American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories

IRVING: My nickname was the reaper in Afghanistan. Killed a lot of guys, and shot more…just never had a chance to recover the bodies, but when you put in a 308 bullet that's traveling almost 26 hundred feet per second, you get a feel of what…what happens…

KLAY: From Insignia Films and PRX for GBH, this is the American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories. I’m Phil Klay.

I’m a veteran myself, though I served in Iraq, not Afghanistan, and never served in combat. Even for me, it can be difficult to explain to civilians what military life is like. That task becomes even more difficult when the veteran has experienced violence, and the act of killing. To help bridge that divide, veterans from every generation have spoken up to let Americans know what has been done in their name. These are their stories.

IRVING: You want the whole spiel?

Producer: No just like…

IRVING: Ok, sergeant, yeah. My name is Nicholas Irving.

KLAY: Nick Irving was interviewed in a TV studio in New York, for the American Veteran documentary series...

IRVING: I was a sergeant in the army and I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, three deployments two each.

KLAY: It seems obvious, but when the U.S. goes to war in a distant country, we’re sending our soldiers to kill people. That’s what war is: violence and killing. Of course, most of the soldiers we send into war never kill anyone. They work in support positions, or they never get into a firefight, never even fire their weapons. But there are some units who over the past two decades have done a tremendous amount of violence. Units like the one Nick Irving ended up in...the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment. 

KLAY: The Rangers are elite light infantry, one of our military’s special operations units.

News Audio: “The Army Times is reporting a possibility of sending Rangers overseas…”

KLAY: In recent decades, they have been very busy.

News Audio: “...Two United States Army Rangers have been killed fighting the terror group in Afghanistan. A third soldier...”

News Audio: “...those boots would reportedly be rangers from Fort Benning's 75th regiment.”

KLAY: Being in a special operations unit is a bit like playing in the NBA. You’re in a small group of physically fit, highly trained people who know how to work together fluidly as a team. So how does the military find people who can make the cut? 

IRVING: My upbringing set the path for me to join the military. Both my parents were in the Army. They were both in the counterintelligence department of the Army. I was born overseas in Germany. Definitely the ultimate Army brat.

KLAY: This is common. Ever since Richard Nixon got rid of the draft, the military has increasingly become a family business.

IRVING: Discipline in my household was really, really strict. My dad was the enforcer when it came to that, push-ups at a very young age, exercising at a very young age, and I wasn't allowed to get away with much as a child. My dad would usually nip that in the bud really quick.

IRVING: For me, it was about being tough, and my dad was very adamant about that of--no pain, no tears, no crying. If I ever felt anything, I always had to take it out and throw it away at a very young age, from falling down the stairs. I'd, you know, had to beat up the stairs because the stairs made me fall. I wasn't able to or allowed to cry.

Audio from Delta Force: “It’s a new age of terror that requires a new breed of warrior.”

“We’re members of Delta Force and we’re here to take you home.”

IRVING: I watched all the Charlie Sheen Navy SEAL movies with my dad. I watched Chuck Norris Delta Force with my dad and watching those movies pushed me to become that special operator. I just knew they had cool jobs. Chuck Norris had rockets on his motorcycle, and I thought that was cool.

Audio from Marine Ad: “It is a rite of passage. A challenge…”

IRVING: Watching the…the commercials and stuff like that, they were all over the place back in the '90s. You would have the…the Marine slaying a dragon. I definitely remember that one.

Audio from Marine Ad: “If you can master your fear…”

KLAY: As a Marine myself, I feel like I should point out that it’s a fire monster in that commercial. All Marines kill an actual fire monster during training. Really, I swear. And all the other military services are jealous. 

Audio: “The proud. The Marines.”

IRVING: I would say that the ads sparked something in me. The mysteriousness behind it, not knowing exactly, at that age, what the Army was all about, other than my dad wore that camouflage uniform, and I'm seeing it on TV now.

Audio from U.S. Army Ad: “We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day.”

Audio: “Be all that you can be...”

