The unseen scars of those who kill via remote control

REDWOOD VALLEY, Calif. – After hiding all night in the mountains, Air Force Capt. Kevin Larson crouched behind a boulder and watched the forest through his breath, waiting for the police he knew would come. It was Jan. 19, 2020. He was clinging to an assault rifle with 30 rounds and a conviction that, after all he had been through, there was no way he was going to prison.

Larson was a drone pilot — one of the best. He flew the heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper, and in 650 combat missions between 2013 and 2018, he had launched at least 188 airstrikes, earned 20 medals for achievement and killed a top man on the U.S.’ most-wanted terrorist list.

The 32-year-old pilot kept a handwritten thank-you note on his refrigerator from the director of the CIA. He was proud of it but would not say what for, because like nearly everything he did in the drone program, it was a secret. He had to keep the details locked behind the high-security doors at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada.

There were also things he was not proud of locked behind those doors — things his family believes eventually left him cornered in the mountains, gripping a rifle.

In the Air Force, drone pilots did not pick the targets. That was the job of someone pilots called “the customer.” The customer might be a conventional ground force commander, the CIA or a classified Special Operations strike cell. It did not matter. The customer got what the customer wanted.

And sometimes what the customer wanted did not seem right.

Larson tried to bury his doubts. At home in Las Vegas, he exuded a carefree confidence. He loved to go out dancing and was so strikingly handsome that he did side work as a model. He drove an electric-blue Corvette convertible and a tricked-out blue Jeep and had a beautiful new wife.

But tendrils of distress would occasionally poke up, in a comment before bed or a grim joke at the bar.

Drones were billed as a better way to wage war — a tool that could kill with precision from thousands of miles away and keep American service members safe. The drone program started in 2001 as a small, tightly controlled operation hunting high-level terrorist targets. But during the past decade, as the battle against the Islamic State group intensified and the Afghanistan War dragged on, the fleet grew larger, the targets more numerous and more commonplace. Over time, the rules meant to protect civilians broke down, recent investigations by The New York Times have shown, and the number of innocent people killed in America’s air wars grew to be far larger than the Pentagon would publicly admit.

Larson’s story, woven together with those of other drone crew members, reveals an unseen toll on the other end of those remote-controlled strikes.

Drone crews have launched more missiles and killed more people than nearly anyone else in the military in the past decade, but the military did not count them as combat troops. Because they were not deployed, they seldom got the same recovery periods or mental health screenings as other fighters. Instead, they were treated as office workers, expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war.

Under unrelenting stress, several former crew members said, people broke down. Drinking and divorce became common. Some left the operations floor in tears. Others attempted suicide. And the military failed to recognize the full impact. Despite hundreds of missions, Larson’s personnel file, under the heading “COMBAT SERVICE,” offers only a single word: “none.”

Larson tried to cope with the trauma by using psychedelic drugs. That became another secret he had to keep. Eventually, the Air Force found out. He was charged with using and distributing illegal drugs and stripped of his flight status. His marriage fell apart, and he was put on trial, facing a possible prison term of more than 20 years.

Because he was not a conventional combat veteran, there was no required psychological evaluation to see what influence his war-fighting experience might have had on his misconduct. At his trial, no one mentioned the 188 classified missile strikes. In January 2020, he was quickly convicted.

Desperate to avoid prison, reeling from what he saw as a betrayal by the military to which he had dedicated his life, Larson ran.

A vexing moral landscape

Larson grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of police officers. At the University of Washington, where he was an honors student, he joined the ROTC and the Civil Air Patrol, set on becoming a fighter pilot.

The Air Force had other plans. By the time he was commissioned in 2012, the Pentagon had developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for drones, and the Air Force was struggling to keep up. That year, it turned out more drone pilots than traditional fighter pilots and still could not meet the demand.

Larson was assigned to the 867th Attack Squadron at Creech — a unit that pilots say worked largely with the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command.

More than 2,300 service members are currently assigned to drone crews. Early in the program, they said, missions seemed well run. Officials carefully chose their targets and took steps to minimize civilian deaths.

“We would watch a high-value target for months, gathering intelligence and waiting for the exact right time to strike,” said James Klein, a former Air Force captain who flew Reapers at Creech from 2014-18. “It was the right way to use the weapon.”

But in December 2016, the Obama administration loosened the rules amid the escalating fight against the Islamic State group, pushing the authority to approve airstrikes deep down into the ranks. The next year, the Trump administration secretly loosened them further.

Before the rules changed, Klein said, his squadron launched about 16 airstrikes in two years. Afterward, it conducted them almost daily.

‘Soul fatigue’

In her job as a police officer, Larson’s mother, Laura, conducted stress debriefings after traumatic events. When officers in her department shot someone, they were required to take time off and meet with a psychologist. As part of the healing process, everyone present at the scene was required to sit down and talk through what had happened. She was not aware of any of that happening with her son.

