Experience had taught me that warthogs who tough it out are better in combat than your natural gazelles.
—Richard Marcinko (founder of SEAL Team 6), Red Cell
Mogadishu Airport, 1995
Okay, thought Alex, this is now officially going down. Mr. Army Shirt was aiming his RPG tube up the runway, directly toward them.
Alex had his .50 cal up on the sandbags with his spotter right behind and to the left. Sitting on an ammo can with the Beast resting at about shoulder height, he found himself wishing he had cut a notch out of the sandbags so he could have rested the gun directly on the wall itself and gotten that solid bone-on-bone support. As it was, he was having to muscle it. That fucker weighed twenty-four pounds dry (just two pounds less than Furlong’s big TAC-50), and it was virtually impossible to hold the gun completely steady.
This would also be the first time he had ever aimed at another human being and pulled the trigger, and his heart was pounding.
Perched right at the edge of the Indian Ocean, there was a fairly good, constant wind blowing. His spotter ranged the target at six hundred yards. Alex got his dope dialed in.
Mr. Army Shirt had his RPG tube cocked back. The rules of engagement were clear: they were taking fire, so they should have been clear to fire back. But everyone was still somewhat paranoid about those damned ROEs.
“Hey,” Alex called out to his OIC. “Am I clear and hot? Am I clear and hot?”
“Hold on,” the OIC shouted back, “I’ve got to call it in!” He got on comms, spoke a few words, then called back over to Alex. “Yeah, man, if they’re preparing to shoot, you’re good to go.”
Alex had been in the armed forces now for eight years, but even long before that—for as long as he could remember, in fact—he had had dreams about being in this situation. I don’t mean “dreams,” as in ambitions or aspirations. I mean he had actual dreams: lying in bed asleep and having the vivid experience of being right here, right now, dreams of being in a place of mortal threat and facing the enemy, of being the one in a position to take out that threat. Of being the big-game hunter of the military, about to take down his prey.
Sometimes, though, those dreams would turn into nightmares. Those were the ones where he would see himself miss the shot.
He lined up on Mr. Army Shirt.
He would not miss this shot.
He squeezed off a round. BOOM! The monster Mark 211 bullet flew downrange, and the backblast from the .50 blew the binos clean out of his spotter’s hands and nearly knocked the man off his feet. Fortunately there was another teammate up there with Alex, also watching with his binos. Alex shouted back to him, “Did I get a hit?”
“No,” the guy called back. “You missed.”
Shahikot Valley, 2002
Based on the previous two days’ experience, Rob and Tim now had some decent dope for the extreme distances they were shooting with their new ammunition. Still, this particular shot was so far beyond maximum effective range, both for the rifle and for the scope, that they would have to do some serious improvising. Rob describes a lot of the 2,300-plus shots as being 60 percent skill and 40 percent luck—or possibly the other way around. But to go out 2,430 meters? That seemed more like 90 percent skill—and another 90 percent luck.
The tangle of complications is staggering when you break it down, strand by strand.
First, of course, was the sheer distance, which was so extreme that not only was the scope’s normal capacity to adjust for elevation way beyond maxed out, but even the dope they had collected over the past few days was of only limited help.
Then there was the severe angle. They were, at this point, up at about nine thousand feet, and the little band of Taliban gunners were walking along the valley floor at probably eight thousand feet or so, so they were looking down on them at a fairly steep angle, about 40 degrees. Even if they’d had good dope for such a distance as 2,430 meters, it wouldn’t work for this shot: if Rob used it the round would overshoot the target, because of the angle.
The angle was actually a help in one sense, in that it would allow Rob to shoot a little bit farther than if he and his target were both on level ground. Because he was shooting downward, the bullet could travel farther in its trajectory; you could say it was actually falling toward the target. Yet at the same time (just as when Jason Delgado would have to take out a crazed gunman in the streets of Baghdad a year later from the top of one of the city’s tallest buildings) it added one more layer of complication.
