Confessions of a Drone Warrior
From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept coldprecisely sixty-eight degreesand the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his console, the image showed the midwinter landscape of eastern Afghanistans Kunar Provincea palette of browns and grays, fields cut to stubble, dark forests climbing the rocky foothills of the Hindu Kush. He zoomed the camera in on the suspected insurgents, each dressed in traditional shalwar kameez, long shirts and baggy pants. He knew nothing else about them: not their names, not their thoughts, not the thousand mundane and profound details of their lives.
He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherds staffs. Still, the directive from somewhere above, a mysterious chain of command that led straight to his headset, was clear: confirmed weapons. He switched from the visible spectrumthe muted grays and browns of day-TVto the sharp contrast of infrared, and the insurgents heat signatures stood out ghostly white against the cool black earth. A safety observer loomed behind him to make sure the weapon release was by the book. A long verbal checklist, his targeting laser locked on the two men walking in front. A countdownthree
two
one
then the flat delivery of the phrase missile off the rail. Seventy-five hundred miles away, a Hellfire flared to life, detached from its mount, and reached supersonic speed in seconds.
It was quiet in the dark, cold box in the desert, except for the low hum of machines.
He kept the targeting laser trained on the two lead men and stared so intently that each individual pixel stood out, a glowing pointillist dot abstracted from the image it was meant to form. Time became almost ductile, the seconds stretched and slowed in a strange electronic limbo. As he watched the men walk, the one who had fallen behind seemed to hear something and broke into a run to catch up with the other two. Then, bright and silent as a camera flash, the screen lit up with white flame.
Airman First Class Brandon Bryant stared at the scene, unblinking in the white-hot clarity of infrared. He recalls it even now, years later, burned into his memory like a photo negative: The smoke clears, and theres pieces of the two guys around the crater. And theres this guy over here, and hes missing his right leg above his knee. Hes holding it, and hes rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and its hitting the ground, and its hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.
Read More http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination
Ace Acme
(1,464 posts)The stuff that comes out in magazines like GQ, and Vanity Fair, and Esquire.
And yet so many remain clueless.
(I don't know what kind of ads y'all get, but I get this little screen at the right that invites me to play a video game firing some kind of laser weapon at tanks that are scurrying around like cockroaches)
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)Jesus Malverde
(10,274 posts)Combat is combat. Killing is killing. This isnt a video game. How many of you have killed a group of people, watched as their bodies are picked up, watched the funeral, then killed them too?
Yeah, its not the same as being on the ground. So fucking what? Until you know what it is like and can make an intelligent meaningful assessment, shut your goddamn fucking mouths before somebody shuts them for you.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)He gets it, he is the heretic, and his former fellows, appalled at the thought of what they have really been doing, are enraged at him for bringing it up.
He sounds very upset too.