by Brandon Webb
A few weeks later, right after finishing the shooting phase, Gabriele and I had our official wedding ceremony and reception. (We had managed to keep the secret from my family.) Fortunately, my hair had grown in just enough so that the staples didn’t show in my wedding pictures.
* * *
Along with the shooting drills, which kept us busy for up to eight hours a day, we also had extensive classroom work, which we did mostly during the heat of the day, sandwiched in between sessions on the range. We would get up early and shoot all morning, then do our classroom and practical exercises during the early afternoon hours, when the heat was at its height. In the later afternoon, we’d head back out onto the range and practice on the guns again.
Every few classes we would be tested on whatever we’d learned. As with the shooting tests, it was either pass or you’re gone, no in between.
One of our classes consisted of a series of drills called keep-in-memory exercises, or KIMs. As a sniper, there are times when you have only a brief glance at a situation, and you have to be able to fix it all in your memory almost instantaneously. These exercises were designed to hone our capacity for accurate snapshot memory.
The instructors would lay a tarp over an array of objects, bring us in and stand us in front of the covered array, and then yank off the tarp, giving us thirty seconds to look at everything and memorize it all before the tarp went back to cover everything. Then we’d have to write it all down. Or they would scatter a series of objects over a hillside, and we’d have to scan it quickly with our binoculars and in that brief glance pick out everything that was out of the ordinary.
We also did very detailed target sketches, similar to the KIMs: In a given amount of time, we would have to sketch a target in detail and also record all sorts of data. From which direction was the sun shining? What were the weather patterns? Where were possible helo insertion points? Helo extraction points? Exactly what was happening right around the area of the target? Digital cameras and laptops had not yet become the ubiquitous technologies they are today, and we had to do our field sketches and record all this information by hand.
Some of our most extensive classroom study was in the area of ballistics, including internal ballistics, external ballistics, and terminal ballistics.
Internal ballistics is what’s happening on the inside of the rifle. When your firing pin hits the bullet’s strike plate, it sets off an initial powder charge, and the exploding powder creates a rapidly expanding gas bubble, which propels the slug, or front portion of the bullet, through the chamber. It’s very much a miniature version of a rocket ship launch. Just as the rocket discards its boosters once it’s in flight, the rifle ejects the empty cartridge, sending only the relatively small front portion on its journey. In the rocket’s case, that’s the capsule that houses the astronauts. In the bullet’s case, it’s the death-dealing slug.
The inside of the rifle’s barrel is inscribed with a series of spiral grooves, or rifling (where the term “rifle” comes from). This puts a fast spin on the bullet, giving it stability in flight, much the way you put a spin on a football when you throw it. Internal ballistics has to do with how many twists there are in the barrel and their precise effect on the bullet, how fast the bullet travels, and how it’s moving when it exits the rifle.
This is where external ballistics takes over. Your bullet will start its journey at a velocity of over 2,000 feet per second. However, the moment it emerges from the barrel its flight path is already being influenced by its environment. Leaving aside for the moment the effect of wind, there is a universal drag created by the friction of that ocean of air the bullet pierces through in order to fly, combined with the downward pull of gravity. At a certain distance, different for different weapons and ammunition, your particular rifle bullet slows to the point where it passes from supersonic to subsonic. As it eats through the yards at rates of something like 1 yard every 1⁄1,000 of a second, the integrity of its flight path becomes compromised. A .308 bullet traveling at 2,200 feet per second will lose its flight-path stability to the point where it starts tumbling head over heels by about 900 or 1,000 meters out.
External ballistics is also about exactly what that flight path looks like. When you shoot a .308 at a target 800 yards away, you’re not shooting in a straight line; it actually makes a pretty big arc. Imagine throwing a football from the 50-yard line to the end zone. You don’t throw it straight toward the goal. Instead, you know you have to throw it upward so that it arcs through the air, hitting its high point at about the 25-yard line and then curving back down to reach the end zone. The same thing happens with the .308 bullet. You’re not shooting it in a straight line; you’re really throwing it up in the air so that it arcs and comes down where you want it to. Understanding exactly how that works can have a make-or-break bearing on successfully hitting your target.
