Modern American Snipers (23 page)

While Van Aalst was assigned to AMU, “the entire Ranger Regiment had deployed multiple times and guys had combat jumps and CIBs [Combat Infantry Badges] and VA [Van Aalst] hadn't done anything. It's a fucked up way of thinking but that's the way the military works and it's the way soldiers think.”

Murphy earned his Ranger Tab and then joined the sniper platoon shortly following Van Aalst's first (rather quiet) combat deployment. He quickly found his lifelong dream of becoming a special operations sniper to be a nightmare in reality.

“VA became a guy who became well known for breaking balls and he had a trail of figurative dead bodies behind him,” Murphy explained. “It was definitely my worst year in the military if not the worst year of my adult life, period. It was like junior high. It was like a popularity contest. VA and RJ were like the cool guys in the secret tree fort.

“I think it was out of insecurity. Because those guys had done all the shooting competitions and stuff, but now you have these other dudes come in and they already have like six deployments under their belts.”

Murphy recalls a sniper platoon run with an iron fist, complete with power plays to remind subordinates who ran things. “There were just childish displays of power. When VA would shake my hand, he would hold his hand out, but not extend it so I had to bend over and submit to him to shake his hand. That's how it went with me and VA. I'd come into work and say, ‘Good morning, Sergeant,' and he'd would walk right past me and not say anything. That's the type of shit I was dealing with. And the attitude that persisted there rolled down hill to the squad leaders who were under pressure to behave the same way.

“That was VA's style of leadership. He read all these corporate self-help books about how to be the ruthless, cut-throat CEO that destroys everyone in their career conquest, and he'd actually use that stuff.”

While on his first deployment as a Ranger sniper, Murphy found himself in deep due to an undisclosed situation (“nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral. But it was really fucking bad shit overseas in Afghanistan”).

That would quickly result in the end of his career in Sniper Platoon. Murphy was just the latest in a long line of snipers to get their walking papers courtesy of Jared Van Aalst.

Even the manner in which it went down rubbed Murphy the wrong way. He was first clued in by a Ranger from outside the section.

“Hey, Murph, I see you're coming back to the company.”

“Wait—what? No, I'm not.”

“Yeah, you are. Your name's up on the whiteboard.”

“What the fuck is going on?”

Murphy tracked down the sniper platoon sergeant to suss out the validity of the rumors. “I was fucking pissed at VA. I talked to him and he just had this cold—I feel fucked up—attitude.”

“I won't apologize to you for how this happened. I won't apologize for something I did not do.”

“That said, it all went very civilly. We weren't screaming or anything, and in the end we shook hands. In my mind, I was accepting that we were parting ways and would go our own separate ways and do the best we could.”

Murphy was sent back to the line and made a team leader at Alpha Company's 1st Platoon.

“I get there, and I am there for—I am not fucking kidding you—twenty-four hours, and the platoon sergeant gets fired,” he said. “He gets the can and the new platoon sergeant who gets brought in to take over 1st Platoon, A/co, 3/75? Who is that?
Jared Van Aalst
.

“Holy shit. Do I have the worst fucking luck in the world?”

It turns out Murphy's new home had a reputation that went all the way up to USASOC, and it wasn't exactly a sterling one at that. The “Glory Boys” of 1st Platoon were widely considered cowboys and Van Aalst had been rewarded with a coveted position as a platoon sergeant of a rifle platoon—even though it meant leaving the sniper platoon he had nurtured just as it was poised to truly live up to its potential. However, the promotion came with the expectation that he would rein the wayward platoon back in check, and his history as an exacting taskmaster made him the ideal candidate to do exactly that.

According to Murphy, “The platoon always had a reputation for being out of control, so who do you send to take over for an inept platoon sergeant? Someone who is a fucking Nazi like VA who will dig into every little detail of every goddamn thing. He'd get pissed off at you for the way you filled up a water can.”

As it turns out, the two proceeded to work together in a highly productive, professional manner when removed from the 3/75 Sniper Platoon pressure cooker. And it's a good thing too because their subsequent deployment in Iraq would prove intense.

“That antagonism wasn't there like it was before. Professionally, we worked together well. But personally, I never forgave him and I always fucking hated him.”

*   *   *

As the operations stacked up during the summer of 2005, so too did the kill count for 3rd Battalion's sniper platoon, and in turn, the number of believers it had inside battalion.

During Burkhart's first deployment as a sniper, Task Force Red captured more than six hundred insurgents and killed well over a hundred during their three-month deployment in the Mosul region of the country.

“Approximately 75 percent of those kills came from just our two sniper teams,” he said. “It was just crazy. It was Wild West shit.

“That deployment really set the bar for how everybody else perceived our sniper platoon. Before that, it was, ‘Oh, whatever. Snipers, we don't really need them. We can take care of all the stuff ourselves.' I think they really realized how much of an asset we were and how much of a ground force multiplier we were. It set the tone for the next few years I was there.”

Subsequently, Ranger officers actively sought the snipers' input during mission workups rather than simply directing (or outright dismissing) them.

“It's funny—as soon as you kill a few people for them they totally change their tune,” Burkhart added with a laugh. “It was bullshit that it took that, but yeah, it was really good. I see that as the turning point for us and that was when Iraq was really ramping up. Really,
really
ramping up. It was nuts there. It was just craziness.”

*   *   *

While the 3/75 sniper platoon played a somewhat more robust—or at least varied—role during the prior deployment to Afghanistan, that was the product of a less-than-scorching pace and a desire to find a niche in which they could effectively contribute. However, in Iraq the platoons were constantly hitting objectives and the snipers' capabilities were now very much in demand.

As a result, over the next few years, they would serve purely as direct action snipers. Recon ops would have to be shelved until another time and another AO.

