Drone Warrior Read online

  We had secret intelligence databases with entire structures of our enemies mapped out and massive line diagrams of the leading terrorist groups around the world, groups you’ve heard about on the news and others that you will never know.

  Weekly, they’d interrogate me for hours, grilling me about terrorist packages I was assigned to put together. The idea was to get better at tracking and planning strikes on our enemies.

  “You have to know these targets better than their own families,” Jack said one day in the team room, the place we went for private conversations. Each of the intel teams had its own room. “You have to find that one chance, that one small window to capture or kill the enemy.”

  Stress was as constant as bad spring weather in those early months, but that was by design. You had to learn to deal with it because stress was the unit’s natural state. One day Bill walked into the operations room, dropped down a ninety-page brick of papers, and said, “You have an hour to learn this and present it to the board.”

  These daily tests and endless hammering from superiors were designed to scare the new intel recruits into feeling like failures.

  The legal document he gave me explained the authorization for use of military force (AUMF) and why we had the authority to conduct drone strikes against certain designated terrorists. He wanted me to quit, but I didn’t. I burned through the document in record time, extracting the info I needed, and crushed the presentation. Bill left the room smiling at me, as if silently nodding his approval.

  Training moved fast. It was like a treadmill running at 20. If you tripped or fell behind, there was an assumption that you’d never regain your footing. You’d be left.

  After a murder board one day, I ran into Johnnie again. It must have been a particularly rough one. His face was white. He looked more beaten down than before. I tried to talk to him, give him a boost like he’d probably do for me.

  “Hey, man,” I said. He just kept walking, without a word.

  A few days later, I heard that Johnnie had been cut. They told him to leave and he was gone before I could say goodbye.

  THE “UNBLINKING EYE” WAS WHAT BILL CALLED DRONES.

  He liked to say that drones were our most important tool, but to be a good targeter, you needed to learn how to observe, how to see what others don’t see.

  “UAVs are nothing without the right people behind them,” he said during one of his teacherly moments, as we sat in the operation room staring at the feeds.

  Bill and Jack came from a time, just a couple years before, when the group had access to only one drone in a given combat zone and everyone in the Army was fighting to use it. Now they had multiple UAVs in their pocket, Predators, Reapers, and others—many “unblinking eyes” that could rove the skies with their eyes wide open.

  In those first few months, I watched hours and hours of drone footage: a strike on a vehicle traveling through the mountains someplace the U.S. government technically wasn’t supposed to be, a Hellfire launch on a compound full of terrorists armed to the teeth in a war zone.

  In our world, we didn’t actually use the word drone much at all. That term came from the media. We called them UAVs, short for unmanned aerial vehicles. I also called them birds, like “put the bird up over the following location.”

  Our first birds had been unarmed and used for surveillance. They also made a lot of noise and crashed without warning after losing link to the ground control stations. The newest crop was completely silent and flew thousands of feet in the air. They varied in size. Predators were typically the length of a small commuter plane at twenty-seven feet, with the wingspan nearly double that. Most landed like fighter jets on a landing strip and had hundreds of Air Force personnel maintaining them.

  Drones brought us a completely new capacity for success on the battlefield. No other generation of warfighters before us had this kind of power. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent yearly to make them better just for our teams, flying higher, faster, stealthier, with more firing precision. The overall intent was to be more exact at targeting while at the same time decreasing the chances of any harm to innocent civilians. Our teams were helping shape the future of drones every day by implementing technology that wouldn’t be known in the public space for years.

  Our drones could stalk targets for hours at a time, collect data, and of course kill. But we used them mostly for surveillance. Usually the camera sensor lives in a bubble pod along the belly of the bird and includes an electro-optical (daytime) camera, an infrared (nighttime) camera, a laser target marker, and laser target designator. In our jargon, this was the multispectral targeting system—all the components we needed to watch, hunt, and kill.

  Early on, the cameras streamed back fuzzy images. The amount of data that needed to be transmitted from one side of the world to the other so that we could see the video clearly was initially too much to handle. The government spent tens of millions of dollars to increase the bandwidth for streaming data, adding secretive data relays that allowed the drone fleets to communicate to us from anywhere around the globe.

  In the course of training, I learned how to manage the drones, the very specialized—and alien to most—language used over the radio and chat systems, and the various complicated processes involved in Pred strikes. The biggest surprise was the massive infrastructure around a drone. It wasn’t just a couple of people flying these multimillion-dollar machines. I was in charge, but there were a lot of people in many different locations, watching the drone, launching it into the air, landing it, and helping to make sure that nothing went wrong along the way. I didn’t pilot the drone or physically move the camera myself. There were Air Force teams sitting in trailers in Nevada or New Mexico that did that for us. The teams flew them from these trailers because it was easier to control the drone infrastructure from the United States instead of constantly creating new hubs in every new combat zone. But I was at the center of it all. I directed the drones where to go, who they followed, what they watched, and who they targeted.

  The media sometimes referred to us as “hunter-killer teams.” But I was learning that we were way more than that. We were part of one of the most efficient, sophisticated, and interconnected organizations in the world.

