Backintothesky
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Good read, thanks for posting.
I had an old-school friend kill himself a few years ago, we'd lost touch but apparently he'd been on tour in Iraq with the reserves and he was involved in drone ops.
It's easy to think that perhaps these men (and women) are distanced from what they see because of a computer screen, but when you are responsible for someone's death and can see it happen close up (regardless of whether its through a screen or face to face) it clearly has an effect on most health, empathetic human beings.Darius11http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination?printable=true
QuoteHe was an experiment, really. One of the first recruits for a new kind of warfare in which men and machines merge. He flew multiple missions, but he never left his computer. He hunted top terrorists, saved lives, but always from afar. He stalked and killed countless people, but could not always tell you precisely what he was hitting. Meet the 21st-century American killing machine. who's still utterly, terrifyingly human
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 cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and 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 Afghanistan’s Kunar Province—a 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 shepherd’s 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 spectrum—the muted grays and browns of “day-TV”—to 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 countdown—three…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 there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s 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.”
That was Brandon Bryant’s first shot. It was early 2007, a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, and Bryant was a remotely-piloted-aircraft sensor operator—a “sensor” for short—part of a U.S. Air Force squadron that flew Predator drones in the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan. Beginning in 2006, he worked in the windowless metal box of a Ground Control Station (GCS) at Nellis Air Force Base, a vast sprawl of tarmac and maintenance hangars at the edge of Las Vegas.
The airmen kept the control station dark so they could focus on controlling their MQ-1B Predators circling two miles above the Afghan countryside. Bryant sat in a padded cockpit chair. He had a wrestler’s compact build, a smooth-shaved head, and a piercing ice blue gaze frequently offset by a dimpled grin. As a sensor, his job was to work in tandem with the drone’s pilot, who sat in the chair next to him. While the pilot controlled the drone’s flight maneuvers, Bryant acted as the Predator’s eyes, focusing its array of cameras and aiming its targeting laser. When a Hellfire was launched, it was a joint operation: the pilot pulled a trigger, and Bryant was responsible for the missile’s “terminal guidance,” directing the high-explosive warhead by laser to its desired objective. Both men wore regulation green flight suits, an unironic Air Force nod to the continuity of military decorum in the age of drone warfare.
The Air Force's go-to drone: The MQ-1 Predator.
Since its inception, the drone program has been largely hidden, its operational details gathered piecemeal from heavily redacted classified reports or stage-managed media tours by military public-affairs flacks. Bryant is one of very few people with firsthand experience as an operator who has been willing to talk openly, to describe his experience from the inside. While Bryant considers leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for their principles, he’s cautious about discussing some of the details to which his top-secret clearance gave him access. Still, he is a curtain drawn back on the program that has killed thousands on our behalf.
Despite President Obama’s avowal earlier this year that he will curtail their use, drone strikes have continued apace in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. With enormous potential growth and expenditures, drones will be a center of our policy for the foreseeable future. (By 2025, drones will be an $82 billion business, employing an additional 100,000 workers.) Most Americans—61 percent in the latest Pew survey—support the idea of military drones, a projection of American power that won’t risk American lives.
And yet the very idea of drones unsettles. They’re too easy a placeholder or avatar for all of our technological anxieties—the creeping sense that screens and cameras have taken some piece of our souls, that we’ve slipped into a dystopia of disconnection. Maybe it’s too soon to know what drones mean, what unconsidered moral and ethical burdens they carry. Even their shape is sinister: the blunt and featureless nose cone, like some eyeless creature that has evolved in darkness.
For Bryant, talking about them has become a sort of confessional catharsis, a means of processing the things he saw and did during his six years in the Air Force as an experimental test subject in an utterly new form of warfare.
Looking back, it was really little more than happenstance that had led him to that box in the desert. He’d been raised poor by his single mom, a public-school teacher in Missoula, Montana, and he struggled to afford tuition at the University of Montana. In the summer of 2005, after tagging along with a buddy to the Army recruiting office, he wandered into the Air Force office next door. His friend got a bad feeling and bailed at the last minute, but Bryant had already signed his papers. In short order he was running around at Lackland Air Force Base during Warrior Week in the swelter of a Texas summer. He wasn’t much for military hierarchy, but he scored high on his aptitude tests and was shunted into intelligence, training to be an imagery analyst. He was told he would be like “the guys that give James Bond all the information that he needs to get the mission done.”
Most of the airmen in his intel class were funneled into the drone program, training at Creech Air Force Base in the sagebrush desert an hour north of Las Vegas. Bryant was told it was the largest group ever inducted. His sensor-operator course took ten weeks and led into “green flag” exercises, during which airmen piloted Predators and launched dummy Hellfires at a cardboard town mocked up in the middle of the desert. The missiles, packed with concrete, would punch through the derelict tanks and wrecked cars placed around the set. “It’s like playing Dungeons & Dragons,” says Bryant. “Roll a d20 to see if you hit your target.” His training inspector, watching over his shoulder, would count down to impact and say, “Splash! You killed everyone.”
Within a few months he “went off” to war, flying missions over Iraq at the height of the conflict’s deadliest period, even though he never left Nevada.
His opening day on the job was also his worst. The drone took off from Balad Air Base, fifty miles outside Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle. Bryant’s orders, delivered during a pre-shift mission briefing, were straightforward: a force-protection mission, acting as a “guardian angel” over a convoy of Humvees. He would search out IEDs, insurgent activity, and other threats. It was night in the U.S. and already daylight in Iraq when the convoy rolled out.