IRVING: College was not an option for me. I graduated high school with a 1.7.

Audio: “...in the Army”

IRVING: It was pretty early on when I figured that that was my only route out, the military was…was it.

KLAY: Nick prepared himself to be a Navy Seal. He took scuba lessons. He completed the Navy Seal physical fitness test. And when he was just 17 years old, he went to the Navy recruiting office. He thought he had come prepared.

IRVING: The test that I did not prepare for, I don’t think anybody could prepare for was the color vision test. And I didn't know I was colorblind. Still have the test to this day. I got a 0 out of 14 on the color vision test.

Producer: So they scrubbed you out of the Seals. How’d you feel?

Irving: I cried, I cried after that first day. I thought all my dreams were shattered…

KLAY: But he found a workaround. He went to the Army, and the recruiter there helped him pass the color test…

IRVING: Still can’t see the colors, but on paperwork, I’m no longer colorblind.

KLAY: Military recruiters are famously shady. I remember one asking me before going for a medical exam if I’d ever done cocaine. I said no, and he said, “OK, but even if you have…you’ve never done cocaine.” 

After “passing” the Army’s color vision test, another recruiter offered Nick a chance to become a Ranger...

IRVING: I had no idea really what Army Rangers entailed. I know they were kind of cool guys, so I asked him, and he said they're pretty much like Navy SEALs. They just don't swim. So, I said sign me up.

KLAY: To become an Army Ranger, you first have to go through basic training, just like everyone else. Nick’s boot camp took place in Fort Benning, Georgia. It was hot...

IRVING: Oh, man.

KLAY: ...and humiliating…

IRVING: I had long hair at the time, so I kind of cut it to where I thought it was going to be okay. I didn't know they were going to take all of it off. That hurt. If I were on the outside looking in, I'd make fun of me, too.

KLAY: And boot camp turned out to be yet another test Nick wasn’t prepared for…

Audio: “Let’s go! Hurry up!...”

IRVING: It felt like I was always under a microscope. Everything was managed, every piece of your time, when you slept, when you ate, how your bed was supposed to be made…I just wasn't used to it. As strict as my dad was, I knew my dad, and I knew how far I could push my dad. I didn’t know how far I could push the drill instructor…

Audio: “Tell me right now, what is your freakin’ problem? ...Get down!”

IRVING: I thought about quitting a lot. Midway through, I suffered from a tibia and fibula stress fractures, at that point it was the most pain I had ever felt in my life.

Audio: “(unclear yelling)”

IRVING: I thought the entire military experience was going to be just like basic training, and I wasn't sure how I was going to adapt to that.

IRVING: There was a few phone calls I made home to my dad, saying hey, you know, pull some strings, I want to get out of this place, but he would hang up or say no.

KLAY: This might not be the warmest and cuddliest style of parenting, but as a vet himself, Nick’s father probably knew this was precisely what Nick needed to hear. 

IRVING: It was a lot of stories of guys attempting to, fake injuries or jumping off a top bunk to try to break a leg or fracture a bone or something like that. I'm not going to say I didn't attempt it at least once.

IRVING: We were in line, waiting to use the bathroom, and one of the guys went in. I guess that, that's when he decided to take apart this razor and slit his wrists, and I was a few guys behind in the line, and the guy who opened it screamed, and we looked over, and we saw this guy like laying on the Porta-John, bleeding out. He didn't die, though.

KLAY: Boot Camp may seem cruel, and it is, in many ways. But weeding out those who can’t handle a drill instructor yelling at you is ultimately less cruel than sending those folks on to war. Nick made it through, though...

IRVING: I don't remember too much of the little ceremony other than we stood around this fire pit and we drank simulated blood, I think, and they congratulated me at being the youngest graduate of that class.

KLAY: Military rituals, like drinking fake blood, often seem bizarre from the outside. I knew a guy whose infantry battalion went out to the woods before they deployed and drank beer in mugs while wearing Viking horns. But human beings need rituals to mark major occasions, and ceremonies like that declare: this is a major occasion. This was Nick’s death as a civilian and rebirth as a soldier. In any case, Nick was done with boot camp.. 

