Modern American Snipers

by Chris Martin

  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.

  In early September, the Rangers raided a safe house in Zanazil. Four terrorists were rounded up in the hit while Zayd was gunned down in a nearby field.

  The following spring 3/75 was back in country and operating north of Baghdad, albeit this time in the Samarra/Tikrit area. And again, they dispatched another of the ten most wanted terrorists in country.

  In late April 2006, Hamadi ’Abd al-Tahki al-Nissani, the emir of Samarra and Tikrit, was tracked to a location some fifteen kilometers north of Samarra.

  The Rangers hit the compound in two MH-60 Black Hawks, rushing in low and landing on the “X”—less than one hundred meters from the target—in an L-shaped formation to isolate and contain the area.

  The assault team breached the compound and immediately engaged in a heated firefight. Two terrorists inside the house were quickly killed, including one as he attempted to lob a grenade at the Rangers.

  “And this other g
uy pops outside of a window,” Burkhart recalled. “My sniper buddy, Jake, and I were the first guys off the Black Hawk. It was this crazy brownout with dust everywhere.”

  A tall and rotund figure emerged from the building and charged straight for the Black Hawk with his AK-47 in hand. It wasn’t some ill-advised but admirable mad charge for the attacking force. Rather, the man was confused and disorientated by the swirling dirt and sounds created by the aircraft. Instead of escaping his fate, he sprinted directly to it.

  Burkhart said, “We were moving toward the building. We were going to go set up in cover and secure the building, and the guy happened to be coming right at us. We didn’t even use our scopes; we just used the lasers on our SR-25s.

  “Jake and I both fired at the exact same time. He aimed the chest. I aimed the head. We both got the guy and he dropped.”

  The assault element that had dismounted the Black Hawk just behind the snipers followed suit, firing at the fallen man who would later be positively identified as Hamadi Tahki.

  “The rest of the guys opened up and popped another twenty rounds into him. Everybody was like, ‘We got him. We got him!’”

  Burkhart laughed. “It’s always a group effort.”

  * * *

  While built around rotating Ranger battalions, JSOC’s task force in the north of the country also included a small Delta component. As the Rangers pulled off missions and targeted HVTs that previously only would have been tasked to a Tier 1 unit, the Mosul-based Unit operators elevated their operations to the next level yet.

  B Squadron’s deployment schedule was synced up with that of 3rd Battalion, allowing the two entities to develop enhanced coordination over time.

  And while 3/75 was regularly adding X marks to the most wanted poster in the JOC with a succession of violent raids, a five-man recce element was doing the same in a considerably more clandestine fashion.

  During the same ’05 deployment in which the Rangers took out Abu Zayd, a small Delta sniper element led by “RS”—a B Squadron recce troop Sergeant Major—operated inside Mosul and the surrounding vicinity disguised as locals. Outfitted in Middle Eastern garments called twabs—but almost universally referred to by the American servicemen as “man dresses”—RS and his team tracked down their prey utilizing stealth and subterfuge.

  “What these Delta guys were doing was basically assassinations,” one ex-Ranger said. “They were going out and just whackin’ guys left and right. We were there as a QRF just in case they really got into something and we’d be thirty seconds out so we could respond.”

  Another 3/75 Ranger added, “[RS] has probably killed more guys than cancer. He was doing low-vis target interdictions, vehicle to vehicle. It was basically high-level drive-by shootings.”

  10

  Punishment Due

  By the conclusion of his first combat deployment as a U.S. SEAL Sniper Course–trained sniper, Chris Kyle had stacked up enough confirmed kills to solidly establish himself as one of the most lethal snipers in American military history.

  Word of his accomplishments had just started filtering through the usual SEAL channels, but Kyle’s status as an emerging historical figure was still largely unknown. However, one SEAL officer was keenly aware of what the big Texan had been up to.

  The last time Lt. Larry Yatch had seen Kyle he was just another new guy on his first deployment. He wasn’t “the Legend” at that point. If anything he had been rather unremarkable, although that was considered a positive in itself because it meant he hadn’t done anything terribly boneheaded to draw attention to himself as new guys tend to do.

  It’s not as if he had many opportunities to stand out either. Their shared deployment back in 2003 just as the Iraq War was kicking off had been disheartening to all of Team Three—and an utter debacle in the eyes of both Yatch and Kyle, who had expected so much more from their first experience in combat.

  SEAL Team Three’s embarrassing opening in Iraq had been softened somewhat by the deeds of its snipers the following year in the Second Battle of Fallujah and elsewhere, albeit largely in an augmentee capacity rather than as part of a larger ST3 campaign.

