Modern American Snipers

by Chris Martin

  Just as he added sniper and navigation skills to his toolset following his first deployment, Kyle learned to operate in a manner closer to a DEVGRU Black Team sniper following his second. His training was now loosely akin to what the real-world realization of the Hollywood fantasy that is James Bond or Jason Bourne might be—well, with a thick Texas drawl anyway.

  * * *

  Despite the new assortment of skills, Kyle’s focus immediately snapped back into sniper mode when he redeployed in 2006. And he was presented with what can only be described as a target-rich environment in the city of Ramadi.

  The reverberations of the remarkably violent offensive that unhinged AQI from its booby-trapped stronghold of Fallujah were felt some twenty-five miles west in Ramadi.

  The capital of Anbar Province and home to a half-million residents, Ramadi replaced Fallujah as the most dangerous city on the planet in ’05 and ’06. This was no coincidence—following the dedicated campaign to rip Zarqawi’s forces from Fallujah, al-Qaeda in Iraq regrouped, picked up shop, and reestablished their business of dealing out widespread slaughter from a new central location.

  Ramadi now stood as the destination point for foreign jihadists who flooded into the nation, driven by a confused notion of achieving paradise by bringing about hell.

  In April 2006, Zarqawi’s men launched multiple simultaneous attacks in the city, setting about the conditions for another coalition/insurgent showdown.

  Contrary to the unrestrained leveling of Fallujah, a combined American-Iraqi force of nearly eight thousand soldiers planned a more deliberate attack on Ramadi. The brunt of the fire and manpower would be delivered by conventional Marine and big Army forces—the 1st Armored Division; I MEF; the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Infantry Divisions; and the 101st Airborne Division chief among them. However, mobile SEAL sniper elements would provide precision fire and overwatch throughout.

  * * *

  It was at the Battle of Ramadi that Chris Kyle became more than just an accomplished sniper; he established himself a transcendent warrior—a symbol to friend and foe alike.

  Seemingly more at ease on the two-way range than he was back in the nation he risked his life to defend, Kyle took pleasure and pride in removing unprecedented numbers of enemies from the fight.

  Kyle slaughtered leagues of insurgents in Ramadi. His accumulating confirmed kill tally not only quickly surpassed that of Carlos Hathcock, but also Hathcock’s USMC contemporaries Eric England and Chuck Mawhinney, along with that of Vietnam-era Army sniper Adelbert Waldron III. The SEAL had established himself the most lethal sniper in American military history and showed no signs of relenting.

  And it wasn’t just the prolific kill count that was reminiscent of Hathcock—it was also the stories that came along with each successive notch.

  The Texan first earned his “Legend” tag back at Fallujah in 2004 when he delivered a kill shot from his .300 Win Mag from sixteen hundred yards away. Later, he would one-up that. To prevent the ambush of an Army convoy, he eliminated an RPG-armed terrorist from a distance of twenty-one hundred yards with a .338 Lapua.

  Reflecting on Kyle’s long-distance kills, former Black Team sniper Howard Wasdin just shook his head. “There was a point I was arrogant enough to say you don’t need any luck. But a sixteen-hundred-yard shot? Okay, you’ve got to be good—you really need to refine your breathing and squeezing skills, eye relief, shoulder placement, all that. But you still have to have a little bit of luck.”

  Kyle’s mentor, Davis, added, “There are a lot of variables involved in making shots at those sorts of distances. That speaks to the skill set, meaning the hard-set scientific skills that go into shooting. He embodied that through practice and experience and with an intellect that I think was probably superior than we know.”

  In Fallujah, Kyle also creatively (and merrily) dispatched more than a dozen heavily armored targets. To do so, he shot their makeshift amphibious personnel carrier (read: beach balls) out from underneath them.

  And in Ramadi, Kyle added another to the oddity column by scoring a double moped kill.

  Following an eight-hour firefight alongside the Marines, Kyle noticed that the appearance of scooters was all too frequently a sign of impending danger. “Five minutes after that scooter disappeared, indirect fire was coming in—mortars and rockets. After the fires were done, the scooter would come back. He was redirecting their fires.”