For example, let’s say you’re shooting at something 800 yards away. In the terrain lying between you and your target, you notice a low-hanging bridge. From all appearances, that’s no problem. Your target stands at maybe 5'8"; you are lying on the ground, on your stomach; and the bridge is a good 10 feet off the ground at its lowest point. When you sight down through your scope at the target, you can see a clear pathway from you straight to the target. No problem, right?
Wrong. That bridge may not look like it’s in the way—but when you take into account the arc your bullet needs to travel to land at your projected site, that bridge could be lying directly in the path of what we call the bullet’s top arc. In other words, it could stop your bullet cold, halfway to your target. And in the kinds of circumstances a sniper will often be facing, you may not have the luxury of a second shot. You have to know your bullet’s maximum ordinate, that is, the maximum height that bullet will reach on its path to your target, and calculate for that.
* * *
Once we had mastered the M-14 we moved on to other weapons, starting with the .308 bolt action Remington, a very solid weapon and quite capable out to 800 or 900 yards, in the right hands. This was our first look at a real scoped weapon—and right away, I knew had a problem. There was a Leupold scope on one of my guns that just didn’t seem quite right. I pretty quickly realized that it wasn’t maintaining at zero: it was slipping off. There was no way I could shoot with a scope that wasn’t reliable.
These weapons are not delicate; they’re made to withstand the rigors of combat. However, they are pieces of precision machinery, and they’re not infallible. For example, the barrel of a .300 Win Mag is only good for a few thousand rounds, and then you shoot out the barrel and it starts losing accuracy. We were shooting thousands and thousands of rounds.
If your gun starts to malfunction in the middle of a shooting evolution, the instructor might assume it’s you. In a lot of cases, he’s right. In some cases, though, the weapon really is shot out, or there’s some kind of equipment malfunction. We had a few guys who were excellent shots but got flushed out of the course because they had the bad luck of getting a weapon that didn’t have a good log and was legitimately shot out, and they didn’t yet have the skills or know-how to deal with it right away.
I was determined not to let that happen. My first shooting test was coming up. No way was this faulty scope going to flush me from sniper school. I told my instructors about it, and when they didn’t do anything I kept bringing it up. I wouldn’t let it rest. Finally they got an armorer out there from Crane, the navy’s ordnance testing division. He looked at the scope and said, “Yeah, you have a bad optic.”
Thank God. I easily could have flunked out in my first test because of a messed-up scope.
At the same time that we started working with scopes on the .308, we also started working in pairs, taking turns as shooter and as spotter. The shooter’s job is to put everything else out of his mind, take the information the spotter feeds him, and make a perfect shot, period. As we soon learned, the spotter’s job is in many ways more complex and more difficult.
As spotter, you ar
e on the spotting scope, identifying and monitoring the target. Your job is to calculate windage and give target lead if necessary (that is, how much to compensate for the target’s movement). As spotter you also watch the shot trace, which tells its own story and either proves the call dead-on accurate or gives important clues for correcting the next shot. Yes, even though it is traveling at speeds of 2,000 feet per second or more, you actually watch the damn thing. In most cases you can literally see those vapor trails all the way in to the target.
The spotter has to take all these considerations into account—and we had to learn it all in a hell of a hurry, or we would be going home.
Even aside from the fact that we were friends, Glen and I soon found that we made an excellent sniper pair. Glen is a naturally gifted marksman. I don’t remember him ever missing a single shot, and most of his shots were perfect 10s. For my part, I seemed to have a natural gift for reading the wind and being able to calculate all the conditions and circumstances. Again, I think this had to do with my experience with navigation and having grown up near the water. Water currents and wind currents may be two very different things, but it is really the same basic concept, albeit in different media and moving at much different speeds. When you’re sailing or boating, you’re always thinking, What’s the weather doing? How is this affecting my point A to point B? It’s the same dynamic when you’re preparing to fire a bullet. I’m here, my target’s there—what factors are affecting my getting from here to there?