  One video in those early days stuck with me. The target was a member of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Another intel analyst had tracked him down one night to a tiny mud hut in the desert.

  As the Pred orbited the compound, an assault team came into view on the monitor and raided the house—a pretty typical operation. Except this time was different.

  Within minutes of entering the house, the assault force started a fast retreat, every one of them sprinting in different directions from the building. And then, boom: thirty seconds later, the house exploded. They had been baited in.

  “You see that!” Bill said, leaning into the monitor. “That analyst fucked up! He should have known that the target wasn’t in the house.”

  Every day the assault force put their asses on the line based on our intelligence.

  “You need to know everything about your target,” he went on. “What if you called for a Hellfire and it got dropped on the wrong house?”

  The criteria for a drone strike changed repeatedly over the years. Mostly they were carried out when we couldn’t get our guys on the ground or didn’t want to risk their lives.

  Bill gave me one bit of advice about all this: “Just be right. If you’re wrong, you’re fucked.”

  I KEPT HEARING RUMORS ABOUT MY DEPLOYMENT. MOST OF THE GROUP HAD BEEN sent to Iraq to head up teams since the war was at its height. I was sure I was going there and I was starting to get antsy.

  While waiting my turn in the chute, I watched as others in our unit got to work. I looked up at the monitors in our dining facility one morning to watch our guys kill a senior Al Qaeda leader in a country U.S. forces didn’t operate in. The media would later say that it had to be the CIA who did it, but they were wrong.

  One week I was sent to Washington St
ate for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school (SERE). People called it Camp Slappy because of the interrogation training. I was tied up, blindfolded, and beaten up, just how you’d imagine it. The program was meant to prepare us in case of our capture by an enemy state—and train us to escape. I learned how to pick locks and get out of handcuffs.

  There were about thirty of us, all from different special forces units. I learned a lot about myself at Camp Slappy. I saw grown men cry. And the trainers didn’t take lightly to women, either. In their eyes, we were all the same. I remembered hearing girls screaming as they got slapped around.

  The hardest part was that you didn’t know what was going to happen next. It was like a house of horrors, where you stumble from one room to the next, each room offering its own unique pain.

  One of the worst moments was the Box. We were individually locked in dark wooden containers for what seemed like days. Shoulder to shoulder, with no room to sit down. They blared rock music and sounds of babies crying. When one of us drifted off, water came raining down. It was freezing. One by one, they pulled us out and interrogated us for hours.

  You never knew what was going to hit you from one moment to the next. I learned that I could withstand a lot more mentally and physically than I could have imagined and I sure as hell never wanted to get captured in enemy territory.

  When I came back home from training, I got right back into the weeds of understanding the drones I would be using in the field.

  During this time I was issued a pager. The pager had to be with me at all times because I was always on call. It buzzed at night, other times in the morning. It kept us on our feet.

  The first time I got a page from our headquarters was after midnight. We used these coded communications—basically ones and zeroes—so that any foreign government watching us couldn’t tell when our unit was activated on a mission. The translation of the code sent to me that night was basically: get your ass to the team room.

  Hours later, I was suited up, with a bag of gear—computers, hard drives, guns, fake documents—on my back and put on a cargo plane with a crew of operators, zooming to an undisclosed location overseas where we’d set up and do a mock mission. I couldn’t tell anyone where I was headed or what I was doing or how long I’d be gone.

  I was being trained to essentially disappear, to conceal who I was. Being a part of a culture of secrecy could be both exhilarating and mundane at the same time. Exhilarating because I was doing something incredibly powerful and important and bigger than all of us, although most people would never know it, not even my mother.

  Bill and the others said it wasn’t always easy holding everything inside. You had to bottle war up, even when your instinct was to talk and sort things out. Any accomplishments could only be shared among the group. Pride wouldn’t come from outside people telling me “good job.” Success couldn’t be celebrated in the ways a normal person would be able to celebrate. Awards were not big events. When somebody said “Jackpot” over the radio, that was the equivalent of a high-five. That was praise.

  I had learned to give up the idea that I should be patted on the back or hugged every time I did good, which is what I had grown up in school learning. None of that mattered. I had an important job to do and American lives depended on me to do it well, whether they knew about our existence or not.

  WE WERE JAMMED INTO A BUS RIDING TO AN AIRFIELD IN KENTUCKY.

  “Is this the new guy?” one of the operators said. He had a thick New York accent, tall as a basketball player and ripped with a full beard. Other burly dudes with automatic weapons and optics laughed. I clearly looked like the new guy, still clean-shaven.

  He grabbed my hand and introduced himself. Rocky was the commander of the assault squadron, an Army lieutenant colonel.

  Six months had passed in a flash and it was near the end of 2008. Bill and the others had blessed this last phase in training: the operators. It was time to start working with the assault team, the guys who would travel with us on the ground and go after the targets we hunted.

  Highly intelligent, Rocky seemed to know the intel side of the house very well, and he shared various insights and thoughts on the future outlook for certain terrorist groups.

  Then his tone changed to deadly serious. “You know that you have an incredibly important job?”

