Modern American Snipers (31 page)

This fact allowed for the widespread initiation of JSOC's ambitious global strategy, as the Ranger Regiment—while small and elite by almost any practical standard at around two thousand soldiers—was roughly four to five times larger than the combined forces of Delta and DEVGRU.

This allowed the Ranger Regiment to literally be in two places at once and was heavily deployed in both theaters throughout.

McChrystal helped to push his old unit further to the fore. The Ranger Regiment had rotated commands with SEAL Team Six in Afghanistan, and the units regularly coordinated their efforts, running joint ops and alternating HVT hits. They were not precisely equal partners in this arrangement, but in the majority of circumstances, they were effectively so.

However, a number of Rangers noted that it generally lacked the big brother/little brother dynamic with DEVGRU that it shared with Delta Force (which does, it should be noted, recruit a large percentage of its operators from the Regiment). The SEALs were more likely to treat them like the “blocking force to the stars”—the outdated BHD image that infuriates so many modern Rangers.

One Ranger noted that he'd taken part in high-profile operations in the Afghanistan theater alongside SEAL Team Six (“stuff that made
CNN Headline News
”) that ended up getting credited solely to DEVGRU.

The Navy has always shown a rare talent for marrying merit with marketability, and the SEALs have long been a powerful recruitment tool.

So it wasn't all that unusual that a skinny kid raised by a military family in the Northeast wanted nothing more than to become a SEAL someday.

Nick Irving was a schoolyard sniper-in-training: he made his own ghillie suits and practiced stalking the other kids in the playground while in middle school. He devoured all the Carlos Hathcock books and DVDs and read all about Vietnam-era SOF.

But once he saw the Charlie Sheen flick
Navy SEALs,
his future was set.

Irving joined the United States Naval Sea Cadet Corps and went through “baby SEAL” training where teenagers receive coaching from SEAL instructors and even take the actual SEAL PT test.

However, there was one problem that he couldn't see. Literally. He couldn't see—at least not colors the way the armed forces require.

He only discovered this when it was time to sign on the dotted line. Straight out of high school, Irving was ready to take his first official steps toward becoming a career SEAL in 2004.

And then it was time to take the test for color blindness. “The only page I could read in that book was the page you're not supposed to read,” Irving said.

A motivated Army nurse heard what happened and pulled the defeated wannabe-SEAL into her office.

“Hey, you want to be in the Army?”

Irving retook the test, only this time he aced it—fourteen out of fourteen. He didn't prove he could differentiate colors so much as he could follow the finger of the nurse as she traced the invisible numbers, but either way, he was now in the Army.

He was then introduced to an Army Sergeant who had also been made aware of Irving's dilemma.

“I heard you wanted to be a SEAL. Well, we have something like that called Rangers.”

“What the fuck is that? Is it hard?”

“Yeah.”

“Do they have snipers?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, sign me up.”

*   *   *

Despite his obvious desire, Irving not only struggled to get into the military, he also struggled to even make it through Basic Training. He wasn't in BUD/S, he wasn't yet in RIP, but he was shocked to find himself pushed mentally and physically right from the very start.

It was a dilemma of his own making. Irving had overtrained prior to joining up in anticipation of the strain that awaited him and suffered from stress fractures to his tibia and fibula.

It didn't help that he came to the Army with the nickname “Stick Figure”—which at five seven and 110 pounds he well deserved.

However, he gritted it out. He made it through Basic, and then Airborne. Next up—RIP—the Ranger Indoctrination Program. He kept on fighting and in the end he was one of just seven out of an original eighty to be standing at the end.

Oh well, that just left more food for Irving. “I went into Ranger Battalion and our chow hall was just fucking epic. All you could eat buffet set up and it was just exclusive to us.”