There was also the altitude. The air was significantly thinner than it would be at more normal elevations. At Wainwright, back in Alberta, where they had first worked up their skills on the .50 a few months earlier, elevation was a little over two thousand feet above sea level. Here they were at nine thousand feet. Thinner air means less resistance, which translates into greater stability when the round enters the transonic range.
In the course of its flight, the bullet from a sniper rifle will start out in supersonic speed, then slow to transonic, that is, about the speed of sound. At this point its center of pressure shifts forward, causing a loss of dynamic stability. This can make it start to wobble like a slowing top, or even to start tumbling end over end. Once it slows further into the subsonic range it can become more stable again, but that transonic phase is a bitch. The thinner air to some degree mitigates this effect, adding up to good conditions for a further and more accurate shot.
The thinner air also means the bullet encounters less friction as it pushes its way through the atmosphere, which allows it to travel farther. Like the steep angle, this was actually another boon—but also another complication. Every thousand feet up you go means essentially a whole new set of equations. As the air thins, muzzle velocity increases, which increases both the velocity and precise arc of the round. It’s a slightly different flight path—but that slight difference is enough to generate a complete miss on a human target on the other end.
Spin drift, at normal ranges an irrelevancy, also became a critical distorting factor at this extreme distance. By the time a bullet has traveled a thousand yards, its gyroscopic spin will have caused it to drift slightly in the direction of rotation—that is, clockwise—by about one minute of angle (MOA). At 1,000 yards, 1 MOA means 10 inches. This shot was more than two and a half times that distance (2,430 meters is about 2,657 yards), meaning that spin drift could have caused that bullet to veer as much as two feet to the right.
Then there’s the Coriolis effect, the slight discrepancy created by the fact that the target (and everything else on the ground) is actually shifting its position in space as the earth rotates on its axis while the bullet is in flight. Coriolis has the most impact toward the poles, and the least at the equator; the Shahikot Valley lay just south of the 34th parallel, roughly on a par with Los Angeles. Not equatorial, but not exactly Siberia. The Coriolis effect is also most pronounced when shooting due north or south, least when shooting east or west. Rob was shooting in a mostly westerly direction. At least this was one complication that wouldn’t be much of a factor here.
Added to all the other influences was the classic sniper’s nemesis: the wind. Between Rob and his target were swirling not one, not two, but three competing crosswinds, each of which would blow his round off-course—in a different direction.
And his target was walking. It would take nearly four seconds for the round to reach the Taliban gunner’s neighborhood on the other side of the valley. You might be surprised at just how far a guy walking at a good clip can travel in four seconds. Even if Rob’s aim was perfectly calculated to match all the imperfections of flight so that the bullet landed precisely where the man was, by the time it got there, he wouldn’t be there anymore.
In other words, he had to craft his aim to precisely compensate for:
In a word, or rather two words: rocket science.
To all these factors, Rob himself added in one more, one that he knew should work in his favor: the sun.
If it was bitter cold at night in the Afghan mountains, it warmed up considerably during the day. In that high mountain desert terrain, they baked and broiled under direct sunlight all day long. Which had reminded Rob of that mental note he’d made back in 1999 when he was competing in Australia before he blew out his shoulder.
Laying the ammo out in the sun for a while before taking the shot.
High tech meets high touch: he had set out that hot-tempered copper-jacketed ammo to sit steeping in the hot sun, knowing it would heat the rounds’ propellant and allow him to eke out just a fractional bit more distance. It might be just that fractional bit he would need.
Husaybah, 2004
Machine gun fire and AK bullets rained down on the marines from multiple directions, raking the lip of the garbage ditch they’d all just jumped into seconds before, the air suddenly filled with flying clods and spray of dirt.
They all froze. For a good ten seconds, nobody moved. To Jason Delgado and his teammates it could have been ten minutes or ten hours. No one did a thing or moved a muscle, just crouched there in that trash ditch, processing the fact that they had walked into a massive ambush.
