Drone pilots at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
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'Did We Just Kill A Kid?' — Six Words That Ended A US Drone Pilot's Career
Der Spiegel
The New Mexico desert gets blistering hot, but inside the small windowless container where Brandon Bryant worked as a drone operator for the U.S. Air Force it stays a cool 63 degrees all year long. Sixty-three finger numbing degrees and Bryant describes sitting with a group of other pilots looking at more than a dozen computer monitors. The crew are directing drones over Afghanistan 6,250 miles away and the screens jump with a two to five second delay, as infrared video sent from the UAVs whips through the air to New Mexico.
When the order to fire on a target arrives, Bryant paints the roof of a hut with the laser that will guide in a Hellfire missile fired by the pilot beside him.
"These moments are like in slow motion," he says to Abé. No doubt, because on this occasion Bryant says a child walked from behind the building at the last second.
Too late for him to do anything else but ask the other pilot, "Did we just kill a kid?"
"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.
"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?
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