From 10,000 feet, Bryant scanned the road with infrared. Traffic was quiet. Everything normal. Then he spotted a strange circle, glowing faintly on the surface of the road. A common insurgent’s technique for laying IEDs is to douse a tire with gasoline, set it afire on a roadway, and dig up the softened tar beneath. The technique leaves a telltale heat signature, visible in infrared. Bryant, a fan of The Lord of the Rings, joked that it looked like the glowing Eye of Sauron.
Flying a drone can feel like a deadly two-person video game—with a pilot (left) and sensor (right).
Bryant pointed the spot out to the pilot, who agreed it looked like trouble. But when they tried to warn the convoy, they realized they couldn’t. The Humvees had activated their radio jammers to disrupt the cell-phone signals used to remotely detonate IEDs. The drone crew’s attempts at radio contact were as useless as shouting at the monitor. Brandon and his pilot patched in their flight supervisor to brainstorm a new way to reach them. They typed frantically back and forth in a group chat, a string of messages that soon included a cast of superiors in the U.S. and Iraq. Minutes passed, and the convoy rolled slowly toward the glowing circle. Bryant stared at the screen, heart pounding, scarcely breathing. The lead Humvee rolled across the eye. “Nothing happens,” says Bryant. “And we’re kind of like, maybe it was a mistake. Everyone’s like Whew, good on you for spotting it, but we’re glad that it wasn’t what you thought it was.” He remembers exhaling, feeling the nervous tension flow out of him.
“And the second vehicle comes along and boom.…”
A white flash of flame blossomed on the screen. Bryant was zoomed in as close as he could get, toggling his view between infrared and day-TV, watching in unblinking horror as the shredded Humvee burned. His headset exploded with panicked chatter from the ground in Iraq: What the fuck happened? We’ve got guys down over here! Frantic soldiers milled around, trying to pull people out of the smoldering wreckage. The IED had been tripped by either a pressure plate or manual detonation; the radio jammers would have done nothing to prevent it. Three soldiers were severely wounded, and two were killed.
“I kind of finished the night numb,” Bryant says. “Then you just go home. No one talked about it. No one talked about how they felt after anything. It was like an unspoken agreement that you wouldn’t talk about your experiences.”
···
The pace of work in the box unraveled Bryant’s sense of time. He worked twelve-hour shifts, often overnight, six days a week. Both wars were going badly at the time, and the Air Force leaned heavily on its new drone fleet. A loaded Predator drone can stay aloft for eighteen hours, and the pilots and sensors were pushed to be as tireless as the technology they controlled. (Bryant claims he didn’t get to take leave for the first four years he served.)
Even the smell of that little shed in the desert got to Bryant. The hermetically sealed control center was almost constantly occupied—you couldn’t take a bathroom break without getting swapped out—and the atmosphere was suffused with traces of cigarette smoke and rank sweat that no amount of Febreze could mask. One bored pilot even calculated the number of farts each cockpit seat was likely to have absorbed.
Mostly the drone crews’ work was an endless loop of watching: scanning roads, circling compounds, tracking suspicious activity. If there was a “troops-in-contact” situation—a firefight, ground troops who call in a strike—Bryant’s Predator could be called to the scene in minutes with its deadly payload. But usually time passed in a haze of banal images of rooftops, walled courtyards, or traffic-snarled intersections.
Sitting in the darkness of the control station, Bryant watched people on the other side of the world go about their daily lives, completely unaware of his all-seeing presence wheeling in the sky above. If his mission was to monitor a high-value target, he might linger above a single house for weeks. It was a voyeuristic intimacy. He watched the targets drink tea with friends, play with their children, have sex with their wives on rooftops, writhing under blankets. There were soccer matches, and weddings too. He once watched a man walk out into a field and take a crap, which glowed white in infrared.
Bryant came up with little subterfuges to pass the long hours at the console: sneaking in junk food, mending his uniforms, swapping off twenty-minute naps with the pilot. He mastered reading novels while still monitoring the seven screens of his station, glancing up every minute or two before returning to the page. He constructed a darkly appropriate syllabus for his occupation. He read the dystopian sci-fi classic Ender’s Game, about children whose violent simulated games turn out to be actual warfare. Then came Asimov, Bryant pondering his Three Laws of Robotics in an age of Predators and Hellfires. A robot may not injure a human being….
Bryant took five shots in his first nine months on the job. After a strike he was tasked with lingering over a site for several haunting hours, conducting surveillance for an “after-action report.” He might watch people gather up the remains of those killed and carry them to the local cemetery or scrub the scene by dumping weapons into a river. Over Iraq he followed an insurgent commander as he drove through a crowded marketplace. The man parked in the middle of the street, opened his trunk, and pulled two girls out. “They were bound and gagged,” says Bryant. “He put them down on their knees, executed them in the middle of the street, and left them there. People just watched it and didn’t do anything.” Another time, Bryant watched as a local official groveled in his own grave before being executed by two Taliban insurgents.
Keepsakes from Bryant's service are proudly displayed in his mother's classroom.
In the early months Bryant had found himself swept up by the Big Game excitement when someone in his squadron made “mind-blowingly awesome shots, situations where these guys were bad guys and needed to be taken out.” But a deep ambivalence about his work crept in. Often he’d think about what life must be like in those towns and villages his Predators glided over, like buzzards riding updrafts. How would he feel, living beneath the shadow of robotic surveillance? “Horrible,” he says now. But at first, he believed that the mission was vital, that drones were capable of limiting the suffering of war, of saving lives. When this notion conflicted with the things he witnessed in high resolution from two miles above, he tried to put it out of his mind. Over time he found that the job made him numb: a “zombie mode” he slipped into as easily as his flight suit.
