U.S. drone pilot haunted by horrors of remote killings
Operator sickened by death count
NEW YORK — A former U.S. air force drone operator has described how he is haunted by his time as a “remote killer” functioning in “zombie mode” in missions over Afghanistan and Iraq that have claimed more than 1,600 lives.
Brandon Bryant, a retired airman who operated remote-controlled Predator aircraft from U.S. bases in Nevada and New Mexico, offers a rare military insider’s perspective on the U.S. drone program in an interview with GQ magazine.
In one episode that will increase controversy about allegations of civilian casualties, he described monitoring a drone strike on a mud compound in Afghanistan and seeing the figure of what he was certain was a child just before it was struck by a Hellfire missile.
When he expressed those concerns to an intelligence observer overseeing the operation, the response came back: “Per the review, it’s a dog.” Bryant replayed the shot repeatedly on tape and said that he was certain it was a child, not a dog.
The years of directing missiles by laser in so-called “terminal guidance” operations and watching their impact on the ground left him a broken man, he told the magazine in the profile entitled Confessions of a Drone Warrior.
When he quit the air force in 2011 after six years’ service, he was presented with a list of achievements for his squadron’s missions that counted the number of enemies killed in action as 1,626.
“The number made me sick to my stomach,” he said.
GQ called him a “21st century American killing machine.”
But Bryant has since been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that has been found to affect as many drone operators as in-combat aircrews.
In grisly detail, he recalled the first time, aged 21, he targeted a lethal strike in early 2007 shortly after starting his deployment at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas as a “sensor operator”.
The three victims were walking along a dirt road in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan when the instruction to fire came through from a commander who concluded that they were insurgents carrying weapons.
After the Hellfire missile struck the three men, he followed the aftermath “in the white-hot clarity of infrared” on the screen in front of him. “The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater,” he said in the article to be published in the November issue.
“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 colour as the ground he was lying on.”
The publication of the interview comes amid renewed scrutiny on the human cost and legality of the American drone program.
The U.S. this week rejected claims by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that some strikes in Pakistan and Yemen in recent years could be war crimes.