Modern American Snipers (3 page)

However, it was also considered insular, secretive, and arrogant.

But if Delta's soldiers were considered iconoclastic cowboys, Marcinko's new unit was nothing short of a gang of pirates.

Marcinko eschewed conventional notions when determining the sorts of men and missions that should define SEAL Team Six. His idea of outside-the-box flirted with the lines of legality. He required SEALs that were loyal to him, dedicated to achieving the desired end result, and willing to break rules to make both happen.

“Demo Dick's” pragmatic approach to this gray world—which demanded operators who could operate independently, decisively, and unnoticed in the darkest pits of the world at a moment's notice—was not easily rationalized by those who did not see its mandate in the same fashion.

While Marcinko could present an argument in defense of almost every questionable procurement, activity, and team-building exercise (code for nightly drinking sessions), to others the unit was simply out of control.

Marcinko deftly wielded his considerably charisma and developed intense loyalty from his enlisted SEALs. Meanwhile, he undercut and ran off any straitlaced officers who didn't get with the program (eventual JSOC commander William McRaven was one such example). He wanted outlaws to combat outlaws and not everyone was comfortable with that idea. But “Six” also possessed capabilities no other unit maintained.

SEAL Team Six had grown out of an existing SEAL intercept/CT initiative dubbed Mobility 6 (or MOB-6). However, it too followed the UK model and was assembled in a largely similar fashion to Delta Force. Rather than platoons, the unit was organized into squadrons and further subdivided into troops, with teams beneath that.

Included in this arrangement was a robust, dedicated sniper capability, necessary for the types of surgical direct action (DA), hostage rescue (HR), and special reconnaissance (SR) missions for which the two units were designed to excel.

Previously, snipers and special operations forces had largely been separate, parallel force multipliers in the American military rather than a single compounded asset.

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“You know why the Unit is so good?” one of its recently retired snipers asked in a clearly rhetorical fashion. “It's all about unbroken continuity from one guy to the next for the past thirty years. Guys have access to every single hit that's ever been done and they learn from that and build on that.”

That continuity traces its lineage back to Larry Freedman, one of the earliest and most influential figures of all Delta's snipers.

A character among characters, Freedman was both animated and idiosyncratic. Just five eight but with an impressive physique (its maintenance said to be driven as much by narcissism as the physical demands of the job), he proudly went by the code name “Super Jew.”

While his custom-made cape brandishing the Hebrew letter “S” may have just been for show, Freedman's concentration and marksmanship were regarded as effectively superhuman by his peers.

A decorated Special Forces veteran, Freedman proved fiercely protective of the snipers under his watch and worked hard to impart his knowledge to them—as they would for the next generation and so on down the line.

Super Jew intentionally tested the boundaries of personalities and situations just to find their limits. As a result, he was reportedly “fired” by Beckwith six times but returned after each dismissal to continue molding the fledgling CT force.

Freedman technically left Delta Force in 1982, but he continued to school its prospective snipers while serving as the Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC) of the Special Operations Target Interdiction Course (SOTIC)—the primary basic sniper course to which the Unit sent its men. He later returned to serve Delta more directly, acting as an instructor for the Unit into the early '90s.

Then in his fifties and with a long white ponytail, Super Jew looked more like a Harley-Davidson-riding grandfather—which he in fact was—than a restless, motivated commando. However, that he was as well. Despite a deep-seated mistrust of the CIA that reflected his various dealings with the Agency while a Delta operator, Freedman signed on as a Paramilitary Officer of the CIA's Special Activities Division.

In that capacity, he continued to shape future generations of spec ops snipers, although his reach widened significantly.

In the summer of 1990, just prior to the first Iraq War, a group of six CIA, DIA, and NSA intelligence operatives were keeping tabs on troop movements. However, they found themselves stranded and surrounded near the Iraq/Kuwait border when Iraq's invasion came quicker than expected.

With nowhere else to flee, they secreted to Baghdad, hoping to find a means of escape in the heart of the enemy.

After U.S. requests for help were refused by the British, French, and Russians, Polish intelligence—driven by a desire to win over their new Western allies—came to the rescue. Operation Simoom—something of a Polish “Argo”—was successfully executed and the Americans were spirited away to freedom.

Following the triumph, the United States expressed its gratitude by assuming a hands-on role in the subsequent formation of a special Polish military unit called Jednostka Wojskowa GROM.

“Naval,” a recently retired fourteen-year veteran of GROM, reflected on Operation Simoom: “Nobody wanted to do it. We were the only ones and we succeeded. Officially, GROM was created afterwards and then the magic began. This was also the moment that the Americans offered their support in providing us with weapons, money, and training.”

Working in collaboration with the CIA, Polish General S
ł
awomir Petelicki envisioned a unit that would blend the best characteristics of Delta Force, the British SAS, and Germany's crack CT team, GSG 9. And indeed, Delta played a major role shaping the new unit from its earliest training.

“In 1991, thirteen GROM soldiers were sent to Delta Force for training shortly after the unit was officially formed,” Naval said. “They actually went through the first selection to GROM somewhere in the mountains in America and that was conducted by Delta Force.”

During one of the training marches, a Delta officer teetered on the edge of a cliff and would have fallen if not for the execution of another impromptu Polish rescue operation. An especially powerful GROM operator, “Artur,” reached out and caught the American.

Following GROM's initial schooling from Delta, a special training group was formed by the CIA to send American trainers to Poland. A familiar face was among these original trainers.

“Larry Freedman, one of the best Delta Force snipers ever, was actually the first sniper instructor in GROM,” Naval said.

Working as an operative of CIA's Ground Branch, Freedman showed the Poles the ropes. And then a few months later, the white-haired Freedman was right back in hostile territory, seeking the ground truth in a fast-devolving Somalia during the opening weeks of Operation Restore Hope.

