Modern American Snipers (27 page)

Delta sniper Don Hollenbaugh, another country boy from a small town, said, “Maybe because you're bored as a kid, you need some exhilaration in your life. ‘I'm going to do something unique.' And snipers, all they are is hunters. They're just hunting a different cat.”

As teenagers, the Horrigan brothers even formed their own juvenile “paramilitary” force—the Manchaca Liberation Organization—with some high school friends for the fun it. The MLO was mostly harmless; they would get decked out in fatigues and face paint and hone their budding tracking skills—and successfully avoid the police when a frightened neighbor woman would call 911. They were also just a bit devious. Two years running the MLO pulled off a clandestine operation at Crockett High School in Austin, Texas, rappelling into a courtyard and chopping down the Christmas tree with the declaration “MLO was here.” And again, they avoided capture as the principal desperately sought the identities of the culprits.

After graduating high school in 1984, Bob and John Horrigan joined the Army where they would serve alongside one another in A Company of the 75th Ranger Regiment's 3rd Battalion, under the command of a young officer by the name of Stanley McChrystal.

In 1991, Horrigan joined Special Forces as an 18B (Weapons Sergeant) with the 7th Special Forces Group's ODA 721.

Ten years later, he was already a seasoned member of Delta's B Squadron recce troop and one of the men Lt. Col. Pete Blaber tasked with the most demanding and perilous missions in the wake of 9/11.

Horrigan would execute hundreds of additional missions following Operation Anaconda, transitioning from calling down air strikes upon snowy mountain peaks of Afghanistan to leading fellow heroes in the vicious alley and hallway gunfights of Iraq.

In June of 2005, Master Sergeant Horrigan was forty years old and only weeks away from returning home. Once back in the States, he was set to file his retirement papers, move back to Texas with his wife and daughter. There he would focus full-time on his passion as a bladesmith, making knives with his brother. He might even find the time to earn himself another Texas fishing state record or participate in some Iron Man Triathlons.

However, until then, he was still doggedly in pursuit of Zarqawi. Living up to his advanced assaulter tag, Horrigan was the first man through the door of a building in Al Qaim—a known Zarqawi compound.

As he burst through the room, he was shot and killed instantly. Another Delta operator, Michael L. McNulty (who also had an identical twin), was gunned down as well and would die hours later.

Retired Unit assaulter Larry Vickers said, “Bob went in and the dude was hiding in a corner. It was the last building in a compound and the guy was there waiting for them. Bob went in and didn't see him. The guy had zeroed in on him. They went in and the guy shot him and the other guy from the corner.

“And the saddest thing of the whole deal is he was two weeks from coming home and starting his retirement paperwork. Everybody was disturbed that he got killed the way he did. That would have made it sad in any case but he was such a well-liked guy.”

Horrigan was awarded his third Bronze Star posthumously. His loss was a crushing blow inside the Unit as he had helped to shape its newer generation of operators serving as an OTC instructor and had a wide base of admirers inside Delta Force, among both its younger and more experienced soldiers.

Vickers added, “I don't know a single person who didn't like Bob Horrigan—extremely well-liked guy. Honestly, I don't know anybody who didn't. He was a really just engaging guy. He just seemed like one of those guys who could click with anybody. He was thoroughly likeable and very well respected operator.”

*   *   *

Following the deaths of Horrigan and McNulty—which came just over two weeks after fellow Delta solider, Sergeant First Class Steven Langmark, was killed in action in Al Qaim—McChrystal formally requested the aid of the UKSF's Task Force Black.

The UKSF declined due to contrasting rules of engagement and ongoing detention and interrogation concerns. This was to the dismay of SAS commander Richard Williams, who wanted the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service to redirect their focus and join JSOC's fight against AQI rather than continue to pick at the carcass of Hussein's defeated Ba'athist regime.

However, SBS's M Squadron was thrown into the fire a month later when JSOC shared critical intelligence relating to an al-Qaeda network as its forces were already overcommitted elsewhere.

In Operation Marlborough—which was executed jointly with the 75th Ranger Regiment and the ISA—SBS operators approached the target building both from the air and from the ground, with SBS snipers loaded in Puma helicopters in an aerial overwatch.

