Free The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers by Gary Brozek, Nicholas Irving Page A

that was kind of what I was like, only I got lucky and never got hit.
    I was also fortunate that I struck up a relationship with a guy named Mark Cunningham. When I was still waiting for my first overseas deployment, he was already into his second and then third tour in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was only a year older than I was, but he was a pretty seasoned veteran in terms of his experience. I had taken advantage of my squad leader’s experience and asked all kinds of questions about what to expect and what it was like over there. However, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome with him, so to speak, and Cunningham always seemed fine with talking to me. He was from Tennessee, and a lot of times when guys told me they were from someplace other than the Northeast, I had a hard time picturing where that was. He was a good guy, had an ever-present dip of Copenhagen behind his lip, and was always patient with me.
    What I knew about the war was what I’d seen on CNN or wherever. I was thinking we’d go over there and live in tents. I told the guys that and they all laughed at me. Cunningham always set me straight. He’d give me crap, but at least he’d laugh and tell me it was okay to ask and to not know things. Our informal briefings and debriefings helped me prepare for what really was unimaginable in so many ways.
    That’s not to say that all my various training schools and activities were horrible. I loved firing the rocket launchers. Getting qualified on them was fun. By the time I did so, I’d been in the army for a couple of years. I’d also gained a bunch of weight. Mom was a great cook but with four mouths to feed and not a whole lot of income, things got spread pretty thin. I was one of those guys in basic and after who seldom complained about the chow. It was a good thing I put on those twenty to twenty-five pounds, because the recoils of the 203 and M240B were so powerful, it would have bucked that skinnier me back into basic.
    I never got to fire them in actual combat, but spending all day on the range watching those things spiral and twist downrange until they impacted was about as relaxing as anything I ever did. Seeing those eighteen-wheeler trucks roll up with thousands and thousands of rounds of ammo ready to be offloaded and fired was like Christmas Day for me.
    Still, I made my share of mistakes early on and even later. Those bumps in the road were good to experience, even when one of those bumps was an M1-Abrams reinforcement tank of ours that I nearly fired on mistakenly during my first deployment in Iraq.
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    I guess you can say that trusting my gut wasn’t something that came natural to me. But in this case, on that third night operation, maybe if I did trust my gut, I’d have thought to make sure that Pemberton and his weapon were truly squared away.
    Even though we only had those two missions under our belt, things had gone so smoothly everybody’s morale seemed to be up. Just walking around our area within the compound, you could sense that people were really into it in a different way. It’s hard to say exactly how things were different, but people seemed to be moving at a different pace for one thing. It was like everybody had a designated time and location in mind. Instead of just killing time, we were moving around knowing that something was going to be up that night and we’d better be prepared for it.
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    Even in my earlier deployments, before becoming a sniper team leader, I’d gotten into the habit of hanging back when it was time to load up. That wasn’t because I didn’t like flying in the helicopters. Instead, it was a part of my desire to get out there. If I hung back on load-up, that meant I was going to be among the first out when we landed. I wasn’t troubled by visions of us being ambushed and trapped inside that fuel-filled bird. I just knew that given my role as a sniper attached to this unit, if anything was going to go down early on, I wanted