IRVING: After that was the hard stuff.

KLAY: The hard stuff included RIP, R-I-P, Ranger Indoctrination Program. 

IRVING: And it was about a month-plus long of essentially a physical beatdown.

KLAY: Push-ups. Lots and lots and lots of push-ups…

IRVING: And then after that, 12-mile ruck march with, you know, almost 100 pounds on your back, followed by no food, no sleep, more push-ups, more weird stuff, just days and days and days. You don't sleep much.

IRVING: It sucked, but it wasn't something that, you know, I look back and I wish never happened. I think if it didn't happen, I wouldn't know how far I could push myself today.

Audio: “...what is happening in many places. The US fired 600 cruise missiles at Iraq today…”

KLAY: When Nick entered training in 2004, we were already at war in two countries—Iraq and Afghanistan. It was clear what awaited him.

IRVING: I knew I was going to war and stuff like that, being an infantry guy. It was just a matter of time.

Audio: “...into Iraq from the South”

Audio: “19,000 troops roughly in Afghanistan, we understand that by….”

IRVING: I remember the plane ride into Iraq, on a C17 cargo plane, and I wasn't sure if when we landed, we were going to get like Saving Private Ryan or landing on Omaha Beach or something, and when they lower the ramp, a bunch of bullets were going to come flying in, and I was going to try to stay to the rear, and when someone goes down, I was going to pick up their rifle and…and do my job. We landed, and I saw a coffee shop and a Burger King and…and stuff like that.

Audio of song Hotel Camp Fallujah: “Plenty to do at the Hotel Camp Fallujah.In a combat zone, (in a combat zone) go get your ice cream cone.”

KLAY: In Iraq the military had set up huge Forward Operating Bases, FOBs. They were basically mini-cities. Some soldiers never left the FOB…they were called FOBBITS, and they would joke, “We’re not even in Iraq…they just flew us to Arizona and told us we were here.” But guys like Nick were there to go “outside the wire.” 

IRVING: I was 18 years old and felt like a dream come true. You know everything that I had seen on TV, all the movies that I had watched, it was, I was in it. It was my movie…

KLAY: Who doesn’t want to be the hero of their own movie at 18? But movies are not reality. Especially war movies.

[MIDROLL]

KLAY: The first time Nick Irving ever shot another human being was during his first deployment to Iraq, in Tikrit...

IRVING: I was a machine gunner on a Striker. It was past curfew, completely quiet. It was a vehicle approaching us, and he had IEDs in the trunk of his car. My platoon leader had to tell me three times, essentially, to engage this guy, and the first time he told me, I was kind of like it's that easy? And then he told me again, and the third time, he hit me on my helmet, cussed me out, and I pulled the trigger on the 50 Cal. That's an anti-vehicle, anti-tank weapon, shoots about a 5 and 1/2 inch long projectile. The actual piece that comes out is about the size of your thumb…I remember I could see his face and his eyes, and he had like no expression, just a blank stare, and when the bullets impacted, I watched a few skip across the hood of his car and kind of spark up, and when they hit him, he kind of just like turned into a…just a mist inside the vehicle, just kind of vaporized, which is what that bullet is essentially meant to do.

IRVING: And it didn't feel like anything. I didn't feel, you know, what the movies told me I would feel like. I didn’t feel anything. No one said anything about it. It was when I got back and I had my first dream after killing someone is when it hit me. I think the dream was very graphic, very graphic. I would have that dream for…I guess once every…once every year, for a few years.

KLAY: This isn’t uncommon. In real life, some things are too big to take in at once. People go numb, or go on autopilot, and the impact that it leaves isn’t in one grand dramatic moment fit for a movie screen, but it’s more like a stone thrown in a pond, with ever-widening ripples. And that was only the first killing he took part in. 

IRVING: Our job set is very focused. We have a list of guys, bad guys that we have to kill or capture, and we don't stop until we knock out as much of that list as we possibly can...

