The Daily - The Unseen Trauma of America’s Drone Pilots

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

This episode contains descriptions of suicide. Over the past five years, a series of investigations by The Times has revealed the terror and tragedy that America’s air wars, despite being promoted as the most precise in history, have brought to civilians on the ground.The program has also exacted a heavy toll on the military personnel guiding the drones to their targets. They include soldiers such as Capt. Kevin Larson, a decorated pilot, who died by suicide after a drug arrest and court-martial.For suicide prevention resources in the United States, go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.Guest: Dave Philipps, a national correspondent covering the military for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Captain Larson was one of the best drone pilots in the U.S. Air Force. Yet as the job weighed on him and untold others, the military failed to recognize its full impact.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Over the past five years, a series of investigations by The Times has revealed the degree to which America's air wars, which were supposed to be the most precise in history, have instead brought terror and tragedy to the civilians on the ground. Today, my colleague Dave Phillips follows up on that reporting with a look at the toll that the program has taken on the drone pilots who have carried it out.

It's Monday, May 9th. Dave, how did you first come to the story of Kevin Larson? It was really out of the blue. Kevin Larson was this decorated drone pilot flying the Reaper drone. And he'd flown hundreds of missions, gotten a number of medals for it. And then he was charged with drug possession and distribution and convicted. And it was kind of a small case and a routine conviction, except for one thing. After the verdict came down, he took off out of the courtroom, basically ran. And a few days later, as the police were chasing him, they cornered him in a rural valley in the mountains

of California, and he shot himself. Wow. That day, I got a call from a military lawyer who I'd known for years, who had been in the courtroom when this young officer took off and had learned about his death. And what he said to me was, you know, you should try to look into this because this isn't just a case of, you know, drug use. I think it's something more. I know what unit he was in. And there's just probably a lot more to this young man's story than just that he was running from a pretty minor conviction. So this guy calls you and says, there's something bigger here and I think you should look into it. Right. And that posed its own challenge because looking into the drone program of the military is almost impossible.

Everything it touches is either secret or top secret. any individual soldier, airman, officer, that's really hard too, because there's all sorts of laws that keep you from seeing personnel information, secret court files, or confidential court files. So it was a story that I immediately recognized, yes, there could be something here, but how do you get it? So what did you do? Sometimes with a deceased service member, the family is the best bet. And so I started there. And what his friends and his family said is that, you know, this was a really exceptional young man, a guy who'd been an Eagle Scout, a really sort of straight arrow who'd been raised by two police officers in Yakima, Washington, and gone to church every Sunday, played a lot of

sports, always wanted to fly. And so he joined the Air Force. But when he joined the Air Force, he was basically told, yeah, you're going to fly, but you're never going to leave the ground. We're going to put you into the drone program. Interesting. And what his mother said, you know, that first he was disappointed, but then he really seemed to like it because during the last 10 years, the drone program is really where all the action was. And he got to fly a lot of missions, more than 600 combat missions and fired about 180 missile strikes. Their son, who outwardly was doing amazing, was just this well-liked, gregarious, good-looking guy who had a young wife who he loved. At the same time, they worried about him because the missions that he was doing, he never talked about them, at least not in detail.

But occasionally, he would make some kind of aside about what he was doing and, you know, what types of people his drones were really targeting. And his parents could tell that it was really bothering him. So his family doesn't really know all that much about his work during his lifetime. But what they do know is that it has left him pretty uncomfortable. Right, right. And so, you know, not only did his parents not know the details, but there wasn't much of a way for me to get the details. And I knocked on a lot of doors of men who had flown drones with him.

And I don't think a single one even responded to me because their community is so secretive. And so, to be honest, I thought that this was one of these stories that was probably really interesting, but that I couldn't tell. There just wasn't enough there. And for the time being, I put it aside, not knowing if I'd ever get to come back. But then something I didn't expect happened that opened it back up again. Which is what?

