Modern American Snipers

by Chris Martin

  USMC Scout Sniper Basic Course graduate Wasdin is a believer. “People like Brandon brought it to the next level. The way the SEAL sniper program is now—their program with different weapons and different targets—that’s cutting edge.”

  * * *

  One of the key developments that differentiates modern SEAL sniper training from other top schools is the emphasis on learning to effectively operate as an independent smart shooter. That is, they are no longer reliant on working as part of a traditional two-man shooter/spotter pair. This not only doubles up the number of guns in the field at any given moment—allowing the small SEAL community to get the most out of their limited number of snipers—it also makes for a more capable, more well-rounded marksman.

  “We do this because we started looking at real-world case studies and the way we were employing our snipers,” Webb said. “We went, ‘Wait a minute—if our guys are being employed in a helicopter as a sniper overwatch, or they’re a single sniper overwatch on an assault element that’s going into a village, why aren’t we focusing more on making sure we’re training them to that standard?’”

  The snipers are taught to understand the fundamentals of ballistics, allowing them to quickly self-evaluate and zero in on the target in short order.

  Webb said, “Without a spotter, that’s what you need—you need somebody who can do it themselves. You don’t have the luxury of having some guy on a spotting scope saying, ‘Oh man, you’re ten minutes high,’ and give them those corrections. Let’s say we’re in Iraq and you’re shooting someone at close range. You shot and you missed. If you didn’t see it impact on the scope, you know you’re high. And if the wind isn’t a factor, you know you have an elevation problem. Now you need to dial down the correct amount of minutes and you need to do it really quickly and get on target.”

  This addition also prevented a strong spotter from dragging along a weaker student with whom he was paired. In the Marine and Army courses, shooter/spotters share a grade. This was formerly true with the SEALs as well.

  “If you can make a good shot, great, but being a sniper is such a big responsibility and so much more than being able to break a clean shot,” Webb said, “If shit goes wrong, you need someone who can figure it out real quick.”

  * * *

  Another major change to the U.S. Navy SEAL Sniper Course was the inclusion of its mentor program. It’s not that the old sniper course wasn’t difficult—in fact, its attrition rates were painfully high. However, the redesigned course was made even more challenging, and yet a much higher percentage of students successfully passed due to a modification in the way they were instructed.

  Davis, one of the key architects behind the modernization of the course, explained, “A lot of guys who were already SEALs were failing out. One of the core things we did to address that was instead of just having them go through the course as students, we assigned them individual mentors. At any given sniper course, I would have three or four who were my students. I would watch their test scores, talk with them individually, and debrief them. It was my responsibility for them to succeed.”

  One of Eric Davis’s very first students—a student who would be among the first SEALs trained to this next-generation sniper standard—was Chris Kyle.

  Webb singled out Davis for his teaching prowess—an instructor capable of both transfixing pupils with illuminating lectures and dazzling them with prodigious feats of learned memory.

  Davis and Kyle came to the Teams hailing from considerably different backgrounds and were naturally drawn to contrasting aspects of SEAL operations. But as a mentor-protégé pairing, they made a tremendous team.

  Davis was as Californian as Kyle was Texan. He grew up in the Bay Area where his father was a sheriff in San Mateo County. His father’s father was a special agent for the FBI, and his father’s father’s father was a lawman, too.

  Becoming a SEAL seems like a natural extension of that impressive family tradition. But whatever his bloodlines may have predicted, Eric simply describes himself as the fan who grew up to live out his boyhood dreams. Tales of superheroes, secret agents, and special operators fueled his childhood. And even after experiencing the hardships and dark realities generally scrubbed from the comics and movies, Eric feels he’s that same fan to this day, just a few decades older and wiser.

  Now Kyle, he just was. He was born to be the guy those stories were stories about.

  Davis was immediately impressed with his new student. He also quickly recognized their dialogue could go in both directions. “He didn’t hold anything back—he told it how it was. But he was able to do that in a very Texan way where you actually wanted to hear it. When a lot of other people speak their mind, it’s generally an idiotic thing to do. Frankly, most people’s opinion is crap and you don’t want to hear it. But not with Chris—it was more than an opinion. He wouldn’t speak it if he didn’t believe in it and it wasn’t grounded in something. Now that doesn’t mean he was perfect. He wasn’t. But it meant there was something to it.”