KLAY: In some ways, being in the Rangers could be easier than being in a line infantry unit. A friend of mine who did both remembered how as an infantryman, he’d go out every day and instead of doing raids, where you knew who the bad guys were and where they are, they’d walk patrols across ground riddled with explosives, never seeing the enemy but always aware that the next step could be their last. And often, the living conditions at their patrol bases were very rough. Meanwhile, in special operations…

IRVING: You have your own room, AC, and you know really good. We had our own cooks and our own chow hall and stuff like that and our own phone system and internet system.

IRVING: Our deployment would kind of just end. You pack up your bags after your 90 days or 120 days, and you fly back on that 18, 12, 18-hour plane flight, and you're literally home within 24 hours after you could've essentially killed someone or been in a firefight. I've always killed someone, except for one deployment out of the six deployments that I had been on.

IRVING: It wasn't until I became a sniper and had a chance to look at a person through a 10-power magnification scope and seeing everything about that person, their eyes, their nose, their mouth, their…you could see when they breathe. You could see a button on their shirt and stuff like that, 9 times out of 10, that person has no clue you're even there. And you see exactly when the bullet impacts. You know it’s very… intimate.

KLAY: This is what’s so peculiar about these types of operations. On the one hand, the killing can be so disturbingly intimate. And yet, unlike troops who are out living in those communities, working with village elders and learning the rhythms of life in rural Afghanistan or western Iraq, the Rangers were flying in and out, on short deployments, working through a kill/capture list.

IRVING: You kind of are trained to not see them as people, just a target.

IRVING: I would hear the guys in the towers, praying every morning. Never understood it. I never understood that religion or anything like that. [Speaking in Arabic] You learned your basic commands on get down, drop your gun in Arabic and Pashto, and that's about as far as the extent went for me.

KLAY: This is why in some of the TV shows and movies about special ops, Iraq and Afghanistan are portrayed as violent playgrounds for highly trained soldiers to kill in. It’s a troubling falsification, because...they’re countries, filled with normal people trying to live their lives and raise their families in the midst of a war. 

IRVING: One time I was on top of this building, and he was running through the wood-line, and our guys were having a hard time engaging him.

IRVING: I ended up shooting him, and as he lied in the bushes and his, you know, blood all over the bushes and stuff like that, I could hear his family crying in the house that I was on top of. I could hear his mom and his sisters and all that, you know, people crying on the inside. It made everything real. It made everything human at that point. It was like, man, these people have emotion, too.

IRVING: In Afghanistan in 2009 I snuck up on the rooftop to go over-watch my guys and there was this female on the rooftop. She was sleeping. I didn't want to wake her up, tried to be as quiet as possible, but after I ended up shooting somebody in this courtyard, she kind of sat up, and I looked at my spotter. I'm like, dude, what do we do? Do we tie her up and make sure she doesn't do anything? And it turned out to be, no, we're just going to leave her there, and she spoke back to us in English, and I was like oh my gosh, hope we didn't say anything secret or anything like that, and we ended up having a pretty good conversation, and her dad, I remember her telling me that her dad taught at the University of Baghdad and that's why she was able to speak English, and she had a, you know, a college degree and stuff like that. She was very smart, very smart. She understood why we were there, but she also questioned our intent, how did we feel being there? Like, do we feel that what we're doing over there is right, necessary. And the question that she presented to us was a…not one that I answered on the spot, but it was, you know, one that I've thought about for quite some time. You know it was just a…just a young lady on the rooftop having a conversation with a guy with a sniper rifle…

KLAY: That question, “Why are we here, is what we’re doing right? Is it necessary?” It’s another stone...thrown in a pond, sending ripples that are still felt years later.

IRVING: I had seen crazy stuff, and I had been on, at that point, 580-plus missions, but I had never been in a fair fight before when it came to the war. It was always we have the night on our side, a small group of guys, and we use the night to our advantage. Most of our operations lasted for a few minutes to a few hours. And it was kind of one-sided firefights, and we were really good at what we were doing and I didn't have that cool firefight that movies are made of, you know, essentially, the ones you watch in movies and you're like, wow, this is, you know, how did someone live through that, and I thought that was how my career was going to end.