Jason instantly understood what had happened. For weeks, the insurgents had been carefully tracking their every movement, learning their patterns, gathering intel, watching and waiting. The spatters of violence, like the small series of attacks three days earlier, were in part an effort to take out some of their key personnel; Colonel Lopez had been shot at, Jason’s sniper, Thompson, wounded and put out of action. But more than inflicting harm, those skirmishes were further intel operations—probing, testing, weighing, and watching the Americans’ responses.
They knew damn well there would be some kind of unit coming out to storm that stronghold. And they’d been ready for them.
Shit, thought Jason. That little kid with the flag had been signaling, all right. He’d been telling his handlers that a big juicy column of marines was down here on Route Train, primed and ready for the killing. The marines had been goldfish in a bowl. And an awful lot of them would probably be dead right now—except that the marines had done one thing the architects of this ambush had not expected.
They’d gotten down into that funky garbage ditch.
That sudden move to the ditch had been either a brilliant tactical move on Aaron Awtry’s part, or a gut response to one hell of a premonition. Maybe both. It had for sure saved their lives. If they hadn’t gotten off the road and jumped down into that trench when they did, they would still be sitting on Route Train right now, reduced to shredded mounds of flesh.
At the same time, that trench now also held them captive. Wherever the shooters were, they didn’t appear to have enough angle to shoot directly into the ditch, but they sure as hell were chewing away at the edge of the thing. The marines had to keep their heads down. Even poking up to barely peek over the edge was a potentially fatal risk.
The stronghold site they’d been heading for was an apartment building, the largest of a cluster of five or six such buildings, located at the southern edge of the city about 250 yards down Route Train to the east. The marines’ formation now stretched out through most of that 250 yards.
Jason heard someone cry out. A marine near the front of the formation, closer to the stronghold building, went down, hit by a round coming from the stronghold building itself.
A moment later a second marine was hit. This was bad. They were taking injuries.
They wouldn’t last much longer.
Helmand Province, 2009
The sheer enormity of the noise was overwhelming. Nick Irving couldn’t tell where the rounds were originating. It seemed like they were coming at them from every direction at once. Nick had been through dozens upon dozens of firefights, but never in all his deployments had he heard this much gunfire going off all at once. There were machine guns and AK-47s, RPKs, a few RPGs—it seemed like they were throwing an entire battalion’s worth of arsenal at them.
Nick and Pemberton both jumped to their feet and scrambled. They knew exactly what to do: run like hell for that little hole in the ground Nick had pointed out a few minutes earlier when they’d been walking in here, and throw themselves in. It sure wasn’t much, but what else could they do? Nick got there a split second before Pemberton and dove in, Pemberton piling in on top of him. Derek, the leader of the recce team, came running from the other direction and jumped on top of Pemberton. The other recce operators slammed themselves down against the dirt just around the edge of the hole.
Nick took stock of their situation.
The depression was about two feet deep. He was lying on his stomach, with two guys lying on top of him, but he could turn and raise his head slightly, just enough to see that the grass poking over the lip of the hole was getting torn up by gunfire. Dirt splashed up a few inches away from his face.
“Dude,” he had to shout to be heard over the din, “we’re going to die out here. That’s a fact.”
Both his and Pemberton’s comms were still out, but Derek’s (miraculously) had some functionality. He called over to the main element to see if they could come help them out with some suppressive fire.
“Sorry, guys,” the answer came back, “but we’re fucked right now, too. We’re in a three-hundred-sixty-degree ambush.”
Okay. So for the moment, at least, they were on their own.
In the process of diving into the hole and squirming around to avoid the gunfire, they had gotten themselves into what looked like a strange game of Combat Twister. Nick was now on his back, lying on top of Derek’s legs, and Pemberton was sprawled out on top of him. He flipped over onto his stomach again and managed to get Dirty Diana up into position. He very briefly peeked his head up over the lip of the depression, caught some motion on top of one building about five hundred meters to the north, then ducked down again.
