When the Killer Man Comes Read online

  I did, and compared with all the other options, I knew if I joined the Rangers I would get to the fight faster and would go into combat with the best men I could keep up with. I was ready to test my mettle and steel myself for the intense storm I imagined combat would be. Becoming a Ranger meant hard, but it also meant fast. I knew if I made it through Ranger training, I could be in Afghanistan fast-roping out of a helicopter with a machine gun before Christmas. Not to mention the dirt bikes!

  The Ranger Indoctrination Program was demanding; it was the most challenging test I’ve ever faced. Army basic training had been demanding, and Jump School had been much tougher than that, but Ranger training pushed me to the limits. I know that many military memoirs—especially those by special operators like me—talk a lot about training. I won’t talk about that in this book. One reason is that my main goal is to tell you what it was like to be part of the U.S. military’s direct-action force in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The other reason is that the story of Ranger training has already been told well in Dick Couch’s book Sua Sponte.

  I graduated from Ranger training, received my tan beret, and became part of the 75th Ranger Regiment, 3rd Ranger Battalion. I was on the ground in Afghanistan fighting on December 28, 2006. Over the next six years I did six rotations to Afghanistan. I saw so many of my close comrades die on what can only be called suicide missions that I can’t count—let alone name—them all here.

  I could have made being a Ranger my career, but I received a medical discharge because of degenerative disc disease. I know that sounds like an old-person’s ailment, but it happens to Rangers far too often. I had herniated a disk when I was a mortarman during my second deployment. I was young and strong, and “Ranger medicine” was a bit different back then. I stubbornly continued training and deploying.

  By the time we deployed with Team Merrill in 2011, I knew I was living on borrowed time. Multiple herniations led to degenerative disc disease. Said another way, my body had been given a beatdown. Six deployments in six years had left me pretty banged up, and the Army did the honorable thing and medically retired me.

  I’d been out of the Army for about two months when my friend Nicholas Irving said to me: “Paul, I had some tough missions as a Ranger, but I got out before it all hit the fan in 2011. I’m writing two books about my time as a Ranger sniper. You need to write a book about what you did, especially all the amazing stuff you did with Team Merrill.”

  I had served with Nick in Afghanistan in 2009. Nick was kind enough to write the Foreword for this book, and that should tell you something about how close we are. Nick has the well-earned reputation of being the deadliest Ranger sniper ever, with more than three dozen confirmed kills. (Nick wrote about his time as a Ranger sniper in two books, The Reaper and Way of the Reaper.) I know about many of these kills because I worked with him with my squad of Afghan Provisional Army. I hadn’t read Nick’s first book (the second one hadn’t been published yet), and writing a book was the furthest thing from my mind.

  But the more I thought about it, the more I decided that the Team Merrill story did need to be told, as well as the larger story of what had intrigued me as I did my research before joining the Rangers: Just what did “the nation’s direct-action raid force” do for our country? I wanted to tell that story today, not wait decades before some historian or journalist decided to tell it. Not that I have anything against either of those professions—they do good work, but they didn’t have the first-person experience I did.

  Nick continued to challenge me to write this book, telling me, “You need to tell this story. People need to hear how leaving a war is so much harder than getting into one.”

  I knew immediately what he was talking about. In 2011 it was left to the 75th Ranger Regiment to “set the conditions” for our drawdown in Afghanistan. That’s a politically correct way of saying we had to kill the terrorist leaders who would take over the country after we left. Otherwise, over a decade of Americans and our allies fighting and dying in Afghanistan would have been for nothing. But that mission was made all the more difficult because this was a time when Afghanistan was transitioning from military to civilian authority, and also a time when our ROE (rules of engagement) became so incredibly restrictive. You’ll learn more about these ROE later.

  So with all those military memoirs out there, why should you read this book? Let me explain it this way. Years ago, there was a popular car commercial that showed salesmen asking their manager how hard they should push and how many incentives they could give to sell cars. The manager replied, “Do whatever it takes.” The meaning was clear: they needed to sell cars.

