The Missing Sniper

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Welcome to the Smoke Pit.

In the military, a smoke pit is typically where troops go to feed their nicotine addictions, but also it's a place to swap stories, funny, tragic, and most certainly, bizarre.

The kinds of stories that aren't usually mentioned in a professional setting because they are inevitably the kinds of stories that could result in the soldier being sent for a psychological evaluation by his commander.

So, the telling of such unbelievable stories is thus relegated to places like the smoke pit.

But make no mistake, whether we believe them or not, the men who shared these stories did so with all sincerity.

They have insisted that these events happened exactly as they are described.

This episode contains three stories from three separate men, all soldiers who were serving in the U.S.

Army at the time these events took place.

In this case, these three men have chosen to remain entirely anonymous.

These three stories were first shared with Nick Orton, a soldier and the author who has compiled many more stories like this in his book, Tales from the Grid Square, Volume 1.

I'm Luke Lamana,

and this is Wartime Stories.

Contact

It is December of 2016.

This takes place in Afghanistan.

Our platoon had been on patrol all day.

After a few hours waiting on a wrecker truck to bail out our lead truck with the mine roller, we had finally arrived to Observation Post Manos on the Hellman River.

This was on the southern border of where American troops could pass.

We had already been to Observation Post Manos and linked up with the Afghan Army several times during this deployment.

After an evening of being in contact with a supposedly red Taliban unit, everything had come to a quiet end and it began to get dark.

Now obviously as an infantry platoon, we had night vision and thermal capabilities.

We set in our security and we sat in place waiting on the word to head back to Camp Dwyer.

I remember laying on my back looking up at the sky

when suddenly a squad leader started shouting that there was something flying around above us.

Everyone began to rapidly look up in the sky to find this object.

Seconds later, that same squad leader that noticed it flashed the flying object twice with his infrared strobe on his night vision lens.

Immediately after he did, this object began to flash infrared beams of light down on every soldier on top of this observation post.

And this beam of light that the object was dropping was only only visible with our night vision and it was so bright.

And as I'm witnessing all this, I have never in my life seen a drone move this fast and have the capability to flash a beam from fighting positions to individual soldiers almost as if it was counting everyone up there.

When the infrared beam flooded me, I do remember screaming, what the f ⁇ is going on?

Probably the most terrifying experience I've ever had.

We even ended up having an Apache come on station and the pilot saw this object as well and tried to get closer.

But once the Apache moved near us, this object shut off all its lights and

flew, zipped so fast over us directly over the Helman River and was gone.

I remember going back to Camp Dwyer and debriefing our S-II, our Intel guys.

Once this information went all the way up the chain and back, it was confirmed that no friendly drone was active in that area,

and there was no official explanation for what we saw.

Afghan UFOs

Hey, Sergeant,

look,

What the hell?

When I was deployed, I would see lights flying around way faster than anything humans make.

I probably saw them at least two or three times while I was in Afghanistan.

My platoon had a video of it once, and I've been trying to hunt it down, but no one seems to have it anymore, which breaks my heart because it was trippy.

I've been trying to hunt that video down since 2012.

They were the same thing you see from the F-18 videos on FLIR.

Honestly, it was too far off to say for certain whether it was tic-tac-shaped or not, and it was nighttime through NVGs, but most likely it was that shape.

But they were dancing around on the mountaintops near Kandahar, looking east, usually two or three at a time.

They would start hovering slowly over the ridge line, crisscrossing, then speeding up and abruptly stopping, defying all physics.

I remember me and a team leader just standing there on patrol, watching them one time.

I even called it up to our company and told them they didn't see it, I guess.

We watched it for a few more minutes, and then these things just took off straight up.

Even more oddly, we just picked up and continued walking on patrol like nothing had ever happened.

Hey, it's Luke, the host of Wartime Stories.

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Balin and Balin Studios have been a huge help in bringing this podcast to life.

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Here is the last story.

One final tale from the Grid Square.

