All in the Mind presents Science Friction
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What is the premise of the Science Friction episode on U.S. drone operators?
Hi, Lynne Malcolm here with a bonus program for you this week. It comes from the ABC's new podcast, Science Friction. If you haven't subscribed, you can catch up with the series. And to pique your interest, here's a recent episode I want to share with you. Natasha Mitchell talks to a mother and her son about the psychological impact of working on the US drone program. What's it like to experience intimacy at a distance as you track your targets on a screen in Nevada? You follow their daily lives and then, if they're deemed terrorists, you kill them? For this thoughtful young man, the mental toll has been immense.
Hi, I'm Natasha Mitchell. And just pause for a moment. Take a breath. Have you ever wondered what it feels like to kill someone?
I remember crying and... turning around and calling my mother. Not with your own bare
hands,
but... And she wakes up, she's like, Brandon, what's up? What's going on? Why are you calling me?
At a distance, oceans and deserts and great swathes of land away, thousands of miles from your victim.
And I was like, Mom, I just killed someone. I just killed not just one person, I killed three people. And everyone was congratulating me and everyone was celebrating. And I feel bad. Like, why do I feel bad? Shouldn't I feel good about this? And she's like, no. She's like, Brandon, it's good that you feel bad. It's good that you feel bad because otherwise you wouldn't have the respect and responsibility to do what needs to be done.
Brandon signed up to the US Air Force when he was 19. He was in his first year of college. He was originally going to work in signals intelligence, but he ended up in the Special Operations Command as a drone operator.
It's 25 feet long with a 48 foot wingspan and it's grey.
If you've never seen an MQ-1 Predator drone up close...
I mean, it looks like a flying dildo and it's got two missiles on it. That's, or a signals intelligence pod on one of the wings. It's not really that an impressive looking aircraft. Looks like it shouldn't even fly at times.
But they do fly over Afghanistan, over Iraq, Pakistan, many places. Like a big eye in the sky, they protect soldiers below from insurgents or hunt down and bomb suspected terrorists. Of course, innocent civilians die too, and they've died in their droves in Afghanistan. Drones are unmanned, so if you're a pilot or an operator, you're back on an American base, in a bunker, perhaps out in the Nevada or New Mexico desert, watching the lives of others for hours and days on end.
I felt like a pervert a lot of the times, you know, like I'm sitting in this like cold, dark bunker watching people. live their lives out in the desert. The culture was so vastly different than anything that I'd experienced. You'd watch people go to the marketplace and you'd watch people go to cafes and eat food. And in Afghanistan, they sleep on top of their houses because it's too hot to sleep inside. And occasionally you'll see people have sex and then people go outside in the back and they'll dig a hole and take a dump and they'll leave an infrared hotspot in the middle of the night. You know, all sorts of things, weddings, funerals. People driving cars, kids and people bathing in the rivers, especially the tigers and Euphrates in Iraq.
It was really surreal just to watch every aspect of everyone's life while I'm sitting there behind a computer screen like the fucking Matrix.
Thousands and thousands of miles away and yet so present in their lives.
Yeah, you'd imagine it's how God feels.
Brandon is one of just a handful of former drone operators to become whistleblowers about what it's like to work inside America's military drone program and what surveillance and killing at a distance can do to your state of mind. In this episode, Science Friction is taking you deep inside that experience and inside Brandon's head. We're talking technology, war and the psyche. Science.
My name is Brandon Bryant.
He and his mum, Lanann, are telling his story.
How does Brandon describe his first experience of killing a target from a drone?
So I'm Lanann Bryant. I don't think there's anything especially special about me,
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the premise of the Science Friction episode on U.S. drone operators?
0:00–4:54
2
How does Brandon describe his first experience of killing a target from a drone?
4:54–10:39
3
What does the MQ‑1 Predator drone look like and how is it operated?
10:39–25:42
4
How did Brandon’s upbringing and family dynamics influence his decision to join the Air Force?
25:42–33:35