  The former SEAL sniper continued, “You know how he had that swagger but was still humble? Well, there’s two things—there’s arrogance and there’s confidence. Arrogance is someone walking around who has all the answers but they have nothing in their experience to back it up. Now someone who is confident, there’s a big, big difference. They are going to seem down to earth and still able to tell you how it is, because they are not speaking to produce a peacock effect; they are not posturing. They are speaking because they truly want to help you. They are speaking out of love—not out of some sort of obligation.”

  * * *

  Another former SEAL sniper instructor said, “SEAL snipers do things a bit differently—Nightforce Optics and all that. But the main thing is the training—it’s ultrahard. We had some Army guys come over and they said this is just crazy. At one point the hours were so intense that we were doing 97-93-91 for the first three weeks of training.

  “With the new curriculum—’05, ’06, ’07—around then we had the best guys to have ever come through here. We had the money to train them and they had the talent and motivation to take advantage. These guys were so well trained, once they were sent overseas, they just crushed it.”

  By all accounts, U.S. Navy SEAL Sniper Course is hard, but it’s a different kind of hard than BUD/S. It’s more analogous to Green Team, the pressure cooker in which experienced SEALs screen for admission into DEVGRU. It’s not simply a matter of pushing your mind and body to the limit and not giving in. You either meet the standard or you don’t.

  “If you send three guys in a platoon to sniper school, you are only expecting one or two of them to pass,” Davis said. “Guys have said they’d rather do BUD/S again than this. Here’s the thing with sniper school: BUD/S you can try your hardest and for most people that will work. Now with sniper school, you can try as hard as you want not to get caught, but if you’re not figuring it out, you’re going to get caught.

  “You can’t ‘try’ a bullet into a bullseye. There’s no way to just really want a bullet to go where it needs to go.”

  There’s a skill set and a certain set of scientific realities that must be met for a bullet to hit its mark. One needs to either know them academically and be capable of repeating them or somehow embody them as part of his intuition.

  Davis explained, “You’re working under a certain set of mechanisms that are indifferent to how much you want something. And that is a son of a bitch. It’s much like life. Life does not care that you need to make $100,000 a year. It does not care if your baby is sick and you can’t pay the hospital bills. Life does not care. And that’s why sniper training, if understood and applied correctly, is the ultimate formula for success in life.”

  * * *

  The U.S. Navy SEAL Sniper Course takes approximately three months to complete. It opens with two weeks of training that might catch prospective snipers off guard as they learn to pull the trigger on a different kind of shot.

  “Believe it o
r not, sniper school starts off with a digital photography class,” said Davis. “The first thing we teach them to do is use these twenty-five-thousand-dollar camera kits. I used to take the cameras to the zoo with my family and people thought I worked for National Geographic. It’s the absolute best equipment you can get your hands on.”

  The primary job for a sniper is recon and surveillance. They are the eyes and ears. In the first phase the prospective snipers learn to camouflage a camera, take pictures through items, touch up the photos, and condense and transmit them via satellite or radio.

  Following the comms and digital photo phase, SEAL snipers-in-training transition to the month-long scout phase. Here they do four weeks of stalking under direct observation. The students attempt to crawl eight hundred yards or more unseen on their bellies to the location of two highly trained sniper instructors who have years of experience spotting even the slightest sign of movement.

  “There’s something called a strategic checklist, which is like what a pilot uses,” Davis said. “And if you don’t have the mental fortitude and discipline to be continually going over your checklist and hold all the items in your head, you’ll fail. And you know the deal—you start off for an hour, and you tell yourself, ‘Okay, check your camouflage. Before you move make sure you’re not getting shadows on your face. Make sure your background matches. Make sure your foreground matches. Make sure you’re moving directly at the target instead of laterally.’ All of these things. But then you get tired and that stuff starts to go away. ‘Crap, I’ve just got to move,’ and that’s when you get busted. So there’s an incredible amount of discipline required along with the ability to execute a strategy over and over again that goes into stalking.”

  Initially, students must sneak up and take an identifiable picture of the instructors’ faces without being caught. Once the picture is taken, a “walker” will point out their exact location. They must be so perfectly blended into the environment as to remain invisible from the instructors’ vantage point.

  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 l
ike 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.