Reach your hand down into a stream or lake, and you might notice that it looks like it juts off as if your arm were suddenly bent at a sharp angle. Likewise, when you see a trout in a stream, it isn’t located exactly where it looks like it’s located. This is because the light is refracted by the body of water, creating an optical illusion. The same thing happens in the atmosphere. When the sun is low in the horizon, it creates the same kind of refractory optical illusion, and you have to compensate for that in your aim, maybe dial it down a minute of angle.
With my knack for spotting and Glen’s natural gifts as a shooter, we made a deadly pair. Plus, we were both new guys, and we felt the same pressure to get this right. We’d have a few beers at night, but we didn’t drink or carouse much. We were focused on staying locked on tight and getting through this thing.
Not that there was much in the way of nightlife anyway. Coalinga is a small town, with a prison, some farming, and not a whole lot more going on. On rare occasions we went out for a drink or got a bite to eat in town. Most often, though, we’d make a big bonfire right there where we were camping, drink a few beers, and tell each other crazy stories.
One guy, Ken, had a Penthouse magazine and would lie there at night in his sleeping bag jerking off, thinking he had all the privacy in the world. Unfortunately, he had this head lamp switched on so he could see his damn magazine, and as a result he would unintentionally be giving the whole camp a shadow-puppet show on the wall of his tent. “Goddammit, Ken, quit jerking off!” we’d yell out. “Or at least turn off the damn light!”
The range had a nice little grass campground complete with a kitchen and a restrooms/shower area. All the students were instructed to bring a tent and kit. Most of the guys traveled pretty light. I take just what I need, and it all fits in my pack. Guys in the teams had a saying, “Pack light and mooch.” My saying was “Don’t pack light—pack right.” Not Glen, though. As I soon learned, Glen liked to travel in comfort, which meant plenty of extras. He was like a one-man gypsy camp. He must have gone out and bought the biggest tent he could find at the local Kmart; that thing could have slept a family of ten. He had three fuel-burning lanterns, a radio, a coffeemaker, a generator—it was out of control.
We were partners, so my tent was right next to his. I love Glen like a brother, but this was torture. That son of a bitch would be up and about for a solid hour before the rest of us in camp even started thinking about opening our eyes, and once he was up it was nearly impossible to stay asleep because his gypsy encampment lit up the whole side of my tent. First I was awakened by the blinding white glow and steady hum of his Coleman-exploration power lanterns. Then the sounds would start: his percolating coffeepot, then some sort of eighties rock music blaring through his earphones, which he thought we couldn’t hear but in fact only made him even more oblivious to the extent of the racket he was making, messing around with all his stuff, clattering around and getting his coffee ready, burping and farting but not hearing himself because he had those earphones in, then followed by his electric toothbrush, endless loud gargle, and the invariable lengthy punctuating spit that made us all groan. After a week or so of this daily routine, the guys began referring to Glen’s morning ablutions as “Chernobyl.”
If I had my choice, I would pull myself out of sleep maybe twenty minutes before we had to muster up, giving myself just enough time to brush my teeth, throw some water on my face, and grab my gear. But no. I tried for days, but it was not possible. Finally I succumbed and started letting Glen be my alarm clock.
* * *
Soon we had our first graded test on the .308.
As pairs we shared a combined grade, so we knew we would sink or swim together as a shooter/spotter pair. Glen and I scored in the nineties on that first test, but by that time we were both feeling completely frazzled and harried.
Still, we knew we had developed into a solid shooting pair, and we seemed to handle the stress better than many of the other guys. During that first paired shooting evolution, we could see the tension level in some of the other pairs simmering; by the time of that test, a few of them went through complete meltdowns.