  The SEAL requested permission to be cleared hot to engage anybody on a scooter, which was promptly denied by the JAG.

  “Forty-eight hours after we made that request—they’d already denied it, so there’s no way in hell you can do it—we’re back out,” Kyle later explained. “I see these two guys on a moped, which first of all, if you see two guys on a moped, that right there should be grounds to shoot.…”

  The scooter slowed and its passenger dropped a backpack into a hole in the road along a major supply route.

  “Ooh—that’s within my rules of engagement. That’s an IED.”

  Kyle woke up the rest of the house and invited them to the impromptu show.

  “Watch this—I’m fixing to get two with one.”

  Unaware they had a .300 Win Mag trained on them, the scooter duo headed directly toward the awaiting sniper. When they got within two hundred yards, Kyle pulled the trigger.

  He said, “It looked like Dumb and Dumber. The guy’s dead, but his hands are still on the handlebars. And he smacks into a wall. It was hilarious.”

  Apparently, the Navy’s legal representative didn’t share Kyle’s sense of humor. Kyle said, “Soon as I got back the JAG investigated me.”

  “What? No … he dropped that. I have all these witnesses. I woke everybody up in the house.”

  Six hours later the pothole was examined and nothing was found. However, Kyle was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing, thanks in large part to the eyewitness account of a Marine element at a neighboring OP.

  * * *

  Besides the kills and the anecdotes, Chris Kyle earned himself a serious reputation in the same way Carlos Hathcock had before him—and not only among those his rifle protected.

  To the Americans, he was “the Legend”—a moniker that was used less and less ironically with each successive kill.

  And to those on the other side of the battle lines—at least among those who survived to spread their warnings of oncoming dread—he was “Shaitan Ar-Ramadi”—the Devil of Ramadi.

  Along with that honor came another sign of respect for his architecture of aggression: a bounty on his head large enough ($80,000) that Kyle joked it might just tempt his wife to cash in.

  He and the rest of his platoon embraced the notoriety. They played it up and actively instilled fear in their adversaries by adopting the demonic skull logo of the comic book vigilante “the Punisher” as their own.

  “We put it on our body armor, our helmets, we’d put it on everything,” Kyle explained. “I mean, if you look back at the Punisher, he was going back to right a wrong. He was going back for vengeance, to get rid of the bad guys. We were going back to right a wrong. We’re going to get rid of these bad guys, and that was the symbol.”

  After the platoon killed enemy insurgents, they’d stencil the logo in the immediate vicinity to let their enemies know who was responsible. They even dared further attacks by adorning their Humvees with the symbol.

  Kyle said, “PSYOPS … ‘We were here. We’re the guys that are going to fuck you up. You mess with us and you mess with America, we’re the guys coming in and take you out.’ We wore it on us so that they would know, ‘Oh, shit, those guys are in our area.’”

  At the Battle of Ramadi, Kyle stood as a combatant at the peak of his existence. He lived for the fight and was thoroughly convinced of his invincibility. This unique combination of talent, training, experience, and boundless confidence made him the rare example of a man on the ground with the ability to singlehandedly turn the tide of battles.

  Lt. Yatch reflected, “What Chris was able to do
was unique to him.… It’s very rare in modern times that you have an individual who is able to make contributions that are unique, and without them, those contributions would not be possible. The end results would not have been the same. The right scenario was in place so that the right culmination of skills, mentality, and raw ability existed in the man that was in a position to do so.”

  Former U.S. SEAL Sniper Course Manager Brandon Webb added, “The stars aligned and he was in the right place at the right time.”

  * * *

  Kyle was one of the first graduates of the modernized program to field test its lessons. He would soon be joined by a host of marksmen with similar abilities.

  “Chris would want to point out that there are probably twenty guys in the SEAL community who have almost as many kills as he did,” Webb said. “These guys are deadly. It doesn’t matter if you’re a DEVGRU guy or at a regular SEAL team, the main training course is the NSW course. They’ve all got to go through the SEAL sniper program. And these guys are out there and just lethal.