On December 23, 1992, his vehicle hit a Russian-built land mine near Bardera City, in the Juba Valley. He was the first American casualty of the conflict in Somalia. His Delta Force progenies would add to that list in the following months as Operation Restore Hope was superseded by Operation Gothic Serpent.

The CIA honored Freedman with an Intelligence Star dedicated to his memory while GROM showed its gratitude by naming a street at their base after him.

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The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) … is charged to study special operations requirements and techniques, ensure interoperability and equipment standardization, plan and conduct special operations exercises and training, and develop joint special operations tactics.

The Combat Applications Group (CAG) … tests special operations methods, equipment, tactics, and combined arms interoperability with a focus of the development of doctrine.…

The Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) provides centralized management for the test, evaluation, and development of current and emerging technology applicable to Naval Special Warfare forces.

By the early '90s, the nation's deeply classified direct action units and the larger command that controlled them were no longer quite the secret the Department of Defense would have preferred. Colonel Beckwith and Captain Marcinko both authored books detailing the origins of the units they founded, and Hollywood quite naturally jumped on the concept of priority-one CT units that existed on a constant war footing and were assigned a global area of operations.

Movies starring Chuck Norris and Charlie Sheen did not exactly lend credibility to the Pentagon's stubborn denial of the units' existence either.

Partially in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, the units were rebranded CAG and DEVGRU, respectively. And, like JSOC as a whole, they were purported to be nothing more than glorified test-and-development-centric organizations.

While it's certainly true they carefully studied and advanced the military in the application of surgical violence, this was work that was tested in the field, not in some lab as their charters attempted to imply.

At least that was the idea. Although the units had captured the imagination of the public, those with the power to actually send these unique solutions into motion remained haunted by the failure of Operation Eagle Claw and thus less likely to get caught up in the hype.

They had not been sidelined completely. During their formative years, Delta Force and SEAL Team Six—collectively referred to as JSOC special mission units (SMUs)—represented the last option a number of conventionally minded military leaders and timid politicians wanted to call upon during a time of need. But in the most pressing cases, they also represented the only option.

Both units had scored significant victories and demonstrated their value multiple times over. Delta executed the first successful hostage rescue of an American civilian on foreign soil when it stormed the Carcel Modelo prison in Panama City in 1989 and freed Kurt Muse. And SEAL Team Six played a key role in capturing Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega just days later.

But those were very much the exceptions. While “all show and no go” is certainly not a fair description, the reality is that the dog and pony shows—CAPEX (capability exercise)—far outweighed the green lights granted. The units regularly underwent extensive mission workups in response to some larger crisis or another before moving on to start training in preparation for the next mission that would never come.

However, the worsening situation in Somalia demanded an overwhelming response. In August of 1993, President Bill Clinton approved Operation Gothic Serpent in order to hunt down Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

The operation was built around Task Force Ranger. And while the soldiers of the 75th Ranger Regiment's 3rd Battalion (3/75) were the most numerous in its overall composition, the centerpiece of this 160-troop-strong manhunting task force was unquestionably Delta Force's C Squadron.

They were further enabled by the Night Stalkers—the elite helicopter pilots who manned the specialized aircraft of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (160th SOAR)—along with their usual complement of attached Air Commandos from the 24th Special Tactics Squadron (24STS), JSOC's Air Force special mission unit.

The manifest also happened to show the inclusion of a small four-man DEVGRU sniper element, although it was considered nothing more than a token representation for the Navy unit.

Ultimately, Operation Gothic Serpent merely replaced Operation Eagle Claw as the fiasco that reminded leaders exactly what can go wrong when it commits its most elite troops to the sorts of extreme-risk, extreme-reward operations for which they were designed.

But even as an already risk-averse SOF environment hardened while the specter of terrorism continued to rise, the manhunt in Somalia also served as a precursor of what was to come … eventually. Though primitive by today's standards, the technology and tactics innovated in Mogadishu served to add to that unbroken continuity that “makes the Unit so good.”

Over time—and following a tectonic shift regarding the nation's stomach for combating terrorism—the somewhat clumsy, uncoordinated attempts to take down Aidid would be transformed into the most efficient and lethal capability ever envisioned.

It would also offer a preview of the capability and courage that exists within the ranks of JSOC's snipers—capability and courage that would come to play such a defining role in subsequent conflicts.

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The SEAL snipers from Red Squadron—Richard Kaiser, John Gay, Howard Wasdin, and Homer Nearpass—weren't exactly embraced by their Delta counterparts. They weren't exactly shunned either, but the tension in the air was irrefutable, as was the general feeling among the Delta operators that the presence of the SEALs added no particular value to the operation.

This was a bitter rivalry born with SEAL Team Six's very inception. While initially sold as a maritime complement to Delta Force—one that could, for example, rescue hostages aboard hijacked cruise ships—that would serve to round out the nation's total CT solution, it was never truly envisioned as such.

Founding commanding officer Richard Marcinko joked (or perhaps more accurately, opined) that a mud puddle or a canteen in the general vicinity was enough to justify SEAL Team Six's right to an operation.

Operators from both units presumed their superiority in their shared core competency of precision direct action, and thus considered their respective unit the more deserving when any potential high-profile operations surfaced (or landed). Delta Force and DEVGRU represented two apex predators claiming domain over a hunting ground barely large enough to feed one.

“Unfortunately, the units have been politically pitted against each other; they compete for the same missions,” said former DEVGRU sniper Craig Sawyer, who experienced this frustration firsthand. “It's unfortunate because both units are filled with heroes—highly capable men with red, white, and blue in their eyes. Brave as they come. Capable as they come. Mean as they come. Dedicated as they come. But they hated each other because they were pitted against each other.”