Irving used it for spackling purposes, and his dad the sergeant never discovered the damage. Fortunately, the walls were white and his sister had white Play-Doh. But he knew he was a good shot from all the practice he took inside the house: He pockmarked the walls with rounds from an air rifle. He wasn’t a great student - the only A he ever got was in junior ROTC - and his discipline needed work. No, thanks to a Charlie Sheen movie, he had a bad case of Navy SEAL-itis. Growing up the son of two enlisted soldiers in Fort Meade, Md., he didn’t want to be in the Army. The kind of fierce dedication and concentration Irving deployed every day as a Ranger would have surprised the younger version of himself. Other guys started calling him “The Reaper,” which became the title of his book. Irving, the first black sniper in the Army’s Third Ranger Battalion, which had previously fought in the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, killed 33 men in less than four months. Eventually the fan got spinning so fast that his limbs were whipped off and he sprayed the room with blood and guts, covering me as well with gelatinous goo.” The sound of velcro He was staring at me with that same dead-eyed stare, but as the fan spun faster and faster, he started screaming at me open-mouthed. The blades of the fan were the man’s four limbs plus his head and chest. “I had a dream,” he writes, “where I was in a room with a ceiling fan spinning above me. “Later that night, the image of that man returned to me,” Irving says in his new memoir. “Yeah!” “Get some!” is what soldiers like Irv say when looking at the after-action videos of some of their exploits, but taking a life is a personality-fragmenting experience. “It wasn’t an IED, it was the man inside it. “I saw something explode inside the car,” he writes. Irv lit him up, with a controlled seven-round burst. He stopped in the middle of the road, facing the American convoy. The Iraqi driver stopped, turned around, stared. “If this guy turns around and approaches us at that same rate of speed,” said Irv’s supervisor, “take him out.” “The Reaper:Īutobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers” On Route Tampa, the sun had just climbed above the horizon when a car sped past them at 70 mph. 50 caliber machine gun in a column of Stryker armored vehicles outside of Ramallah. Once you kill a man, you can’t replace that feeling.” “After you kill a man,” said the NCO, “there’s no other feeling like it. Nick “Irv” Irving had never taken a human life when his platoon sergeant took him to one side.
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