Irving quickly filled out, packing on fifty pounds of muscle. “I wasn't used to eating three meals a day,” he explained. “Dinner for me would sometimes be a box of candy or something because we didn't have that much money. Usually on either Friday or Sunday there would be an actual dinner. Other than that was like scraps of whatever left over.”

Thrown into 3/75 just when the Rangers were thrown into the thick of it themselves, Irving logged three consecutive combat deployments in Iraq during the period of its greatest severity, serving as a “door kicker, Machine Gunner, Stryker Driver, .50-Cal Gunner … any big gun is what my job was.”

However, even as he was still learning exactly what it was that Rangers were and what Rangers did, he was reminded of his original schoolyard dreams.

*   *   *

The real-life demonstration provided by 3/75's lethal sniper platoon in rapid succession near Tikrit during Irving's first deployment in 2005 was a better recruitment tool than any Charlie Sheen movie.

Two of the platoon's snipers—“SM” and “AC”—took out a sentry with a simultaneous 3-2-1 shot to kick off an assault that left seven foreign fighters dead. The snipers immediately transitioned to aerial overwatch, engaging a pack of insurgents who were attempting to swarm a downed Little Bird from the bench of another MH-6. And then the coup de gr
â
ce came when a terrorist on the roof of a three-story building attempted to maneuver on the Ranger element below.

SM and AC, back from aerial platform support duty and reintegrated with the rifle platoon, pulled off another coordinated 3-2-1 kill—this time a double headshot that created such force the combatant's head essentially exploded while his body cartwheeled to the ground below, landing right in front of Irving.

Irving looked at the man on the ground and then he looked up at the snipers.

“Holy shit. I want that job.”

The young Ranger immediately started pestering the guys in the sniper platoon to try to find his way in. He said, “I started plucking their brains—what do I have to know and all this stuff? I never was a smart kid—graduated with a 1.7. I came out of high school and I sucked at math. I'm going to go fucking kill people, I don't need school. That was my mind-set. But once I saw that, it was game on. I wanted to be a full-fledged sniper at that point and I studied my ass off, worked out, read all the books, and talked to all the guys that I could.”

*   *   *

In 2005, after Jared Van Aalst became a platoon sergeant in a rifle company and Robby Johnson returned to the Army Marksmanship Unit, new leadership took over the 3/75 sniper platoon.

One of the major changes was the introduction of a selection process—something the Rangers already in the platoon saw as a step in the wrong direction.

“GM,” a former 3/75 Ranger, explained, “Some guys came in who wanted a selection, where you had to ruck and do all this stupid stuff. ‘We're going to have you do this song and dance.' Honestly, you didn't need all that. You just needed an interview to see a guy's character and the quality of the guy. You didn't get any better guys. Honestly, you got worse guys because you got away from what you were looking for.

“Hey, he's in shape.… Well, that's nice; we're all pretty much in shape. But is he going to be a thinker? Can he work by himself with just another guy and perform?”

Isaiah Burkhart concurred. “I actually didn't like that shit. I thought it was bullshit. The right guy may not be the best at whatever, but they are just a good fit. It just gave people a reason to judge other people. ‘This guy did the road march faster than so-and-so.' I don't give a fuck how fast you road march.”

However, having gone through the process himself, Irving saw its value. He explained, “It was a little smokefest. It was like a week long where you do this PT test in full kit, climbing ropes, different types of ladders, test to see if you're scared of heights—which I'm fucking terrified of—and you do that and take two psych evals. After that the veteran snipers interview you and decide if they want you on their sniper platoon. There's only like fourteen, fifteen guys that are snipers in the entire 3rd Ranger Battalion and they want to keep it a tightknit family.

“Looking back at it, I do think the selection was a good thing to have. At the time I thought it was pointless because we've all had three or four deployments under our belt and endured the suckfest. But guys can get lackadaisical back on the line.”

Irving had put in his time and finally got a shot to become a 3/75 sniper. He had multiple combat deployments, earned his Ranger Tab, and now he'd passed sniper selection.

