Modern American Snipers (15 page)

Later, the requirements progress to firing a rifle with blanks while avoiding observation. Once fired, they must be able to shoot a second time without being seen as the instructors scan for disrupted foliage and the like.

“They are taught to move as if we are looking directly at them the whole time,” Davis explained. “The idea is to train them for the worst-case scenario. If you are stalking an enemy, you don't know when that enemy might take his binos and look right at you. That means 100 percent you have to be moving as if he's staring right at you.”

The former SEAL sniper mentor also added that while many real-world stalks take place under conditions very different from one in which a ghillie-suited sniper patiently inches his way into location in the brush, the skills readily translate. “A lot of people ask, ‘Oh, we're in an urban environment now, why are you teaching these guys out in the bush?' It's because the fundamentals at their core are the fundamentals of performance. It doesn't matter if you're in a mall following someone or if you're in the field. Either way you need to think about your background, your movements, dead space, cover and concealment, and blending into the environment.”

Scout phase provides the sniper with the mental tools to juggle these requirements even as they are constantly in flux.

Davis said, “This is where you also start all the sniper games. We have observation drills where we hide objects in a field and give them a certain amount of time to find ten items. They have to get incredibly good at systematically scanning their environment to pick out whatever they are looking for.”

Among the observation drills are KIM—Keep-in-Memory—games. Davis is a master at these, capable of memorizing thirty students' phone and social security numbers after reading the list just once. To show them what will soon be expected of them, Davis asked classrooms filled with new students for their names and in return he rattled off their personal information.

“We teach these guys the skill sets to remember anything,” Davis explained. “I could teach them to remember a deck of cards in order if that's what I wanted them to do.”

While it might seem strange to some that the first month and a half of the course is focused on skills other than sending bullets at targets from great distances, former DEVGRU sniper Wasdin confirmed the importance of the less violent aspects of being a sniper.

“The thing about a sniper is that we are trained observers,” he said. “Way more times than not, when I went on an op I didn't shoot anybody. But I damn sure got a lot of information, whether it was terrain, how many stories a building is, or a guard patrol routine.

“If I see a guard patrol routine on a building, I know when to send my assault team in to avoid that patrol. The big thing about being a sniper is playing KIM games. That way all the stuff you observe, you can go back and relay it. You might be pulling the trigger 10 percent of the time, but you're observing 100 percent of the time.

“You can't take most average people and just train them to be a SEAL sniper. Most people just don't possess that attention to detail. First of all, most people don't want it. People think they want it but don't have the intestinal fortitude to get it. Many times I was there freezing, baking, getting mobbed by mosquitos, snakes crawling across me, or whatever, and you're observing the entire time.”

The final seven weeks are the sniper phase, where the sweet science of shooting is finally mastered. The finer points of ballistics are drilled into students as they learn how to practically apply them in the field.

Among the drills used to train the sniper students are unknown distance shooting with targets located on hills at various ranges. The students are not told the distance, forcing them to measure it using the Mil-Dots inside their reticles. They accomplish this by utilizing the trigonometric milliradian to calculate the distance to an object—such as an average-sized human—based on its assumed height or width.

Davis said, “They're using their eyeballs with something very far and fuzzy. That's a skill set in and of itself. When they shoot the target, they have to determine whether they missed high, low, left, or right, and that's another philosophical conversation right there. They then make corrections. They typically make corrections that are too small. If you really sit back and do the math, if you missed, you had to have missed by a certain amount.”

Another category of shooting drill is called “snaps and movers.” Set at a known distance range, targets ranging from the size of a human head to a full E-size target snap into place or move from one side of the range to the other.

“We go out to eight hundred yards in that and they're hitting moving, man-sized targets,” Davis said. “Again, they calculate the math based on the speed they're moving and the distance and then they have to pull the shot off at the right moment so that the bullet meets up with a moving target.”

*   *   *

Upon graduation, Kyle was among the very first SEAL snipers sent to combat where this modernized training course and its products would be field-tested. The results would be convincing.

He was a natural in the role and the course provided him with the tools to provide a devastating protection presence for his countrymen downrange.

Kyle jokingly referred to himself as an “L” rather than a SEAL. He wasn't particularly fond of time spent underwater or parachuting. Soon that “L” would be just as applicable in reference to his lethality, and eventually, in reference to his forthcoming status as a legend.

Interestingly, in the same way that Chris Kyle developed into a standout SEAL despite his aversion to diving and jumping, both Brandon Webb and Eric Davis admitted that they became SEAL snipers and, later, chief architects of the redevelopment of the SEAL sniper program despite being somewhat less than hard-core shooting enthusiasts.

Davis said, “Chris was from Texas. He hunted and did rodeo. He lived his life the way a lot of people believe you should. He was able to self-sustain, care for himself, change a tire, skin a deer … stuff like that. That's a really good attribute for a sniper—that's really their element—the gun range, the dirt, the dust. Where I was like, I don't really like shooting. I mean, I enjoy shooting a little bit, but the other sniper instructors, they would hunt. I was clearly different than them.”

However, Kyle's preference would prove perfectly matched to the war at hand in Iraq just as SEAL leadership was allowing its men to contribute at the level they themselves knew they could.

“It was a perfect time for him to be a SEAL and the perfect place for him to operate,” Davis said. “I'd rather be growing my hair out long, wearing civilian clothes, and using surveillance equipment or diving with rebreathers and stuff like that. But Chris was like, ‘No, no, put me on the ground and let me shoot some folks here.'”

Both would happen soon enough.

 

7

Kingpin

With Hussein's forces soundly routed, the remnants of his Ba'athist regime were rooted out from their holes just as Saddam himself had been, and, with the deposed dictator's cronies largely rounded up, the Iraq War was effectively nearing its conclusion.

