Shooter Read online

  Not long after that, our second daughter, brown-haired Ashley, was born, and I fell in love all over again with the latest chatterbox in my life. After a hard day in the field, I would go home and play daddy, wading through a crowd of plastic dolls on the floor and watching so many cartoons on television that I developed a genuine hatred for that purple dinosaur, Barney.

  Things stabilized between Kim and me, but we knew that we were going to have to be very careful in the future.

  3

  Thou Shalt Kill

  The manual says, “The primary mission of a scout/sniper in combat is to support combat operations by delivering long-range precision fire on selected targets from concealed positions. The scout/sniper also has a secondary mission of gathering information for intelligence purposes.”

  I consider that definition to be a waste of a sniper’s unique skills. It is anchored in the way wars were fought in ancient times and confines us to working in much the same ways as the sharpshooters did along the trench lines of World War I, hiding in the mud and waiting for an enemy soldier to appear. We can all do it.

  A few years ago, I was part of a Marine Recon Team raid on an enemy encampment. My spotter and I crept into the area, found the bad guys, established a hide-a camouflaged position deep in a burned-out room on the third story of a building-and hunkered down there for about twenty-four hours, feeding quiet radio reports on every move they made. During the night, the rest of our Recon Team moved up while I covered them from about eight hundred yards away. It was straight out of the book, about supporting a military operation by delivering precision fire from a distance, and would require no fancy shooting on my part.

  I locked my scope on a guard who was carrying a light machine gun, and when the attack signal was given and the Recon Team rose like shadows in the new dawn, I fired one shot, knocking the guard backward, down, and dead. Our guys overwhelmed the camp in a savage assault, and I took out another target, then lined up on a third soldier who was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade and trying to flank our team. I brought him down, too. The raid took no more than a couple of minutes, and a dozen enemy soldiers lay dead. From a distance of eight football fields away, I had killed three of them. It was a perfect mission, since we accomplished our assignment and sustained no casualties. But when I emerged from the hide to shake out my cramped muscles, I once again had the gnawing feeling that I could have done much more than just lie there and wait.

  In my opinion, the quick pace of war today has rendered the traditional role of the sniper obsolete. In a raid of this sort, the tactic still worked well, but modern battlefields are changing, and long-distance precision shooting means little if tanks and armored personnel carriers filled with infantrymen have already moved the fight five miles beyond you.

  Somehow, we needed to be able to move, far and fast, and I dreamed of running a Mobile Sniper Strike Team that could roam the battlefront and take the fight to the enemy. Scraps such as the one in Somalia only validated my belief that important parts of basic sniper doctrine were flawed.

  For instance, snipers are taught never to expose themselves to the enemy. In Mogadishu, we ignored that; we arrived quickly at the front edge of a likely fight and worked out in the open, shielded only by a masonry wall. With other Marines around, we had plenty of protection, and without having to worry about whether or not the enemy could see us, we dominated the battlefield.

  Mobility would be the key to the sniper remaining an effective combat tool.

  Using traditional methods, just reaching a good shooting position could be extraordinarily complicated. Sometimes we humped along with a patrol and dropped off at a specific point to find a hide and set up shop. Or we might cling like leeches to the back of a tank and roll off when it passed a certain location. Or a helicopter might drop us several miles from the target location and we would sneak forward on feet, bellies, hands, and knees.

  I dreamed of the day that we shooters would have wheels, but the time had not yet come for that. Bringing about that change became my beacon, and I intended to hurry things along any way that I could. The problem with evolution is that it is too damned slow.

  During World War II, snipers who fought in Europe worked much as their forerunners had on many of the same battlegrounds twenty-five years earlier. The Germans and Russians both used snipers to great effect, and in the Pacific, Japanese snipers were deadly shots. However, the primary tactic remained the same: hide and shoot.

  In Vietnam, the craft was forced to adapt to a jungle environment, which proved that it could change to meet new conditions. Then, creative Marine marksmen such as Carlos Hathcock and Chuck Mawhinney proved that snipers could be much more aggressive and effective by getting out of their holes and going on the hunt. These guys refined the ability to stalk and shoot, and showed up where the enemy least expected them to make a kill. Hathcock’s stalking and assassination of a Vietnamese general was a classic piece of work.

  Perhaps they were too good, because their methods became embedded doctrine. Hathcock’s story, Marine Sniper, was not only a best seller but became a bible in sniper school. Students can often pick up an extra ten points on an exam by answering a bonus question that almost always comes from Marine Sniper.

  Our planners apparently believed that if Hathcock and Mawhinney did it, then it must be right, and they adjusted their training to include the conditions imposed by Vietnam. That meant they were still mistakenly basing their teaching upon historical patterns, albeit more recent history, when they should have been looking into the future. What the modern tacticians missed was that Hathcock and Mawhinney were not only good shots and scouts but were also very thoughtful men who would have been among the first to insist that what was right for Vietnam would be pretty useless outside of the jungle.

