Modern American Snipers (10 page)

“That was cool,” Burkhart said. “Maybe that was an excuse and I was a turd, but it seemed legitimate. He actually cared about the personnel in his section.”

The reality was, the training inside the sniper platoon was so strong that 3rd Battalion snipers were being given the tools to excel before they had even attended the Army's baseline training course.

GM, a former sniper with the battalion, explained, “They'd start out with the basics. They had a template. You'd take a new guy, you'd put him on iron sights with an M16A2—old school M16—and if he can shoot iron sights with the M16A2 out to a thousand, he can do anything. They had a little pipeline. You start with this, you bump up to this, you go onto this. After that you were constantly doing ranges or constantly going to schools.”

Burkhart continued, “I went on my first deployment [as a sniper] and I hadn't even gone to sniper school. But we had been training at the range four or five days a week, and these guys who were teaching me were just amazing shots. And our whole section went to the Marine High Angle Course.”

Even as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq raged, the 3/75 Ranger sniper platoon continued to run roughshod through competitions. During Burkhart's time with the section, they had teams that won the International Sniper Competition, the Canadian International Competition, and the Special Operations Sniper Competition, defeating snipers from Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and Special Forces in the process.

“Our guys were really on point so I was learning from amazing marksmen,” Burkhart said. “I didn't feel like I was really far behind.”

Van Aalst finally made his first combat deployment in 2004 to Afghanistan. But just as Iraq was heating up, Afghanistan had begun to cool, with the initial postinvasion flurry of activity followed by a slower-paced game of cat and mouse.

“Most of the time we were in support of actual direct action elements,” said Murphy, who went to Afghanistan on his first deployment as a 3/75 sniper a few months later in late '04. “It wasn't like Carlos Hathcock stuff, going out with a spotter for five days and hiding out, looking to shoot some communist general or something like that. We were going out there with actual rifle platoons and we would support them however they could best employ precision fire.”

During Murphy's three-month deployment, they ran a couple dozen missions. That pace would pale in comparison to what was to come in subsequent deployments. However, the more measured speed did allow the snipers to operate with the sort of creativity that would prove impossible due to the punishing operational tempo the Rangers would inflict on their adversaries in the more target-rich Iraq AO in the months and years ahead.

The 3/75 snipers pushed their operational boundaries in search of targets with a dearth of obvious objectives to keep them busy.

Additionally, the line platoons still did not know how to best leverage the battalion's potent sniper capability. However, Careaga saw that as an opportunity rather than a handicap and one that resulted in two combat jumps in the opening months of the Afghanistan War for the sniper.

“They just didn't know how to use snipers properly, so we just told them how we could best be used. And that was just awesome,” Careaga said. “They didn't know but we did. It wasn't a bad thing. I think it actually worked better for us. It allowed us to pretty much pick our own missions.”

On multiple occasions, Van Aalst led a team of six snipers through the night, a loose pack of shadows shifting from observation post to observation post. In the final hours of darkness they built hide sites so they could scan the valley below for targets in the following hours.

“We did that quite a bit,” Careaga said. “Afghanistan, with all that open terrain, was more permissive to that kind of mission.”

Their initiative and ingenuity resulted in a handful of kills in what otherwise was an uneventful deployment.

Murphy and his sniper partner also conducted a handful of recon patrols that bordered on clandestine. At various times decked out in civilian attire, traditional Afghani robes, or Afghani military uniforms, they traveled in NSTVs—nonstandard tactical vehicles—to scout out potential overwatch positions for upcoming raids.

Most memorable of these atypical ops were the aerial platform support missions.

“Of course those stand out in my mind,” Murphy said. “On one occasion we went out at night—me and the other sniper on one side of a Little Bird and a rifleman on the other side just in case we needed to get off the helicopter and take someone prisoner.

“I never knew that a Little Bird could fly that fast. You're just hanging outside the aircraft. Like
‘holy shit.'

“We got to the target area just as the assault elements were rolling up in their Humvees. We pulled security over the objective, watching specifically for anyone running up on the objective or maneuvering on our guys while they captured the HVT on that objective.

“But nothing really happened.”

3/75 along with elements from its sniper platoon would next deploy to Iraq. The days of nothing really happening were about to come to an end.

 

5

Triple Threat

As the Global War on Terror altered in shape, so too did the role of the nation's most elite snipers.

In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been overwhelmed by the initial onslaught. Forced to accept the military and technological superiority of the presumed “paper tiger,” terrorist leadership and foot soldiers alike scattered into hiding. Some sought the shelter of borders while others dispersed among the local population.

As a result, Herculean efforts to scale perilous mountainsides no longer granted AFO teams a vantage point in the clouds from which they could call death down from the sky on collected masses of enemy fighters with any sort of regularity.

Instead, the Joint Special Operations Command became more and more focused on executing surgical snatch-and-grabs and decapitation strikes aimed at high-value targets. As such, JSOC's special mission units were presented with the opportunity to demonstrate their highly vaunted capabilities in dark arts such as close-quarters combat.

Despite contrasting political and geographical considerations in Iraq, the same was not only also true there, but especially so. Delta Force had begun storming compounds with increasing frequency as it made its first steps toward developing a powerful capability to systematically tear apart loosely connected networks of enemy combatants, strategic piece by strategic piece.

The rounding up of Hussein and his cronies who represented Iraq's 55 Most Wanted was only a minor preamble to the statement JSOC was about to make. The hard-hitting, up-close nature of this next phase of GWOT had shifted the spotlight over to the assaulters.

Even when special operations forces are viewed through a relatively microscopic lens, the assaulters that lend the line squadrons at Delta and DEVGRU their heart and soul are regarded as exemplars of soldiering in its highest form … and for good reason.