Unfortunately, a different, far uglier Iraq War was restocking the battlefield even faster than the old pieces could be removed.

The coalition was initially in denial over what was transpiring as it focused its sights on the Fedayeen paramilitary force and other FREs (Former Regime Elements). But while few Iraqis shed tears over the end of Hussein's oppressive reign, his removal did create a void that wasn't completely sealed by the occupying forces.

As hoped, the swift and decisive victory set the conditions to create a new land of freedom and opportunity. However, that new freedom provided a multitude of diverse groups the opportunity to reshape Iraq to suit their desires, and many of them proved willing to do so by the most depraved and macabre means imaginable.

Following a near-instantaneous victory over the Iraqi Army, the coalition attempted to impose order while harried by small but persistent pockets of resistance. Initially thought to be largely composed of guerrilla fighters who either remained loyal to the nation's former ruler or were disenchanted nationalists struggling to scratch out an existence as the country was reshaped, the makeup of the insurgency shifted to something darker, hidden beneath a veneer of overly optimistic situational reports.

New players emerged. Power in country was no longer exclusive to the likes of CENTCOM Commander General John P. Abizad, Ambassador Paul Bremer, or JSOC Commander Stanley McChrystal. Its splintered shards were also being wielded by the likes of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who sensed opportunity as he had a ready audience composed of the nation's Shia majority. They had long suffered under Hussein's former regime, and now he saw a new enemy in the occupying force to galvanize his forces against.

Another name was increasingly whispered among the militant Sunni opposition—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—a Jordanian terrorist thug whose shockingly brutal methods saw him rapidly increase his profile while transforming this new Iraq War into the centralized battleground of a truly global conflict.

The nation slowly devolved into a confusing and chaotic mire of unrelenting violence, as each successive vicious strike begat its response, escalating an array of intersecting wars. The nation was spiraling into a near-unstoppable feedback loop of carnage.

In early 2004, the coalition struggled to get a handle on exactly what was occurring. A mass of motivated, militant actors were operating, but they had not yet merged into more identifiable, organized groups. Many had shared motivations but differed in terms of tactics. Others were in direct ideological conflict but willing to stoop to the same inhuman practices as they traded blows. Still others existed only to pull the strings of one side or the other in order to enflame the hell that was formulating.

However, to the American-led coalition, this vast collection of disparate combatants looked practically identical to one another (and even more problematically, identical to the larger, benign populace they were attempting to secure and protect). Whatever their separations, they all posed a lethal threat to Westerners in country, whether they were military, contractors, journalists, or aid workers.

This new, disturbing reality was brought into sharp focus in the spring of 2004.

*   *   *

Tensions between the coalition and Muqtada al-Sadr's Shia Mahdi Army erupted in late March, setting off a series of battles between the two forces in Baghdad and southern Iraq.

At the same time, a diverse and nebulous collection of fighters, ranging from emboldened nationalist groups, Sunni insurgents, and a flood of foreign Salafi jihadists headlined by the aforementioned Zarqawi, bunkered down in Fallujah, a city of some 320,000 in Anbar Province, forty-five miles west of Baghdad.

Initially viewed as a relatively minor concern, the city grew increasingly unwelcoming throughout 2003 and into 2004. Protests turned into sporadic hit-and-run attacks, which in turn matured into coordinated assaults.

These guerrilla strikes intensified alongside the city's widespread anti-American sentiments. This ultimately took the form of a horrific display of protest and violence that changed the face of the war.

*   *   *

On March 31, four Blackwater USA contractors—Jerry Zovko, Wesley Batalona, Michael Teague, and Scott Helvenston—were ambushed as they attempted a shortcut through the volatile city. They were stopped on Highway 10 and murdered in the streets of Fallujah. Their bodies were desecrated and dismembered. A pair of burnt corpses hung from a bridge that straddled the Euphrates River while the other two remained in the streets, put on display as a gleeful mob mugged for the cameras.

The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) had only recently taken ownership of Anbar Province from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. Prior to the attack on the contractors, they merely contained Fallujah rather than engaged it.

Bremer—the man who effectively ran Iraq at the time—promised an unequivocal response, announcing in threatening terms that the deaths “will not go unpunished.”

I MEF was given its orders to conduct an overwhelming offensive on the city dubbed Operation Vigilant Resolve. Fallujah's inhabitants were given advance warning, as leaflets were dispersed that instructed them to leave, stay inside, or prepare to meet their end.

The city was encircled by a force of more than two thousand Marines and masses of concertina wire. Meanwhile, the insurgents actively prepared their defenses, making an already determined enemy that much more difficult to root out.

It's estimated that a flock of residents totaling more than 100,000 fled the city as a bloody showdown loomed. A series of air strikes and devastatingly precise fire from Scout Snipers allowed the Marines to tighten their grip during the battle's opening week in early April.

Following concerns of mass civilian casualties, a tenuous (and largely one-sided) cease-fire was called on April 9, which only allowed both sides to further entrench their positions in anticipation of an inevitable resumption.

The northern half of the city had been assigned to 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines. During its short time in the province, one of its subcomponents—Echo Company—earned itself an enviable reputation as an unusually fierce fighting force—even among Marine infantrymen. It was also one seemingly destined for what laid ahead, its men having crossed paths with the four Blackwater contractors while out on patrol only days prior to their grisly slaughter.

Echo 2/1 was an extension of its charismatic yet uncompromising leader, Captain Douglass Zembiec. Zembiec's skills were unquestioned—he had been a two-time New Mexico state champion wrestler and then a two-time All-American at the Naval Academy. And he was among the first into Kosovo in the late '90s during Operation Joint Guardian while serving as an officer with the fabled 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company.