  Most people go through life without ever seeing a dead body, unless it is laid out on coffin silk. Cops and first-response emergency workers wade in carnage but usually arrive after the violence has been committed. Even in the armed forces, death frequently is not seen, and much of the killing is done from a great distance. A ship can launch a missile that will fly hundreds of miles before striking a target. Airplanes drop their lethal loads, many times at night, from a great height and are long gone before the bombs even hit the ground. A tank firing at another tank is a duel of machines, and most infantry skirmishes are brief, wild firefights in which everybody shoots at something, somebody, somewhere, and hopes he hit it.

  My job is very different. Through the powerful telescope on my rifle, I see the expressions on the faces of my victims at the moment I quench that spark of life in their eyes. You don’t dwell on that point, because you are just doing your job, and the sniper’s one true commandment is “Thou Shalt Kill.”

  We soften the ultimate severity of what we do in vague terms such as “removing the threat” and “controlling the battlefield,” which puts us firmly into the military matrix, where national security interests easily scrub away any personal guilt, like soap and water removing a spot of dirt. When I “smoke-check a target,” as we call killing someone, I feel nothing at all, other than a bit of professional satisfaction.

  I never enjoy taking a human life, for only a homicidal maniac would do so. An experienced sniper can hate what he what he does when he pulls the trigger, but at the same time, he understands the important fact that he is involved in something much larger than himself. I always knew there was a good reason for what I did-if I didn’t get him, he would get us-so I put him in my crosshairs and squeezed the trigger without remorse.

  With that mindset, a good sniper, over time, becomes almost immune to sharp emotional reactions. I never have nightmares, at least not the usual sort, but I do have the occasional surprise nocturnal visitor. Those who have fallen to my rifle will sometimes drop by in my dreams, vague acquaintances who show up for a while and then leave again. The line is long.

  By the dawn of the twenty-first century, as wars changed, the sniper had become almost irrelevant on a shif
ting battlefield. We were no longer the marksmen who picked off the Viet Cong in rice paddies, any more than we were the seaborne Marines who fired on the Barbary pirates from the rigging of American sailing ships. We had thermal optics, night vision lenses, handcrafted weapons, satellite communications, and other toys straight out of science fiction, but our basic mission remained the same. We were prisoners of yesterday’s success.

  Although I was making noises about changing that, my suggestions to create Mobile Sniper Strike Teams were not warmly received by military tacticians who still considered snipers to be little more than support troops, like bakers and truck drivers. It became plain that this would be an uphill battle all the way.

  Our last big war had been Vietnam, some thirty years earlier, and after that adventure was done, the whole machine remained poised for another two decades to fight the Soviet Union in a huge land battle. Advances in technology, new weaponry, plans, and training mirrored those threats until they simply evaporated with the demise of the USSR. Since then, the overwhelming majority of U.S. military deployments have been in cities and towns, not in Asian jungles or on sweeping European terrain. These latest dangerous conflicts are an entirely different kind of warfare, but our tactics were slow to change.

  Tangled urban environments sharply inhibit the advantages of our smart bombs, overhead imagery, and standoff robotics, and jet fighter-bombers and aircraft carriers cannot hold territory. When a bad guy hides deep in a building or mixes in among civilians, he cannot be readily seen and identified, so his low tech beats our high tech: If you can’t find him, you can’t kill him.

  General Robert Alexander once observed, “The infantry soldier, using intelligently the firepower of his rifle, is still, as always since the introduction of firearms, the dominant factor of victory… In war the machine, while it may assist the man, can never replace him.” Sooner or later, the ultimate weapon is the guy on the ground with a gun. Guys like me.

  But the Pentagon’s planners virtually left snipers out of their future assessments, deeming us to be irrelevant. In modern conflicts, the airpower would strike hard, then the armor would move fast, computerized weapons systems would smother all resistance, and helicopters would deliver to the battlefield soldiers loaded with specialized gear, superwarriors from Silicon Valley. The image of a sniper hiding in a hole somewhere, waiting for a specific target, virtually relegated us to the status of anachronism, and we were valued about as much as some old Army mule. It was as if our age-old craft, which had evolved from the days of bows and arrows, could not change again to meet the new challenges. What nonsense. These people apparently believed their press clippings and thought that things always go right in battle.

  A good sniper is trained to think for himself, and I had spent a lot of time in the wild places and had spent countless hours considering the puzzle facing shooters like myself if we were to have a future in this game. I knew the way out was to prove the usefulness of the Mobile Sniper Strike Team concept, but how could I challenge the beliefs of senior officers and military thinkers from around the world? Just talking about the problem did no good. I was, after all, just a staff sergeant, and they were officers, and military protocol, yeah, yeah.

  The difference, of course, was that they didn’t have my experience, they were not Marine sergeants, and, most important, they were not snipers! Just because they had read Carlos Hathcock’s biography did not mean they were right.

  I wasn’t feeling loved, which is never a good thing with a sniper. So, being just as stubborn as that old Army mule, I decided to stop arguing and start doing. I needed a showcase in which my boys and I could upset the groupthink mentality that was betting everything on technology, and I decided that the best way to get the attention of the strategists at the top of the pyramid was to simply go out and kill a whole bunch of people.