And with that, he became 3rd Battalion Sniper Platoon's first black sniper. As had always been the case in the Regiment, it was basically a nonissue. “When I first got to Battalion, there were three other black guys in Battalion. And after my first six months in, those guys were already gone. That made me and my 1st Sergeant the only ones there. I didn't get treated any different or anything like that. I went to Sniper Platoon and I was the first black sniper in 3rd Battalion's history. No one treated me any different. It was like, ‘That's pretty cool, man,' but that's as far as it went. It was just, ‘You have a job to do; you're a sniper like the rest of us.'”

Once in, Irving was loaded up with six months of consecutive sniper training, attending both military and civilian courses. They ranged from the standard U.S. Army Sniper School to various other courses that provided more specialized high-angle and urban training.

“We did the Army Sniper School and then after that we just sent the guys to every civilian sniper school we possibly could,” he said. “I think out of those six months I was Stateside, I only had the chance to sit in my own home, like, one week total.”

All of Irving's previous training and deployments led up to a particularly intense four-month run in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2009. The platoon he and his spotter were attached to was engaged in brutal firefights on a nightly basis.

Irving was there to tip the odds in the Rangers' favor.

From March to July of that year, he tallied up thirty-three confirmed sniper kills, an enhanced reputation, and a new nickname with a considerably higher cool factor than “Stick Figure.”

A couple of Rangers from 2nd Platoon sought Irving out at his compound.

“I heard you killed like seven-hundred-something guys.”

“What?”

“Yeah, man. Everyone is calling you the Reaper.”

The platoon actively jumped on the budding legend and Irving's accumulating feats were nightly discussions. “You're like the angel of death out there,” he was told. “How many did you get tonight?” The Rangers kept tallies and continued to spread the word, although the “legend has it” number ballooned as word traveled, as it tends to do. In northern Afghanistan there was talk of a “reaper down south” with 150 kills.

*   *   *

Irving is a huge sports fan and often speaks in football metaphors. His explanation of exactly where a sniper team fits in with the platoon it's supporting is a bit surprising. It's also quite apt in reflection.

“[Being a 3/75 Ranger sniper] is a full-time, dedicated job,” he explained. “There's no real interaction with the line guys. We stay in our little cage and do sniper shit, which is pretty much math and free climbing.

“We're like the field goal kicker on a football team. The team needs you to step in to win the game and they'll call you out. You have this nice, good-looking uniform.… You know you're not really going to be in the shit and get beat up the whole game like the other guys. But you can either win the game for them or you can lose it.”

He continued, expounding on the lonely existence of the specialist who is something of an outcast. A valued, critically important outcast, but an outcast all the same and only as good as their last shot.

“If we're in a big firefight and I can see the guys who are shooting at us but I can't make that shot, everyone looks at me. I've missed shots overseas—not many—but I've missed ones where you have that feeling where you want to walk away and go in a room and huddle into a little ball and cry.”

This hero/goat discrepancy is typically determined by a matter of inches (or less). But in some cases, minutes are what make the difference.

*   *   *

Irving and his spotter were presented with six prime targets—the Taliban commanders of Helmand Province. Frantically awaiting permission to take the shot, Irving finally gave himself the green light. (
“Fuck that—we're at war and they all have weapons.”
)

All six were dropped in rapid succession. However, when the platoon went to examine the bodies, there was nothing to be found save for some intestinal tissue.

“So where's the bodies, Reaper?”

Taunted by the Rangers' equivalent to running backs and linebackers, the lethal field goal kicker responded, “Fuck you, I see the guts right here. I know I shot them.”

The following day the Rangers watched an infrared camera feed from an UAV and spotted sweet—if gruesome—redemption for Irving. The drone picked up imagery of a large ceremonial funeral procession with six dead bodies—bodies that had, apparently, been collected from the battlefield by their tribesmen just ahead of the Rangers' arrival the day before.