  “What do you mean, sir?” I asked.

  “All of the men around you here”—Rocky pointed at all the operators kitted up around me—“they rely on you heavily.”

  The operators were the best in the business. They were the badasses of special forces—muscled up, with tricked-out weapons, ready to go anywhere, anytime.

  I nodded.

  “We’re going to risk our lives because of your decisions.” He looked me in the eye. “You are choosing who lives or dies because you’re the guy who finds the target. . . . You’re the guy who’s signing a target’s death warrant.”

  I had never really thought of it that way until Rocky said it to me that afternoon. In my head I had always rationalized it as, “Well, I’m not the one pulling the trigger. It’s someone else.”

  But the truth was that the operators would not be in the house of that terrorist unless I told them to go there.

  “He’s right,” Jack said, leaning in closer. “You get that? You need to choose the bad guys you target wisely. Because they better be bad enough to make it worth them getting killed.”

  BEFORE MY DEPLOYMENT, I WENT HOME FOR ONE FINAL TRAINING EXERCISE. I HADN’T been back to Houston in four years and it felt strange arriving at the airport and driving into the city with my team.

  We set up at a nonmilitary place in the city, a place that you’d never expect to find us in, and worked all day and night. If you’d passed us in the halls of a hotel or a fast-food joint, you’d never know we were conducting mock terrorist hunts in your city. We’d set up the full box in the suite of a hotel, managing drones, intelligence personnel, and operators from a single living room.

  When the training settled down one afternoon, I called some old high school friends. I’d been wondering what they were up to because I hadn’t seen any of them in years.

  That night about twenty of us met at a restaurant a few blocks from my hotel and it was just like old times, the whole herd hanging out, guys and girls.

  Everyone had grown up. Tim and Brad had settled into bank jobs, just like they’d all talked about, Jenny was an accountant, and Greg and Steve were lawyers. A couple of the guys had just gotten engaged and had their fiancées along with them. They were starting to talk about having kids already, buying homes. The white picket fence stuff.

  “What about you,” Jenny wanted to know. “How’s the Army?”

  I simply said it was great, because I couldn’t say anything else. I told them I was just passing through and then steered the conversation away, just as I had been taught.

  A part of me thought they wouldn’t really understand it if I told them what I really did anyway. I was working in another world. Where did I even begin?

  As the hours passed and the beers went by, I realized I definitely missed old times. Since I left college, my life had become my job, and that night I missed the days when things were simpler.

  We all said goodbye after midnight and went our separate ways. While they returned to their new homes, I headed back to the operations center in the hotel to continue work. It was another five hours before the sun rose.

  I GOT MY ORDERS TO SHIP OUT NOT TOO LONG AFTER THE HOUSTON TRIP. SENIOR leadership had finally signed off on me running my own intelligence team overseas and we were headed to the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

  Word came later that the cargo plane was leaving in ten hours for Iraq, so I went home and packed the last of my things. I threw essential gear into a North Face backpack—civilian clothing, mostly cargo pants and button-down rugged shirts ideal for the desert environment, a seventeen-inch customized Alienware laptop, GPS handheld devices, and some additional technology lightweig
ht enough to take on the long flight.

  Days before, I had already sent off heavier things, like years of intelligence data on Drobo hard drives, my long rifle, and boxes of ammo. That would all be waiting on the other side.

  It was 3 A.M. when I rolled into the office and climbed on the bus with my intel team, along with the assault operators. No fancy sendoff, no parade, no friends waving goodbye. This was how it would always be.

  I didn’t call my mother that night, but I thought about her and whether she would be proud. I didn’t want to worry her and couldn’t exactly explain where I was going. I didn’t even think she knew I was heading overseas.

  The bus slipped through the night and soon we were at the landing strip with the C-17 warming up. We didn’t talk much, each of us in his own head. Wheels were up within the hour.

  As the plane hit cruising altitude, the other guys passed out. They had been through this a few times already and were eager to get to where the action was. I tried to shut my eyes, but the excitement and nerves kept me up. I remembered Bill’s advice: “Drones are nothing without the right people behind them. . . . Just be right.”

  Hours in, I decided to swallow the Ambien that the doctors on board had passed out. I drifted off to the sound of C-17 engines.

  9

  THE DRONE

  WAR BEGINS

  My intel team and the operators suited up and headed for the Black Hawks and Little Birds on the runway. It was late afternoon, sun burning down, just north of Baghdad. As we walked down the long flight line, we passed a Predator drone, gleaming and sleek in the hangar. I did a double take as I walked past—it was the first one I’d seen in person—while the others around me kept moving as if they had seen hundreds before.

  The summer air was burnt and whipping, same as it was when I’d left Iraq a year before, when I was living just outside Sadr City. Only now it was July 2009 and the U.S. troop surge had started to prove effective. It was important we capitalized on those gains and clearly the enemy was starting to lose, but many senior leaders remained. Fewer soldiers were getting killed and Baghdad was getting safer, or at least it felt that way. That forced the bad guys and killers underground, mostly to northern Mosul, which was where we were headed.