The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers by Gary Brozek, Nicholas Irving Read Free Book Online

something explode inside the car. It wasn’t an IED; it was the man inside it. He turned into mist and chunks.
    We stopped the vehicle and, just like in any operation, the assaulters approached the car acting as they would if they knew the man was still alive. I knew better, but still they needed to be cautious. When the man didn’t respond to any of their orders and it was clear that he wasn’t going to be able to, they opened the driver’s side door and this pile of stuff dropped to the ground. They made their way to the car’s trunk and unloaded some AKs and then one of the guys held up the head of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). If we had charged the guy and run him over, that RPG could have gone off and done some damage. We didn’t know exactly what the guy’s intent was, but it didn’t matter, both because of what happened to him, what I’d done to him, and because of how he’d chosen to respond to our presence.
    A couple of the assaulters congratulated me, and that felt good, but later on, when my shock wore off, I had this funny coppery taste in my mouth, like I was sucking on a penny. I felt a little queasy, with that stomach-sinking feeling you get when somebody gives you some bad news.
    Later that night, the image of that man returned to me. I had a dream where I was in a room with a ceiling fan spinning above me. The blades of the fan were the man’s four limbs plus his head and chest. He was staring at me with that same dead-eyed stare, but as the fan spun faster and faster, he started screaming at me openmouthed. Eventually the fan got spinning so fast that his limbs were whipped off and he sprayed the room with blood and guts, covering me as well with this gelatinous goo.
    I woke up thinking about what my platoon sergeant had told me prior to our going over to Iraq. We were in a Humvee, with me in the back and him in the front seat. He turned and said, “You know what, Irv?”
    “What’s up, Sergeant?”
    “After you kill a man, there’s no other feeling like it. Mark my words. You won’t want to do any hunting again. The excitement of that will be gone. You won’t find any joy in it either. Once you kill a man, you can’t replace that feeling.”
    He was right. The combination of emotions and the physical rush that floods through your body after combat is unlike anything I’d experienced before or since.
    Sitting in the chow hall, I knew that Pemberton was sorting through some of those same thoughts and feelings as a result of that first close-in kill that night. It helped that I was there, even if we weren’t talking about his mental state directly.
    Pemberton nodded toward a few of the occupied tables. “They don’t get it, do they?”
    I shrugged. “I doubt it. From what I’ve heard most of them haven’t been outside the wire at all.”
    “They think they want to be out there.”
    He left the last part of that unfinished, but I knew what he meant. “Roll of the dice, I guess.”
    Depending upon how I felt at any particular moment, when our operational tempo proved to be consistently pedal to the metal, I sometimes thought we were rolling double sixes or snake eyes. A lot of the time, though, it was like we were rolling both.
    I did tell Pemberton that I had taken the wrong route into the compound that night and that I wouldn’t let that kind of thing happen again.
    “Walking past that open area along that wall? That was messed up—anything could have been on the other side.”
    “At least we cleared it.”
    I appreciated him saying that, but I knew that I didn’t want to do anything like that again.
    Eight hours or so later, I sat in bed looking at the display on my pager. I decoded the message and was immediately wide awake. I ran across the hallway and banged on Pemberton’s door.
    “Hey, man. Get ready. I think we’re about to go out.”
    As I made my way down to the ready room, the scene reminded me of something from a movie about Wall Street or some busy office.