KLAY: But then he did get his firefight. 

IRVING: Being pinned down by an enemy sniper in Helmand Province. That was a…a big eye-opener.

IRVING: Three-plus hours in a little four-foot diameter hole with five other guys trying to get as much cover as possible, that was an intense, humbling experience, you know. That was the closest I think I’ve come to death, and kind of accepted it at that point. You know I knew I was going to die that day. We all did. We contemplated on pulling a grenade out and hug it and blow ourselves up. We didn't want to get captured, and it was almost to that point.

KLAY: A machine gun team came to their rescue, and as they were trying to reconnect with their main unit, they ran into a large group of enemy fighters. Nick took cover with his platoon leader in a ditch filled with water.

IRVING: I felt water splash on my face, thought it was water, and then all of a sudden he goes down and gets limp, and I see this opening in his chest, and that was blood coming out of his chest onto my face. My spotter had to dive on him, put his fingers inside this bullet hole, and at that point, everything got really slow. I quit, I guess you could say, for a very brief moment, not quit but just I'd never seen anything like that before and blacked out for a moment.

IRVING: I remember one of the communications guys from the reconnaissance team that I was on smacking me on my helmet, and he's like Irv, get back in it, man, get back in it. Started engaging targets, just squeezing the trigger, squeezing the trigger. That went on for almost a full day. Went in with 210 bullets and I left with 6, so it was a…one heck of a firefight.

KLAY: So there it was, his movie fire-fight. Which felt very different when he actually lived through it... 

IRVING: There's no rewind button. There's no restart or anything, and the blood is real. The pain is real. Hearing one of your guys cry or shout out, that is real. I don't think there's any actor on this planet that can portray that real, authentic, blood-curdling scream…you won't forget that.

KLAY: After his final deployment, Nick came back, as usual, to Fort Benning. Normally he didn’t want anyone to meet him, but this time, for the first time, his wife was there…

IRVING: As weird as it may seem, I kind of felt loved, I hate…I don't want to say I hate saying that, but yeah, I did. I felt loved, you know what I mean and it was quickly shut down when the guys around me on that deployment, they're, you know, talking to me as I'm putting guns on the back of a truck, and someone slips up and says hey, man, I heard you killed like all these people overseas, and you know, my wife, she kind of looked at me, and she was like…kind of in shock. She had never heard that before. Up until that time, no one in my family knew that I'd ever killed anybody, and her hearing the numbers of people who I killed and I wasn't sure how she would kind of, you know, take it.

PRODUCER: Yeah, how did you guys process that? 

IRVING: She's very quiet. She--she could've been a great sniper. She's quieter than I am, and I learned how to read people overseas. You build up enough time behind the scope, looking at people, you learn how to read emotion differently, and I could read her, and I knew she was uncomfortable with the fact that I had killed some guys, and she never asked too many questions. She never pried too deep. She was always scared. You know I didn't find out until later that she was nervous about asking because she thought that I was going to snap or something. She heard stories from her family that after they get back from war, they have PTSD and they wake up in the middle of the night and they can kill you, and all this and that. So, it…it played different on…on her.

KLAY: Nick is hardly the first veteran to come home to the person he loves the most, only to realize that they’re afraid of him. That there are parts of who he was that they didn’t want to hear about. Nick was deployed six times, and then he went back to Iraq, as a private military contractor. Eventually, though, he returned to civilian life, and it wasn’t easy for him. 

IRVING: Overseas, I had all the control in the world. I just pull a trigger and anything that was bad went away. Over here, you can't pull a trigger on a house note, a car note, phone bill, stuff like that. So, all that accumulated and piled up into this big bad enemy that you couldn't shoot, and it slowly started to take its toll on me, big time.