Potential operators are first identified through methods that are custom designed and proven over time. They sift through the nation's most battle-hardened and accomplished warriors and then choose only those with the traits required to excel at an even higher level.

Those who pass selection are then subjected to months of exhaustive training that forces their bodies and minds to push the upper bounds of human limits. If one actually succeeds in making it through to see the light at the other end of this demanding pipeline, they are issued customized and technologically advanced gear available nowhere else that allows them to effectively leverage their extensive training. They are then given the operational support necessary to conduct the most high-priority and tactically challenging operations in existence at a breakneck pace.

The vast majority of well-proven SOF veterans who attempt to enter their ranks never make it to this point. Those who do now occupy the uppermost stratum in the warfighter hierarchy.

And yet, there exists an even more advanced tier to which they may eventually ascend.

*   *   *

Even though the mission had evolved, the importance of JSOC's recce assets did not diminish in the least. Rather, these snipers' stacked skill sets were called upon in new ways, and they again responded by demonstrating a total mastery of modern warfare.

Collectively, Delta and DEVGRU's snipers stand as the most seasoned, capable, and versatile human assets in the nation's arsenal.

The term “sniper” is actually something of a misnomer when discussing the special mission units. The word naturally directs one's mental images downrange in a Hathcockian trajectory centered around ghillie-suited soldiers stalking their prey with bolt action rifles.

And while it's certainly the case that the recce snipers must be capable of delivering precision fire at great distance and with superior accuracy, that is just one of the three primary—and in some ways, contradictory—roles with which they are tasked.

In addition to the expectation that they outshoot even single-purpose snipers hailing from other units, JSOC's recce operators must also be capable of executing violent, close-range raids with the same surgical exactness as their Tier 1 assaulter brothers. On top of that, they must be able to blend in to hostile, nonpermissive environments to conduct high-risk reconnaissance and surveillance that may be considered too dangerous for even the most brazen intelligence operatives.

Each of these three broad disciplines is extreme in its demands, requiring intensive training across a wide range of tactics and techniques that test one's physical, mental, and psychological strength.

They also require different approaches, from the distant (physically and emotionally) sniper, to the hyperaggressive assaulter, to the unassuming clandestine operative.

It is a position that requires maturity and experience in addition to inordinate amounts of training.

“They're assaulters first; rarely does anyone go straight to sniper troop out of OTC,” explained Larry Vickers, who spent fifteen years in Delta Force as an assaulter and combat marksmanship instructor.

With few exceptions, JSOC's recce ranks are filled with operators who registered years of exceptional service as an assaulter before transitioning to the sniper role.

Vickers himself trained as an SF sniper prior to his arrival in the Unit, attending the Special Operations Target Interdiction Course (SOTIC). He's far from an unusual case in that regard. But established—even celebrated—snipers start the process all over again when they graduate to the next level due to unique demands required of SMU snipers.

Combined with their previous time spent in high-speed units such as the Army's Special Forces, the 75th Ranger Regiment, or the Navy SEALs, it's not unusual for an operator to have already accumulated a decade of special operations experience before he first begins to learn the ropes as a Tier 1 sniper.

“Once you become a sniper at DEVGRU … the performance requirement is so high,” said former DEVGRU sniper Craig “Sawman” Sawyer. “You end up in a spot and you try for all your worth to become the best in the world at it. You get a lot more time on the rifle and a lot more support. You have no excuses for failure.”

*   *   *

While the individual operators would strongly disagree, Delta Force and DEVGRU are largely similar units, at least from a broader perspective. There is, perhaps, an 80–90 percent agreement in their respective organizational structures and mission sets. And certainly, they are more similar to one another than Delta is to Army Special Forces or DEVGRU is to the other SEAL Teams in this regard.

However, it's an oversimplification, and often inaccurate, to simply group the two units, their snipers, or the methods by which they are chosen into a single explanation.

The transition for a SEAL who moves from one of the regular Teams to ST6 is less abrupt in some ways than it is for a solider progressing to Delta Force from any other command. The separation between the two levels is not viewed quite so great by many inside the Teams, and the reputation a prospective DEVGRU operator previously earned as a vanilla SEAL will play a significant role determining whether he'll be given a shot at “the big leagues.”

Meanwhile, the chances of a would-be Unit operator—whether he is a Green Beret, Ranger, Marine, or even Information Technology Specialist—is weighted more heavily on their performance during the selection process.

And just as this basic recruitment methodology differs, Delta and DEVGRU also tend to approach tabbing an assaulter for sniper duty differently as well.

Here too the Army unit is more structured and formalized. Following the conclusion of each round of its taxing selection process and follow-up Operator Training Course (OTC), rookie operators are divvied up among the line squadrons via a draft that would not be unfamiliar to fans of professional sports. Similarly, experienced assaulters can be drafted to the recce troop in the same manner.

A selected sniper remains with his previous Sabre Squadron, and again kicks off another round of in-depth training to obtain the skills required to operate in a recce capacity.

With SEAL Team Six, progression tends to be driven more by the career aspirations of its operators. DEVGRU also utilizes a draft following Green Team (its version of OTC), but after that, at a certain point, assaulters may be given the chance to volunteer for a sniper position. While a three-year minimum is the loose guideline, there are examples of SEALs being given the opportunity much sooner based on need and prior experience.

To get technical, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group's four Tactical Development and Evaluation Squadrons—Red, Blue, Gold, and Silver—are split up into three troops of approximately twenty operators apiece. Each troop contains a small sniper element (“RECCE”) to complement its assault teams.