AUDIO-Drone operator made long-distance war from close to home | NCPR News
"Taylor" is a ten-year veteran drone sensor operator and trainer who didn't want to give her real name because she fears critics of the U.S. military's drone program will target her for protests. All photos courtesy Taylor.
Dec 09, 2014 — The United States ceremonially ended its combat role in Afghanistan yesterday,but unmanned United States aircraft (drones) still gather intelligence and bomb potential terrorists in various parts of the world. The Air National Guard in Syracuse and Fort Drum in Watertown, N.Y., host parts of the United States drone program.
"Taylor" is a drone operator who has done her job for a decade. She is only 30 years old and has never been deployed outside of the United States. David Sommerstein visited Taylor at her suburban home.
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She wore makeup and eyeliner, peach nail polish, and has dove tattoos on the inside of each wrist. Taylor did not want us to use her real name because some people are not very happy about what she does for a living. She fears they will target her for protests.
You can't talk to anybody else. Everything you're doing is classified.
Taylor grew up on a little farm in northern California. After high school, she was looking for a way out of town. “I always wanted to be an F.B.I. profiler,” Taylor said. “So I joined the Air Force into the intelligence portion.”It was 2003, around the start of the Iraq war. She was assigned to what was then a small Air Force program—only about 50 young men and women—who learned to analyze images gathered by Predator drones and act on them. “I had no idea what I was getting into. There was no press about them really. There was just what you heard word of mouth through the community.”
A military drone has two operators: a pilot who flies it by remote control, and a sensor operator who manipulates the cameras and missiles. Taylor trained as a sensor operator for six months, and just like that, she was running missions. “It was intense,” she said, “because you’re these 19 year-old kids who have never had any experience in war or anything like that, and you’re getting trained how to blow things up and be responsible for million dollar equipment, flying over countries you’ve never even heard of. So I like to think I was pretty much scared out of my mind going through.”
I asked her if her instructors taught her how to shoulder that responsibility. She said she thinks they overdid it. “It was a little overwhelming, worrying that you’re going to mess something up. Messing something up could be blowing up the wrong house.”
She was not responsible for deciding who to blow up. Higher-ups watched and gave orders on who to follow, and when to pull the trigger. The stress was still immense. “You would have people saying, ‘alright, the President is watching what you’re doing right now, so don’t mess up.’”
A typical work day might involve snooping on insurgents in Nigeria, or bombing terrorists in Afghanistan.
Then, in a huge, post-modern disconnect, her shift ends, she walks out of the control station and she is in Nevada, ready to go home, or grocery shopping, or, as Taylor said, “turn the beer light on”.
Mostly, she said, she and her colleagues would drink. “You can’t talk to anybody else. Everything you’re doing is classified. Whether you just did something you’re very proud of or whether you just did something that is leaving you walking around with the ‘thousand yard stare’, you can’t talk to anyone, except for the people that you just did everything with—your crew. So you bind together, you drink a lot, and that’s pretty much how you deal with it.”
I wanted to know how Taylor’s perception of war and security compare with the older generation, the fighter pilots who actually flew planes and dropped bombs from the sky. Taylor and I called an older acquaintance from the industry, Keven Gambold.
Gambold was a “Top Gun” kind of pilot. He ran missions over Kosovo and Iraq multiple times for England and the United States. He eventually transitioned to drones. He now owns a commercial drone consulting firm called Unmanned Experts. Gambold said in the ‘old days’ most of a fighter pilot’s life was training. “The fighter guys only go to work, real work,” Gambold said, “when there’s a war on. They only go for a couple of months. And then they come back.”
What’s changed so dramatically, he said, is what caused Taylor so much stress. Drone operators don’t need to play war games because they are actually doing the real thing every day. It is perpetual war. “It’s a massive, massive turnabout,” Gambold argued. “That’s a lot of pressure. You put people on the front lines for three years, working a shift system that is barking mad, and go, ‘Yeah, that’ll be fine. They won’t have an alcohol problem.’ I think it’s pretty intense.” The military knows this. Drone operators are tested for PSTD and other mental health issues.
One of Taylor's medals for flying overseas campaigns, even though she never left the United States.
Taylor looks at the next generation, the 19-year-old-recruits she helped train, and they worry her. She said they are extremely native to the world of first-person gaming, so she fears they are more desensitized to the gravity—the life and death nature—of this work. “The way video games are so realistic now,” Taylor said, “you’re running around shooting things, bombing things. You don’t feel anything because it’s just a game.”There has been widespread opposition to the kind of work done by Taylor. Critics protest that drones kill innocent civilians from Pakistan to Yemen. “Now we have this label as baby killers or something, and it’s not fair,” Taylor said. “I wish that people could understand the benefits of not having to send guys on the ground and putting them in harm’s way.”
I asked Taylor if she thinks she has killed innocent people. She took a long, deep sigh, and stammered out military-speak about trusting the chain of command, but then she got to her real point. “You’re told these are bad guys, really bad guys. These guys are planning the next 9-11. So you want to think that you just saved thousands of people as opposed to ‘I just killed five people’. But, I’ll never know for sure.”
Taylor's medals and an American flag that flew over Iraq.
Taylor took me down into her basement where I saw toys and a racetrack strewn about the carpet. In a corner, an American flag and military medals are laid out on a table. Taylor is proud of her service to America. She signed up as part of the “9-11 Generation” — the millennials who wanted to get the bad guys who blew up the Twin Towers.When she had her son who plays with these toys on the floor, things changed. “I think it brought a sense of humanity to what I had done,” Taylor said. “Maybe all that hate just melted away and you’re left with this feeling left over. It’s kind of a sadness. You’re sad that these things have to happen.”
Taylor left the Air Force in 2009 and trained other sensor operators after that. She recently took a leave of absence because of health issues. She attributes some of those problems to a decade of living in a perpetual state of long-distance war. She is not sure what she will do next: maybe school, maybe playing the field for government jobs. She chuckled wryly and said, “I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.”
David Sommerstein produced this profile of a drone operator for PRI's The World, for the seriesSafeMode: New Wars, New Warriors – How technology is changing the meaning of securityon how technology is changing the meaning of security for the millennial generation.