···
Bryant’s second shot came a few weeks after targeting the three men on that dirt road in Kunar. He was paired with a pilot he didn’t much like, instructed to monitor a compound that intel told them contained a high-value individual—maybe a Taliban commander or Al Qaeda affiliate, nobody briefed him on the specifics. It was a typical Afghan mud-brick home, goats and cows milling around a central courtyard. They watched a corner of the compound’s main building, bored senseless for hours. They assumed the target was asleep.
Then the quiet ended. “We get this word that we’re gonna fire,” he says. “We’re gonna shoot and collapse the building. They’ve gotten intel that the guy is inside.” The drone crew received no further information, no details of who the target was or why he needed a Hellfire dropped on his roof.
Bryant’s laser hovered on the corner of the building. “Missile off the rail.” Nothing moved inside the compound but the eerily glowing cows and goats. Bryant zoned out at the pixels. Then, about six seconds before impact, he saw a hurried movement in the compound. “This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person.”
Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot.
“And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ ”
Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog.
If they’d had a few more seconds’ warning, they could have aborted the shot, guided it by laser away from the compound. Bryant wouldn’t have cared about wasting a $95,000 Hellfire to avoid what he believed had happened. But as far as the official military version of events was concerned, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The pilot “was the type of guy to not argue with command,” says Bryant. So the pilot’s after-action report stated that the building had been destroyed, the high-value target eliminated. The report made no mention of a dog or any other living thing. The child, if there had been a child, was an infrared ghost.
···
The closest Bryant ever got to “real” combat—the roadside bombs and mortar fire experienced by combat troops—was after volunteering to deploy to Iraq. He spent the scorching summer and fall of 2007 stationed at the airfield in Balad, flying Predators on base-defense missions—scanning the area for insurgents. Some troops thanked the drone crews for being “angels in the sky,” but more often they were the butt of jokes, mocked as “chair-borne rangers” who would “only earn a Purple Heart for burning themselves on a Hot Pocket.”
Bryant struggled to square the jokes with the scenes that unfolded on his monitors. On one shift, he was told by command that they needed coordinates on an insurgent training compound and asked him to spot it. There was a firing range, and he watched as a group of fighters all entered the same building. One of the issues with targeting insurgents was that they often traveled with their families, and there was no way to tell who exactly was in any given building. Bryant lasered the building as he was ordered. Moments later, smoke mushroomed high into the air, a blast wave leveling the entire compound. An F-16, using Bryant’s laser coordinates as guidance, had dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on the building—ten times the size of a Hellfire. “They didn’t actually tell us that they were gonna blow it up,” says Bryant. “We’re like, ‘Wow, that was nice of you to inform us of that.’ ”
In 2008, Bryant was transferred to a new post in “the shittiest place in the world,” a drone squadron out of Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, New Mexico, where, Bryant says, “the air is not oxygen, it’s basically cow shit.” He continued as an operator for several more years, but his directive had changed. He was now mainly tracking high-value targets for the Joint Special Operations Command—the same secret-shrouded branch of the service that spearheaded the hunt for Osama bin Laden. “We were going after top dudes. They started showing us PowerPoint presentations on who these people are,” he says. “Why we’re after him, and what he did. I liked that. I liked being able to know shit like that.”
Bryant has never been philosophically opposed to the use of drones—he sees them as a tool, like any other, that can be used for good ends, citing their potential use to fight poachers, or to monitor forest fires. For him it’s about who controls them, and toward what ends. “It can’t be a small group of people deciding how they’re used,” he says. “There’s got to be transparency. People have to know how they’re being used so they’re used responsibly.”
Transparency has not been the defining feature of U.S. drone policy over the last decade. Even as Bryant was being trained to operate drones in our very public wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a parallel and clandestine drone war was being waged in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Since 2004, the CIA has carried out hundreds of strikes in Pakistani territory, cutting secret deals with Pakistani intelligence to operate a covert assassination program. Another covert CIA drone base was operated from Saudi Arabia, launching strikes against militants in the lawless and mountainous interior of Yemen. While Bryant never flew for the CIA itself, their drone operators were drawn directly from the Air Force ranks.
While stationed in Clovis, among the highest-value targets Bryant’s squadron hunted was Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born Yemeni imam and Al Qaeda recruiter. Al-Awlaki was ultimately killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September 2011 (as was his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a few weeks later). But Bryant claims his Air Force squadron “did most of the legwork” to pinpoint his location.
By 2011, Bryant had logged nearly 6,000 hours of flight time, flown hundreds of missions, targeted hundreds of enemies. He was in what he describes as “a fugue state of mind.” At the entrance to his flight headquarters in Clovis, in front of a large bulletin board, plastered with photographs of targets like al-Awlaki, he looked up at the faces and asked: “What motherfucker’s gonna die today?”
It seemed like someone else’s voice was speaking, some dark alter ego. “I knew I had to get out.”
By the spring of 2011, almost six years after he’d signed on, Senior Airman Brandon Bryant left the Air Force, turning down a $109,000 bonus to keep flying. He was presented with a sort of scorecard covering his squadron’s missions. “They gave me a list of achievements,” he says. “Enemies killed, enemies captured, high-value targets killed or captured, stuff like that.” He called it his diploma. He hadn’t lased the target or pulled the trigger on all of the deaths tallied, but by flying in the missions he felt he had enabled them. “The number,” he says, “made me sick to my stomach.”
Total enemies killed in action: 1,626.
···
Since speaking out about drones, Bryant has been a target.
“After that first missile hit, I didn’t really talk to anyone for a couple weeks.” Bryant spoke to me while driving his beat-up black Dodge Neon in looping cursive circles around his hometown of Missoula. A yellow support-the-troops sticker on his bumper was obscured by a haze of road salt. The car’s interior was festooned with patches from the different units he’d served with; in the back seat was a military pack stuffed with equal parts dirty laundry and bug-out gear. The gray midwinter sky weighed on a procession of strip malls and big-box stores; the snowy crenellations of the Bitterroot Range stretched far away to the south. He stared ahead as though watching the scene of his shot on an endless loop. “I didn’t know what it meant to kill someone. And watching the aftermath, watching someone bleed out, because of something that I did?”