Typically what happened was that the spotter would make a bad call or, even worse, not make a call at all and leave his shooter partner hanging. One or two of these scenarios and the honeymoon would be way beyond over. We saw guys actually throw down and get into a knock-down, drag-out fistfight because a buddy had fucked up multiple calls. Needless to say, this constituted a guaranteed ticket home.
Pretty soon it dawned on us that the steadily escalating stress we were seeing was no accident. Not only was it intentional, it was being carefully orchestrated. Our instructors were constantly watching, pushing, and testing us to see who could handle the stress and who could not.
One day, while I was spotting, Glen took a shot that I could clearly see had struck the target—but our instructor marked it as a miss.
“What?” Glen exclaimed. I knew what he was about to say next: That’s total bullshit!
“Don’t worry,” I told him, “you’re fine. It was a hit.”
We continued on with the evolution unfazed. Later we learned that the instructor had called down to the butts over the radio and told the students who were working our lane to mark his hit as a miss. Why? Just to fuck with us and see how we would handle it.
We were fortunate. By this time Glen had developed total faith in my spotting, making us killing machines on the range—and we had already realized that the instructors were playing games with us to see how well we handled adverse situations. Some guys didn’t get this, and they would self-destruct, carrying the falsified missed shots into a testable evolution and failing miserably.
They gave us two kinds of tests on the .308, starting with a snaps and movers test.
Snaps and movers involves targets that suddenly appear out of nowhere, snapping upright in a variety of locations and at different, unpredictable time intervals, and targets that move continuously, left and right, in random and unpredictable order. These are full-size E-silhouette targets, a flat panel with a sort of bottle-shaped silhouette on it that represents a human torso and head. Typically we had three head snaps and three moving targets on each yard line, positioned at the 200-yard, 400-yard, 600-yard, and 800-yard lines.
Working with snaps and movers was where we learned how to lead a moving target. This is tricky, because you have to take into account what the wind is doing and calculate for the distance that you have to lead ahead of the target as it moves.
It can feel counterintuitive at first, because often you shouldn’t aim where common sense tells you that you ought be aiming.
I remember the first time I put my crosshairs directly on the target, even though it was obviously not stationary and everything in me was screaming at me to move the crosshairs a few degrees off in the direction the target was moving—in other words, to lead the target. According to what we were learning, however, the wind would push my bullet out of its attempted straight path and, over the course of its arc toward the target, actually blow it into the target and cancel out those few degrees of lead. If this sounds like some kind of bizarre funhouse-mirror maze of calculations and competing factors, that’s exactly what it felt like—and it all had to happen on a time scale of thousandths of a second. It felt completely wrong, but the logic of external ballistics told me it was right on the money.
I squeezed the trigger and ping! The target went down.
Next was an unknown distance test. For this, they laid out a series of steel targets in each lane at various elevations and distances, all the way from 50 yards to 900 yards, which was right at the outer limit of effective range for the .308—only we didn’t know exactly what any of these elevations and distances were. This was where we started really learning how to use our scopes and, in particular, learning range estimation using the mil dot scope reticle.
The reticle, or crosshairs, in a sniper rifle scope is outfitted with two series of tiny dots, called mil dots, that run horizontally and vertically through the field of vision and allow us to measure the approximate height and width of sighted objects by making some simple visual calculations.
If we saw that our target measured, say, 1.5 mil in height in the scope, and we knew the target’s actual height in inches, then we could plug that into a formula that would give us the target’s distance. As long as we had a known measurement to work with, we could work out the exact range. Practically any kind of known measurement would do. We learned to ask questions like “What’s the standard dimension of a Middle Eastern license plate? What’s the height and dimension of a standard STOP sign in the Middle East? What’s the standard window height?” We learned to record this information carefully, knowing that sooner or later, we would be in a situation in some Middle Eastern country and need to know how to calculate the range of a target so we could dial in the correct elevation before taking the shot—and do it fast.