  In 2011, Afghanistan was, far and away, America’s longest war. The United States needed to get out of Afghanistan, and to do it with honor. As I said earlier, that couldn’t happen with terrorist leaders ready to take over the country once we left. But wiping them out meant sending the 75th Ranger Regiment on high-risk missions day after day and night after night.

  This is why I’m telling this story. General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, “War is hell.” Hunting down these terrorists, whose single organizing impulse was to kill us, was hell. But we did it because that’s what Rangers do. In these pages, I’ll take you to the hell that was Afghanistan in 2011.

  1

  CHECHEN SNIPER

  By the spring of 2011, the war in Afghanistan had been going on for a decade, and the United States was trying to salvage what it could from what was now our longest war. It was early in our seven-month deployment to Afghanistan. Our Ranger unit, Task Force Merrill, was based at Kandahar Airfield, the U.S. and allied operating base just outside of that city. Late one afternoon, our task force leader, Major Dan, told us to saddle up and that we’d be launching on a mission that night. We were going to launch out of Kandahar with the Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR (Special Operations Aviation Regiment) and head for the Musa Qala District in Helmand Province.

  Those Army Special Operations CH-47G Chinooks are flown by some of the most courageous pilots in the Army. They had taken us into hostile territory, and gotten us out, time and time again, knowing that at any time an enemy with an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) could blow their helo out of the air. We trusted them, and they trusted us, and we’d rather work with them than with any other unit in any other service. In fact, while there are sometimes rivalries between various U.S. military units, there was no rivalry between the 75th Ranger Regiment and the 160th SOAR, only a solid bond. You could think of us as two sides of the same coin, we were that close.

  We were briefed that our mission was to clear enemy fighters out of several villages in the Musa Qala District. We had good intel that the village was a stronghold and sanctuary for foreign fighters operating in southern Helmand, Sangin, and the surrounding areas. Past efforts to clear the area of these fighters had met with extremely heavy resistance, and the Musa Qala District was now believed to be an important command and control node where the Taliban operated with near-impunity.

  For anyone who wasn’t in the fight in Afghanistan, you can think of the Musa Qala District, and most of Helmand, the way you’d think of a Mafia-controlled neighborhood, or a pirate hideout in the Tortugas. It’s a crossroads for bad actors where the Taliban, the Haqqani Network (an Afghan guerilla insurgent group), and foreign fighters wanting to join the jihad meet up. It’s probably the worst den of iniquity in all of Afghanistan. Putting it mildly, there was overwhelming circumstantial evidence that there were high-value targets in the Musa Qala District that needed to be taken out.

  While our intel was good, it wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t solid enough to send in conventional forces. So the decision was made to send in the Rangers—in force. At about 2200, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment CH-47G Chinooks loaded with us and all our heavy weapons lifted out of Kandahar Airfield headed for our objective area, close to several villages in the Musa Qala District. Two Chinooks carried 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, our sister platoon, and the other two carrie
d 2nd Platoon, Alpha Company, the platoon I was with.

  Some people think that special operators get pumped up before a mission, and they envision a bunch of guys getting fired up like a football team in a locker room. But it’s not that way at all. As we settled into the Chinooks, each of us had our game face on and sat there silently reviewing the intel and going over in our minds how we were going to execute the mission. We each reached back to previous missions and thought about how we would deal with the unexpected—those things we hadn’t planned for. If we knew one thing, it was that there was always going to be the unexpected—our enemy was going to get a vote.

  One of my Ranger buddies who was from New York City told me that seeing us sitting on the hard canvas seats in a Chinook heading for a mission reminded him of the New York City subway. No one spoke, and there wasn’t even any eye contact. There was only eerie silence as we each prepared for our mission in our own way.

