“The front element is in contact,” I tell a couple of the guys. “Make sure you guys are scanning those buildings because they’ll probably use them as cover to try to flank us.” The buildings are between seventy-five and one-hundred meters from where we lie. With the advantage of knowing the landscape, it would not take long for a couple fighters to slip around us if we aren’t vigilant.
As our guys begin scanning their sectors of fire, I try to orientate myself to see where we can maneuver to support the lead squad in contact. As I am scanning, an enemy combatant steps out from one of the buildings wielding an AK-47. Through my night vision goggles, I can see him about seventy-five meters away, looking left and then right, trying to figure out where we are. I can tell that he’s really feeling himself like, “Yeah, the American infidels are going to die tonight!” But he has no clue where my squad is. His attention has been drawn to the gunfire he can hear immediately in front of him. I lift my infrared laser sight and paint a little infrared bindi of death right on his forehead. Then I pinged off two rounds that slapped him in the head and killed him instantly.
Shooting someone was nothing new to me at this point, but this time the milliseconds that passed between pulling the trigger and him hitting the dirt felt like they lasted a lifetime. In a way, I guess they did. Most times in war, things happen way too fast for anyone to really see anything or register human emotion. But in this specific instance, through my night vision goggles, I could see and feel the subtle nuances of his resolve, his motivation, and then his death. In a few milliseconds, I saw an entire lifetime. It was very Angel of Death-y. I had his life on a string, and the only question was “pull or don’t pull?” It doesn’t get much more immediate and primal than that.
After I killed the world’s worst hide-and-seek player, my squad and I began engaging other combatants who’d maneuvered toward our position. Note to future terrorists: Don’t try to gain a position of advantage on a Ranger fire team by running out in the open. It makes it really, really easy for us.
No, wait. Actually: Please do that.
In the midst of all this contact, the radio crackles and I hear, “Roger, first squad. Do you have a LAW?” I just start laughing. There is no fucking way that they just called for a LAW. I was surprised it even occurred to them that we might have one on target. We’re such a precise light infantry unit, where clean mission execution is the order of the day, that the only way we’d have a LAW with us (and they’d know about it) is if the mission specifically called for something that could blow entire structures all to hell. Fulton looks at me and says, “Hey dude, they need the LAW up front.” Is he still fucking with me about this? Did he bring 1st Squad in on it? Man, that dude really commits to a bit. As it turns out, the lead element was still in contact with a few combatants who had found cover in a building and were taking potshots at us. Along with launching some 40mm mortar rounds at the building, our guys figured while we’re at it, why not also enforce the LAW? (Sorry, I had to.)
There was a weird moment of trepidation as Fulton ripped the LAW off the back of my kit and I prepared to cross the fifty-meter gap between our squads. I wasn’t scared about getting shot at. What I was really worried about was screwing up. Fulton, like a dickhead, had ordered me at 7 P.M.—less than eight hours earlier—to bring this thing on the mission. At 8 P.M., I was tying it to my kit. The hour in between was all the time I had to learn how to operate it. I’d had the field manual out the whole time, walking through a couple test runs with a dud rocket we had in the Conex, but I had no idea if I could shoot the LAW accurately. I didn’t even know if it still worked.
With AK rounds whizzing past my head and riffling into the dirt, I grab the LAW and start pushing toward the front element. As I’m running through farmland and getting caked with mud, I’m going over the field manual in my head. I remember thinking: This is some serious John Rambo shit. I didn’t feel like I was Rambo; it was not that kind of visceral emotion. (That would come later.) It felt more like an out-of-body experience, as if I was in the audience at a theater watching everything go down on the big screen. Weirdly, I was having fun. No, actually, that’s not true. I was having the time of my life and I didn’t want it to end, until or unless it ended because I ended.
(In case you are wondering, I am available for children’s birthday parties and middle school speaking engagements.)
By the time I made it to the front, 3rd Squad had figured out where the fire was coming from and they had 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.