It looked like three guys, doing something. Something like setting up a machine gun. He needed a better look.
He started raising his head once more to peek out over the lip of their little foxhole. Just as he did he heard an extremely loud sssssnap! just to the left of his left ear.
He dropped back down on his stomach, face in the dirt.
As loud as that snap was, that round had to have come within inches of his head. And it was a high-speed round. No question about that. Nothing else cracked open the sound barrier in that intimate, immediate way, like a sniper round.
Was there a sniper out there?
Very, very carefully, he started raising his head just enough so his eyes could peek back over the lip again—and immediately the same thing happened: sssssnap!
Son of a bitch.
The Chechen.
Mogadishu Airport, 1995
The Army Shirt guy downrange was clearly startled by Alex’s shot, and his reaction cost him a few precious seconds.
“Correction!” shouted Alex. “Give me a correction!” he called to the guy behind him with the binos as he went to reload the Beast:
Pull out the bolt—
Eject the spent brass—
Slide in a new round—
Slam in the bolt—
Ratchet it in and down and ready—
It felt like it was taking an hour.
Mr. Army Shirt now had his RPG tube shouldered again and was once again preparing to launch.
The SEAL with the binos said, “Shit, man, I can’t give you a correction—I couldn’t see where it impacted.”
Motherfuck! thought Alex.
It was his nightmare come true. Not only had his first shot missed, but he also had no idea in what direction he had missed, and nobody could give him the correction he needed. And his fucking gun took roughly twenty years to reload.
Okay. The .50 was now reloaded. Alex got back on his scope.
Mr. Army Shirt was now seconds away from launching his grenade directly at them.
With no correction to go by, Alex had no clear information on which to base the second shot. He wasn’t sure he’d get a third. There was nothing he could do but go by his gut.
When Alex went through the NSW course they started the students out on iron sights, just like Delgado’s marine course. They had some civilian service rifle instructors there, who right from the start taught them a mental shooting program, something like the checklist a pilot will do just before takeoff.
“Front sight focus, front sight focus, front sight focus,” they’d repeat, “breath, breath, breath, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze—” And then somewhere in there they’d suddenly shout “Break!”—and Boom! The shot would practically take itself. Alex had made that practice part of himself at the cellular level. It not only served as a solid checklist, it also calmed his mind, almost like a mantra in meditation, and helped ensure that the round would go where he needed it to.
Without thinking, he ran through his mental program: Front sight focus, front sight focus, breath, breath, squeeze, squeeze …—BREAK.
He took the shot.
Shahikot Valley, 2002
The scope mounted on the big .50 cal was a fixed 16x. Rob and Tim had selected that particular scope because it provided 120 minutes of adjustment, which at the time was extremely high-end precision. But that 16x magnification limit was now a serious handicap. Staring at the spot Tim was describing, all Rob could see was a tiny grouping of three specks. He couldn’t make out any details whatsoever. If Tim had said, “The guy with the beard” or “the one with the long sash” it would have been meaningless to Rob. In fact, “the guy with the machine gun over his shoulder” was already more detail than Rob could make out.
The three men looked literally like three ants, crawling along the valley floor. Or maybe, three flies.
Tim, on the other hand, could see everything. He could tell that the guy in the middle, the one with the backpack, was carrying the machine gun. It was a classic shooter-spotter scenario.
“Okay,” said Tim, “lead guy, not our target. Rear guy, not our target. Our target is center man.”
Okay, the fly in the middle, thought Rob. Let’s see if we can hit that fly.
“Confirm center man,” repeated Tim.
“Yah,” replied Rob. “Center man.”
Tim lased him again with the Vectronix and gave Rob the exact range.
Using the mil dots in his scope, Furlong aimed at a point 4 mils high (about fifteen feet above the target) and 4 mils to the left (fifteen feet to the left of his target).
He sent a round downrange.
“Miss,” he heard Tim say.
No surprise. And he wasn’t worried. They weren’t having any first-round hits now anyway, not with this new ammunition and at these extreme distances.
