Shock Factor Read online

  For most of those soldiers trapped in the American kill zone, there would be no escape. One by one, the frontiersmen picked them off. Terror-filled cries rang out. Calls for help went unheeded. When the last shot had been fired, over fifteen hundred corpses littered the battlefield. Sixty Americans had died, almost all to artillery fire at the start of the fighting.

  New Orleans is a case study in how precision marksmanship can destroy a numerically superior foe’s will to fight. Despite having better weapons, better supplies, veteran troops and leaders, the British stood no chance in the face of the dirty shirts and their stunning accuracy. In minutes, that accuracy shredded their officer corps and left the foot soldiers leaderless and panicked in the kill zone. When they started to break and run, they received no respite. The British army came apart in a welter of blood and terror, victim of the Shock Factor applied on a macro scale.

  I witnessed the Shock Factor firsthand many times during my career. During one fight in Iraq in the 2003 invasion, I spotted a two-man Iraqi machine-gun team in a window of a building while I was scanning for targets from the hatch of one of our Amtracs—an amphibious armored personnel carrier. The two men were so close together, I couldn’t tell who was the loader and who was the gunner. I drew a bead on them just as they swung their weapon toward another Amtrac not fifty yards from their building.

  I pulled the trigger once. My M40 barked, and the loader vanished from the window. The gunner was so stunned by his comrade’s death that he couldn’t move. This surprise and fear-borne paralysis is a significant way we snipers psychologically dominate our battlefields. I racked my M40 rifle’s bolt and killed the frozen gunner with my second shot.

  When an enemy force advances into a sniper’s zone of control, one well-placed bullet can stop the assault in its tracks. As soon as the enemy troops realize they are under precision sniper fire, they will often seek cover and stay there until the sniper either leaves or is taken out—no easy task. Often, the Shock Factor causes strange reactions. The death of one of their own, combined with the sound of only a single shot, acts like a reset button on the neural circuitry of the men nearby. They’ll dive for cover, only to pick totally exposed places. They’ll freeze up, as the Iraqi gunner did; they’ll run in odd directions or return fire randomly. Some will flee. Some will cower. Some will babble nonsensical orders. A very few will actually continue to function and search for the sniper’s position. They are the ones we usually make priority targets.

  In Somalia, I learned that a sniper doesn’t even need to kill an enemy to create the Shock Factor and psychologically dominate him. My spotter and I had just climbed atop the Spaghetti Factory, a tall building in the heart of Mogadishu that provided a good vantage point of the city. While a platoon of our men conducted a patrol a few hundred yards to our left, we started to scan the area. The first thing we saw was a group of teenaged boys huddled together. On previous missions into the city, we’d seen these sorts of human clusters and learned to recognize that they usually meant the kids involved were up to no good. They were usually smuggling something the huddle was designed to conceal, like drugs or ammunition or weapons. We call behavior like this a tell, or a target indicator.

  This time, they were circled around a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy who held an American-made M1 Garand rifle that dated back to the Second World War. I centered my scope on the kid and saw he wore cut-off jeans and flip-flops. Like the other kids, he was shirtless and super-model skinny. We checked the wind. Three to five miles an hour—not a factor at the distance between my rifle’s barrel and the kid, who was one hundred sixty-eight yards away.

  The gaggle of kids began to move toward our patrolling Marines. The boy with the rifle looked like he was psyching himself up to take a shot. I watched through my scope, reporting everything I saw while praying that he’d lose heart. I could not let him shoot a Marine and tear worlds apart back home, but I could not stand the thought of killing a child.

  He and his pals kept moving toward the platoon. Soon, they’d be in a position to open fire. My mind raced, searching for options.

  Inspiration struck. I adjusted the crosshairs and pinned them on the M1 Garand’s stock. The boy was carrying it low with one hand wrapped around its receiver. The stock jutted out behind him as he walked.

  I pulled the trigger. The stock splintered. The stunned children scattered as the boy dropped the Garand. I scanned their faces and saw shock on all of them. They stopped running a few seconds later, then looked around as if they’d been witness to some sort of supernatural event. I hoped this would convince them to go on home, but teenage bravado prevailed. The boy in the cut-offs and flip-flops steeled himself and returned to his weapon. As he bent down, I put a round right into the dirt next to the Garand. It kicked up a cloud of dust and the rifle jerked. The boy leapt backwards, as if the gun were possessed. The other boys scattered again.

  Long seconds passed. The boys approached the Garand one more time like kids goading themselves through a cemetery at midnight. When they tried one more time to retrieve the weapon, I put another bullet beside it. That did it. The boys scampered off and left the weapon in the dirt. I later retrieved it and took it home as a souvenir.

  Without taking a killing shot, my accuracy destroyed the boy’s will to fight. That is significant power, and no other element on the battlefield has it.

  In the years since the Shooter killed Lieutenant Walcott’s brother officers at New Orleans, the technology and science of long-range precision marksmanship has undergone multiple revolutions. They have served to widen the kill zone for us, which in turn has magnified our psychological power. Today, we snipers are more flexible. Night is no longer an obstacle. Neither is weather. But even as we adapted the latest hi-tech gadgets, the basic skill sets the Shooter used in 1815 have remained the same. They are the same principles I learned when I became a sniper some one hundred seventy years after the Battle of New Orleans.