We started doing some reporting on airstrikes in the fall of 2021 that really revealed that there was a pattern of problems in how they were picking targets. And the result was all sorts of people that shouldn't be a legal military target. Passersby, women, children, people just sitting in their homes or their cars were getting killed by drone strikes. Right, something we have covered here on the show. Yeah, and in that process,

I talked to a number of people who were active in the drone world who were telling me what they saw. They were my sources for this reporting. But while I was talking to them, it was very clear that the work that these men and women were being asked to do was really troubling to them. And of course, that wasn't the story I was writing at the time, right? We were writing a story about how there were systematic problems that were killing people that the government wasn't admitting to. But as I went on and I was talking to all sorts of drone crew members, I asked myself, well, isn't this the story of Kevin Larson? Aren't they experiencing the same stuff? I mean,

they're doing the same work during the same time period in the same types of units. And that allowed me to pick the story back up because all of a sudden I had this chorus of people who could speak for Kevin's experience when he couldn't. What was challenging is finding some that would actually go on record because it's such a secretive community. And in some cases, talking about it can even be illegal. But, you know, through some work, we were able to get a number of people on record. And one of them was willing to talk to me on tape. He's a drone pilot named James Klein.

Hi, can you hear me? How are you, man? Doing well. How are you doing? And what should we know about James Klein? Well, he had been in the Air Force for years before becoming a drone pilot. I loved traveling. I loved the missions we were doing. We went down to Haiti when the big earthquake happened. We went to Fukushima and got people out of there and brought supplies when that happened. I really enjoyed getting to see new places, getting to meet new people, getting to hear new stories, and helping people out. So that's what I was really hoping to do as a pilot. He had been an enlisted guy, a guy helping out on a crew of one of those giant transport planes. And he shifted over to the officer side because

he wanted to fly. And he ended up in a drone squadron. I was like, you know what, I can be at the roughly the forefront of this, get to learn new technology and see how it plays out. What that meant for him was he was living in Las Vegas and he was commuting every day, several miles north of the city to a remote base called Creech Air Force Base. It's all in a classified area. It's all in a skiff. There's no windows, no cell phones allowed, so you leave all your cell phones out.

And there, essentially, the drone pilots would go through a secure top-secret door every day, and inside they had cockpits that were linked by satellite to drones on the other side of the world. So if I look to my right, immediately I have my sensor operator. Pilot's always in the left, sensor's always in the right. And next to him was someone who was operating the cameras and the sensors. And they would receive orders to go on missions, to fly the drone to a certain spot, to watch, to aim, and occasionally to fire. But it was ultimately

an office job. You were working shifts, commuting, sitting in a chair, even though you were doing combat. So these things can stay up 24 plus hours, depending on how you use them, depending how far the base is and everything like that. And they have cameras on them that are just mind-boggling. And they have other technology on there that's just, you know, it's insane. And what they can do is crazy. James Klein, when he started this work, he really was a supporter of it because he felt that this tool, the Predator drone and the Reaper drone, they were amazing. Because he could fly over some remote valley in a dangerous land where in the past you might have had to put 100, 200 Marines. But here you could have a very precise weapon system with an amazing camera. And he felt that if that was used right and deliberately, it was better than any alternative.

And for a year and a half, two years, you'll build your spider network up and you'll find out, okay, this guy's always meeting with him. And we've got some assets on the ground or whatnot that are also helping us. Oh, we have found this network and now we can paint a picture and we know who's doing what, what's really important. Maybe we don't want to kill all these people. Maybe we want to do something else with these people. And he said that for a long time, it was used right. They had very strict protocols in place. They would watch a target to figure out who is the exact, precise, high-level leader that we need to hit to take this threat apart. And they would wait for the moment when they could do that without causing any other casualties. So he's comfortable with the checks and balances and the decision-making process that he's participating in? Yeah, at least at first.

You got to understand that the pilots, they launch the missile, but they don't get to make the decision about who they launch it at. I mean, from a pilot's perspective, we're just a taxi driver. That's all we do. That comes from someone that they universally refer to

as the customer. And the customer could be a lot of different people. It could be the CIA. It could be a colonel who's running a bunch of ground troops on the ground in Afghanistan. It could be a secret special operations strike cell that's looking at targets and saying, hey, okay, here's the bad guys. Hit them now. We drive the signals intelligence that we have on the aircraft and we drive the hellfires to wherever the customer requires them to be. And then we position the aircraft way we know best for what they want. Whatever the customer wants,

the pilot's supposed to give it to them. The initial customer I came in with cared only about building up those networks. And I would almost say elimination was secondary to that. It was much more important for them to build those networks and be able to, like I said, maybe not even eliminate, maybe do something else on the ground. And that was fine when he started because he had a lot of faith in the customer. The customer seemed to be deliberate and well-informed and patient. The biggest shift for me was changing squadrons. I changed squadrons. I had a new customer. But as time went on, the customer started to change. Whereas, you know, the first customer, oh, you found something? Let's follow it for two years. This customer would be like, you found something? Give us 30 minutes here real quick.