The incident at Fort Drum, Training Area 1.

Alright, listen up.

Alright, gents, you know the drill.

You've got your point cards.

As soon as we break from here, you're going to plot your points, and you're going to get out there and get it done.

The sooner we finish, the sooner we can get out of here.

So try not to lollygag out there.

No white lights, red lenses only.

Do I have any questions?

Okay, hop to it.

Definitely a lot of information.

This is about something unexplained that happened to me about nine years ago when I was a PFC in a sniper section on Fort Drum.

So this is in upstate New York.

So we were training for the upcoming Expert Infantry Badge and being obsessed with being the best in the battalion, we were going to Training Area 1 to do land navigation just about every other day after work.

For those that have never been to Training Area 1, it's really not that big.

It's about two clicks by one click, that's kilometers, but because of the insane snowfall, it's thick and swampy as all hell.

The particularly strange thing about this training area is that there are a bunch of old colonial graveyards and settlements.

They're mostly behind signs that say off limits by order of the commander, but you can still stumble on them accidentally, especially at night when you're running these land nav courses.

These points had individual designators, and by this point I had run this course so many times I could tell you which point you had just by looking at where it was plotted on the map.

If you're not familiar with land navigation in the military, they give you a map and they give you a 10-digit grid point.

And so you plot your grid point, so you demonstrate that you actually know how to use the map.

And then you have to walk out to this grid point and once you find it the specific point sometimes it can be really hard to find it's like an engineering stake stuck in the ground and attached to that engineering stake is a hole punch and each individual stake spread out throughout this training area has a unique hole punch and they give you a scorecard that you punch once you get to the point and so then when you bring the scorecard back they know if you got the right point or not

and so you can't cheat.

So you still have to walk your happy ass all the way out to each point.

So one night, our section was out doing some night iterations.

It was around midnight.

And I got a point at the top northeast corner of the training area.

Remember that?

Northeast corner.

And I remember it being a very low illumination night with a heavy cloud cover, so very little ambient light, no moonlight, starlight, etc.

And I had just punched the hole on my scorecard at this grid point

when I heard the strangest noise ahead of me and I just froze when I heard it.

It sounded like something had just blown out of breath in the brush, the vegetation directly in front of me.

I hit the area with my red lens flashlight

but all I could see was a strange fog.

that was now developing.

You know, alarms started going off in my brain.

Something was not right.

And I try to go by protocol.

Stop, look, listen, smell, think.

Because there was no fog that night.

And this fog, it had an odor to it,

but almost a synthetic type of smell that I had never smelled before.

And then I heard the noise again, but this time I noticed that it's almost deliberate.

So I close one of my eyes to preserve my night vision and I try my white lens but the fog just ruins it.

It reflects most of the light and it makes it even harder to see.

So I turn off my light and I take a couple of cautious steps forward

and this time when I hear the noise again my brain thinks

mechanical.

It sounds mechanical.

I take a couple more steps forward and I start to hear what sounded like tones and beeps coming very faintly from the area right in front of me.

So once again I hit it with my white light, but this time even through the fog, I can see that my light is almost casting a shadow, like a veiled shadow on the trees,

but from something that is right in front of me.

But I can't see anything.

So as I start to step around and move my light to try and figure out what it is that I'm seeing or not seeing,

I hear a hollow thump just before a blinding flash of light takes over my vision.

All I see is white light and there's an overwhelming ringing sound in my ears.

Then it's complete darkness.

It's like

a television turning off.

Then I come to

and now I'm walking.

But I'm on a gravel road.

I was out in the woods, and now I'm on a gravel road.

I feel feel intensely groggy, and my limbs feel very heavy, exhaustingly heavy.

I stop, wondering how the hell I got here.

I'm missing my map,

but I still have my scorecard tucked into my pocket.

And I look around and realize that I have no clue where I am.

So I take out my phone, and I try to check where I am on Google Maps.

My phone is now dead.

