Modern American Snipers

by Chris Martin

  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 grâce 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 pr
ime 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.

  “See, I told you. I knew we got those fuckers.”

  “Aww … shut up.”

  * * *

  When the 3rd Battalion Ranger snipers operated in the alien landscape of Afghanistan in 2004, they took on some expanded sniper ops in addition to the direct action role—stalking, setting up in hides, reconnoitering, and the like.

  However, this was not out of any particular faith placed in the section by the line platoons. Rather it was largely driven by the snipers making themselves useful to demonstrate their worth.

  The sniper platoon’s value would become more than evident in subsequent deployments to Iraq. But at the same time, the scorching pace of operations and the urban nature of the conflict saw them transition into almost a pure direct action role where climbing skills and the accurate delivery of short-range, quick-twitch sniper fire were of paramount importance.

  Now back in the open of Afghanistan—and with considerably more pull with the battalion—Irving helped push the snipers back to a more expansive mission set. However, this time it was highly prized by those above them.

  “That was my claim to fame I guess, if you want to call it that,” he said. “At that point it was normally only direct-action-type stuff. The longest shot you’d take is fifty or a hundred yards or whatnot. When we were in Afghanistan, the minimum engagement was like three hundred. I pitched this deal to my commanders—‘Hey, let us go out on this op and actually do what snipers are trained to do, which is stalking, staying out for five days, just to go get a guy.’”

  Irving was actually recruited himself for the mission he would later pitch to his commanders by the anonymous elite—the Regimental Reconnaissance Company.

  Inside the Regiment, RRC is legendary. Outside, it’s largely unknown. It exists in a role similar to Delta and DEVGRU’s recce assets—specializing in close target reconnaissance—only minus the sniper capability.

  In fact, their talents were so valued that in 2004 JSOC pulled RRC out from under the 75th Ranger Regiment and put it to work directly for the Command. In response, the 75th Ranger Regiment’s sniper platoons reorganized so that the Rangers would retain an organic recon capability.

  Former 3/75 Ranger sniper Pete Careaga explained, “Once we lost them we couldn’t use them as much as we used to. So the reconnaissance mission had to be done in-house. At first, the snipers had to do the reconnaissance mission. I remember many days being out there all week just gathering information because [RRC] was busy doing more important stuff.

  “So they took half of our platoon, the snipers, and made them a recon platoon. They also recruited some more guys from the line to plus up those numbers so they could become full platoon while also recruiting snipers a bit more heavily as well to make up for the shortfall. That didn’t slow us down; it just kind of rearranged our numbers a little bit.”

  But now several years later and all but a distant memory to the 3/75 sniper platoon, the elusive RRC was back on the scene. A small team of RRC Rangers approached Irving and his spotter and presented them with a mission they could not refuse—a five-day mission behind enemy lines to track down an HVT.

  On day four, Irving was positioned on a roof and overwatching 2/5 Marines as they attempted to take control of a hostile village. The suspicious arrival of a man on a moped with a bag of tools caught his attention. Minutes later, that bag of tools was revealed to be an RPG pointed directly at a Marine Humvee at point-blank range.

  The Reaper sent a round from his cherished SR-25 from 743 meters away.

  “Holy shit, dude; you blew him out of his sandals.”

  The insurgent’s sandals had not moved. His body, meanwhile, slumped on the ground several feet away. The Marines were suitably impressed.

  On the fifth day, the hybrid RRC/sniper element was joined by a larger Ranger assault force to finally take down the targeted individual they had been tracking.

  However, after breaking off from the assaulters, the smaller team found itself engaged in a sudden and overwhelming 360-degree ambush. Meanwhile, their potential reinforcements were engaged in a blistering firefight of their own as they approached the objective and were in little position to help.

  It got worse—much worse—for the Reaper when he realized he had also come under the glass of an enemy sniper. He found he didn’t much like being on the other end of the equation.

  When he was with the Marines just before, he had heard tales of “the Chechen”—a sniper rumored to have logged some three hundred kills fighting against the Russians and now the Americans. While Irving knew how those kill count rumors went, he immediately recognized his hunter possessed serious skill.

  “That one I still dream about to this day,” Irving said. “At that point in my career, I had already killed a shit-ton of people, and it’s cool. But when you’re on the other end of a scope and he’s really good too, it kind of puts you in your place. Maybe I’m not that good.”

  Pinned down in a small ditch with sniper rounds cracking inches away from his head, the Ranger sniper recalled the mental aspects of his training. He first sorted out the sniper’s distance utilizing the snap/bang theory. “You hear the snap of the bullet and you count from one to five in under a second. When you hear the bang of the rifle, the number you land on gives away the distance. I knew how far away he was so I started to think about the different buildings, figuring out where I would be.

  “If you’re good, you’re going to be a spot no one would ever think of, which is what I try to apply. If there’s a big building and a pile of dog shit, I’m probably going to put myself in that pile of dog shit and cover myself as opposed to that big, tall building because that’s where everybody is going to look. That’s where he fucked up.”

  Irving had earlier noticed an odd building with a curtain hanging up in the window that was the correct range he was looking for. Suspecting he may have found the hide, he decided to make sure … by sticking his head up.

  But only for an instant. The Chechen fired and missed, but Irving’s spotter saw the telltale movement in the window.

  “I knew it! I knew that’s where that guy was at.”

  Irving identified the location but found the sniper was too experienced and too well trained to effectively countersniper. He explained, “It took quite a while to find him and spot him. He had everything down to a science but one simple mistake gave him away. But we still couldn’t shoot him because he was shooting through small, little holes in the building. Special Forces guys use that a lot—they have a special school just for shooting like that, and he was applying it. He was damn good.”

  Still pinned down by the sniper, the ambushers started closing in on their position. Irving’s spotter next noticed two men three hundred yards away headed in their direction. Irving was unable to make visual contact for fear of giving the Chechen sniper just the look he needed so he talked his teammate though the shot instead.

  “Which way are they walking?”

  “Left to right.”

  “Okay, what angle?”

  “Thirty-five degrees.”

  “They are only th
ree hundred yards in front of us and they are walking really slow. Give them a .3 lead.”

  The spotter squeezed the trigger of his .300 Win Mag.

  “Oh fuck.”

  “What?”

  “‘They’re not moving. They just stopped.”

  “Well, fucking hit them then.”

  “Oh never mind. One of the guys has his hands in the air now.”

  “Roger that. What’s he doing now?”

  “He’s strutting around.”

  “What? Did you hit him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Irving laughed when he recalled the conversation. “He has a .300 Win Mag and at a thousand yards that hits like a .357 at point-blank range.” One of the RRC Rangers popped his head up and said, “Fuck no. You hit him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His whole shit is red.”

  The sniper explained, “He was wearing a white man dress. I popped my head up a little bit and just saw this arterial spray of blood coming out this guy’s arm.”

  “Hey man, how the fuck do you not see that?”

  The wounded fighter’s movements resembled an awkward dance, which Irving assumed was related to his brain suffering from the massive blood loss. Once he fell, the other insurgent attempted to apply a tourniquet with his turban.

  “It was the worst tourniquet I’ve ever seen,” Irving said. “It was a like a weird bow knot. That was the first time I’ve ever seen that happen.”

  * * *

  The eye-opening deployment continued to deliver fear-and-adrenaline-imprinted memories. On time, Irving’s spotter knocked a combatant’s head clean off with a shot to his upper chest. And the Reaper later collected his longest combat kill—883 yards.

  Again ambushed and pinned down under the light of day, AH-64 Apache gunships arrived and engaged the fighters three hundred yards to the sniper team’s left. Rounds then started to streak in from directly in front of their position.