I look back now, and I'm completely amazed at a lot of things we all did. I was scared every time we went outside the gate. Every single time. Every … - Nicholas Irving
" "I look back now, and I'm completely amazed at a lot of things we all did. I was scared every time we went outside the gate. Every single time. Every single firefight. That last deployment in Helmand Province I was convinced I was going to die. Maybe it was superstition, but on your last deployment after you'd made the decision to leave the military, you know that you were either going to get shot or killed. We were experiencing way too much contact with the enemy, way too many ambushes, way too many close calls. At that point, Marjah was the Wild West. The only thing that kept me going was the guys to my left and to my right.
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About Nicholas Irving
Nicholas Irving (born November 28, 1986) is an American author and former soldier. He was a special operations sniper in the 3rd Ranger Battalion for the U.S. Army.
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Additional quotes by Nicholas Irving
I'm sad about the state of this nation right now. I really am. I remember how people rallied around the flag after 9/11. We were all on the same page. We felt unified for a while. I am proud of what I did in fighting the Global War on Terror. I'm glad I served, but in a way, with what's going on now in this country and how divided we are, it's almost like what our Vietnam veterans faced in coming home. We aren't physically being spit on and degraded, but it is an enormous sign of disrespect for our efforts to come back home from war to have another one going on here. Especially since we can fix this.
I think that a lot of people have this misconception about what it means to be a sniper. A lot of people are fascinated with the long-distance kill. That's kind of the romanticized version of the lone gunman out there stalking his prey. Guys do that, and that's important, but that's not the only kind of sniping that gets done. Direct-action sniping is different. You're in a firefight. Chaos is going on all around you. I saw a mix of both kinds and they required a different skill set- not entirely, but to a degree- and a different mindset. But a lot of people don't understand that as a sniper, 90 percent of your job is relaying information back to the other guys and teams and command personnel behind you. You're out in front and can see things they can't but need to. The way I looked at it, that first 90 percent was about helping save lives. The same with the 10 percent.
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I've never really talked about this openly. I was too scared and too uncomfortable. Given what's happened recently with the death of George Floyd and the response to that, I've been asked about these issues more. The simple answer is that yes, in the military, I was discriminated against. It wasn't always open, so it was often subtle, but I felt it was there. Some people made assumptions about me just because of the color of my skin.
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