That night, on the drive home, he’d started sobbing. He pulled over and called his mother. “She just was like, ‘Everything will be okay,’ and I told her I killed someone, I killed people, and I don’t feel good about it. And she’s like, ‘Good, that’s how it should feel, you should never not feel that way.’ ”
Other members of his squadron had different reactions to their work. One sensor operator, whenever he made a kill, went home and chugged an entire bottle of whiskey. A female operator, after her first shot, refused to fire again even under the threat of court martial. Another pilot had nightmares after watching two headless bodies float down the Tigris. Bryant himself would have bizarre dreams where the characters from his favorite game, World of Warcraft, appeared in infrared.
By mid-2011, Bryant was back in Missoula, only now he felt angry, isolated, depressed. While getting a video game at a Best Buy, he showed his military ID with his credit card, and a teenage kid behind him in line spoke up. “He’s like, ‘Oh, you’re in the military; my brother, he’s a Marine, he’s killed like thirty-six dudes, and he tells me about it all the time.’ And I turn around and say, ‘If you fucking ever talk like this to me again, I will stab you. Don’t ever disrespect people’s deaths like that ever again.’ ” The kid went pale, and Bryant took his game and left.
At the urging of a Vietnam veteran he met at the local VA office, Bryant finally went to see a therapist. After a few sessions, he just broke down: “I told her I wanted to be a hero, but I don’t feel like a hero. I wanted to do something good, but I feel like I just wasted the last six years of my life.” She diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was an unexpected diagnosis. For decades the model for understanding PTSD has been “fear conditioning”: quite literally the lasting psychological ramifications of mortal terror. But a term now gaining wider acceptance is “moral injury.” It represents a tectonic realignment, a shift from a focusing on the violence that has been done to a person in wartime toward his feelings about what he has done to others—or what he’s failed to do for them. The concept is attributed to the clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who in his book Achilles in Vietnam traces the idea back as far as the Trojan War. The mechanisms of death may change—as intimate as a bayonet or as removed as a Hellfire—but the bloody facts, and their weight on the human conscience, remain the same. Bryant’s diagnosis of PTSD fits neatly into this new understanding. It certainly made sense to Bryant. “I really have no fear,” he says now. “It’s more like I’ve had a soul-crushing experience. An experience that I thought I’d never have. I was never prepared to take a life.”
In 2011, Air Force psychologists completed a mental-health survey of 600 combat drone operators. Forty-two percent of drone crews reported moderate to high stress, and 20 percent reported emotional exhaustion or burnout. The study’s authors attributed their dire results, in part, to “existential conflict.” A later study found that drone operators suffered from the same levels of depression, anxiety, PTSD, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation as traditional combat aircrews. These effects appeared to spike at the exact time of Bryant’s deployment, during the surge in Iraq. (Chillingly, to mitigate these effects, researchers have proposed creating a Siri-like user interface, a virtual copilot that anthropomorphizes the drone and lets crews shunt off the blame for whatever happens. Siri, have those people killed.)
In the summer of 2012, Bryant rejoined the Air Force as a reservist, hoping to get into the famed SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), where he would help train downed pilots to survive behind enemy lines. After so much killing, he wanted to save people. But after a severe concussion in a training accident, he dropped out and returned once more to Missoula. He walked with a cane, had headaches and memory lapses, and fell into a black depression.
During the worst of it, Bryant would make the rounds of Missoula’s dozens of roughneck bars and drink himself to blackout on whiskey and cokes, vanishing for days or weeks on end. Many of those nights he would take his government-issued minus-forty-degree sleeping bag and pull into a parking lot in the middle of town next to the Clark Fork river. There’s a small park with a wooden play structure there, built to look like a dragon with slides and ladders descending from it. He would climb to the little lookout deck at the top, blind drunk, and sleep there, night after night.
He doesn’t remember much of that hazy period last summer, but his mother, LanAnn, does. Several times he had left a strange locked case sitting out on the kitchen table at her house, and she had put it back in the closet. The third day she woke to find the case open, with a loaded Sig Sauer P226 semi-automatic pistol lying out. Terrified that he might kill himself, she gave it to a friend with a locked gun safe. She’d only told her son about it a week earlier. He had no memory of any of it.
“I really thought we were going to lose him,” LanAnn Bryant says now.
Something needed to change. Bryant hoped that by going to the press, people would understand drone crews’ experience of war, that it was “more than just a video game” to them. In the fall, he spoke to a reporter for the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. The story was translated into English, and the British tabloid Daily Mail picked it up, posting it with the wildly inaccurate headline drone operator followed orders to shoot a child…and decided he had to quit. The story went viral.
The backlash from the drone community was immediate and fierce. Within days, 157 people on Bryant’s Facebook page had de-friended him. “You are a piece of shit liar. Rot in hell,” wrote a former Air Force comrade. In a sort of exercise in digital self-flagellation, Bryant read thousands of Reddit comments about himself, many filled with blistering vitriol and recrimination. “I read every single one of them,” he says. “I was trying to just get used to the negative feelings.” The spectrum of critics ranged from those who considered drone warfare a crime against humanity to combat veterans who thought Bryant was a whiner. He’d had death threats as well—none he took seriously—and other people said he should be charged with treason and executed for speaking to the media. On the day of one of our interviews, The New York Times ran an article about the military’s research into PTSD among drone operators. I watched as he scanned a barrage of Facebook comments mocking the very idea that drone operators could suffer trauma:
>I broke a fucking nail on that last mission!
