See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism by Robert Baer Read Free Book Online

wiped the sawdust and sweat off my face.
    Just to make sure we got the message, Red produced a former paramilitary officer who had survived a jump thanks to good technique. One night - in Laos, I think - his chute didn’t open all the way, and he came barreling in at twenty or thirty miles an hour. If he hadn’t hit all five points, he would have died. As it was, he walked with a marked limp. Point made. At night we took to practicing five-point landings off the bar. The other trainees, who were in the operations course and wouldn’t be going through the paramilitary training, would turn away, embarrassed.
    After we mastered the sawdust pit, Red introduced us to the dreaded tower, which everyone agreed was much worse than jumping out of a plane. Thanks to some weird psychological quirk, jumping out from forty feet hooked up to harness and steel cable was scarier than jumping out of an airplane from a thousand feet - if you ever got to jump, that is, and on this particular night I was beginning to have serious doubts.
    Red, let’s go, we’re gonna miss it.
    Without warning, Red slapped me on the ass, and I was out the door. A sharp yank of the harness, and then the quiet. It surprised me each time. The roar of the plane’s engines faded almost immediately to a monumental silence, but at less than a thousand feet, there wasn’t much time to enjoy the ride. Check the canopy. I did, and it was fine. It was still too dark to see much, but as I pulled the right toggle hard, turning the chute in a 360-degree circle, I dimly made out the tree line in the distance. I silently thanked Red for his timing. I wouldn’t be landing in the forest canopy tonight. .
    Never look at the ground.
    Red had pounded the lesson into our heads: Look at the ground as you’re about to hit and you’ll unintentionally straighten and lock your legs, which is the best way to break one. I turned the chute into the wind at the last minute, slowing my speed enough so I could have landed standing up if I’d wanted. All the while I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon. I hit with my knees bent. Not quite a five-pointer, but it didn’t matter; the ground was soft and wet.
    I stood up and reeled in my chute, looking around for the rest of the team. I could just make out Alan. It was too dark to see the other three members of the team: Peter, Curt, and Eric.
    Alan caught sight of me and pointed to a clump of trees, signaling to follow him there after I’d buried my chute. He and the rest of the team were crouching in some high sedge. We’d been warned that the bad guys had passive night-vision binoculars, and it was best to stay out of the open.
    My team that night was fairly representative of the DO class I had come in with - about a sixty-forty split between ex-military officers and civilians. I would spend the next two decades watching the CIA evolve into an organization where garnering promotions and pleasing political masters became more important than collecting secrets, but back then the spirit of the CIA’s World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), still lived. We were all adventurers - after all, we had chosen operations over the stay-at-home DI side - but a public-service ethos burned in us, too. We believed the United States needed a competent intelligence service, and we wanted to serve a higher cause.
    Alan, the team leader for the night’s exercise, had been a pilot in the air force. After he had pushed the envelope one time too many with the big equipment, he was switched from jets to Caribous, twin-engine planes that could take off and land on a dime and were also a lot less expensive to replace.
    Alan never talked about his tour in Vietnam, but we heard about it at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where we had gone for heavy-weapons training with the special forces. It happened one night when we were out drinking with a couple of sergeants on Fayetteville’s sleazy strip.
    ‘One of the damnedest things I saw in Nam