Modern American Snipers

by Chris Martin

  And in fact, the Rangers of a slightly earlier generation were somewhat more “conventional” in their approach—hard-charging and disciplined infantrymen to which the rest of the Army could look to set an example. And they’d be called in to back up their big brothers from Bragg on occasion, too. This was the case in Mogadishu in ’93, and subsequently this image became the defining one for a generation whose primary source of Ranger knowledge is Black Hawk Down.

  But the accelerating pace of operations required that the Rangers both evolve and step up in a major way. Before long, the 75th Ranger Regiment assumed responsibilities not massively far removed from those of JSOC’s special mission units, at least in a pure DA capacity.

  The days of holding down street corners while CAG (the unit designation most often used by Rangers in reference to Delta Force) goes to work have largely become a relic of an older world. Post-9/11 Rangers are eager to dispel the fallacy when presented with the opportunity to do so.

  “That’s the great myth,” former 3/75 Ranger sniper Jack Murphy said. “As far as the operations I did in Ranger Battalion—the amount of times we did security or support for any other unit—I could probably count on one hand.”

  Isaiah Burkhart, a former 3rd Battalion sniper team leader, added, “It’s a poor misconception that all we do is block positions or whatever. That’s not true. I think in my four deployments as a sniper, on three of them, I worked with CAG at some time. And in all that time, in the hundreds and hundreds of missions that I did, I know one for sure, and maybe two, where I was actually ever on a blocking position. That’s a pretty low percentage.”

  GM, another ex-3/75 sniper, opined that while the Regiment—even the very active, very lethal Regiment that has emerged over the past decade—has been slow to capture attention in the way its more celebrated SOCOM counterparts have, people are finally starting to catch on.

  He said, “Vietnam made SF and SEALs look like gods. They rode that forever. And when you really look at it, between Vietnam and GWOT, there’s really been nothing. I mean, there’s been a few things here and there, but nothing crazy like ’Nam or like this. Not too long ago I used to hear, “[Rangers] don’t do anything; they just do blocking positions for the guys at Bragg.’ That was the reputation. ‘You all don’t do anything, y’all just pretty much carry their water.’ Nobody says that now. Nobody.”

  A major reason no one says that now is due to the heavy influence of Stanley McChrystal, who thrust his former unit into the spotlight when he ascended to the very top of the black spec ops world.

  “I think if McChrystal were wounded on the battlefield, he would bleed red, black, and white—the official colors of the 75th Ranger Regiment,” wrote former Ranger and Delta officer Dalton Fury. “He is 110 percent U.S. Army Ranger. As the Ranger Regimental commander, McChrystal was considered a Tier 2 subordinate commander under the Joint Special Operations functioning command structure. The highest level, Tier 1, was reserved exclusively for Delta Force and Seal Team Six. This always seemed to bother McChrystal. His nature isn’t to be second fiddle to anyone, nor for his Rangers to be considered second-class citizens to the Tier 1 special mission units.”

  McChrystal became the tenth consecutive Army general running the Joint Special Operations Command, a stretch of Army leadership that dated back to JSOC’s inception. However, he wasn’t so much just another Army “daddy” as he was the Rangers’ “daddy.” And he made sure the 75th Ranger Regiment would play a lead role in this new age of special warfare.

  * * *

  The Regiment largely planned and executed its own operations in Iraq, supported by JSOC’s intelligence fusion and complete with access to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Bolstered by top-flight gear and weaponry paid for by inflated budgets, sporting relaxed grooming standards, and executing surgical raids on myriad high-value targets, the GWOT-era 75th Ranger Regiment more closely resembles an outsider’s (similarly misguided) idea of Delta or DEVGRU than it does the tired BHD image.

  “I’d say that people have this conception that SEAL Team Six is saving the world,” Burkhart lamented. “I really don’t have anything bad to say about those guys. They are an amazing unit in their own right. But they’ve been so publicized and everything, I don’t think people realize the Regiment … we had our set of targets we went after all the time. We were getting bad guys all the time. And we were not just going after these little small guys.”

  In Iraq, Task Force Red’s JOC (Joint Operation Center) prominently displayed a large graphic featuring images of the top HVTs in the task force’s sights. Arranged like a pyramid, Zarqawi sat at the very top, with a spiderweb of connections linking the remainder of the most wanted terrorists on JSOC’s target deck beneath him.

  Burkhart said, “As the deployment would go on it was like, ‘Check this guy off, check that guy off, check this guy off.…’”

  Once JSOC’s industrial counterterrorism campaign was put into full effect, the 3rd Battalion alone was responsible for eliminating multiple HVTs who held down places near the very top of that chart. “These guys were top ten guys in the whole country,” Burkhart said. “They were on Delta’s top ten list, the CIA’s top ten list. These were the dudes that we really want to get. We were doing big things. We were getting big guys.”

  In the summer of 2005, the blistering pace required that 3/75 put two platoons into rotation near Mosul so that they could press the initiative twenty-four hours a day.

  “One platoon would do day ops for two weeks straight while the other platoon was doing night ops,” Burkhart explained. “We generally didn’t do day ops that much, but we were up there because there was so much going on. It was such a big hub for guys coming in from Syria; it was a major meeting point and from there they spread out to the rest of the country.”