>Maybe they should wear seatbelts
>they can claim PTSD when they have to do “Body Collection & Identification”
And then Bryant waded in:
>I’m ashamed to have called any of you assholes brothers in arms.
>Combat is combat. Killing is killing. This isn’t 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, it’s 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.
Bryant’s defense—a virtual battle over an actual war—left him seething at his keyboard. He says that when flying missions, he sometimes felt himself merging with the technology, imagining himself as a robot, a zombie, a drone itself. Such abstractions don’t possess conscience or consciousness; drones don’t care what they mean, but Bryant most certainly does. Now he plans to study to be an EMT, maybe get work on an ambulance, finally be able to save people like he always wanted. He no longer has infrared dreams, no longer closes his eyes and sees those strange polarized shadows flit across them.
Bryant closed his laptop and went out into the yard, tossing a tennis ball to his enormous bounding Japanese mastiff. Fingers of snow extended down through the dark forests of the Bitterroot, and high white contrails in the big sky caught the late-afternoon sunlight. The landscape of western Montana, Bryant observed, bears a striking resemblance to the Hindu Kush of eastern Afghanistan—a place he’s seen only pixelated on a monitor. It was a cognitive dissonance he had often felt flying missions, as he tried to remind himself that the world was just as real when seen in a grainy image as with the naked eye, that despite being filtered through distance and technology, cause and effect still applied. This is the uncanny valley over which our drones circle. We look through them at the world, and ultimately stare back at ourselves.
Long but Good read about one of the first drone operators. -
It's NOTHING to do with the number of guns floating around in the world.
It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that a kid was walking around with a very realistic looking toy gun.
In a country like the UK with very high gun control (compared to the US) if armed police believe you are carrying a weapon and you act in a manner that they believe is threatening, they will shoot you.
Google "Mark Duggan" - a UK man shot dead by UK armed police because they had intelligence that he was carry a weapon. When they went to stop his vehicle, according to the police's version of events, he reached down in the vehicle as if to grab something and then moved upwards in a manner consistant with someone bringing a weapon to bear on a target. So they shot him.
The moral of this story is not gun control, but to not walk around in a public place with a firearm (or toy firearm) exposed. And when armed police point their weapons at you, do exactly as they say and don't make any sudden movements that could be construed as threatening.
At the end of the day, if they don't know if the weapon is real or not then why should they wait to see if it is if that person makes threatening gestures with it? No rational human being would allow themselves to be shot first.
To me, there is no such thing as a toy gun, and I don't feel I stole any part of my kids' childhood by making them treat toy guns like the real thing. Like my granddaughter, my kids grew up shooting at an early age. One is a "pistol packing momma".Bignugget************Yes it is a shitty situation. Especially for those deputies and family of the kid.
Chuck
I like this sentiment.
All guns are capable of being used to kill. Even the ones that can't shoot.
You wouldn't intuitively think you could kill yourself with a plastic toy gun, but you would be wrong.
This kid proved that.
Like Masterrig said though, when you allow guns to proliferate so much you have to expect cops to shoot first, and never ask questions.
If there were only a million guns floating around instead of 300 million I could see a better case for the cops waiting another 3 seconds to see if it was an actual weapon or not. Me? I think the parents are 100% at fault here.
300 million guns "floating around"? Ok, lets start with Chicago first. It is more dangerous than a tour in Afghanistan these days, and until these "floaters" around the country are removed from the criminals and insane, the killing will go on.
"If there were only a million guns floating around...." Nope, there are more than a million law abiding gun owners in this country.
That is my point. Since there are 300 million guns floating around, and apparently Chicago is more dangerous than Afghanistan, cops shoot first, and don't worry about questions.
Solution, don't have an environment like that, and cops might not have to react the way they did. -
Can't seem to post in the "Scam" sub forum, but here it is.
QuoteHello My Dear,
Greetings, it is my pleasure to contact you after going through your profile.I expect that you are not going to let down this trust am about to repose on you for the fact that we have not yet known or written to each other before. Though I will not compel you to honor this proposal,against your will, but first let me introduce myself to you.
My name is Ms. Sofia Johnson from Ivory Coast West Africa.I am the only child of my late parents and that has made me to run away from our family house because my uncles and my step mother is after my life as they want to have full access to my inheritance.
My dream is to find somebody overseas whom I can trust with my future life and inheritance, also who can be able to assist me for relocation abroad and also assist me in my investment plans abroad. I am seriously searching for a very reliable person, who will assist me in this investment plans over there.
I have some reasonable amount worth 4.500,000$ USD which I inherited from my late father who was a traditional ruler and an international business man before his sudden death.Presently I am ready to relocate out of this country and come over there to your area,in order to secure a resident permit and investment establishment in luctrative avenues.I wish to invest in areas like (Hospital Equipment, Transportation, Agricultural Project and Real Estate).
I need to invest the money in your base because of my the political instability here.Please your assistance is highly needed to enable me achieve my educational career in your country.
Your urgent response is needed so that I will give you full details on my plans for relocating to your country for these establishment.Please should in case if you are not in a good position to work with me on this aspect.I will appreciate you inform me immediately.
waiting for your urgent response.
Faithfully
Reply to my private e-mail box. ([email protected])
Ms.Sofia Johnson -
Love that film!!
"There are many people I wished would have died before my dad.....like mom." -
Calvin19***Is there somewhere we can order the sky balls used in freefall that are filled with lead pellets and empty at a certain altitude if not caught? I've seen them around and checked with online stores but haven't had any luck actually finding them.
I empty my balls around 400' on just about every flight.