I started walking down the road until I came to the main road and found that I was now standing, I'm very familiar with this training area, I was now standing at the southwest corner of the training area.

I pressed the light on my watch and I see that only 15 minutes has gone by since I found my last point.

I started to panic because now I'm starting to remember what happened just before the light and everything blacked out.

I think a combination of my head, which was now throbbing, and the anxiety, I felt nauseous and I immediately started puking my guts out right there on the road.

I still could not believe that I was standing where I was,

but I trusted my instinct.

I didn't have a map, and I followed the road back to the rally point.

I had recently had surgery on my groin, and it had healed enough that it wasn't in pain throughout the day.

But at this point, the surgery site is now on fire.

It's like a, if you ever had an injury like that, it's like a burning pain deep down, but it was, it was numb at the skin.

It was a weird sensation.

So I get to the rally point and now I am stunned to silence.

Because I find that I'm one of the first ones back.

So I handed my scorecard, get get 100%, I had all my points, that was my last point where everything blacked out.

They didn't even ask about my map.

Someone told me that I look like shit and to go drink water, eat some chow, and rack out, you know, get some sleep for a bit somewhere while we waited for everyone else to finish and come back.

So first, I go to take a piss and to look at my scar to make sure that I didn't mess anything up while running around out there, reopen the wound or something.

But

when I popped my trousers, I saw that

my pubic hair was gone.

Sorry, I'm sure nobody expected the story to go here.

But I was now completely bare.

Not just shaved, but you know, baby smooth.

Nothing was damaged,

but there were no razor marks, no stubble.

There was no loose hair,

no incisions.

The skin was just numb at the surface with that deep burning pain beneath.

And you know, this messed me up pretty bad.

And I was so confused.

And I didn't tell anyone about this for years.

And when I did, I wouldn't say anything about that last part you know it was it's too weird

you know too real

and it used to make me panic and

you know tear tear up just choke up just trying to think about it I felt

I don't know I felt molested

it was

Part of me honestly wants to think that I just got drugged and molested by some weirdo

because I'm I'm not quite sure I'm ready for what I really think happened.

You know?

I think I found something that I wasn't supposed to find, that

something that didn't want to be found.

I think that something

took me,

maybe inspected me a bit, found a fresh example of human medical science that they wanted to take a closer look at, my surgery.

I think I found a craft that was having malfunctions or something, so maybe they thought to put it down somewhere thick, you know, in those woods, while they figure it out.

I also am pretty certain they had some kind of cloaking device that was supposed to keep me from finding them or seeing them.

And once I got as close as I did, acting like I was, I would assume they thought I could see them and decided to grab me before I bolted.

I honestly think they must have done something akin to an ultrasound or something on my surgical site, probably pushing on it or maybe even opening me up to see what was done.

I really don't know, but I didn't notice anything other than the strange pain and the particularly efficient removal of hair.

What's crazy to me is not only that I was more than two clicks on the other side of the map as the crow flies in roughly 15 minutes, but that's as the crow flies.

I mean there's things you got to go around.

There's trees, there's ditches, there's creeks, and

but that the area is actually on post in the contonent area.

It's really not a wild place.

That's what makes me think that this thing had to be something passing through or something.

I suppose they could have known of humans settling there in the past and came back to check it out again, all those old settlement ruins that are out there.

I don't think it was planned or that they were even out to do anything like that.

I think, you know, my curiosity got the better of me and they felt they had to stun me or something.

I don't know.

I have no clue what really happened.

I didn't actually see anything.

It just

happened to me.

I don't know.

I've had years to overthink this and to try to make sense of it.

And all I have now are a lot of largely baseless theories, unfortunately.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Written by Jake Howard and myself.

Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole LaCascio, and Whitlacascio.

Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham.

Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Kane.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone.

Production coordination by Avery Siegel.

Additional production support by Brooke Lynn Gooden.

Artwork by Jessica Cloxen Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picada.

If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com.

Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.