IRVING: Drinking--alcohol was a way that I would suppress certain emotions and…and process everything that happened, but it really wasn't a state of processing anything. It was just blacking out and forgetting whatever happened, happened.

IRVING: They say you’re not supposed to have remorse. One of the snipers’ quotes is ‘without warning, without remorse’, but that remorse part is kind of where it gets iffy. Not remorse for killing a bad guy, just taking a life in general. You know, you grow up 18 years of your life and you’re taught one thing, to abruptly end that, you know, there’s gonna be a play on emotions somewhere in there. For about two years, after I got out, monthly it seemed that 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock in the morning, this guy died, this guy died, and old team leaders that I had, my very first team leader to battalion ended up killing himself, platoon leaders and platoon sergeants, guys who I looked at when I got in to be these superhero tough, tough guys, and they had families, they had children, and getting the word after I got out them taking their life was kind of a…I didn't--it was just hard to process. I've been to more funerals after my time in combat than I ever had to attend when I was in.

KLAY: A few years ago, Special Operations Command investigated suicide in their ranks. Nearly all the soldiers they looked at who’d taken their own lives, had struggled with post-traumatic stress or emotional trauma following their first deployment. Many had spoken to loved ones of combat, or of seeing comrades die, or seeing things that violated their sense of ethics, like the abuse of detainees.

KLAY: We can’t say for sure if there’s any one thing that causes suicide. But as one general noted, the “pressurized environment” of special operations, of witnessing horror on the battlefield time and again during two decades of war, was having an impact. 

IRVING: I woke up one day and the car was gone with the foreclosure notice on our house and stuff like that, so…I was used to killing things and getting rid of bad things, and the bad thing at that time that I felt was me. So, I contemplated on taking myself out of the equation. I had a bottle of Jack Daniels one time and a Glock pistol with one round in it. I felt like a burden.

KLAY: That same night, Nick says he started taking notes on his computer. The notes turned into a journal, and eventually, the journal became a book. “The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers.” The book was a bestseller, and it saved him financially, but he says it was something else that turned his life around… 

IRVING: My son was born. Born on my birthday. That was a big eye-opener. I had a purpose to live, at that point, and it was pretty much that everything that I didn't have as a kid, I saw that I wanted to give him. My dad didn't know how to be a dad, so my childhood and the way my dad was a dad to me differed from the way I always saw how dads needed to be on TV, I guess. So, two rehabs didn't work, but him popping out November 28 was like instant, yeah.

KLAY: In the military, you have a mission and a purpose given to you. The stakes are high, and the physical and psychological cost can be huge. In civilian life, sometimes veterans struggle to find something that provides that same sense of purpose. 

KLAY: But Nick had one now, a mission that wasn’t about taking life, but nurturing it. And looking back later, he had a more complicated perspective on all those years he spent taking out the bad guys...

RVING: When I got out, we were still winning. After I got out, I find out that ISIS has taken over those exact same places that I had fought, and that was really weird, and I've watched both of those countries go back to the same endless cycle, you know, and it's just for what now, you know, for what? Yeah.

[Credits]

KLAY: American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories is a production of Insignia Films and PRX for GBH. The lead podcast producer is Curtis Fox, the composer and sound designer is Ian Coss, and the executive producers for Insignia Films are Amanda Pollak and Leah Williams. Stephen Ives did the interview with Nick Irving. Thanks to Kathleen Horan and Matt Gottesfeld for their research. For GBH, Devin Maverick Robins is managing producer, and Judith Vecchione and Elizabeth Deane are executive producers.

KLAY: Funding for American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories was provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding was provided by The Wexner Family Charitable Fund, Battelle Memorial Institute, JPMorgan Chase, and Analog Devices.

KLAY: For more powerful memories from veterans, visit PBS.org/American Veteran, where you can also watch the American Veteran television series and digital short films.  You can also learn more by using #AmericanVeteranPBS.” 

I’m Phil Klay. Thanks for listening.

[GBH sting]

Note: Red text denotes Archival Transcription.