Tim followed the round’s vapor trail, bringing every ounce of his concentration to bear on the tiny field of vision through that spotting scope. The sand of the Shahikot Valley floor was almost like fine flour, and when they hit it with a round, it would send up a distinctive POOF! of dust. Sure enough, Tim saw the splash as the .50 cal round hit the ground near the gunner.
Using the Vectronix’s click-and-drag feature, Tim fed Rob a correction. Rob couldn’t actually enter that data anywhere, because every adjustment he had was already well past maxed out, but he took what Tim gave him and translated it into an adjustment plotted to the reticle inside his scope.
Furlong ejected the spent cartridge from the first round, slammed a second round home into the chamber, then reset his aim, sent a second round downrange—and waited patiently for his round to soar across the valley.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi … or rather: One Anaconda, two Anaconda …
And saw the three scatter for cover.
“Fuck,” said Tim. “I think you hit his backpack.”
Wow, thought Rob. Damn close.
Although the Tali fighters scattered, they didn’t do so very effectively. Confused about where the bullets were coming from, they were all still trying to scan locations out beyond them, in the opposite direction from where the Canadians lay. It must have never occurred to them that such accurate shots could possibly be coming from clear across the valley. So when they made for cover behind some dirt mounds, they actually placed themselves between their cover and the snipers, putting their backs to the hunters who were watching them.
Rob figured he had one more chance. After a third miss, chances were good it would finally dawn on his targets just where these shots were coming from, and if they then scrambled and put effective cover between them and him, the match would be over.
This one had to be it.
This time Tim didn’t have to feed any data to his partner. Rob now knew his dope was solid. He knew everything he needed to know. He didn’t need any further corrections. It was all up to him now.
He looked through his scope again.
For a moment he had a weird image. It felt like he was in the clouds, looking down at the earth—like he was in a passenger plane, looking out the window at cars crawling like ants across the plains below, only they weren’t cars, and they weren’t ants or flies, they were three people, crawling along the foot of a mountain ridgeline opposite the one on which he sat.
He squeezed the trigger.
Husaybah, 2004
As gunfire continued raking the edge of the trash ditch, Jason Delgado struggled to get a clear assessment of just where the enemy forces were located.
A barrage of machine gun fire was coming at them from the east, from inside the stronghold building itself, which, because it was the southernmost building of its little complex, had an unimpeded view of Route Train. The insurgents had set up a machine gun nest there with multiple machine guns, so that anyone who came down that road was going to get lit up in a big way. The gunners’ view into the trash ditch wasn’t perfect, because the ditch didn’t line up exactly parallel with the building’s location, but close enough to give them way too much visual access. The marines, especially those closest to the stronghold complex, couldn’t hide in there forever. Two had already been hit by machine gun rounds.
And that wasn’t all. They were taking significant fire from at least one other direction.
Jason crept up on the berm, and managed to take a split-second look around before ducking down again.
In that brief glimpse, he spotted two men on a rooftop, perched on a building due north from his location, that is, right across the tracks and Route Train and a few buildings into the city. One held an AK, the other a machine gun. Jason was in no position to range them carefully, but if he had to wager on it, he’d put them at about 230 yards. It was the same rooftop where that kid had been waving his little flag.
So that was it.
The enemy’s plan was clear now. The marines would walk down Route Train toward the stronghold building while the guys on the machine guns to their east watched them advance, waiting until they drew just level with this second machine gun nest, the one to the north, before giving the signal to open fire.
A classic L-shaped ambush.
It was a solid plan, and if it had worked, it would have taken out more than two entire platoons of marines, plus the new company CO, since Lieutenant-now-Captain Neal was in the mix with Kilo 1. It would have been a devastating blow to the Americans.
Except that Awtry’s decision to hit the ditch had saved their asses.