  Our intel told us we’d be going up against a ruthless, well-entrenched, and extremely well-armed enemy, so we were loaded for bear with two full platoons—about forty Rangers total—and all our heavy weapons. That meant we were carrying six M240 machine guns, six M249 SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons), two 60-mm mortars, and two RAWS (Ranger Anti-Tank Weapons Systems), which were 84-mm antitank recoilless rifles. We had our personal weapons, mainly M4s, and, for several of us, our sniper rifles. I was cradling my M110 sniper rifle, which I had nicknamed “Miss America.”

  It wasn’t a long flight from KAF to our objective area in the Qala District of Helmand Province. The 160th’s Chinooks made short work of the 150 klicks (kilometers), about 100 miles, to our target. As we approached the objective area, the Chinooks carrying 1st Platoon broke off to the south to deliver them about 5 klicks from where we would meet at our proposed ROD (Remain Over Day) site. The Chinooks carrying our platoon, 2nd, broke off and landed about 10 klicks away to the south.

  As soon as we landed, our platoon began to work our way toward the objective area along a dried-up riverbed, clearing small clusters of villages along its banks. (“Clearing” means making sure there are no enemies among the civilians.) In the hours we advanced, we cleared about one hundred houses, as well as countless other structures. If we found Taliban, or any other insurgents, our mission was to capture or kill them.

  Major Dan’s plan was clear: If we found nothing, we were to tell the villagers where we were going, knowing that they would alert the Taliban. I mistakenly took this as bravado, but in retrospect I realized it was exactly why we were on this mission.

  From there, the plan was to remain over the day in a defensive position between the area we cleared and the northeastern outskirts of a much larger village. We would fight the Taliban there, or we would wait until nightfall before we started our infiltration.

  The way that Ranger platoons work together is unlike any other U.S. Special Operations groups. When we execute a mission, we always share roles. In this case, we divided the labor between the Main Effort or the Assault Platoon and the Support Platoon.

  The ROD platoon might conduct a quick takedown of a compound on its way to the ROD site, but its primary task was to fortify the compound where we intended to Remain Over Day. Said another way, the ROD platoon “provides the castle” for the Assault Platoon. They also carry the “Speedballs,” which are bags containing extra ammo, water, food, and other gear carried on flexible litters. These Speedballs weigh several hundred pounds each, and humping them into a compound is a brutal task.

  Once the ROD platoon had built the castle and given them a secure base to operate from, the Assault Platoon would conduct what we call a “clearance in zone” and investigate an NAI (known area of interest). You don’t have to know a whole lot about Rangers to guess that being in the Assault Platoon was always first choice for all of us.

  But it wasn’t about doing what you wanted to do. Our 1st and 2nd Platoons alternated duties on each mission, sometimes attaching a squad or certain special weapons to one or the other, depending on the mission. It’s a well-choreographed dance that we practiced dozens of times in our training cycle, and it gave us the ability to have the maximum flexibility in our infantry operations.

  That meant we could go from small reconnaissance elements and “kill squads” to a full-on infantry company with a full complement of weapons, including a half-dozen 240s and 249s, several 60-mm mortars, and two sniper teams with a wide variety of sniper weapons. These included everything from the M110 to the SR-25 to the Barrett M2 to the Mk-13. A company-size element could form four sniper teams with what we call Squad Designated Marksmen, and could also have some K-9s (multipurpose canine teams).

  On this mission, 1st Platoon was the ROD, or support platoon, so they made their way through a small village to the south of our proposed ROD site. Their objective was to clear and fortify that site and give us a secure area to operate from. On their way, they were ordered to conduct a raid on a compound that had drawn attention from Special Operations intelligence.

  The raid site turned out to be a dry hole—something that would happen frequently during our deployment. First Platoon arrived at our ROD objective area around midnight and found an adobe house that was isolated from the surrounding villages. It was on low ground and was surrounded on three sides by high ground and on the fourth side by a large village that we hadn’t cleared yet. Our only ways out of this position would be back the way we came or through congested roads going through those villages.