Totally took that thread title a different way. -
Yep, in their situation it would have been a "choice" (not that they had time to make it) as to how they wished to die. Impact in plane, impact the tail or, if they missed the tail, impact at line stretch...
mr2mk1g***Does it change your procedure now that you know had you done nothing
you would be deadothers in a similar situation happened to die after a complicated chain of events played its course?
Fixed it for you.
It's still an odds game. Sadly, the odds didn't pan out for those in that 1 example. The odds still massively favour staying with the plane at 120ft, especially in an Otter with one good engine. Buckling up, keeping your helmet on, adopting a brace position and staying still all load those odds further in your favour.
Hell, at that altitude how the hell do you know exactly how high you are - the needle on your alti would only indicate a fart over zero anyway. -
Hollywood does take some pretty big liberties with realities though. I can sympathise with him.
Who can remember Hogan from Cocktail's "BASE" jump in Along Came Polly. The film makers forgot leg-straps on the rig for fucks sake....or perhaps that was his character being an even bigger insurance liability -
Forgive my ignorance but what's the actual average cost of this whole thing per month then (for the average person) - 200/300 per month, more?
I'm far from a socialist/lefty but I do think we are so lucky in Europe to have a, relatively, socially funded healthcare program. You pay your taxes you get healthcare, or hell you get healthcare even if you haven't paid taxes for the most part.
Sounds like you guys are getting fucked in the ass -
I love hearing stories like that. It's great when people don't take their differences too seriously.
But, replying to the OP - I think that if a couple have completely opposing life philosophies then I think coupling your life together would be a mistake. Nothing stopping you being friends, but can you imagine an extreme leftist having kids with a die-hard free market advocate? It would be a nightmare for all involved.
Every couple has it's differences, but when it comes to life philosophy there needs to be at least some closeness in point of view even if you don't agree on certain points.
In fact I wouldn't even see how a couple would get together if they had such opposing life philosophies - barring pure physical attractionlabrysQuoteWhat're your experiences?
I'm a fairly liberal, atheist, lesbian. I've worked 8-10 hours a day for almost 5 years with a conservative, born again Christian, straight guy. We get along grandly and I consider him one of the best friends I've ever had. We go out after work for beers a bunch. We look out for each other, share advice, laugh a ton, and respect each other and we really don't have any investment like a relationship. It's workable. -
Thus "random". A random accident of birth and culture. You are more likely to be a Christian if you were born and raised to a Christian family in America's bible belt.
How many Christians have actually studies other religious texts? How many Muslims have studied other religious texts?
You are right it is a completely emotional decision. Which blows my mind even more.
Monotheistic religion will tell you that the fate of your soul hangs in the balance. Get it wrong and you face an eternity of torture (let's not even get started on that!).
That to me would be the most important decision any person could make. Certainly not one you would take with blind faith/an emotional decision.
But how many religious people take the time to go through all of the religions out there and make SUPER CERTAIN that they aren't making the wrong choice by cultural/experiential bias?
Very few.
In the case of that chap who converted to Christianity, I think it's pretty clear to see that had his care been administered by a Buddhist, an atheist, a humanist or any other person he probably wouldn't have converted to Christianity.RonD1120***
Quotethat their "choice" of religion is completely random.
Actually, it's not random at all. Your religion will most likely be the religion of your parents. Faith is learnt.
I think religion is taught and learned. Faith is a variable based on experience, usually emotional experience referring to spiritual faith.
Sunday night I watched a video of a Lebanese Muslim who was taught the Koran by his mother daily and raised to be a martyr for Allah. He later was given military training and sent to the U.S. to participate in cultural jihad. He was in an automobile accident requiring a prolonged recovery. His care just happened to be administered by Christians. He was overwhelmed by their unconditional love. He sought the truth from Allah and received nothing. Again in prayer he sought the truth from Christ and received his answer. He instantly converted to Christianity.
Spiritual answers are not logical and rational but none the less real.
A side thought, how many Muslims are actively involved in cultural jihad here in America? -
+1
I find it shocking how those who have religious belief simply cannot see that their "choice" of religion is completely random.
If "faith" is the answer for why people believe then how on earth do they distinguish between all the tens of thousands of religions there have been, are and will be? They can't.
I have no problem with people living their lives like that. But when they hassle me about me lack of religious belief and expect to try and convert me to their religion then platitudes don't cut it.
There is no logical proof of a God and more importantly there is no way of working out which "God" it is.
But religious people tend to point to their book and say "it says its true in here". Well it says that in virtually every religious book in the world. How do you choose?DanGQuoteDo you believe we came from somewhere?
I believe in cause and effect, yes. That's not religion. I think your boiling down of religion is far too simplified. If religion stopped at, "we came from somewhere," then people wouldn't be killing each other over it. Religion (at least Abrahamaic ones) divide people into us and them, believers and infidels, good and evil.QuoteI mean it comes from a root that is absolute, THERE IS NO GOD it leaves no room for interpretation no room to say we came from anything.
No, it means that I don't believe that we were designed by a higher power, and need to live our lives according to His will. That's it. You're hung up on this notion of something from nothing, but that's really not the root of it all.QuoteI think that iron clad certainty is impossible to achieve we simply do not have enough evidence to make any definitive conclusions.
Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, sent from heaven to take on the sins of humanity, and only though Him can you enter into heaven? No? How can you take such an absolutist position without proof? How can you know for sure that isn't the truth?
What about Vishnu? Or Odin? Or Allah? How can you take such an absolutist position that they are not the one true God? Your beliefs (what ever they are) leave no room for interpretation either, you just don't seem to see it.QuoteAs in comparison to a hate group is meant because of the lack of logic.