  But now the SEAL officer was placed in a position to address the deficiencies that had afflicted the Teams from the ground floor. Following his ’03 deployment, Yatch was assigned two senior chiefs, a warrant officer, and a mammoth task: to head up Naval Special Warfare Group One’s nascent internal intelligence effort, then known as “NSWG-1 Special Activities.”

  It also provided him an opportunity to closely monitor Kyle’s mounting success in Iraq. He paid closer attention than he normally might due to the fact that the Texan hailed from Team Three’s CHARLIE platoon—Yatch’s former outfit back when his was a third O. And its OIC, Lt. Leif Babin, was also an old friend. Their connection went back to their very first day at the Naval Academy together, further solidifying his interest.

  And what he observed astonished him. “At Group One I spent a lot of time reading the intel traffic,” the SEAL officer said. “I remember very vividly reading all of those after-action reports and just being amazed.”

  The macabre statistics alone were undeniable. “You’d read that he’d had nineteen confirmed kills in a twenty-four-hour period. It was almost unbelievable. It was also neat to read that those guys were finally getting into it. That was a testament to the leadership.”

  * * *

  Whereas the Joint Special Operations Command—including SEAL Team Six—had hugely benefited from its amped-up intelligence emphasis, the vanilla SEALs had found themselves handcuffed. Worse than that, they’d even needlessly been put into danger on occasion due to an ill-suited ad hoc intelligence apparatus—one devised for blue water analysis, not commando raids.

  JSOC was increasingly able to parlay the efforts of its organic assets into actionable intelligence. The Activity efficiently secured high-tech signals and low-tech human intelligence in order to “prepare the environment.” Meanwhile, this effort was further augmented by the AFO capabilities provided by its special mission units’ recce snipers.

  Without the ability to find and fix, JSOC’s much-vaunted finishers would have been relegated nonfactors. And in fact, they too had been largely caged prior to the world-altering strikes on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, and even in its immediate wake. But by late in 2004, JSOC’s shooters were finishing Iraq’s innumerable targets in extraordinary numbers.

  However, this capability was virtually nonexistent on the “white” side of American special operations—as evidenced by the inability of the SEALs to operate effectively once the Iraq War set into motion, along with the need for Naval Special Warfare Group One to divvy up the integral intelligence section of Task Unit Raider for use by CJSOTF-AP’s SEAL task units.

  In an attempt to transform this weakness into a strength, Lt. Yatch precommissioned the SEAL’s own “Activity”: NSWG-1 Special Activities grew into what officially became known as “Naval Special Warfare Support Activity One.”

  Support Activity One was designed to provide the regular SEAL Teams with its own Activity/AFO analogue of sorts, which would allow it to develop actionable intelligence internally. And it would, in part, recruit from the ranks of the SEALs to do so.

  While clearly influenced by JSOC’s more recent successes, its inspiration actually traced back considerably further.

  “This was in the effort of what we call preparing the battlefield,” Yatch explained. “The philosophy was to go in ahead of time and make sure we were more successful. But really it was going back to our core tactics that allowed the SEALs to be so effective in Vietnam. There, SEALs went out, gathered intelligence, processed that intelligence, got other forms of intelligence where needed, planned the next op, and then executed it. It was a closed loop.”

  Intelligence developed outside the Teams and later handed off for them to execute too often resulted in missions that went sideways. “It was either not good enough, old, or just plain wrong,” Yatch said. “With the SEALs de
veloping their own intelligence, they could actually plan and execute missions very effectively because they knew the degree of reliability of their intel. We got away from that after Vietnam.”

  Following the humiliation of Team Three’s initial foray in the Iraq War, Larry was motivated to bring about change. “We got back from that and learned and said, ‘We need to go back to our roots.’”

  Initially, a number of hand-picked SEALs would receive specialized training—either ASOT (Advanced Special Operations Techniques) or AFO (the aforementioned Advance Force Operations). Those who trained in ASOT would focus on human intelligence—developing and running sources. Meanwhile, the SEALs with advanced AFO training would learn to use technology to support the ASOT operations, along with individual platoons, by gathering and collecting intelligence through tracking and tagging items by means of technical surveillance.

  Having recently tracked Kyle’s exploits in Fallujah and elsewhere, when it came time to select an all-star team of operators to provide Naval Special Warfare with this enhanced capability, Yatch was quick to recruit the Texan to complete the three-month AFO pipeline.

  “After Chris’s platoon got back [in 2005], I was ramping up the Support Activity,” he said. “When we’re looking to pull people into this—which is a very sensitive group—of course I’m going to pick Chris.”

  Kyle was sent to New Orleans where he learned basic electronics and the finer points of building and utilizing covert camera systems. He was taught how to conduct countersurveillance, both on foot and in vehicles, along with surreptitious entry—picking locks and “borrowing” other people’s cars when necessary (for example, to successfully complete his training).