it all lasered in for me. It was a first-floor bedroom window about 150 meters away. Since there was no infrared on this LAW because it was an antiquated piece of shit, I had to line up the shot through the sight aperture using my naked eye. I went through the motions one more time. It’s locked. It’s cocked. The safety is off. It’s pointed in the right direction. Okay, good to go.
I got into position and took a good two-second breath. That exuberant feeling I had had thirty seconds earlier, sprinting across open farmland, was gone. In its place was a set of emotions that I assume would be very similar to whatever happens the moment before someone throws out the first pitch at a Major League baseball game. Deep in your soul, you want to whistle a strike right down the pipe that snaps in the catcher’s mitt. But really, what you want even more is to not spike it into the dirt or throw it high and wide and hit the mascot. So to calm your nerves, you have to tell yourself that nobody’s going to be aiming a radar gun at your fastball and to concentrate on getting it over the plate. That’s all you have to do.
Fuck it, I thought, I don’t know if this thing is even going to shoot. I just hope it gets near that fucking window.
“Back blast area clear?!” I shouted.
“Clear!”
With a recoilless rifle or rocket launcher, in this case the thermobaric LAW, you never jerk or anticipate recoil because there is really no kickback. Usually, it’s the pause between trigger pull and launch that catches most people off guard. I pressed the button, held it steady, and waited for launch. Inshallah, motherfuckers. Two seconds later, the munition left the tube on a line and zeroed the window that the 3rd Squad guys had been painting for me. Just like the field manual described, that building went BOOM, right where I was aiming.
I stepped away from the launcher like I’d done it a thousand times before. No sweat. It wasn’t a one-in-a-million shot by any means, but considering the circumstances it was better than bad. I think if you measured it on the scale of famous first pitches, with a 1 being Gary Dell’Abate at a Mets game in 2009 and a 10 being George W. Bush at Yankee Stadium after 9/11, I’d say I pretty much got the W.
After we cleared what remained of the building, we finished up all the fun stuff. You know, like sorting enemy KIAs and patching the wounds of dudes who had just tried to kill us. I was dying to talk shit right in Fulton’s face about my shot placement, but I couldn’t because I knew he’d have the perfect comeback: I told you so.
Chapter 10
Iraqi Rave Party
Not every day in Ranger Battalion is a shooting gallery at the carnival type of day. You forget that sometimes. You also forget that you tend to do things a little differently than the other branches of the military and that they look at you differently than you see yourself. Often you don’t realize this until you get pulled from direct action raids and are attached to other units for short periods to complete specific objectives or to fill in when other elements of a unit are rotating home.
At one point in Iraq, I was tasked as the Ranger fire team leader along with four other Rangers to an Air Force Pararescue team (PJs) for a two-week CSAR (combat search and rescue) rotation. CSAR teams are typically first on the job any time an American helicopter or plane goes down. When we get the call, the Rangers secure and defend the crash site while the PJs do the recovery and provide any necessary medical care to the downed pilots and crew. Once they’re good to go, the Rangers then plan the movement for exfil and return to base.
It’s not uncommon to lose aerial assets during wartime, and this was especially true in the adverse conditions of hot, dusty Iraqi deserts and the 14,000-foot Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan. That said, it was rare enough that when it happened, it usually made the news back home. What that told me was, with only two weeks before I had to go back to my platoon for more direct action stuff, there was an excellent chance that this could be a nice, quiet little vacation.
Around 10 on