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    The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers
    The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers
    The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers

    Written by Nicholas Irving and Gary Brozek

    Narrated by Jeff Gurner

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Instant New York Times Bestseller by Co-Star of Fox's American Grit and Legendary Ranger Nicholas Irving.

    Groundbreaking, thrilling and revealing, The Reaper is the astonishing memoir of Special Operations Direct Action Sniper Nicholas Irving, the 3rd Ranger Battalion's deadliest sniper with 33 confirmed kills, though his remarkable career total, including probables, is unknown.

    Irving shares the true story of his extraordinary military career, including his deployment to Afghanistan in the summer of 2009, when he set another record, this time for enemy kills on a single deployment. His teammates and chain of command labeled him "The Reaper," and his actions on the battlefield became the stuff of legend, culminating in an extraordinary face-off against an enemy sniper known simply as The Chechnian.

    Irving's astonishing first-person account of his development into an expert assassin offers a fascinating and extremely rare view of special operations combat missions through the eyes of a Ranger sniper during the Global War on Terrorism. From the brotherhood and sacrifice of teammates in battle to the cold reality of taking a life to protect another, no other book dives so deep inside the life of an Army sniper on point.

    Also available: Reaper: Ghost Target and Reaper: Threat Zero, the first books in Nicholas Irving's thrilling series that Brad Thor calls "one hell of a read"!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateJan 27, 2015
    ISBN9781427252487
    The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers
    Author

    Nicholas Irving

    NICHOLAS IRVING is the New York Times bestselling author of The Reaper and Way of the Reaper. He spent six years in the U.S. Army’s Special Operations 3rd Ranger Battalion 75th Ranger Regiment, serving in a wide range of positions, from assaulter to Sniper Team leader. He was the first African American to deploy in the G.W.O.T as a sniper in his battalion. Irving is now the owner of HardShoot, where he trains personnel in the art of long-range shooting, from Olympians to members of the Spec Ops community. He also appeared as a mentor on the Fox reality show American Grit, and has consulted on various films and television shows. He lives in San Antonio, Texas.

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    Reviews for The Reaper

    4.5/5

    117 ratings12 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent story, brave soldiers without think they did anything unusual.
      They make me so proud of them .

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great book. Took a couple chapters for me to go all in then I was addicted

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great story and good speaker.
      Maybe too short but worth time I spent for it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This book will make some people very uncomfortable. And rightly so - it contains graphic depictions of people being killed and wounded, and several other very unpleasant and difficult situations.

      It also is a description of someone who is charged with killing people, and who takes a certain amount of pride in how well he does that job.

      I've read a fairly good amount of military books, war biographies and memoirs. Some of them are very very good, like the works of Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge. Many are average, and a great deal are truly awful. The better ones tend to be, not unsurprisingly, written by professional writers who are describing their own experiences in combat, such as Leckie. (BTW, I was given this book by the publisher, in exchange for a possible review of it).

      It's hard to get a sense of a person in an autobiography written with a ghostwriter, as author Nicholas Irving did with his co-author Gary Brozek. So much of a story like his comes down to who he actually is, how he tells his own story, how much of a feel for the real man we get in reading his book. That's much harder to do when what we are reading is filtered through the writing style of a ghostwriter.

      The name of this book put me off. The Reaper. It felt self-aggrandizing, and made me think that I was picking up another look-at-me-and-how-great-I-am-for-killing-people kind of book, a feeling I got when I read the late Chris Kyle's service memoir. The first few chapters didn't do a lot to change that impression. It very well may be that the title was a product of the publisher - it's hard to deny that it's catchy and grabs the eye.

      But I'm glad I held on and finished the book. I don't know whether it was me and my preconceived notions about the work finally being overtaken by the story itself, or if the writing got better as I went along - but as I was nearing the end, I realized that I at least felt I had some idea of the character of Irving, and why he was telling us this story. I stopped over-analyzing and judging, and just read.

      Chapter six, "The Chechen Comes Calling", and the chapters immediately after that one, were very engaging, and again, this is when I felt I was beginning to recognize and understand Irving a small amount. It also became clear to me as I neared the end that all of Irving's combat experiences took place before he was 24 years old, a very young age to have to come to grips with being a quite successful professional killer.

      It's the military's job to kill people and break things. It's very difficult for people who have not been in that situation to hear or read about the satisfaction and even joy that some feel when they do their job well. Despite my own military background, I sometimes share that discomfort. This is a tale well told, and for good and bad, Irving opened up very private experiences for other to read and learn from. I respect and salute his service, and his honesty.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      What happened to my review? Good book, good narrator - you'll enjoy if you like reading about special forces and their operations.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great story with real insights that are hard to find any place else.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Braught back some memories both good and bad fantastic book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Love the book enjoyed hearing about what the News won't say.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Irv is a fucking G. This is a quality read.
    • 4/5
      Overall a very interesting and captivating book. As a quick summary, the story mostly revolves around the experiences of a sniper who had a pretty active deployment in Afghanistan. Many books and movies I've read covers the horror of war and the hellishness of everyone involved. So it was certainly surprising how different these soldier's experiences were. They were raring to go shoot some bad guys and the author was frequently approached by people who were jealous of how often he saw action. I guess the key differences they had was a safe base to go back to every night and recuperate and they almost always had overwhelming firepower and technology. As the author said when he and his team was pinned down by an enemy sniper, it's not as fun as when YOU'RE the one being targeted. Personally, the highlights of the book was when he went into details on his missions. I found myself fully engrossed in the adrenaline-pumping action and unable to put the book down until I knew he had made it safely back to base.
    • 5/5
      Awesome book. Very eye opening and honest. Thank you Nick for your service.
    • 1/5
      Unfortunately for this author I read “American Sniper” by Chris Kyle before I read this book. Kyle’s book was amazing. This book was a poor imitation of it. While Kyle’s accounts were told in a reporter-like manner, Irving’s were told more in a manner of I am the greatest. Kyle’s use of language and structure were for an educated adult, Irving’s writing more for a grade-school crowd. There are very few insights or stories worth reading in Irving’s book. The best part of it was it was a quick read, basically due to lack of depth and quality of the writing.

      1 person found this helpful