All right, pass on it. Or, hey, we think you should be doing something with this. Prepare to strike. Late in the Obama administration, ISIS invaded Syria and Iraq, and they loosened the restrictions on who could be the customer. And then President Trump came into the White House and he loosened them even more. And so at one point, the customer was sometimes the President of the United States or more often a high-level general or admiral. But over time, as these rules loosened, the customer became oftentimes a mid-level enlisted person on the ground and the targets that they were picking and approving were much less careful.

What drone pilots were telling me about this era was that the strikes became, I think problematic is probably too nice of a word. You know, a rushed strike might be targeting what people thought was a enemy command post, except it's a school and it's full of civilians, or it's a market, or the car that they thought was carrying the terrorist leader, in fact, was carrying a family. So James, he was not only watching this, but he was launching a lot of this stuff. And he became very troubled because he lost faith that the customer really knew what they were doing. So my sensor and I were flying.

And we're flying around this town. I believe at the time, it was during the ISIS thing. And at the time... One story he told me about was a time when he was asked to watch a river that ISIS was using to transport supplies. So we're watching this river and there's, you know, there's ISIS on both sides of it. So we see two guys walking and there's a lot of dust in the air on this day, but you see two guys and they've got two things on their back, which, you know, the JT jtac's like do you think those could be ak's or anything like that his drone was told by the customer to follow two men along the river in syria because they appeared to be armed and then the analyst goes hey those kind of look like fishing poles and we look at them like oh yeah those are those are fishing poles we didn't

know what they were before but the more they said they were fishing bulls and like, oh yeah, those are fishing poles. We didn't know what they were before, but the more they said they were fishing poles. And like five minutes later, they're down there fishing. And he and his essentially co-pilot, the man whose job it is to look at the video feed, said, wait a minute, these guys, they're not armed. And the customer's response was, well, stay ready to fire anyway, because we might need to take these guys out. I went like, hey man, these are fishing poles. That's what the analyst is saying. Why are we still looking at these? He's like, well, you just never know.

And his response essentially was no. He refused to fire that day. And my sensor on that day was one of the guys that had come from the first unit with me. And both of us were just staring at each other like, what are they doing? What are these guys doing? Why are they so adamant about shooting? Why does this guy still want to shoot two fishermen? And that afternoon, he prevails.

The shot is not taken. These men are not vaporized on the side of the river. And you would think that he'd feel pretty good about that. But in the moment, I think that was the point where he started to really doubt what he was doing and the system as a whole. And it was at that point that I realized, what if I didn't want to push back? Then yeah, maybe there's two fishermen who end up dying that day. We'll be right back. So Dave, this is clearly a kind of turning point for James. Well, yes and no.

Like, it's a turning point in his attitude towards the drone program and whether it's right or wrong. But it's not a turning point for the Air Force. The Air Force still expects him to show up to work the next day. Right. And that's really hard because he doesn't know what the customer is going to ask him to do. He may ask him to target another pair of fishermen or something worse.

And that really, really starts to weigh on him. Depression shows in different ways. For me, it was, I'm just going to shut myself inside, basically, inside myself. Not tell anyone about what's going on, just be, you know, a curmudgeon all the time. It affects his sleep. It affects his mood.

Every day he wakes up fearful of going in and what he's going to be asked to do. And it basically makes him totally miserable. And is he able to talk to anyone about all this inside the military? Well, that's really tough because the Air Force for sure has spent a lot of money and effort in getting mental health professionals into these drone squadrons. So there is some help there. But James, he didn't necessarily see that as help he could use because I think there's a lot of stigma in the military. And if you say the wrong thing, you'll be taken off of flight status.

And he just wasn't sure that going in and talking to someone would do any good and it might do a lot of harm. So it doesn't seem like much of an option. So basically he's stuck. Right. I knew in my head I was sabotaging my life. I was almost leaning into how much I disliked it. So basically he decided to just suck it up. So I didn't enjoy what I was doing. I would focus on it intentionally all day almost and then question myself on why I felt so terrible all the time. Pretend nothing was wrong.

My wife's confused as to why I'm not really talking anymore. I'm always moody. She's trying to help, but I'm not letting her. But, you know, pretending nothing was wrong at work didn't necessarily work at home. She'd just be like, you know, how's work going? I'd be like, oh, it's going great. And she'd be like, do you want to go out and eat?