  Fortunately, the battalion arrived at FOB (Forward Operating Base) Marez in Mosul in July 2005 armed with an extremely potent, dedicated sniper capability. Unfortunately, the line companies did not fully appreciate that fact, at least not initially. While 3/75’s sniper platoon had enjoyed considerable success at the Haditha Dam during the initial invasion of Iraq and in its previous deployment to Afghanistan, the rifle platoons still did not understand how to fully exploit their organic force multipliers nor did they necessarily recognize their value.

  As a result, the snipers were forced to sell themselves to secure work. GM said, “Half the job in Battalion of a sniper was being a sniper. The other half was being a businessman. You had to build relationships with the platoon sergeant and the PL [platoon leader].

  “If you have a bad relationship with the platoon sergeant or anybody there, they are going to shut you down. They are not going to put you on manifest. They’re going to cut you at every turn. I saw that with one guy. He was an asshole. They wouldn’t put him on missions. They didn’t want to bring him out. They just thought about him as a liability. He ended up getting fired from the [sniper] platoon.”

  * * *

  While the rifle companies still needed to be convinced, 3rd Battalion’s sniper platoon was hitting on all cylinders and just waiting to be set loose.

  Jared Van Aalst had only returned from the Army Marksmanship Unit to serve as the section’s platoon sergeant. And just prior to the battalion’s Mosul deployment, he showcased his skills by scoring a blowout victory in the 2005 U.S. Army Rifle Individual Championship.

  While the advantage inherent with being based at Fort Benning and in proximity to the AMU provided 3/75 was a factor, that alone did not account for the section’s sharpened edge. That had been instilled by Van Aalst’s management style and the resultant environment that had been fostered. Snipers were forced to perform under constant stress or risk being jettisoned back to the line with little warning.

  “Sniper section guys were different,” said GM, a former 3/75 sniper team leader. “It was just kind of the personality profile. They were quiet, they were into guns, they were kinda into themselves, they were secluded, and th
ey didn’t like to talk to people. They kind of do their own thing, you know? And all of them are extremely competitive alpha males.

  “It was a shark tank essentially. They ate the weakest one. If a weak guy came in, he didn’t last long. And we’re talking about Ranger team leaders. You could go at any time. They could fire at will. It was stressful.”

  In fact, it was so stressful that established snipers in the section (and some stayed in their position for several years) welcomed the introduction of new blood to the platoon … simply so that the blood most likely to be spilled in the water was not their own.

  “You wanted a bunch of new guys because it would take heat off you,” GM continued. “It was so stressful because they’re constantly looking to fire guys. They even said, ‘We’re going to put someone’s head on the chopping block because that’s how we get the best out of people.’ The ‘Hey, he’s a good guy—he’s my drinking buddy…’—that didn’t work there. You performed or you didn’t. When I was there, it was like twelve guys and nobody was safe. It’s what you want—that culture of fear to get the best out of people.”

  The uncompromising approach evoked Jack Welch’s vitality model in which the bottom 10 percent of a company are slated to be fired each year. “You want it to be competitive and it was. That’s why it became so good.”

  * * *

  3/75 Sniper Platoon leaders Van Aalst and Robby Johnson demanded a certain degree of experience in potential candidates for the section—one had to be an E-4 and have already earned their Ranger Tab. (Around that time the other battalions’ sniper platoons experimented with accepting much less experienced Rangers.)

  But beyond that, the right mind-set was all that mattered. There was no extensive selection process, simply an interview (“You never knew what was going to get asked, never. They’d feel you out. And then, ‘Okay thanks’ and they’d send you out”), an internal background check, and a psych evaluation to determine if someone could succeed in the role.

  GM said, “They needed guys who were thinkers who you could send out in the middle of nowhere and he could do his own thing. He’s fire and forget; you don’t have to worry about babysitting him.”

  The personable Isaiah Burkhart is enthusiastic and welcoming. Despite his four deployments as a 3/75 sniper in which he played a decisive role in some of the more intense combat operations American SOF has conducted since 9/11, he doesn’t exactly fit the profile (in fact, one sniper got his walking papers simply because even Burkhart couldn’t find a positive thing to say about him).

  Now an Oregon State grad living back in Oregon with his wife and their young daughter, Burkhart admitted that he had to, in a sense, fake it to make it in Sniper Platoon. To do so, he first had to identify the traits that were most coveted.

  “I don’t know if I necessarily had it, but I did a good job of not standing out,” he said. “I think it is a mentality of believing that you are the best maybe even if you’re not all the time, but still being humble enough to know when you’ve screwed up. They have that mentality of, ‘We’re better than you’ type of thing. And I honestly do believe at one point in time the 3rd Battalion had the greatest sniper section in the entire military.”

  * * *

  Prior to the battalion’s 2005 deployment to Mosul, Jack Murphy became one of the victims of the notorious 3/75 Sniper Platoon shark tank. While others credited Van Aalst’s leadership style and the pressurized atmosphere it produced with elevating the section to new heights, Murphy felt the corporate approach reeked of insecurity and was too often petty and counterproductive.

  “Jared was an interesting cat,” he said. “I had a strange relationship with him to say the least.”

  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 ever
y 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.