Nearly six years removed from his last combat tour, the war isn’t quite over for Nicholas Irving, the 3rd Ranger Regiment’s first African American sniper and reputed to be its deadliest, with close to three-dozen kills.
Irving, who wrote a best-selling memoir titled “The Reaper,” his wartime nickname, has wrestled with PTSD and alcohol abuse, and is on guard 24/7. Recently, as he bent over a table at a book-signing near his home in San Antonio, the outline of a what appeared to be a handgun formed in the small of his back. He keeps a gun under his pillow and an AK-47 next to his bed. Security cameras are mounted at his two-story home.
Irving said he worries about criminals hitting his upscale neighborhood, not terrorists.
Perhaps because of the attention, and controversy, over “American Sniper,” the box-office hit based on the memoir of Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, Irving also has become celebrity with the release of his book, which also is Hollywood-bound.
Kyle, credited with the most sniper kills in American history, was killed with a friend two years ago while they tried to help a troubled veteran at a Texas gun range. Their assailant confessed to police and is on trial for murder in Stephenville.
Dalton Fury, a former Delta Force commander, wrote that if Kyle’s nickname was the “Killer Man” then Irving was “the Killer Man’s son.” Both faced enemy snipers who were their equals. Irving’s desperate battle against one, on July 10, 2009 in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, is still fresh in his mind.
“I became comfortable with death at that point. If I died it didn’t matter. You just accept death at that point,” Irving said of the firefight, which lasted 10 hours and ended in retreat. “We debated it, like pulling a grenade and jumping on it and blowing up. You just have to accept it at that point. It was not an option for us to be captured or anything. I’d rather kill my guys and kill myself before we get captured.”
'Angel of death’
On a recent evening at his house, Irving offered a beer and opened one for himself. In the first two years after leaving the Army, Irving put down a bottle of Jack Daniels every day and called himself “a raging alcoholic” with sleepless nights and suicidal thoughts, “one of those PTSD things.” He and his wife, Jessica, say his drinking is now under control.
He left the Army as a sergeant in March 2010 after deploying three times to Iraq and once to Afghanistan, spending 19 months in both places. In 2009, his final tour, Irving said he killed 33 insurgents as a Special Operations Command direct-action sniper over 100 or so days. The command said it doesn’t track sniper kills and cannot verify his claim.
Fellow Rangers called him “The Reaper.”
“I had killed a lot of people, saved a lot of lives,” he said. “I was just the Angel of Death.”
Troops said Irving killed hundreds of insurgents, prompting him to liken the Ranger community to “a big school class” because of the exaggeration. He loved the comradeship and respect but exited the Army to be a military contractor. Irving won’t share details of that work.
But he freely talks about what he drank — Jack Daniels and Bud Light, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.
“So a bottle a day with 20 beers, 2010 all the way to 2011, 2012, 2013, slowed down in ’14,” Irving said, adding that now he drinks “maybe six a day, six beers.”
Jessica Irving said she and other soldiers’ wives often had beer ready for their husbands. In those days he was always on alert, snappy and didn’t like crowds. But Jessica said he is “10 times better” today, adding, “As far as staying on alert and everything, that’s still there.”
Gun freedom in Texas
In an interview, Irving rarely smiled in a dimly lit living room. He gave no hint of joy over his sudden celebrity, even though word had just come through that his book will become a TV miniseries. He was more relaxed days later at the book signing, where adoring fans lined an aisle at a Costco store off Loop 1604 and US 281.
“I like gun laws and the freedom,” Irving, 28, laughed, when asked why he settled in Texas, where he owns a firing range for professionals.
Referring to Jessica, he said, “She thinks it’s because of her. I mean, she can say that, but the gun laws are what appealed to me. I mean, Maryland is very strict with gun laws … And it’s because of her, too. I’ll let her have that.”
Irving’s book, written with Gary Brozek, colorfully describes the seconds after a kill, including this passage: “An instant after I squeezed the trigger, I saw the target’s eyes roll back just as his head first tilted straight back and then plunged forward like his head was on a spring.”
That’s not how he talks, yet as Irving spoke in his living room he could have been at a campfire recounting the split seconds after firing from his SR-25 sniper rifle, which he named “Dirty Diana,” after a Michael Jackson song.
“It’s almost like they’re dead but they don’t know it yet, maybe. I’ve never been shot,” Irving chuckled, “so I have no idea what it’s like. I’ve seen guys get shot multiple times and continue to run away.”
Irving’s two sides
Irving calls himself a simple guy, and points to the lack of artwork hanging from the walls of his two-story home and the older-model Jeep with a stuck sensor light he drives as proof. His beer is domestic. He chews tobacco and smokes more than a pack a day.
Irving was a mediocre student whose only “A” came in junior high school ROTC, but he embraced math when he realized its importance to being a sniper. A self-taught musician who played piano and violin in his youth, learning songs he heard, Irving identifies with music by composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
“You can have a beautiful symphony or like a beautiful person, but then at the same time you can also be this chaotic individual when you have to, but it's all controlled, so it's not all over the place," Irving said, adding that when he turns that switch he goes from nice guy “to really, really bad. But that's just overseas. I never really had to do that here.”
The war sparked haunting memories for Irving and his wife, who met in first grade and reconnected on the Internet a decade ago. The gunner in an armored vehicle, he logged his first kill in Iraq. Something exploded as he pumped seven rounds into a car.
“It wasn’t an IED; it was the man inside it,” he wrote in the book.
Back in San Antonio, anxiety dogged Jessica Irving at work and at home after they married in 2007.
“There would be times where I’d be sleeping and I’d hear car doors opening and I’d be really scared that somebody was going to come up to my door,” she said.
Toll of PTSD
Nicholas Irving wanted to be a sniper for a long time, and it was a bigger passion than music. Born in Germany to soldier parents and raised in Maryland, he said he didn’t have friends and still doesn’t outside of his Ranger buddies. He was, however, very interested in weapons.
Irving once built a blowgun that was so efficient it chipped holes in the walls of his bedroom and shattered a window. He took potshots at birds with an air gun. Early on, he was a hunter who liked stalking his kill. He describes a scene with his dad much like one from “American Sniper,” where Chris Kyle’s father takes his young son on his first hunting trip.
As much as Irving liked the power he felt, “part of it was also about control,” he said in the book.
Irving also badly wanted to be a SEAL, but he joined the Army after he was found to be color blind. He said a helpful Army nurse knew about the condition but covered it up. In battle, Irving took to his task. A sergeant once told him, “After you kill a man, there’s no other feeling like it … Once you kill a man, you can’t replace that feeling.”
That, Irving said, is true.
He has no regrets, other than not killing the insurgents who took out his buddies, but one thing he identifies with in “American Sniper” is Kyle’s PTSD.
“It takes a toll on you, physically, mentally, everything, and being married, my wife was pretty much one of those, you know, too many close calls in my last deployment, way too many close calls,” Irving said of his decision to quit the Army after once dreaming of it as a career.
“It was time to hang it up, and I was done, I had already accomplished everything I wanted to do since I was a child, so it wasn’t like I was giving up on anything,” he continued. “I just decided to get out. It was not too much, it was just my time.”
sigc@express-news.net
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