  “The proof is in the pudding, right? It’s like someone graduating from an MBA program and going out and building a billion-dollar company. We’ve got guys like Chris and other guys you don’t hear about just wasting guys overseas.”

  Soon the SEAL Sniper Course schoolhouse would be receiving calls from the Army and the Marine Corps asking for their secrets of success.

  “Man, what the fuck are you teaching these dudes? They are over here just fricking laying waste.”

  “Then we started getting foreign spec ops units. The Danes and Norwegians started sending guys over and the Germans were calling us. Everyone wanted to know how we were training these guys.”

  Even though Kyle was actually in a tight race to claim the top spot in the all-time American sniper kill category during his run in Ramadi, his unique presence made him a natural to serve as an unofficial ambassador for those sailors sending rounds downrange with deadly accuracy during the Global War on Terror. As his celebrity grew—first inside the SOF community and later in the wider public—Kyle would come to represent SEAL snipers as a whole.

  In the same way Hathcock put the Marine Scout Sniper program on the map, Kyle forced the sniper world to wake up and recognize the effectiveness of the radically overhauled SEAL training. His exploits put a face on what was actually a much wider trend.

  Webb said, “Now, I think because Chris was this big, friendly Texan and a personality among personalities, that’s how he got elevated into the spotlight. They called him the Legend and that got out to his friends and family. But he was a widely known personality in the SEAL community. We get guys like that who come along every so often. Chris was definitely that guy of his era.

  “The same way Hathcock was that guy for the Marine Corps back in his day. You had a lot of Marine snipers in Vietnam, but Hathcock was the guy that stood out because he had a little bit of a swagger behind him, he had the competitive shooting team background, and he did a lot to elevate the tradecraft.”

  Webb furthered the comparison: “Hathcock had a really big influence on the Marine Corps course and it’s a solid program. He had all these confirmed kills and that book, Marine Sniper, came out, which was like American Sniper in the ’80s. I think there’s a lot of similarities there. The way that Hathcock brought awareness to the Marine Corps Scout Sniper program, I think Chris Kyle has really raised awareness of the SEAL program. Before him a lot of people didn’t even realize that the SEALs have their own sniper course and it’s one of the best in the world.

  “Hathcock became this cult figure among the sniper community. And now Chris Kyle has done the same in his time.”

  * * *

  A longtime East Coast SEAL sniper instructor first got word about Kyle’s exploits from one of his former students. “One of the East Coast guys told me they heard one of our snipers had 150 kills. “Holy shit.” I did the math—that meant he was getting one guy every third day … unbelievable. It was such a target-rich environment.

  “He was an above-average shooter, he had the right mind-set, and he was in the right place at the right time. But he was nowhere near our best.”

  The instructor compared the situation in Iraq as comparable to what snipers faced during WWII in the Battle of Stalingrad (“very aggressive—you see a bad guy, you shoot”).

  He added that for every Chris Kyle there were several others with similar accomplishments who went unrecognized. “There are lots of guys you’ll never hear about. There’s one guy in particular who is very, very professional. Others are still out there doing it—they just keep going back. One is an absolute ass kicker. He’s extra-prepared, patient, and has all the shot solutions in his head.”

  The instructor said he knows of one SEAL sniper who racked up more than Kyle’s combined total (“and not just a little more”) over the course of just a few days by directing in air strikes.

  The Second Battle of Fallujah marked the beginning of a shift, and this new breed of SEAL snipers were prepared and in position to rise to the occasion.

  “This is how it happened—the ROE [rules of engagement] changed overnight,” the former instructor explained. “Those bad guys thought they were safe and were just out there walking around. But our guys knew ROE was going to change and were gearing up for it. As soon as it happened, they were dropping them like flies. The insurgents were getting their asses kicked so bad, they were literally crawling into cemeteries and digging graves to hide in. That’s some badass shit right there.