No, I don't. Well, you just went out to the bar with all your friends last night. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't want to go. I just want to go to sleep. Why didn't you sleep last night? And as we're having the conversation, I'd be like, I really should be hanging out with her more. I should, I should.

But then I'd be like, no, you shouldn't be happy right now. So don't go do it. Don't be happy. you shouldn't be happy right now, so don't go do it. Don't be happy. The stress, the anger that he was feeling, you know, inevitably was taken out on his relationship with his wife. And then I would use that the next day of like, oh, now your marriage isn't doing great. Great, look what you've done kind of thing. He couldn't talk about what was bothering him because it was all classified, but it was still eroding their relationship.

The trigger point was, she's like, I can't do this. And finally it comes to a head when his wife says, I think I need to leave you. And I was like, I completely understand. I completely understand why you can't do this because I know what I'm doing. I'm fully aware of what I'm doing to myself. And this is the moment when he realizes that he really needs to take action.

I was like, you know what? I need to get out of this. So I went to the commander and I said, I can't do this anymore. I need something different. And he ends up getting transferred to another unit where he's still working with drones, but he's not anywhere near missions where he pulls the trigger. And he spends a couple of years doing that until he finishes out his Air Force contract

and leaves the military. When I spoke to him, he was on the other side of this experience. He works in insurance now. He's reconciled with his wife and he and his wife have a child. But he's still, to this day, I think, trying to make sense of those years

that he was in the seat of a Reaper and trying to heal from them. So, for James, the only way to solve this is for him to leave the drone program altogether. Right, because you can't fix the program. You can't continue to refuse to do what the customer wants. You know, pilots have very little say in all of this, even though, you know, physically they control everything.

And what he said is that there were a lot of other people like that, people that just couldn't take it. And so they quietly sort of drift out of the system. So I'm really curious, since James' story was a way for you to understand the experience of Kevin Larson, this drone pilot who took his own life, what exactly did it end up revealing to you? Well, Kevin Larson's father had told me this story, and I didn't really get it until I talked to guys like James Klein. It was a story where one day he was sitting with his son at home and asked him, so what are you doing down at that Air Force base? And his son sort of in a moment of candor shook his head and told him,

you know, on this recent mission, I was told to go track an Al-Qaeda terrorist and kill him. And then once he was dead, I was told to track the body and follow it to the cemetery. And then whoever showed up for the funeral, I was told to kill all of them too. And his dad was really troubled by it. And he said his son was too. And of course, who wouldn't be? But I didn't understand that a lot came along with that. Not only is the customer asking you to do things that you don't want to do, but you don't know if the customer asking you to do things that you don't want to do, but you don't know if the customer is going to do the same thing the next day and the day after that. And you don't feel that you have anyone to turn to that you can talk to about it.

In fact, because of the stigma of not being real combat troops, quote unquote, you're not even sure if you're deserving of feeling that trauma. And so all of that stuff, it just stays inside and slowly erodes these pilots. You know, it erodes their relationships. It erodes their marriage.

It erodes their selves. And that helped me make sense, not only of how heavy that experience was for Kevin Larson, but why this guy who had been an Eagle Scout, raised by cops, going to church every Sunday, why he ended up with a drug conviction that ended his Air Force career. Explain that. drug conviction that ended his Air Force career. Explain that. Well, the types of drugs he was doing was very specific.

It was mushrooms and it was MDMA, which is commonly called ecstasy or molly. Those are two psychedelic drugs. And they are both drugs that there is a lot of clinical evidence to show they really can help with depression, with PTSD. And what his wife said is that it was working. You know, for weeks afterwards, she would see an improvement in his mood, in his sleep, in everything.

But of course, this type of thing is also completely illegal in the military. Right. And when the Air Force found out, of course, they charged him with a number of crimes. And they sent him to court-martial and to trial. And what's interesting is that the trial, it's not a question of, hey, was this guy traumatized by killing civilians in a foreign land? It's just a question of, did he do the drugs or not? You know, his mental health never came up.

And very quickly, the jury convicted him and he was waiting for sentencing. Wow. So they were supposed to do the sentencing after lunch. And the judge let everybody out and said, be back in an hour. And Kevin Larson never came back. and the judge let everybody out and said, be back in an hour. Mm-hmm. And Kevin Larson never came back.