“Nah, man—you're not ISR,” a former 3/75 sniper said. “You already have other elements out there doing that stuff, you know what I mean? If you did that, you could burn the target and then it was over. The thing was, we were rolling out every night and it was time sensitive. You didn't have time to go out there and do your thing. [The platoons] were constantly on the move.”

*   *   *

“When the war first started out, nobody knew what to do with the augmentees, like the snipers and stuff,” former 3/75 sniper team leader GM said. “Now everyone knows what to do with them—the dogs, the snipers … everyone knows the job.”

Burkhart added, “I learned the way from my first team leader and I took that and ran with it. It kind of evolved a little bit. They gave us a lot of freedom after those first couple of deployments. Everything was going so well that most people kind of stayed off our backs.”

The 3/75 Ranger snipers had hundreds upon hundreds of raids with which to perfect their methodology and practices in a sort of twisted, death-dealing take on
Groundhog Day
.

The snipers had to quickly absorb intel on their next objective and plan accordingly. After the team leaders and squad leaders were paged ahead of an operation, the sniper team leader would report to the Joint Operations Center to be brought up to speed.

“Okay, this guy's cell phone is locked,” Burkhart said, providing an example. “I would talk to my F2—the intelligence guys at the JOC who could print out the GRG [grid reference graphic, a black-and-white satellite overview of the target area superimposed on a numbered grid].”

The GRG was then used to study shadows to determine the heights of potential overwatch perches. “Okay, here's the target house.… Where do we want to go? Do we want to go on the back side or do we want to go on the front side?”

The sniper team leader would generally confer with the platoon sergeant he was supporting, offer suggestions, and then take the assault team's preference into account.

GM said, “After a while, when you're working with a platoon, you know how they act and you can brief it in a split second. I'll do this and this. You look at a map and know instantly, I'll go on this roof right here.”

Initially, the snipers leaned toward setting up on the back side of target buildings (“that's where the insurgents always ran to escape”). However, that all changed when a 3/75 Ranger platoon was ambushed during the '05 deployment in Tal Afar, a city located fifty kilometers west of Mosul.

A terrorist training complex had been established in Tal Afar to train the foreign fighters pouring in from Syria, and thus became a primary hunting ground for the 75th Ranger Regiment.

When an unsuspecting assault force approached their target house, they were greeted in the courtyard by a bombardment of grenades from awaiting insurgents.

“These guys had chutes built almost like rain gutters and they snuck up on the rooftop and started hammering them with grenades,” Burkhart said. “They came popping out in the courtyard where you had a whole platoon of guys. They got pretty messed up.”

After that, the rooftops became a heightened priority. “Even though we had ISR flying above us, those guys are fast enough that they can act before you have a chance to communicate, ‘Hey, there's dudes up there.'”

Once a workable overwatch location was identified, the snipers would typically head out toward the target with the assault team in vehicles only to be dropped off a kilometer or so short in order to maneuver into position on foot.

GM explained, “They'd let you out first, and you'd run up first and set up before the element. Call up and tell them you're set and they'd move up. You had to be quick because if anybody gets wind, they call each other and it's all lost.”

Actually getting into position occasionally required its own special tools and skill set. For direct action snipers in an urban environment, the ability to scale buildings is every bit as vital as their talents as a marksman.

“We had these backpack ladders with hooks on them,” Burkhart said. “We'd climb some random building. I'd even carry a climbing aider in my pocket so I could climb ledges and terraces. It was kind of sketchy, now that I think back on it. There would be a lot of times you'd be like forty feet off the ground and if you fell you'd just land on the pavement below.”

Working almost exclusively at night forced the Ranger snipers to make heavy use of Mil-Dot range estimation—the process of acquiring distance utilizing the milliradian reticles found on their optics, the known height or width of an object in the distance, and a simple trigonometric equation.

“We really worked on not having to dial in our scopes,” Burkhart said. “We didn't have night-vision rangefinders and everything we did was at night so I couldn't look at something and go, ‘Oh, that's five hundred meters away.' I had to estimate and hopefully hit the guy when I put a round downrange.

“I think that's why guys in Ranger Battalion had such an advantage and were so much more effective than a lot of units. We shot so much and we were always on the range. We put in an amazing amount of time just getting that feel, that muscle memory.”

During training, 3/75 snipers would practice this skill by first estimating the range with their eyes and their Mil-Dots and then confirm the actual distance with a laser rangefinder.

Experience operating in Iraq proved crucial too because markers back home didn't necessarily translate. “I went to Iraq so much, I got really used to certain things,” Burkhart explained. “How big certain things are and how they should look from a certain distance away. Cars over there are smaller than in the USA, especially like the full-size pickup trucks. When you're looking at vehicles, you kind of have to judge like what does a little Toyota pickup truck look like compared to a full-size pickup truck.”

Once in position, the platoon would be notified and begin their advance while the snipers trained their SR-25s on the target in anticipation of whatever was to follow.

GM explained, “The assault element would go do their thing, and we'd be overwatch making sure nobody climbed up on a roof to do anything or run out the back side. It was an evolution. You would call up too. I was constantly looking through windows with my scope. ‘Hey, you've got people moving around.'”

“A lot of times nothing would happen,” Burkhart added. “Most of the time, nothing would happen. But when it did, it was generally pretty chaotic.”

*   *   *

Late in their 2005 deployment to Mosul, 3rd Battalion located and eliminated Abu Zayd, al-Qaeda's emir of Mosul.

Just a month earlier, he made headlines when a Task Force Red raid intercepted a scathing letter penned by Zayd and intended for Abu al-Zarqawi. Zayd's growing desperation in the wake of the Rangers' nonstop assaults was obvious, as he complained of the local insurgents' lessened ability to carry out meaningful attacks while warning that Mosul could soon be lost too.