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| "They don't realize what's going on over there, and they don't care" Brandon Bryant |
MONTANA: Brandon Bryant, who worked for more than five years as a U.S Air Force drone operator from Nevada base has revealed that he sees every little pixel if he just closed his eyes.
Brandon, 27 said his job led him drinking, depression and finally a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder due to watching bloody images on the computer screen.
Despite Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports expressed concerns over killing made through drone attacks by calling them war crimes, instead U.S. argues that the strikes are vital in the fight against terror.
Mr Bryant, who joined the Air Force when he was 19, made his first kill in 2007, he described this event in vivid detail. After firing a Hell-fire missile at three men on a dirt road in Afghanistan, He detailed the event as,
'The smoke clears, and there's pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there's this guy over here, and he's missing his right leg above his knee,' he said in a November article for GQ. 'He's rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it's hitting the ground, and it's hot. His blood is hot,' Mr Bryant said. 'It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.'
Mr Bryant was presented with what amounted to a scorecard showing the number of fatal hits he had made and he said, 'I would've been happy if they never even showed me the piece of paper. I've seen American soldiers die, innocent people die, and insurgents die. And it's not pretty. It's not something that I want to have - this diploma,' he said.
Mr Bryant’s experiences left him 'feeling like a sociopath'.
'I don’t feel like I can really interact with that average, everyday person. I get too frustrated, because: they don't realize what's going on over there, and they don't care.'