“At one point, I pulled him aside and told him, ‘If things start bothering you, you and your friends need to talk about it,’” she said. “He just smiled and said he was fine. But I think he was struggling more than he ever let on.”

The Air Force has no requirement to give drone crews the mental health evaluations mandated for deployed troops, but it has surveyed the drone force for more than a decade and consistently found high levels of stress, cynicism and emotional exhaustion.

Starting in 2015, the Air Force began embedding what it called human performance teams in some squadrons, staffed with chaplains, psychologists and operational physiologists offering a sympathetic ear, coping strategies and healthy practices to optimize performance.

“It’s a holistic team approach: mind, body and spirit,” said Capt. James Taylor, a chaplain at Creech. “I try to address the soul fatigue, the existential questions many people have to wrestle with in this work.”

But crews said the teams were only modestly effective. The stigma of seeking help keeps many crew members away, and there is a perception that the teams are too focused on keeping crews flying to address the root causes of trauma. Indeed, a 2018 survey found that only 8% of drone operators used the teams, and two-thirds of those experiencing emotional distress did not.

Instead, crew members said, they tend to work quietly, hoping to avoid a breakdown.

A question of forgiveness

In February 2018, Larson and his wife, Bree, got into an argument. She was angry at him for staying out all night and smashed his phone, she recalled in an interview. He dragged her out of the house and locked her out, barely clothed. The Las Vegas police came, and when they asked if there were any drugs or weapons in the house, she told them about the bag of psilocybin mushrooms her husband kept in the garage.

When she and Larson had met in 2016, she said, he was already taking mushrooms once every few months, often with other pilots. He also took MDMA — known as ecstasy or molly — a few times a year. The drugs might have been illegal, but, he told her, they offered relief.

In Las Vegas, civilian authorities were willing to forgive Larson, but the Air Force charged him with a litany of crimes — drug possession and distribution, making false statements to Air Force investigators and a charge unique to the armed forces: conduct unbecoming of an officer. His squadron grounded him, forbade him to wear a flight suit and told him not to talk to fellow pilots. No one screened him for PTSD or other psychological injuries from his service, Bree Larson said, adding, “I don’t think anyone realized it might be connected.”

As the prosecution plodded forward over two years, Larson worked at the base gym and organized volunteer groups to do community service. He and his wife divorced. Struggling with his mental health, seeking productive ways to cope with the trauma, he read book after book on positive thinking and set up a special meditation room in his house, according to his girlfriend at the time, Becca Triano.

The trial finally came in January 2020. His former wife and a pilot friend testified about his drug use. Police produced the evidence. That was all.

After deliberating for a few hours on the morning of Jan. 17, the jury returned with guilty verdicts on nearly every count.

On the run

Larson would be sentenced after a break for lunch. His lawyer told him to be back in an hour. Instead, he took off.

He loaded his Jeep with food and clothes and sped away, convinced that he was facing a long prison sentence, Triano said. Within hours, the Air Force had a warrant out for his arrest.

Larson headed southwest to Los Angeles and stayed the night with a friend, then started heading north. By the afternoon of Saturday, Jan. 18, he was driving by vineyards and redwood groves on U.S. Route 101 in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, when the California Highway Patrol spotted his Jeep and pulled him over.

Larson stopped and waited calmly for the officer to walk up to his window. Then he gunned it — down the highway and onto a narrow dirt logging road that snaked up into the mountains. After several miles, he pulled off into the trees and hid. The police could not find him, but they knew something he did not: All the roads in the canyon were dead ends, and officers were blocking the only way out.

Night fell. Nothing to do but wait.

In the morning, during a briefing at the bottom of the canyon, records show, Air Force agents explained to the Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies that the wanted man was a deserter who had fled a drug conviction, was probably armed and was possibly suicidal.

The officers drove up the canyon and spotted tire tracks on a narrow turnoff. Agents crept up on foot until they spotted the blue Jeep in the trees but did not risk going farther. The deputies had a better option, something that could get a view of the Jeep without any danger. A small drone soon launched into the sky.

Larson was hiding behind a mossy boulder. There was no phone service deep in the canyon, no way to call for whatever hope or solace he might have conjured. He could only record a video message for his family members. One by one, he told them that he loved them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t go to prison, so I’m going to end this. This was always the plan.”

There was a lot he did not explain — things that have kept his family and friends wondering in the years since.

Perhaps he was planning to say more, but as he spoke into the phone camera, he was interrupted by an angry buzzing, like a swarm of bees.

“I can hear the drones,” he said. “They’re looking for me.”

Had they found him alive, his pursuers would have been able to tell him this: In the end, the Air Force had decided not to sentence him to prison, only to dismissal.

But now, just as Larson had done countless times, the officers could only study the drone footage and parse the evidence — slumped behind the boulder, shot with his own assault rifle — of another unintended death.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2022 The New York Times Company