Logic is all I have. Just because you don't follow the logic doesn't mean it isn't there.QuoteI can never explain to member of the KKK why there are good black people. When he comes from the absolute belief that anything a black person does is wrong and he hates him just for being black. So there is no place to start a debate of any sort. He is already sure
I think you misunderstand atheism. I don't wake up in the morning and think, "Today I'm going to hate God and religious people. Nothing anyone says can convince me otherwise." There's no active hate like the KKK. Frankly, I'd drop the hate group thing, it's pretty offensive.QuoteNo I just mean being certain being 100% sure. I do not agree with that.
Atheist are as sure of their position as religious people are of theirs. Why is one extreme and not the other?QuoteReligion doesn’t say there is a dude with a white beard living in the clouds that’s mans interpretation.
Since religion is man's creation, you can't separate the two like that.QuoteIt just says we are created for a reason and there is a creator. What he/she/it is we have no clue as we are limited to our field of existence.
Really? I think most religious people would disagree. They seem to know quite well what God is like, and how he expects us to behave.QuoteAre you an atheist?
Do you claim there is no god?
How did you logically reach that conclusion?
Yes. Yes. Same way you're concluded there are no unicorns.QuoteI think most people are selfish and will change their point of view and do mental gymnastics whenever it is convenient for them regardless of their faith or lack of faith.
I agree. -
Sorry I haven't had/noticed that feeling in skydiving, most people don't. Tandem jumps do have some differences from solo jumps, so it's possible you won't (for example tandem jumps involve a stomach drop feeling when you deploy as you release the drogue in order to deploy the main, dropping you faster for a second or two. Its called the trapdoor effect).
Either way, if you enjoy the rest of the experience, it will probably something you will grow to love or at the very least not really notice. When you are doing a tandem, you have nothing to occupy your mind and body, whilst jumping solo/fun jumping you will be focusing on exiting stable and (if doing relative work/freeflying/other disciplines) other tasks in your skydive. This could explain why most of us don't ever feel that dropping feeling you do, because we are hyper focused on other things.mickeyb117I have only made 2 jumps so far and while I have to say I absolutely love it I hate the initial feeling of my stomach dropping. It only lasts about 10 seconds but im afraid that when I finally make my first solo jump its gonna screw me all up. Is this something to worry about ? Will I just get used to it the more I jump ?
-
QuoteWhat would I hope to achieve? Less gun violence.
What evidence is there to support that a ban on guns would achieve less gun violence?
And if there was indeed less gun violence, what do you believe would be the effect (or non-effect) on other forms of violence?Quote
Sure its idealist, but what is so bad about that?
Could there be circumstances where being an idealist is a bad thing?
A kind of "road to hell paved with good intentions" kind of deal? -
Obviously that's the extreme position I'm talking about
In all seriousness, it is clear that guns (amongst many other things) kill a lot of people worldwide.
So, if you are being serious on here, what do you hope to achieve with a total gun ban and what makes you think it is achievable?BignuggetI think that. But I want to see them executed summarily by firing squad. Specifically a firing squad armed with cordless drills.
-
I think this is the main problem. My girlfriend says all the time that "extreme" viewpoints, regardless of their motive, are almost always bad. The more I think about it, the more I agree with her.
The "ban every gun in the world" anti-gun lobby are just as wrong and dangerous as the "no limits" pro-gun lobby. Both can lead to people dying unnecessarily. There's even someone in here who suggested the death penalty for anyone who has a gun!
Extreme viewpoints are almost never based on actual reality, but on utopian ideals. Reality is more nuanced than "all guns are bad" and "more guns are good".
Unfortunately the world's media/politicians tends to be very good at whipping up polarising opinions, none more so than the American.QuoteBoth sides can bring up rare and rediculas senarios to support their position.
-
When you hear these incidents on the news (only a small portion of actual incidents) every other day it is regular and, given the subject matter, depressing.Stumpy***
This is depressingly regular shit.
No it isn't.
HTH -
I've have lived in 2 societies (UK and France) where guns are illegal for self defence. In both of these societies guns are available for purchase for sporting purposes - including AR-15s and other "assault rifles".
The UK banned hand guns for sport because of a single shooting incident in Scotland. In France handguns are still legal.
In both countries, like everywhere, you are allowed to meet lethal force with lethal force but good luck using your gun to do that as it has to be locked up in your house with ammunition stored in seperate areas of your dwelling.
And, as I've said you cannot carry a gun, knife, cosh, baton, spray or anything to defend yourself in either country.
Gun crime continues with illegal bought handguns, many young black boys are killed by other black boys in london, nottingham, manchester and other cities around the UK. They use guns, and if they can't get hold of guns they use kitchen knifes.
In London's Notting Hill carnival myself and friends have witnessed 2 stabbings in one day.
Where I used to work, in Victoria (London) a young school boy aged 15 was chased into the metro station by a gang of about 10-20 other school children brandishing samurai swords and kitchen knifes. They proceeded to brutally hack him to death in the middle of the evening rush hour in front of hundreds of commuters. All of whom could do nothing to intervene against an armed group.
This is depressingly regular shit.
In Woolwich, London, just a few months ago a young soldier was run over and decapitated by 2 men in broad daylight. Again, all civilians could do was watch in horror. By the team police turned up and shot the pair the young soldier was lying dead on the floor.
In France just last week, the son of a jewelry store owner was shot dead by armed robbers after he attempted to resist their robbery. He was unarmed.
Just a few days later another jewelry store managed to thwart an armed robbery because he, unlike the other store, actually exercised his right to own a firearm for self-defence (those whose job puts them in harms way in France can apply for the licence). He shot dead his attacker.
In Marseille, France, barely a week goes by without more stories of people being killed with AK-47s. These firearms are legal in France in semi-automatic. But the ones used for the murders are fully-automatic and are brought illegally.