Immediately, a suicide bomber ran out of the compound and detonated himself just outside the target. The explosion very nearly caused one of the Pumas to crash into the rooftops below. Another Puma spotted a suicide-vest-laden squirter attempting a mad dash out the back. However, a heliborne SBS sharpshooter took him down with clutch accuracy.

The SBS assault team then proceeded to take down the objective, neutralizing a third suicide bomber inside.

The UKSF would continue to work in an increasingly tight fashion with JSOC as the war went on, gradually enmeshing operations to the point that they were essentially de facto JSOC special mission units themselves.

*   *   *

The following year, B Squadron escalated the campaign to wipe out the elusive Zarqawi and acquire a measure of vengeance, blowing doors off hinges and clearing buildings with even greater intensity. Over a six-week span, Operation Arcadia resulted in the killing of more than a hundred AQI fighters. This push demonstrated the expansive powers JSOC had harnessed by 2006, fusing the intelligence obtained on site following each successive raid with that which was collected from the air, backed by the analysis of hundreds of hours of UAV footage.

During one particularly eventful weekend, B Squadron shredded through an entire network in the so-called Triangle of Death located southwest of Baghdad. On a single evening, Delta operators raided four houses in Latifiyah, taking out the gang's leader, Abu Mustafa, and more than a dozen of his men.

Supremely confident following their rolling sequence of assaults, the squadron hit another compound the following day, electing to go in without the cover of darkness in its favor. This proved to be a critical miscalculation that would have lethal consequences.

Under intense fire as quickly as they departed the 160th SOAR Black Hawks that ferried them to the objective, the Delta Force assaulters were pinned down. A Night Stalker AH-6M Little Bird was then knocked out of the sky by enemy fire while attempting to defend the Unit operators on the ground. The helicopter's pilots, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Jamie Week and Major Matthew Worrell, were killed in the crash.

The assault element continued to pursue its objective, killing more than two dozen terrorists and apprehending four more in the process. However, despite scoring a tactical victory in the face of overwhelming odds, B Squadron's top officer was relieved of his command due to the mission plan that was deemed over-the-top even considering the Unit's ultra-aggressive stance.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, the close-knit collaborative relationship that formed between Delta's B Squadron recce snipers and their 3/75 counterparts was forged even stronger after they returned home following the '05 deployment to Mosul.

Multiple Rangers interviewed termed the Delta/Ranger relationship akin to one shared by a big brother and a little brother, and the B Squadron Delta snipers lived up to that unwritten contract, enthusiastically taking the Ranger snipers under their wing.

In '06, RS—the Delta recce Sergeant Major—invited the 3/75 Ranger sniper platoon up to the Unit's expansive, high-tech facility for a two-week advanced sniping master class.

According to one of the ten or so Ranger snipers who attended the session, “It was like drinking from a fire hose; it was the best training of my entire life.”

RS and a couple of other snipers from his troop subjected the Rangers to Delta-style drills. They were instructed on the finer points of climbing and various other tricks of the trade. The Ranger snipers trained with shot timers, worked on barricade shooting, firing with both hands, learned unorthodox positions, and were even introduced to the low-vis vehicle interdiction techniques B Squadron's snipers had used with such lethal efficiency in Mosul.

“They treated us like we were one of them,” a former Ranger said. “It was really nice. We used their gym and they have a frickin' Olympic-sized pool in their compound with diving platforms and everything. The place is an amazing complex.”

The connection carried over to subsequent deployments as the Delta recce operators again took on the role of big brother. In 2007, the B and 3/75 snipers rotated into Baghdad.

A former regime palace in the Green Zone had been transformed into a sort of black SOF village known as Mission Support Fernandez—named after Delta C Squadron Master Sergeant George Andy Fernandez—the first Unit operator killed in the Iraq War.

Adjacent quarters at MSS Fernandez housed not only the Rangers and Delta operators, but also British SAS troops of Task Force Black and an Army Special Force CIF Company, along with a collection of OGA spooks and soldiers from the conventional 1st Armored Division, who “would barely ever go out but were there as a last ditch, ‘Come save our ass with your Abrams tanks' capacity.”

