Born Out of War

I was seventeen when I graduated from high school. My mother had died two years before and dad had just not been the same, he died a day after I graduated. I think he held on that long only because of me. The doctors said it was of natural causes. I think it was because he could not stand being without my mother. I was young and angry, so I joined the Army.

While I was waiting for the recruiter to do the paperwork I had a visitor. He did not say who he belonged to but I had the idea it was CIA. It seems that since I did not have any living relatives it flagged some program they had. He asked a lot of questions and I think he realized how angry I was. When he left he said they would be in touch. Since I was not eighteen someone from social services had to sign for me.

The branch of the Army I joined was the Infantry. I should have read the contract, it seemed that the CIA had added some things into it. Like Airborne school, Ranger school and then sniper school. How they managed the sniper school I will never know, you have to be assigned to a regular unit before they will accept you.

So nine weeks for basic, nine weeks for advanced training for Infantry and then four weeks for airborne school. After airborne school the fun began, seventy two days in ranger school. I can not even describe what that was like, think about being wet and starving all the time and then doing physical stuff that put a quarter of the class out because of injuries.

After ranger school I thought I was ready for anything, I was wrong. Do not get me wrong Sniper school is not extremely challenging physically, it challenges you mentally as well. The physical part deals with how you move and if you want to be a successful sniper you do not move fast, you move slow and carefully. You learn about ballistics, you learn how to notice things out of place.

You learn how to read the wind, how to stalk your target but most importantly you learn how to shoot. A sniper’s motto is, “One Shot One Kill.”

Out of fifty two men, five of us graduated. In fact, I was at the top of the class in every one of the schools. Before I left advanced training, I was promoted to private second class. Not that it mattered, I was still a private. I was promoted again before graduating from Ranger school to private first class.

I thought I was done and finally headed to a line company. I had requested a unit that was already deployed. The sergeant in personal frowned when he saw my orders and said I was being sent to a cushy division job. I was going to wait until I got to my new division to request a transfer out when a civilian in a suit stopped me outside the personal office and handed me a new set of orders.

My first thought was, CIA. What was Special Operations? I got my answer when I got off a C141 that had flown me into Iraq. SOG operated at the direction of division commanders but in cooperation with the CIA and other covert groups. I had become a CIA sniper!

My first challenge was a shooting competition with a Staff Sergeant. We used three different weapons, the closest range was ten feet. The longest? Well lets just say a fifty caliber bullet goes a long way. I won so I was in. I had spent over eight months training and suddenly I was on the line.

My first mission was not in support of our military. The CIA had one of the private mercenary companies raid a house and I was to take out anyone that tried to leave. My spotter was an old man that never spoke until he had to. I was using a silenced Armlite 7.62, that is basically an M16 chambered for 7.62 NATO. Only I was using 168 grain boat tailed hollow points.

I had been given three pictures to remember, they were primary targets. I was on top of a one story building six hundred meters away. All three were confirmed dead as well as four others. That was how I started, every time my tour was up the CIA offered me a bonus to stay and I did. They gave me more than a quarter of a million to extend my enlistment three more years. I stayed through four tours and was getting burnt out.

Not that I killed anything that moved, it was just that I had finally gotten over my anger. That last time they had a very specific target and really wanted me. I told them I wanted out, that I was going to find someplace quiet in the middle of nowhere. Well they made me an offer I could not resist, a ten thousand acre ranch in the middle of nowhere and a million dollars.

I will not tell you how many I killed, that is classified and I do not really want to talk about it. Most of the targets were never identified by the military. They gave me a name though and it should give you an idea of how good I became. The name came from the line units I supported from time to time, they called me Thantos. I was the ghost that appeared in the night after insurgents died suddenly during an attack.

I had spent six years in the military and five of those were in combat. With ninety days of leave and ten days travel allowance, I left the Army in the last week of March. I went from the airport to a car dealer I had contacted online. I paid in cash and drove off with a large flat bed truck.

When they had said the ranch was in the middle of nowhere they were not kidding. The nearest town was twenty minutes away, if you called it a town. The population was only fifty three. It had a diner, a gas station with a garage, a general store and finally a feed store for cattlemen. If you really wanted something they did not have you drove the other way for just over an hour.

The ranch backed up to public lands and I had a large ranch on each side of me. The ranch house was larger than I expected. It was a single story with four bedrooms and two baths. The kitchen was very large and the living room had a stone fireplace with a deer head mounted over the mantle.

It looked serviceable, even if it had not been lived in for awhile. There was a long open shed and a big barn. On the side of the barn I found three vehicles that had been left by the last owners. Two old Willey jeeps, and a 1947 ford pick up. Inside the barn, were trailers used for plowing and bailing hay. There were two trailers in a field behind the barn that looked like they were for hauling cattle.

In one end of the shed was an old tractor and at the other a large pile of wire. I frowned as I looked at the wire and moved closer to discover an old medium size bulldozer under it. Now all I had to do was fix everything, sell the cattle already on the ranch and buy some calves. Oh, and buy a horse and learn to ride.