Both the UK and France have (contrary to worldwide belief) HUGE gun-ownership. Nearly every house where I live in France has at least 2-3 firearms: usually semi-auto shotguns and high powered, high capacity hunting rifles. Yet the majority of killings are done with illegally obtained weapons or, where people where unable to get hold of firearms, blades.
You talk a lot about banning guns and how it will solve everything. My experience leads me to disagree.BignuggetPersonally I think the outcome woulda been different if he had to use cordless drills and baseball bats to carry out his attack.
Instead of being able to buy a shotgun the day before you go on a rampage while hearing the guys microwave talk to you through the walls. -
I for one don't equate self-defence with death or firearms. Every human being has the legal right to resist attack using proportionate force in virtually every country I can think of that has a legal system. That may involve firearms or not. -
Fucking hell.
We really are the most fucked up species to have ever existed on this planet.NelyubinIt was immediately clear who was fighting on the side of the "oppositions".
Insurgents execute the Catholic priest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc9UVFA6fvc&bpctr=1379483477 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO17ac6mtj0
"How long you been doing this?"
"Couple of weeks" Woo!"
Hahaha -
Fair enough, I can see your point of view.
airtwardoQuoteBUT, for our friends and family, I think a little bit of sugarcoating and white lying is necessary to lessen their emotional burden.
There I gotta disagree...
I've always been straight up about what I'm doing and the hazards involved.
It's really only fair to them - and if something should happen to me, I don't want friends & family saying "That dumbshit thought it was SAFE"
It's a risk, and it's a risk that I understand fully and choose to take - again, I feel the reward I receive is worth it.
I think I 'ease their burden' more by being truthful, by letting them know I appreciate the concern and that I do everything possible to mitigate the risk involved.
To 'downplay' any part of that is to take away from both who I am, and what the sport IS ~ what it means to me.
After careful consideration I decided to stop motorcycle riding & BASE ~ my wife stopped flying competitive aerobatics and performing her airshow act when we adopted our 3 kids...we'd both lost too many friends doing those things and it didn't seem right to keep playing those odds when others needed us around.
I kept Skydiving because I need that & if done conservatively I believe the risk to be minimal...I've been in the sport 38 years and have never been injured - I stay safe because I want to do it again next time.
Like Jeb said...you WILL get injured - thanks but no thanks.
The video in question wasn't meant to be a PR move to gain mainstream interest in that sport, it was IMO an honest characterization of what it is, who does it & where it may lead.
I think we need MORE of that, too many people out there watch youtube vids of proximity flying etc. and think they're on the fast track to rockin' a wingsuit two weeks after their tandem.
There are people in both sports these days that have no business being there, but we've 'sugar coated' it so much they don't have a clue as to the sour taste that is also served up at times with the sweet coating one sees first.
No...I like the story, I like what it says and the way it says it. It's kinda like when Paul Harvey use to say ~ ...and now, for the REST of the story. -
I think from our point of view, it's good to see the reality of it. For the record I think that what they were talking about in terms of the danger and the real chance of not surviving very long was spot on from the little I know about BASE. Certainly Jeb Corliss knows what he is talking about.
What gave me the "bitter" aftertaste was that this documentary, along with the Bridge to Nowhere documentary, is available to the general public.
The general public already have a wildly exaggerated idea of the danger of skydiving, BASE and such sports. I've heard shit like "1 in 10 skydives ends in fatality"
Like the lady in 20 seconds of joy, we have friends and family around us that worry excessively about our safety because of our chosen sports - why pile on more worry with documentaries like this. I would never want my family or friends to see shit like this, they already worry as it is.
We as a group whether we are skydivers, base jumpers or whatever should always try to open our eyes to the real dangers of these sports - we should never sugarcoat reality for ourselves.
BUT, for our friends and family, I think a little bit of sugarcoating and white lying is necessary to lessen their emotional burden.
Is it really necessary to have Jeb Corliss explain that BASE jumpers will get seriously hurt, watch close friends die and quite possibly die themselves; to the general public?
Is it really necessary to have the general public be able to watch BASE jumpers go in and see their bodies lying in the woods impaled on a piece of tree like we saw in Bridge to Nowhere? Or watch them talk to the film-maker and then die on camera 5 minutes later?
Non BASE jumpers friends and family will jump to the same conclusions about skydiving cos "they both involve jumping off things with a parachute".
Unnecessary drama for the general public, but most certainly "need-to-watch" stuff for anyone looking to get into BASE. -
Tink1717You need to watch it again, and pay attention this time. There's nothing in this show that portrays us and BASE in a negative light. The psychologist interview shuts all the "crazy adrenaline junky" notion down in thirty seconds. What exactly do you have a problem with?
I was paying attention, thanks for the patronising command though
I think it does. This whole "I can't stop, where will this end, am I normal, I have a pathological urge to push the limits", Jeb Corliss's whole "look how extreme I am" attitude (don't get me wrong, he knows what he is talking about). It's just the vibe it gives off.
I'll watch it again, perhaps I'm completely off-base (no pun intended) here, but just from my subjective point of view it didn't show things in a good light.
No-one has to agree with me, there's no objective standard here. It's interesting to hear other's point of view. -
Yep, I watched the whole thing.
That's okay, you don't have to agree.
Not stirring up shit, just my opinion.NatalyWhere to even begin... I think I disagree with just about everything you wrote... Did you actually watch the whole thing???
Or are you just stirring up shit???
Hmmmm...
![[:/]](/uploads/emoticons/dry.png "[:/]"){kind=small}
Dear Liberal…Here’s Why I’m So Hostile
in Speakers Corner
It seems to be a very American cultural thing to pigeon hole people politically.
Your either republican or democrat....er NO. The average person is a mixture.