“What is?”
“Heading into a storm you know is there,” I said.
A glimmer of mirth in her eyes. “It doesn’t rain in San Diego,” she said.
13
Psychiatrist Jared Leising had seen Kenny Bryce approximately twenty-four hours before his death. Bryce had been in treatment with the doctor for four years. Kenny had left the Air Force two years previous, to do landscape maintenance for Kern County, but apparently he had thought highly enough of the doctor to drive the four-plus hours from Bakersfield to Las Vegas once a month to see him.
Leising was wiry, in his early fifties, with a pair of rimless Freudian glasses and a sharp Vandyke to complete the psychoanalytic look. He had told me over the phone that Kenny Bryce was one of his favorite people, and he was shocked by what had happened. He had been expecting a call from the Bakersfield PD, not from a PI from San Diego.
Hall Pass 2 had landed me here in Las Vegas just in time for a $7.99 all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at a minor downtown casino and a short Uber to Dr. Leising’s office. The storm had passed and the late Las Vegas morning was cold and sunny.
Leising’s consulting room was crisply lit and furnished in a fifties desert style — orange carpet, an aqua-colored couch and chairs, and lime-green wall assemblies in various geometric shapes. I took one of the aqua chairs and Leising the other.
He crossed his legs and set his notepad and pen on the white cylindrical stand beside him. “I don’t know where to start or what to say,” he said. “Can you ask me the questions? Rather than what usually happens here in this room?”
“Tell me how you met Kenny.”
It was four years ago, Leising said, while Kenny Bryce was flying Headhunter missions out of Creech AFB. Kenny had come to him on the advice of his pilot, Marlon Voss, and his sensor, Lindsey Rakes, both of whom were seeing Leising occasionally to work through “combat-related stresses.”
It surprised me that Lindsey had never mentioned her psychiatrist. But I’m a believer in the right to keep and bear secrets. Which is probably why the Headhunters had taken their burdens to someone outside their own Air Force mental health system. Combat stress is hard enough; the stigma of PTSD is a military career killer.
Dr. Leising’s voice was clear and his words seemed to be amplified by the hard, brightly colored surfaces of the interior. He said that he thought he could help Kenny, because Bryce’s symptoms were not unlike those of Voss and Lindsey, and a number of other RPA — remotely piloted aircraft — operators that Leising had treated.
He said that his general approach with combat stress was to go light on drugs and heavy on talk, exercise, and clean living. Mostly talk, he emphasized. He was old-fashioned in that way.
“What were Bryce’s symptoms?” I asked.
“Fatigue. Anger. Anxiety. Sleeplessness. Confusion. Like many other people, Kenny tried to self-regulate with alcohol and marijuana. Which exacerbated the symptoms and dulled his performance as a flier. And later, in his job with the county, in Bakersfield.”
I thought of what Lindsey had told me of the Reaper team’s long and tedious hours in flight, the fruitless patrols and surveillances, the many weeks spent watching one man on the ground, miles away, a known terrorist, surrounding himself with innocents because he knew that to be alone meant death from above. Then the moment when he needed to move into the open, and the sudden violence the Headhunters unleashed. If the mission took place at night, the crew would see their target explode in the eerie infrared light. If the mission was during the day, they would see their target blown apart in a post-pixelation high-def gorefest intimate in its closeness and focus. And if there was any doubt that their target had been destroyed, they’d send down another missile to make sure. She told me that often, four or five Reapers at once were deployed on a targeted kill. Their firepower was lethal and accurate and meticulously recorded. That was Lindsey’s job as sensor operator. She may have been flying from a trailer at Creech, but her unblinking vision was right there when the missiles hit, Roland — collecting the images and sending them back to her ground-control station. Lindsey had told me that those mental pictures were part of their take-home pay. You took them home and tried to find a place to hide them.
“Lindsey told me that drone fliers see things that other fliers don’t see,” I said.
“They see what grunts see,” said Leising. “The RPA crews have more in common with the boots on the ground than the fighter pilots who drop the bombs. On top of that, the more glamorous conventional pilots consider themselves the only ‘real’ pilots. They’re full of swagger and pride. They are celebrated in movies and TV. While RPA fliers are often very disturbed by their killing. So there’s no joy in a flight trailer, Mr. Ford. No rush of velocity. No beers after with your crew. The RPA fliers go home after twelve hours and try to live their lives.”
The word cost came to mind. The cost that Kenny had paid. And Lindsey was still paying. How you measured and weighed it against the good it was intended to do.
Leising picked up his notebook and pen, patiently wrote, then closed the booklet and set it back on the white stand. “Pardon me. I’m writing a book about all this. Robotic warfare and what it does to the human being. It’s a story that should be told.”
“I’ll read it.”
“My wife has promised to also,” said the doctor. “Which gives me two preorders with which to entice an agent.” He looked at me in frank assessment. “You served?”
“Marines.”
“Then you understand the burden drone fliers share with all other men and women in war — that sometimes innocent people die.”
“I understand that burden,” I said.
Leising waited, letting the silence be. “It is the deepest gulf between the expectations of the RPA fliers and what they experience in combat. Because, in spite of what many politicians and generals and the public like to believe about the ‘surgical’ precision of drone warfare, the truth is not so simple. So, on top of the discrete challenges of hunting human beings from thousands of miles away, drone teams have the up-close experience of watching their munitions blow up the wrong people. There’s a twelve-second lapse between the time the pilot says ‘Rifle!’ and the moment the missile destroys its target. Kenny liked to say that those twelve seconds are the longest twelve seconds in sports. Joking, of course. He always was. But the truth is that those twelve seconds could be when the target leaves the room and his wife comes into it. When the child walks from the courtyard into the impact zone. When a boy rides up on a bicycle. When the target answers a knock on his door from an innocent neighbor.”
Another cost, I thought. I had seen innocents killed in Fallujah. Their blood was on my soul but not on my hands.
“Innocent blood was a heavy burden for Kenny Bryce,” said Leising.
Lindsey had never spoken to me about collateral damage. And I had respected her privacy enough not to ask. Soldier to soldier, she knew that I would at least understand the context of the thing. But a soldier’s secrets are hers to keep.
“As combat fliers, I suppose the Headhunters spilled their share,” I said.
He looked at me over the top of his small round spectacles. “I only tell you this because of what has happened to Kenny. And with the hope that it will save Lindsey and Marlon from such a horror. It took Kenny two years to come to the point where he could tell me what I’m about to tell you.”
I waited.
14
“Do you remember reading about the Doctors Without Borders improvised hospital in Aleppo? In April of 2015?”