Aim Point

Day 224. The Congressional Research Service reported this week that 45 Reapers are among the 81 US aircraft lost or damaged in this war. Most people couldn’t tell you what a Reaper is, so here’s a story about one. (Stars and Stripes · CRS count, Oct 7)

It comes from Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff, and he tells it about his son.

The son flew the Reaper, an Air Force drone with a 66-foot wingspan, a propeller, a camera and Hellfire missiles under the wings. Nobody rides in it. The pilot sits at a console and flies it over a satellite link, and in this case the console was in Nashville while the drone was over Afghanistan, more than 7,000 miles away. (Air Force · MQ-9 Reaper fact sheet)

By the colonel’s account, the enemy had nothing that could reach it, so it could circle over a firefight while the pilot watched the ground on a screen and talked by radio to the Americans down there. Sometimes the voice on the radio belonged to the leader of a Special Forces team asking for a missile on an enemy 50 feet from where he stood. Soldiers have a radio call for a strike that close to their own people, which is “danger close.”

One day a man on the ground asked for something closer than that. He gave his own position and told the pilot, “Your aim point is me.”

The pilot refused, because you don’t fire on your own people and the rules say so. The man told him to do it anyway and said he wouldn’t be there when the missiles landed.

So the pilot did it. The team cleared out as soon as the call was made, and by the time the missiles came down, the Americans were gone and the enemy was standing on the spot they’d left.

That’s the colonel’s telling, and I can’t check the strike itself. What I can check is the console: a bio of the colonel puts his son in the Tennessee Air National Guard in Nashville, and the Guard’s 118th Wing flies Reapers from Berry Field, at the city’s airport. (Military Religious Freedom Foundation · Wilkerson bio; Air National Guard · 118th Wing at Berry Field)

I spent the week reading counts of targets destroyed, jets flown and drones lost, and none of them has a column for what happened on that radio, which was one man deciding to trust another with his life and being right. It’s the only thing I heard all week that I couldn’t put a number on.