies. Too many of them had burned him too many times. He wouldn’t even get on the phone with the agency when they needed intel from him. “Fuck them,” he’d say.

  Mark was in his thirties, a big guy, solid as a concrete piling. Ironically, he always thought of himself as a nice guy, not realizing it didn’t take much to set him off. Over the deployments, he was constantly firing our “augmentees”—the people whom various government agencies sent to support us around the globe. Any slight error and they were on the next military cargo plane smoking back to Washington, D.C.

  Over the years, our team would become very close. In this job, you spent more time with one another than with your own family. We knew each other like brothers.

  Most days before deployment were spent in one of the team rooms or in the main operations hub, which was sort of like the control center of a submarine, stacked with computer screens under a low ceiling. I got there at 5:30 A.M. and didn’t leave before 7 P.M. Some nights I didn’t leave at all.

  “Every one of us has spent the night in this place at some point,” Bill said to me early on. He wanted me to know that I wasn’t the first person to do this and wouldn’t be the last. It was exhausting, but something was different about this place than other jobs I had previously. I wanted to be there and knew I was following in the footsteps of the best. It wasn’t a chore.

  When I wasn’t in the bunker, there was a lot of training. We practiced tactical driving and shooting pretty much every badass weapon under the sun—automatic rifles, pistols, shoulder-fired rockets. Even though the operators were the unit’s boots on the ground, as members of the intel squadron within the unit, we still needed to know how to pull a trigger. My weapons of choice were a Glock 9mm and a Hechler & Koch (H&K) 416 long rifle.

  The main job of our team was something that I’d been doing for years but was expected to take to another level: building target packages of terrorists, figuring which ones to go after, and finding them on the ground to capture or kill.