Independent Lens

It was like slow motion, and it was like you're watching someone just drag themself across the field. When you watch someone in those dying moments-- what their reaction is, how they're reacting, and what they're doing--

sighs

--it's so primitive. It's really raw, stripped-down death. That's what it is. This is real. Like, this isn't-- it's not a joke. I have specific memories of many of them that I know I killed, but it's so messy and, like, they don't report it down to us who we killed. Maybe we killed our objective; maybe we killed a guy who we thought was our objective. We don't know. And I can say the drone program's wrong because I don't know how many people I've killed. After we would do a strike, then I would ask for a break and, like, go outside and smoke a cigarette and just think and, like, try to decompress and just try to push the, like, idea that I was involved in killing people, um, out of my mind and, like, try not to think about it. Sometimes, if I couldn't really get out of the situation for very long, I would just go to the bathroom and--and just sit on the toilet, like, just sit there in my uniform and just, like, cry and just think about, like, what I was doing. It was just different emotional responses. I mean, a lot of times afterwards, I would feel just empty, and if I was crying, it was because I just didn't know... how to stop feeling like that, how to stop feeling like a shell, and it was...that empty void. And it was--I was, like, always shaking after we would do strikes 'cause it's such an adrenaline rush. You're--you're killing someone. You see someone die because you said it was OK to kill them.