Modern American Snipers

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Foreword

  
1. Next-Gen Force Multiplication

  
2. Set the Conditions

  
3. Ground Truth

  
4. Three Seven Five

  
5. Triple Threat

  
6. Tex

  
7. Kingpin

  
8. Making of a Legend

  
9. Industrial Revolution

10. Punishment Due

11. The Bullet Does Not Lie

12. Reaper

13. Champions

14. The Tribes

15. End of the Beginning

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Photographs

Also by Chris Martin

About the Author

Copyright

 

Foreword

There's no doubt in my mind that American special operations has produced the finest and most technologically savvy snipers the world's battlefields have ever seen. This book is a back window into some of the most accomplished marksmen deployed against America's enemies.

I had the honor of serving as a Navy SEAL instructor at the Naval Special Warfare Group One sniper cell, and later at the Special Warfare Center's basic sniper course. The instructor cadre that I worked with at both units sacrificed long hours, and put their hearts and souls into the training in order to ensure that our guys were ready to deploy at the tip of the spear, and rain down hate on the enemy. These were some of the finest men I've had the pleasure to work with in my career.

Outside of the schoolhouse we came to work with other units' sniper instructors in different branches of the U.S. and coalition militaries. Always on the lookout to share ideas and improve our courses even more, we shared one thing in common, a desire to produce the best student possible. What this also did was let us get to know coalition programs, the USMC's Scout Sniper course (we even sent some SEALs there), and the Army's Special Operations Target Interdiction Course (SOTIC), and to know them with great respect and mutual admiration of the work we were all doing.

Reflecting back it was a rare moment in history and time. While most of the instructor cadre had real-world sniper experience, most of it was limited to doing airborne support or reconnaissance and aerial targeting. We had no idea that the men we were training, in our newly modernized sniper program, would go on to become some of the deadliest snipers the American military has ever produced. Guys like Chris Kyle (
American Sniper
), and Marcus Luttrell (
Lone Survivor
) would come through our schoolhouse, and go on to do different but great things in their own way. These men have been highlighted in the media but they would likely defer attention away from themselves and toward many of the other unknown snipers in the community that have equally incredible accomplishments against the enemies of America.

While I'm admittedly biased to the product we put out in the SEAL sniper program, the accomplishments of the U.S. Special Operations Command (US SOCOM) sniper community cannot, and should not, go unknown. These are their stories. Whether it was Chris Kyle giving sniper support to the Marines in the hot and dirty streets of Iraq, or Nick “The Reaper” Irving providing sniper overwatch for the SEALs, one thing is clear to me: It's one team, one fight.

Eric Davis,

Former Navy SEAL Sniper Instructor

 

1

Next-Gen Force Multiplication

Some three hundred miles off the coast of Somalia in the dead of night, everything was black. Even the silhouettes of the hulking floating structures that surrounded their little vessel could not be made out against the sky behind them—at least not well enough to discern that those shadows were growing larger.

The three remaining pirates had been played—convinced it was in their best interest to accept a tow from the USS
Bainbridge,
the destroyer on point of the shepherding armada.

The enterprising teenagers were exhausted, weary, and growing increasingly agitated. Only a few days before, they had accomplished something no others had in nearly two centuries: the successful seizure of a United States Merchant Marine vessel.

The hijacking had not gone exactly to plan and now they found themselves in an awkward-looking lifeboat, cramped and breathing stale air. Their single source of leverage was the man who not long before was in charge of the cargo ship they had boarded—Captain Richard Phillips of the MV
Maersk Alabama
.

However, that bargaining chip was significant enough to prove considerably more than they had actually bargained for, bringing the maritime might of the United States Navy down on top of them. And that might was expressed not only by the mammoth naval destroyers, frigates, carriers, and aircraft those boats ferry.

Unbeknownst to the pirates, an advance team of DEVGRU operators had materialized on the scene, taking up station on the
Bainbridge
. The commandos had jumped in following a short flight from their operational base in Manda Bay, Kenya, and they were soon joined by a larger force that flew in from the States on a C-17 and also parachuted into the shark-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden.

Earlier there had been four pirates threatening the life of the captain on the lifeboat. But one, the wounded and desperate Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, had surrendered and voluntarily placed himself in the hands of the SEALs.

Despite its cramped quarters, the bobbing orange lifeboat had already been the backdrop for plenty of drama. Phillips attempted an ill-advised escape at one point but was fished back out of the water and yanked back into the craft.