  “It was unprecedented sniping in military history. And these guys were incredibly well trained. The guys from the ’90s and early 2000s stepped up and made sure the new generation coming through the program would be ready to go.”

  He added, “Chris Kyle is representative of an amazing generation of truly dedicated guys. I know one who was making $450,000 on Wall Street—his dad told me—and after 9/11 he joined the Navy, went through BUD/S, and then came to the sniper school in 2005. Just think of all he sacrificed.”

  * * *

  “The Punishers” gradually developed an SOP (standard operating practice) that invited regular, extended firefights. They would take down a building and then transform it into a sniper hide. Once a target was identified, Kyle or another of the element’s snipers, such as Kevin “Dauber” Lacz, would pull the trigger, transforming their hide into a defensive position in an instant.

  At that point, they would bunker down and fend off the resultant counterattack. Well positioned—usually on the roof or behind an upper-story window—Kyle and his crew would pick off reinforcements as they attempted to rally to their location. Once the battle was won, they would head back out, find a new prime location, and repeat the process.

  CHARLIE’s confidence bordered on arrogance but the results backed up their belief. They considered themselves untouchable to the point of amusement, intentionally adding to the level of difficulty. For instance, they’d swap through their weapons just to chalk up a kill with each one—simply for the entertainment value.

  “Hey, new guy … film this!”

  “Combat was a daily event,” Kyle recalled. “It starts happening, your training takes over. You start telling jokes to each other. Guys are laughing, high-fiving, saying, ‘Hey, watch this one.’ You’re cool under fire. It’s when the fire stops and when everything is done that your heartbeat starts to spike.”

  When he was back in the States, Kyle was subjected to virtual reality testing in an attempt to unlock the secrets of his, arguably, irrational calm when confronted with such remarkable violence and peril.

  He explained, “They wanted to do this experimental type stuff to figure out the mind-set, heart rate, and all this other stuff of SEALs. They basically put us in this video game. It was a virtual thing.… It puts you right back into some scenarios you’re in.”

  As it turned out, at that point, Kyle only felt vulnerable when subjected to virtual combat. After his platoon would come back to camp following a number of days in the
field, the rest of the guys would immediately crash in bed. The Texan, however, would instead fire up his PC and play games long into the night (or day).

  While typically more a connoisseur of sports titles like Tiger Woods PGA Tour or Madden NFL, he tried his hand at digitized warfare as well.

  “The new Call of Duty came out and we had the headsets and we hooked up our whole camp so we could be playing each other from our rooms,” Kyle explained. “We were going online with satellites and everything. I had a headset that one of my guys gave me and I’m sitting there playing. And the same kid keeps killing me and he was talking mad junk to me. I’m sitting there, and I’m getting pissed.

  “He’s cussing and everything. Come to find out, he’s like a twelve-year-old kid back in America. He kept killing me, and he’s like, ‘I’m going to slay you.’

  “Motherfucker—when I get home, I’m going to sneak into your bedroom and I am taking you out. I’m a Navy SEAL!”

  “Whatever. You’re in your mama’s basement.”

  Kyle laughed as he considered the surrealism of it all: “Oh, God—I couldn’t handle the war games anymore. I just wanted to take that little kid out.”

  * * *

  In Kyle’s eyes, his apparent invulnerability bordered on divine right. After fighting back an attempted assault on their hide, the SEAL moved through the building and into another room.

  Just as he entered, a bullet aimed in his direction came straight through the window. At that moment, he fell back and slumped onto the floor as the round soared safely—albeit inches—over his head.

  “Chris is dead! Chris has been shot!”

  “What? No—I’m good. I’m good!”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Well, I don’t think I fell back,” Kyle admitted. “I honestly think I had a guardian angel; I think I was pushed down. When you’re being shot at, when would you ever just fall straight back? You don’t do it. If you’re going to fall down to avoid it, you go to the side.… That’s the only time where I just went straight back.”

  However, that illusion of invincibility would be shattered in Ramadi, replaced by a sense of inevitability that hung over the sniper for the remainder of his career.