  4

  New Ideas

  The chance fell into my lap during January 2001, when the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, a think tank that prepares the Corps for the latest wrinkles in warfare, dreamed up Project Metropolis, or ProMet.

  ProMet would unfold in various scenarios. Some units, known as OPFOR, the Opposition Force, would defend a make-believe city while the USFOR, or U.S. Force, attacked. When one phase was completed, a new exercise was begun to familiarize Marines with how to fight in cities, or Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain, known in the trade as MOUT. As usual, specific roles were given to the armored units, the infantry, the artillery, and the support teams, but the snipers were swept aside. When I raised hell, I was bluntly told that snipers were unimportant in a big battle because we simply could not survive in urban combat.

  I was running a platoon of ten school-trained snipers and six scouts, plus myself, a medic, and a lieutenant who was in overall command. We could put a lot of trouble on the street, and I argued that to leave such firepower on the shelf was asinine. Lieutenant Bryan Ziegler, the platoon leader, was a true believer and made the same points I did, only in more polite ways, but he had no better luck. They just would not listen to us.

  Finally, I had a showdown with a senior planner who told me this was to be a mixture of the lessons learned in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and Central Asia. Hell’s bells. I reminded him that I had been in most of those places, including spending six memorably unpleasant months in lovely downtown Mogadishu, where I had proven that mobility multiplied the effectiveness of snipers in urban environments. He was right that a prepositioned sniper was a duck that would soon be dead, but set us free to move and hunt on our own, and the paradigm changed dramatically.

  They finally told me to be quiet. Lieutenant Ziegler wisely quieted things down, but our good cop-bad cop routine had worked. To shut us up, we were told to find some way to make ourselves useful and were given eight days to train independently while bigger units prepared for a full-fledged ProMet invasion. We would work with the defending forces.

  Nobody said we had to play by the rules.

  Marines across the country were involved in such training. On one exercise, another Marine unit in full combat gear had “invaded” North Little Rock, Arkansas, where they stopped and questioned motorists going to the supermarkets and dry cleaners. The population happily pretended to be the residents of some unknown hostile land, but it simply was not realistic. American cities were no place for a military shootout, and we didn’t want an Abrams tank accidentally squashing somebody’s SUV.

  So the War Lab guys had decided to use the real thing and leased a couple of abandoned military bases, including the former George Air Force Base outside of Victorville, California, some ninety miles northeast of Los Angeles. The Mojave Desert base once had been a huge facility of more than 5,300 acres, with thousands of men and women, civilian and military alike, living and working there, all dedicated to getting planes in the air. Closed in 1992, it was now almost a ghost town. We could take this place apart in combat drills and nobody would care.

  I showed up for an unscheduled walk-through one morning, and the empty little town seemed to breathe, almost talking to me, as I prowled its streets, clapping my gloves together for warmth as a bitter rain lashed the area. The old base had two long runways, and although part of it had been given over to the Southern California Logistics Airport, the roosting places for airplanes were of no interest to me. Instead, I poked around the fourteen massive oblong dormitory buildings, the 1,641 individual housing units, and a hive of other buildings that ranged from what had been a hospital to routine office space. Wonderful. Cities are sniper country.

  For several weeks, Marines from our base at 29 Palms had been invading and fighting in the town. Big tanks parked in the driveways of little bungalows, helicopters swooped over the rooftops, and helmeted Marines carrying rifles dashed across scraggly brown lawns. I already knew that the overall game plan called for massive assaults, platoon- and company-sized actions supported by tanks and armored vehicles that would crush enemy positions with overwhelming force. The planners b
elieved any prepositioned sniper would be only a minor irritant, to be picked off early in the game. I wanted to teach them simultaneous lessons in mobility and humility.

  People often ask why I did not try out for the prestigious Marine Corps Shooting Team, but the question usually comes from someone who does not understand that there is a world of difference between competition shooters and snipers. Pure shooting is only part of what a sniper does, for we also must master the arts of sneaking into an area, hiding, deception, and hunting. We are entirely different societies, although the Marine competition shooters are awesome to watch.

  I personally didn’t care about being called a marksman, winning a medal or trophy, or becoming an Olympic shooter, because a competitive rifle expert must spend so much time at the training range that his body becomes programmed to do just that. By doing so, he loses the skill sets necessary to be a good sniper. Paper targets don’t shoot back, so it’s really kind of boring.

  It is important for snipers to thoroughly understand that what we do is not a competition. The best sniper in the world will have no success if there are no targets, but even an average shooter can rack up a bunch of kills in an environment filled with possibles, so the numbers can lie. Put an excellent sniper in a target-rich situation, and amazing things happen. One of the best was a young Russian who mowed down German soldiers during World War II like a John Deere tractor tearing through a Kansas wheat field. The soldier’s name was Lyudmila Pavlichenko. That true rarity, a woman sniper, she terrorized the Eastern Front, with more than three hundred confirmed kills. For myriad valid reasons, American armed forces do not train women to be snipers, but this Russian Annie Oakley of the Steppes could stall an entire attack.