By the end of April I had fixed the tractor and both jeeps, dug a ditch from the road to the house and laid a new phone and power line. I had bought twelve horses and had the woman I bought them from teach me to ride. By the end of May I had repaired the 47 ford pick up and the bulldozer. In the beginning of June I plowed a thousand acres and seeded it for hay, I also planted my own garden.

My estimate of cattle on the property was around one thousand head, three quarters of those I would sell. I made it a practice to go into the nearby town and eat a breakfast or dinner at least once or twice a week. That way the locals would see me and get acquainted. I had one incident over breakfast one morning, a ranch hand was smarting off and decided I was fair game.

They had all heard that I had just gotten out of the Army. He kept making comments and I had just gotten up to leave when he stepped in front of me demanding to know what I had done in the Army. I looked at him and then around the room at the rest of the people. I looked into his eyes, “I killed people, I was a sniper.”

I pushed him out of my way as the room went quiet and I walked out. I had stayed in contact with several people over the years, one was my first spotter. I wrote to him once or twice a week, his name was Nelson McBride and surprisingly he lived only a couple of hundred miles away. Two things happened because of that incident in the dinner.

First, the older men started nodding to me or stopping by the house to talk. Second was something strange, someone from the Sheriff’s office had tried to access my military file. The day after high school got out I had a visit from two girls. Both had red hair, one short and the other long, down to her lower back in fact. They were twins and got out of an old beat up pick up.

I had been working on the engine of an old water truck I had been given. The owner had said that if I got it running I could have it. The twins looked around the place and walked over to me. The one with short hair cleared her throat, “we are looking for work.”

I smiled, “ladies, all I have out here is hard work.”

They grinned and the one with the long hair held out an envelope. I looked at them and took it, when I opened it I saw it was from Nelson.

William

These are my granddaughters. For some reason they do not want to continue with schooling YET. They can both ride and know what to do on a ranch. You can trust them.

P.S. You have rustlers so keep the target in sight.

I looked up at the girls, “Nelson is your grandfather?”

They nodded and I sighed, I really could use the help. I started bargaining with them and ended up providing both room and board as well as paying them a respectable amount. I had cleaned out the house, mostly by throwing everything away and replacing it. I gave each girl her own room and then sent them out in one of the jeeps to check the four water tanks and pumps.

Three days later we started rounding up the cattle. They both laughed at my attempts at roping and other things cowboys were supposed to do. The round up seemed easy until Sarah, (that was the one with the long red hair), said to wait until we had to go into the brush for the rest. We put four hundred head in a holding pen beyond the barn until we could separate the calves and young heifers from the bulls.

That is when things started happening. I still was not sleeping at night and had been out walking around the holding pen. I heard the vehicles before I saw them. I had acquired a lot of things from the military besides sniper rifles. I carried a .45 Kimber, that night I also carried a set of thermal night vision glasses. What came into view were two semi trucks and two hummers.

I stayed in some brush and watched them drive past. Several men wore inferred night vision goggles. I carefully followed them to the corral where they had already started putting up ramps for the cattle. The men had spread out around the pen and I moved to the unattended vehicles. First I removed the valve stems from several tires on the semis.

I slipped under the hummers and cut the starter wires. When I was done with the vehicles, I started on the men. I could have done it the easy way and just killed them but I had already done enough of that. I slipped up behind them one at a time and put my gun to their head before disarming them and tying them up using leather string I carried for the cattle.

After I had taken the last one, I led them back to the barn. Sarah and Lynn had a habit of making hangman knots to hang up all the small bits of rope. Well, they came in handy. There were six men and I lined them up, put a noose over each man and threw the rope over a low beam. I tied it off and left them while I went into the tack room and called the sheriff.

While I was still on the phone the dispatcher put me on hold and then I heard her voice on one of the radios I had taken from a rustler. She was telling them to get out of here because I saw them and had called it in. When she came back on the phone I did not say anything while she told me a deputy was on his way. It was over twenty minutes before a deputy arrived.

He thought he would just be taking a report and was shocked to find the six men lined up in the barn. As the men were being taken into custody several made threats. One of the things I had done was to take each man’s picture and another of their ID. The other deputies that showed up later and looked things over said they would leave the vehicles where they were.

They also dismissed my report that their dispatcher had called the rustlers and warned them. After the deputies left I went into the house and downloaded the pictures onto my computer. I made a one page poster for each man. It said, “CATTLE RUSTLER.” It had both a picture of the man and of his ID. There was also a brief description of what happened.

When the girls walked sleepily into the kitchen I told them we would be eating breakfast in town at the diner. After everyone showered and dressed I handed the posters I had printed out to Sarah as we got into the ford pick up. In town we spent several minutes putting the posters up and went into the diner. The room went quiet when we walked in and an old ranch hand turned to face me “Is it true? Did you catch the rustlers?”

I nodded as we sat at an empty table, “Yes. I turned them over to a sheriff deputy.”

I handed the waitress the stack of posters I had left, “If you could find someplace to post these.”

While everyone talked and gossiped around us, we ate breakfast and left. When I got back to the ranch I had a message on my phone. The men had been released, the message said they had been released because of lack of evidence. I called the sheriff’s office and got a run around so I called the state police.

I ended up being passed from one person to another before I was finally put through to a captain. He kept explaining that it was the sheriff’s jurisdiction.