  But from a tactical standpoint, 1st Platoon had picked a good—even optimal—ROD position. We were about 500 meters from those villages and about 600 to 800 meters from the cliffs. With that kind of standoff from potential enemy fighters, it would be difficult for them to overrun our position. But the downside was that it would be equally difficult to defend long-range attacks from enemy RPGs or machine guns.

  As was the case with most Ranger missions, there is no such thing as a perfect plan. Our mission was to draw the Taliban into attacking us, and if we wanted a fight, this position was as good as we could hope for, given the area and the terrain. After an animated discussion with the family that inhabited the house, including extended negotiations over how much they wanted to be paid to pack up and leave their home, they finally gathered a few of their belongings. But before they left, the 1st Platoon leader ensured his interpreter conveyed to the family that they were to tell everyone—especially Taliban—exactly where we were.

  Meanwhile, our platoon—2nd, led by Major Dan—was the Assault Platoon, and we were making our way along the dried-up riverbed, clearing all the villages we passed through. This was our usual tactic, making sure we didn’t leave any enemy fighters behind us in our haste to get to the objective area. Our predecessors had paid an enormous price in blood when they were ambushed from behind after not securing the area they passed through. We were humping all that heavy gear about, and even at night the Afghan heat was stifling. The thousand-plus-meter altitude made things just that much more of a slog.

  We arrived at our objective area about 0330 and were met by 1st Platoon, who simply said, “Welcome to your new home.” We saw immediately why they had picked this as our new casa. It was a typical Afghan dwelling—adobe brick walls about a foot thick and pretty nondescript, but large enough to house our two platoons. The house itself was two stories, with the second story offering a clear field of view for 360 degrees. The house was surrounded by a wall that was maybe two feet thick. Adjacent to the house, on its southern side, were the remains of what had once been another house, and that one was also surrounded by a wall.

  We were exhausted from our trek getting to the ROD site, but no one could bed down yet. We surveyed the landscape around us through our NODs (night optical/observation devices). There were steep hills to the north, cliffs immediately to the east, a large village to the southeast, what looked like rock outcroppings and caves due south, a village to the southwest, and another village due west. We had intel telling us that the village to the west was a known
area of interest where Taliban might be hiding, so 1st Platoon had cleared that village before we got there. They didn’t find any Taliban—another dry hole.

  Our platoon leaders assessed the threat from each of those sectors and, armed with that info, we knocked holes in the adobe walls surrounding our outpost and positioned our M240 machine guns, M249 SAWs, 60-mm mortars, and 84-mm RAWS where we thought they’d have the best field of fire to deal with the potential threats surrounding us. Major Dan had 1st Platoon set up in the intact house, and our platoon, 2nd, set up south of them, in the rubble that was once a house. That meant that 1st Platoon would be responsible for a field of fire north from nine o’clock to three o’clock, while our platoon would have a field of fire south from three o’clock to nine o’clock. Our platoon leaders made guard assignments for the night and posted the first round of guards, and the rest of us finally grabbed a few hours of sleep.

  It was early morning when about twenty elders came out of the village to our southwest and began approaching our outpost. At the same time, women and children in the village were moving in the opposite direction in a mass exodus—not a good sign. This had “ambush” written all over it. Despite the clear danger, Major Dan decided we needed to walk out of our compound and talk to the elders. I jumped at the chance to be part of the greeting party, all of us volunteers.

  Major Dan, John, Ryan, “Stryker,” our JTAC (Joint Tactical Air Controller), our Afghan interpreter “Zeke,” and I left the mud walls of the compound where we’d camped out and headed toward the elders.

  I knew, tactically speaking, that what we were doing was wrong. We were walking out onto low open ground. Our relaxed posture was meant to show our goodwill toward the hopefully friendly elders, who could tell us if any Taliban were in the village. We were carrying our basic Ranger infantry weapons, our M4 rifles, and, for me, my M110 sniper rifle, Miss America.