The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers by Gary Brozek, Nicholas Irving

was that I patch up the screen. He’d take care of the glass. I had to get a ladder and deal with the second-story window—that’s when I discovered I was afraid of heights. I also discovered something else. My dad was a very cool guy and a very fair one. On the day I was to leave for basic he said to me, “Before you go, check your bank account’s balance.”
    I asked him why.
    “Because you’ll see you’ve got a few dollars less than you probably thought. I took out the money I spent to fix that window you broke with your blowgun.”
    “How’d you know?”
    “C’mon, son, what you told me made no sense. I could tell you were lying. I also found the dart out on the lawn.”
    “Wow. You’re good.”
    “And you better be. Own up to your mistakes and learn from them and you won’t have any trouble.”
    My mom didn’t have the same level of patience with me as my dad. That was especially true when, that same year as the dart incident, I got into a fight with my sister. The rule was ironclad. Keep your hands off her even if she came at you. I tried to push her out of my room, and before I knew it, my mom had burst out of the closet, and she was like a little Mike Tyson. She threw me out of the house immediately. It was cold and pouring down rain, and I wasn’t even given the opportunity to grab any of my stuff. Looking back on it, I don’t blame my mom at all for what she did, but at the time I was doing a little why-me whining as I wandered the neighborhood in bare feet.
    I hadn’t gotten very far before Dad’s pickup brake-squeaked to a stop beside me. I watched as he rolled down the window, counting the seconds until the reckoning. I knew not to lie about this one. I told him that Jasmine and I had gotten into a fight and that I’d been kicked out of the house. He nodded slowly and his head disappeared for a moment as he leaned all the way over to push the door open for me. I got back in the house then, but it was a long time before I got to get back out of the house for anything other than going to school.
    You’d think I’d learned my lesson, but I snuck out of the house a few weeks later and stole a neighbor’s car. Well, “stole” is kind of a strong word because the owner was this young girl who didn’t mind it when we took her car out for joyrides. She’d leave the keys where we could find them, and then we’d go for a drive around the neighborhood. This time, something possessed me, and instead of just leisurely touring the nearby streets, I decided to really gun it. I was going way too fast on roads that were way too tight, and eventually ventured out of our area onto a two-lane highway and nearly flipped it. I heard the police coming and tried to evade them. I drove the car back to the girl’s house, tires squealing around the corners, and went flying up her driveway before slamming to a stop.
    There, a couple of doors down, was my dad standing in the driveway. He didn’t look too pleased.
    Today, I know that a lot of young people, boys especially, suffer from what is now called a lack of impulse control. I didn’t have a name for it back then, but I can see how that diagnosis fits. If I wanted to do something, I did it regardless of the consequences. I don’t know if enlisting in the army immediately transformed me, but I know that I started to think about my decisions with more care after going through basic. When my stress fractures kept me from moving on to airborne school immediately after basic, I think I finally started to show some sense. One of the instructors kept encouraging me to go despite the fact that my shins were so bad. I wanted to go. I’d made some buddies and wanted to stick with them and I didn’t want to feel like I’d somehow failed.
    I resisted the temptation, and spent a few weeks putting myself through some physical therapy. If I wasn’t in the gym working on my fitness using low- to no-impact devices like the elliptical trainer, I was doing what my