  More than once our community has been disbanded. Wars end and snipers are the first to be trimmed from peacetime military budgets. We’ve paid the price for those mistakes when we’ve found ourselves in another conflict and had to build a sniper program on the fly. In World War I, our shooters were given less than two weeks extra training before being sent into the trenches to fight Germans with years of sniping experience. The same thing happened in World War II. The Army’s snipers received a nine-day course in theater before entering combat. They suffered an eighty-five percent casualty rate as a result.

  Marine snipers had better equipment and better training, but even after they more than proved their worth on the island battlefields of the Pacific, the entire program was dismantled after Japan’s surrender. When Korea kicked off five years later, the cycle repeated itself, and both services had to scramble to rebuild sniper programs from scratch.

  When Korea ended in 1953, it happened again. The courses were abandoned and the snipers sent to other duties. It took Vietnam to break this pattern at last. Both the Army and the Corps established schools in country. The 2nd Marine Division kick-started the effort, closely followed by the 3rd. Both units built ranges around Da Nang and culled through the records to find expert marksmen or aging competitive shooters who had once been part of sniper units. They found shooters in unlikely places, like supply offices and desk jobs. Carlos Hathcock, one of our most successful snipers, had been an MP before he was pulled into the new program. It took time to rebuild and relearn the field craft and skills the Shooter of New Orleans possessed a century before. But when it all came together, our snipers set a fresh standard for effectiveness. Men like Carlos Hathcock and Chuck Mawhinney established the new legacy and became our role models in the years ahead.

  Vietnam ended in 1975, and fortunately this time the community was not disbanded. Since Grenada, we have rolled into every battle with an increasing level of professional acumen and expertise. Gone are the days where our raw recruits were born on the frontier and raised with a rifle in hand. While more snipers
hail from urban backgrounds, our classes and schools have expanded in scope and depth to hone their skills to a razor’s edge. Today’s American sniper has no peer in training, skill, and support. Despite this, we still face friction within our own chain of command over how we should be used on the battlefield.

  This is an old problem that dates back to the Revolution. The best officers grasp the Shock Factor and find ways to apply it, but most have no understanding of the psychological power we possess. Those men historically have reverted to their default knowledge base. We’ve ended up being used like regular line infantry too many times to count, and it only serves to increase friendly casualties.

  Part of the problem we face is that the Shock Factor cannot be replicated in a clean, analytical training environment. It is a phenomenon reserved only for combat, and the reaction to it cannot be quantified. Nor can it be fully understood unless experienced or witnessed. As a result, our capacity to influence a battle has almost always been underestimated. Until the War on Terror, New Orleans was the exception, not the rule.

  During my career, I only glimpsed the Shock Factor once in training during a 2000 multinational field exercise. One phase of the training included an assault in urban terrain. As we planned how this would look, I suggested we deploy a few of my sniper teams to hold the objective town against a battalion-level infantry assault. I had no doubt we could keep the enemy at bay for as long as necessary, provided we were allowed to use all our skills in stealth and concealment. The leaders running the exercise refused to believe this, and my commander did not want to put two of his men out on an island without support. Even in training, our officers are often casualty-averse. Of course, this is usually a good thing, but when it comes to snipers, this level of caution stems from a failure to understand our capabilities.

  After an intense discussion, I finally convinced them to let us give it a try. We were using simunitions—short-ranged projectiles that sting like paintballs when they hit a man—so I knew we would have to rely on stealth and concealment instead of stand-off distance. The result? Our two-man sniper team held up seven hundred Marines for an entire morning. We used surprise and precision to stop every assault, and our red force never even located us.

  To our delight, the surprise and mild pain the simunitions inflicted actually created a mild form of the Shock Factor. It was the closest we ever came to replicating it in a peacetime setting. Unfortunately, our leadership did not appreciate our success. They pulled us out of the action so the assault battalion could finish its mission and complete its training objectives. We were seen as hindering the training process, not enhancing it. For the rest of the exercise, we sat on the sidelines feeling like the Corps’ bastard redheaded stepchildren. The psychological power we had demonstrated was all but ignored.

  Fortunately, since 9/11 this attitude has started to change. Our officers now undergo sniper employment courses, taught by snipers, before they take over battalion-level commands. Since most of the Corps has seen extensive combat over the past decade, our officers are more familiar with the Shock Factor than ever before. They’ve seen it in the field during firefights with an enemy who wears no uniform and often fights us amongst innocent civilians. They’ve seen how threats come at our soldiers and Marines from every compass point, and they’ve learned the value of having a sniper team on their shoulder, watching over them for just such surprise attacks.