A minirange was set up for pistol training and zeroing rifles, which encouraged further cross-training. One of the Delta recce troop snipers who had worked with RS to train the Ranger snipers in Fort Bragg pulled aside one of the two-man Ranger sniper teams and said, “Anytime you're not going out, I'm paging you and you're coming out with us.”

It was a heady experience for the 3/75 sniper team leader, who found himself in mission briefings surrounded by an abundance of warfighting experience, including the Unit commander along with a bevy of Master Sergeants and Sergeants Major.
“Holy shit—this is crazy.”

Typically, when operating together, the Delta and Ranger snipers would perch on the opposite sides of a 160th SOAR Little Bird's outer benches where they could quickly dismount atop strategically located rooftops to overwatch a raid on a target building.

However, on one occasion, the objective was deemed especially sensitive, with the possibility of escape a genuine concern. As a result, the sniper team was positioned well ahead of the primary raiding party to swat down any potential squirters.

While one Black Hawk loaded up with the primary assault element, another carried just the two Delta snipers, two Ranger snipers, a JTAC (joint terminal attack controller—a soldier trained to direct close air support), and an assaulter armed with a Squad Automatic Weapon, who tagged along in the event things went sideways.

The recce element set down five kilometers from the objective to conduct an offset infil.

“The six of us were on our own,” the Ranger recounted. “We had to walk through a couple villages and set up positions around a big complex, overwatch it for an hour before the full complement of CAG guys flew in. It was a fifty-minute flight and we were put down in the middle of fucking nowhere.
‘We are in some shit right now.'”

While it may have seemed like they were on their own, this small six-man sniper team actually had some pretty serious support in the form of the dedicated aerial assets assigned to them—two F/A-18s, an AC-130, and other platforms waiting on standby.

“The assets that were just flying above us the whole time we were out there … it was pretty amazing,” the former Ranger sniper said. “It was equivalent to the amount of assets a whole conventional Army brigade might get—if they requested it months in advance.”

Once the snipers were in position, the larger Delta Force team swooped in and secured the targeted individuals without incident.

While the evening was not punctuated by a chaotic firefight, merely playing in the big leagues alongside their Tier 1 counterparts proved to be an eye-opening experience for the Ranger snipers.

*   *   *

Working with Delta's recce troop could be an eye-opener for those watching from on high as well. In late 2007, 1st Lieutenant Brian “STUFR” Watts (his call sign had been “Flex” before he was “hostilely renamed”) was at the stick of one of those dedicated assets.

An F-16 pilot with the 421st Fighter Squadron, Watts belonged to one of the three USAF F-16C squadrons that continually rotated through Iraq and served—along with Navy F/A-18s—as the primary close air support platforms watching over the troops.

JSOC's exceedingly brisk OPTEMPO required the air assets remain flexible just to keep up as missions were nonstop and ever in flux. Watts explained, “What the tasking would start off with versus what actually ended up happening—rarely did they gel. After the briefing, the Army liaison guy would come back and say, ‘Okay, here is what you're doing at this time, this time, and this time.…' And then you'd get ready to go and he'd come back in again. ‘Okay, no. Now you're doing this and this.' And then you'd walk out to the jet and it would change again.”

He continued, “I remember my first mission over there. I was getting ready to fly for the first time in a combat zone and the mission literally changed four times before takeoff. It was a kind of surveillance thing for the Tier 1—that's what we classified it over there. They were waiting for a high-value target to come back to a building and they were set to action them, all teed up and ready to go.”

The fighter pilot reflected on the experience of being just one small ($20 million) cog in the JSOC counterterrorism machine. He said, “A lot of times we would provide overwatch. Now how many assets they had besides us … What we kind of found out was we'd think we'd be on to something but they'd also have two Predators or whatever. You'd be thinking, ‘Okay, we're all ready to go
,
' but, ‘Nope, we've got a drone.' ‘What the fuck? Why are we sitting here burning holes in the sky?'