Troublingly, Phillips's captors had grown more and more unpredictable as the days wore on. At times they would crack shots from their Kalashnikov rifles at the Navy ships, and at others they would communicate via satellite phone with potential reinforcements of their own—a makeshift Somali pirate armada consisting of five additional hijacked ships loaded with additional hostages.

And almost comically, the pirates also provided occasional real-time updates to the international press corps as the world became entranced by the ratcheting drama.

The FBI negotiations cycled between promising and nonexistent. Lockheed P-3 Orion and Boeing ScanEagle ISR (intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance) platforms circled overhead while the DEVGRU assaulters readied on the USS
Boxer
, just waiting for the green light to launch.

For days the unit's snipers—members of its shrouded Black Team—had rotated through gun positions fanned out the back deck of the
Bainbridge
.

While waterborne operations are the historic calling card of Navy SEALs and maritime hostage rescues DEVGRU's raison d'
ê
tre, the reality is that by April 12, 2009, these SEALs had spent nearly a decade dismantling terrorist networks in the jagged mountains of Afghanistan. Even the most senior of DEVGRU's men were far more familiar with operating at an elevation of ten thousand feet above the sea rather than in it; their particularly demanding tasking requires they be prepared for any mission, in any environment, at any time. And the more impossible it's deemed, the more likely it will come their way.

The SEALs who had come to save the captive American hailed from Red Squadron, one of DEVGRU's four assault squadrons. It had shed blood in the region before. In 1993, four of its snipers had taken part in Operation Gothic Serpent—more popularly known as Black Hawk Down—in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 and earned four Silver Stars for their considerable trouble.

One of Red Squadron's own was also the first make the ultimate sacrifice following 9/11. Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts died fighting alone atop the peak of Takur Ghar in Afghanistan during Operation Anaconda.

And over the decade following that loss, the squadron had doled out vengeance in spectacular numbers and with unapologetic efficiency.

Now the SEALs were back in the water, preparing to add three more to their monumental toll. Execute authority had been granted by
the executive authority
: President Obama provided the team with the permission it needed to intervene should they judge the captain's life to be in grave and immediate danger.

While the night was pure blackness from the pirates' perspective, through the DEVGRU snipers' advanced night-vision optics they could clearly see the beams of the infrared lasers that stretched out from their accurized SR-25s across the
Bainbridge
and danced across faces of the fleeting targets.

And then an AK-47 was driven into Phillips's back. The frantic shuffling inside the lifeboat's cabin exposed all three heads simultaneously for just a fraction of a second.

DEVGRU's snipers—collectively known as Black Team—offer commanders a 100 percent headshot guarantee within a certain range. Its snipers are regularly tested to demonstrate that they can actually deliver on that promise. Reeled in to a range nearly ten times shorter than that magic distance, the pirates had become the closest possible literal realization of the idiom “shooting fish in a barrel.”

Three mechanical clicks of suppressed Mk 11 Mod 0 semi-automatics registered almost as a single hushed sound as the weapons issued forth three 7.62mm rounds. At that distance the bullets traveled precisely down the path shown by the lasers. Barely slowing from their initial velocity of over twenty-three hundred feet per second, they found their marks in near-instantaneous fashion.

Almost as quickly, two DEVGRU snipers traversed the two ropes to secure Phillips.

A complex situation had been resolved in shockingly simple, almost elegant fashion.

Three bullets equaled three dead pirates. And those three bullets also meant one American life had been preserved while the entire globe watched on at full attention.

The dramatic rescue provided a rare and fleeting glimpse of the wealth of capabilities that had been acquired by the nation's spec ops snipers during the Global War on Terror.

What went unseen to the world at large were the vast multitudes of operations executed by these marksmen and others like them. Their work is largely performed behind a veil of secrecy, hidden by special access codes and other gray mechanisms of classification.

A former Black Team sniper said, “As impressive as that was, I can guarantee you it wasn't that big of a deal to those who did it. They're used to being in a much more difficult environment than they were that night. I know that's difficult for people to conceive. Difficult as those shots were or that scenario seems to be to the average Joe, for those guys, it was just another night at work.”

The dead pirates were only three of thousands—if not tens of thousands—that have perished at the discretion of America's modern special operations snipers.

And Richard Phillips was just one of an even greater number saved by those same actions—whether directly, more broadly, or abstractly.

*   *   *

Depending on how much slack the definition is allowed, the first sniper arguably came into existence before the first human did; newly discovered evidence suggests that ancient hominids were throwing spears nearly 280,000 years ago. You have to figure it wasn't too long after that an enterprising prehuman devised one a little straighter that flew a bit truer. Later, archers dominated battlefields for hundreds of years, striking from distances of hundreds of yards.