Instead, he rushed off the base across town to his house, packed up some food and some supplies in his Jeep, and took off, not telling anyone where he was going. He headed into the mountains of California and he started heading north. And while he's driving, the Air Force is putting out essentially an APB saying, be on the lookout for this guy. He's a deserter with a drug conviction.

He may be armed. He may be dangerous. Apprehend him if you can. And he's in Northern California in Redwood Valley when Highway Patrol spots him and pulls him over. He stops, but as soon as the officer reaches his window, he gasses it and takes off and tries to lose the police out on a windy dirt road up in the mountains. But the police know something that he doesn't. It's a dead-end road, and there's no way out for him.

So they just sort of park at the bottom of the valley and wait and wait. Eventually night falls, and in the morning with reinforcements, the police, officers from the Air Force, officers from the Sheriff's Department all head up there to try and see if they can flush him out. So at that point, Kevin Larson's basically trapped. And he's been waiting all night behind a big boulder. He's got an assault rifle with him. He's got his phone, but there's no service, so he can't call his family or the police.

So he just makes a recording and starts talking to his family, saying to each one of them that he loves them, that he's sorry that all this happened, but he doesn't want to go to prison and he doesn't see any other way out. And there's so much in there that he doesn't say. He doesn't talk about the more than 600 missions he went on.

He doesn't talk about any of the airstrikes. And maybe it's because he runs out of time. Because at the end of the video, he sort of stops and looks up and there's an angry buzzing, sort of like a hive of bees. And he says, I can hear the drones. They're looking for me. They were hunting him like he had hunted people before. He very quickly realizes that this is the end. And he shoots himself.

So when that lawyer called you and said about Kevin Larson, you should look into this. There's a bigger story here. The bigger story that he was referring to and the bigger story that you found is really a mental health crisis among Air Force drone pilots. Yeah. I mean, the Air Force has been tracking and surveying these drone crews for years,

and they know that this stuff is traumatic. They know that 20% of them have clinically high levels of emotional distress. They know that witnessing civilian casualties can make you eight times more likely to have PTSD. They know all of this stuff. They just don't know what to do about it. So after the story about Kevin Larson came out, I called James Klein and I asked him what I always ask sources. After a really big story comes out, I asked, you know, did I screw it up? And he laughed. He said, no, you know, you did pretty good. And I said, okay, well, what do you think is the larger story of this? The weird part is, you know, they say it's like a video game,

and you kind of have to desensitize yourself to where it is. And he's like, well, you know, we have this new kind of warfare, drone warfare, and everyone thought it would be better. And in fact, it's just different. What's combat? Is it getting shot at? Is it watching somebody die? I mean, we kill people.

And, you know, in a lot of cases, these guys were conducting more combat than anyone else in the United States military. You know, what infantry doesn't have to do is they don't have to follow that body to the funeral. They don't have to watch the wife and kid cry. They don't have to watch the friends and stuff like that. But because they were not in a war zone, they weren't counted as combat troops. You can look at their personnel files and it'll say essentially that they had no exposure to war.

So what became clear to me talking to James was that the United States had built this whole system of drones intended to keep troops out of harm's way. But by removing them from the battle they had, in fact, exposed them to just a ton of unseen trauma. Well, Dave, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Here's what else you need to know today. In eastern Ukraine, dozens of civilians are feared dead after a Russian airstrike leveled a school where local officials said that about 90 civilians had been sheltering in what could be one of the deadliest attacks since Russia renewed its offensive in the region.

But. Russia renewed its offensive in the region. But... Today, we send a resounding message to the world that Canada and our allies continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine. In a sign of how much Western Ukraine is beginning to return to normalcy, First Lady Jill Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau both made visits over the weekend in a show of support for President Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin and his accomplices will fail. Ukraine will prevail. Slava Ukraini! And rallies in defense of abortion rights were held in cities across the U.S. over the weekend as supporters of Roe v. Wade reacted with fury to the draft Supreme Court opinion striking it down.

The only thing the other side is interested in is power. Power over women's bodies, control over the women of the state of Texas. The largest rally appeared to be in Texas, whose Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has passed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, a law denounced during the rally by his Democratic rival, former Congressman Beto O'Rourke. And when we win, every woman in the state of Texas makes her own decisions about her own body, her own future, and her own healthcare.

You all with us? Today's episode was produced by Aastha Chaturvedi, Mooj Sethi, and Caitlin Roberts. It was edited by Mark George and Michael Benoit, contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.