  In this perilous environment, we snipers are in our element. As the war has dragged on, our role on the battlefield has expanded. Our leaders have recognized the value of our psychological power and surgical accuracy in a fight that is as much for the hearts and minds of the locals as it is to destroy the enemy. Without a sniper’s precision, we would have to rely on firepower to take out our enemies. Laser-guided bombs and artillery destroys neighborhoods and kills civilians—side effects that generate bad press, complicate our efforts politically, and spawns fresh recruits to the insurgent cause. A post-Vietnam study found that it required ten thousand bullets for a conventional unit to kill a single Viet Cong. It took a sniper three and a half. We shooters can find, fix, and eliminate the enemy without endangering local populations, all while leaving property undamaged. Our psychological power can crush an attack before the enemy has a chance to launch it.

  This is our kind of fight. As Lieutenant Walcott wrote, we are messengers of death. If a sniper is stalking you, his bullet is not To Whom It May Concern, but a very direct and personal Special Delivery to you. That personal aspect makes us more than messengers of death. We are deliverers of fear.

  PART I

  SPECIAL OPERATIONS

  CHAPTER TWO

  Night Assault

  YOUSSIFIYAH, IRAQ

  THE HEART OF THE SUNNI TRIANGLE

  JUNE 16, 2006

  For months, the tide of war in Iraq had been turning against the Coalition. Thanks to the cunning strategy employed by al-Qaida Iraq’s commander, Musab al-Zarqawi, the country had fallen into a brutal civil war drawn along ethnic and religious lines. Using foreign volunteers as suicide bombers, Zarqawi had unleashed a wave of terror not on American forces, but on the Shia majority within Iraq. His minions blew up markets, mosques, and local councils and assassinated Shia officials, all in a bid to destabilize Iraq so completely that the American effort in the nation would be swamped by violence and doomed to defeat.

  That spring, the strategy was working. Zarqawi’s cells had killed thousands of innocent Shia, who in turn had formed local militias that retaliated against their Sunni countrymen in night raids full of shocking levels of brutality. The war devolved into a bloody street-by-street battle for control of all of Iraq’s major cities. Where once Sunni and Shia lived together in harmony, by 2006 they were ruthlessly purging their neighborhoods and carving out enclaves as the sectarian murders left scores, if not hundreds, of dead every night.

  Caught in the middle trying to control this Arab versus Arab bloodletting was the American occupation force in Iraq. Both sides carried out attacks against U.S. troops whenever it suited them. The Shia, led by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Militia, had launched two major rebellions in 2004, followed by periodic upticks of violence in 2005 and early 2006. Meanwhile, the Sunni population, under attack by increasingly reckless and barbaric Shia militias, turned to al-Qaida in Iraq for protection and help. In Sunni-dominated areas, such as the districts south of Baghdad, the Sunni insurgents virtually controlled the countryside. Known as the Sunni Triangle, the area around Youssifiyah became one of the most dangerous places in Iraq. Here, sixteen miles southwest of Baghdad, hundreds of Coalition soldiers died fighting in the town and its environs, mostly to the roadside bombs the Sunni cells had so craftily perfected. From October 2005 through June 2006, the American units around Youssifiyah were attacked 2,296 times. The insurgents had detonated over 1,600 roadside bombs during those attacks.

  The legendary 101st Airborne Division joined the fight around Youssifiyah in the late fall of 2005. From their first missions, the Screaming Eagles encountered fearsome opposition as these young Americans were on the receiving end of most of those twenty-two hundred attacks. The 2005–2006 deployment became a hellish slugfest of roadside bombs, sudden ambushes, and betrayals by traitorous Iraqi “allies.” The 101st’s 1st Battalion, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment suffered twenty-one killed in action during this deployment, along with scores more wounded from an original force of about seven hundred.

  For the men of the 1/502, each day began and ended with uncertainty. Spread dangerously thin across checkpoints and forward operating bases, they had little support available when the enemy struck at them. As the losses mounted, morale plummeted. For some of the soldiers, the enemy became all Iraqis, not just the al-Qaida-armed and -financed insurgents. What followed was a descent into one of the worst chapters of the Iraq War.

  2000 HOURS

  JUNE 16, 2006

  Specialist David Babineau should not have been on bridge duty that night. At twenty-five, he’d done his eight years
in the Army and had been ready to get out the previous fall. But as his platoon readied for a second Iraq deployment, he’d been stop-lossed. Instead of serving out the end of his contract and hanging up his uniform, the father of three found his service extended until after this tour in the Middle East.

  He never grumbled about that. Rather, he’d always exhibited leadership skills and had a knack of getting along with everyone. At times officers took note and asked him why he didn’t push to make sergeant. Truth was, he didn’t care about rank. He was happy where he was, and looked forward to leaving the Army when 1/502nd returned home later in the fall of 2006.

  On the night of June 16, Babineau was detached from his platoon with two other soldiers, Private Thomas Tucker and Private Kristian Menchaca, to guard a bridge over a canal outside of Youssifiyah. The original bridge had been destroyed at some point earlier in the war. Now an armored engineer vehicle rested in its place. Called an AVLB, for armored vehicle-launched bridge, the massive vehicle carried a metal temporary bridge on its back that could be unfolded to cross such a divide as the canal. With it in place, the Coalition needed to guard it, lest it be destroyed or even stolen by the local insurgents.