Still, they couldn’t last long where they were. The ditch was giving them cover, but not complete cover. It wasn’t that deep, and at the angle they had, sooner or later the shooters would walk their aim in closer and nail them. Plus they had fire coming at them from two directions, at basically 90 degrees from each other, pinning them into a vise that kept them at least partially exposed no matter what they did—and gunfire from additional fighters scattered everywhere in onesies and twosies only added to their exposure.
They needed some leverage of movement here.
What was the weakest chink in the enemy’s armor? It had to be the machine gun nest directly across from them. Jason had to neutralize the two shooters manning the position to the north.
But these two guys were maddeningly elusive, moving around like crazy up there on that rooftop. When Jason first spotted them they were at the western edge of the roof they were on. Their building was adjacent to another, slightly taller building, which looked to Jason like they’d been planning to use for cover. In fact, they had probably been hunkered down behind that taller building when Lieutenant Awtry spotted the boy with the flag.
At the same time, that had also most likely prevented the two shooters from seeing what Awtry did when he moved his whole column down into the trash ditch. Jason now realized that the shooters may have been surprised when they realized the marines were already passing them in the ditch. They were expecting them to appear on the road.
In any case, now it came down to a duel. The machine gunner and AK gunner were ripping into the column but they were also moving around so constantly that it was extremely difficult to get a fix on them. They, on the other hand, now had a clear fix on Jason, and from the way their fire was focused right at his position, they had clearly made him their primary target. Classic battle tactics: target officers and snipers first.
Which made targeting them even more difficult, because now it wasn’t just a matter of getting hit by random fire. They were expecting him and gunning for him.
The one thing going for Jason was, they didn’t have the accuracy he did. They had an AK-47, a solid workhorse but not much of a gun for range or accuracy, and a machine gun, which was great for raking an area with random fire but not so great for target shooting.
He had his bolt-action M40A3.
Popping up and down, doing his meager best to maintain evasive action by being at least marginally unpredictable, running the math in the back of his head to account for the upward angle, Jason kept at it, trying to maneuver his way into a kill shot. It was maddening, like trying to thread a needle with gloves on while sitting on a bucking bronco. It felt to Jason that it took forever.
Finally, for a split second, he got the machine gunner in his scope.
This was the opposite of that high-angle shot in Baghdad. There he’d been aiming down at a target on ground level from fifty-plus stories up. Now he was at sub-ground level himself, aiming upward.
To compensate, he moved his point of aim to slightly above center mass.
And squeezed.
The gunner flew back from his weapon, dead before he hit the roof.
A perfect one shot, one kill.
Delgado racked another round.
And took the guy on the AK with his second shot.
Helmand Province, 2009
Irving figured the enemy sniper must have been observing them before the firefight broke out, because he seemed to know exactly where they were. And he wasn’t shooting at anyone else. He had a clear strategy. He was going after Nick.
Nick knew the number one rule for a sniper in combat: the first person you want to target and kill is another sniper. The Chechen obviously knew that rule, too.
And he was pretty well dialed in on them. Every time Nick moved, another shot skimmed past him. The rest of the fusillade of bullets didn’t bother Nick that much, because it was mostly machine gun fire scattering at them from what appeared to be either at or fairly near to ground level, and those rounds weren’t coming in at enough of an angle to get down into their shallow hole.
This guy, though. This guy had to be in an elevated position, because those bullets were finding their way in.
Nick needed to pinpoint just where this shooter was located. Derek was a trained recce operator, a master of reconnaissance and observation. If they both took a quick glance at the same time, splitting up the general area where Nick figured the shots had to be coming from, they might be able to triangulate. And presenting two targets simultaneously might also have the effect of forcing the sniper to pause for a fraction of a second as he decided which target to go for. It was worth a try.
He communicated this idea to Derek. They crouched down together and prepared to work fast and in perfect synchronization.
They both raised their heads up slightly, about six inches apart—sssnap! another high-speed round tore through the air right between their two faces.
They both slammed down into the dirt again, Derek screaming, “Are you hit? Are you hit?” and Nick screaming at the same moment, “You okay? You okay?” until they each realized the other was shouting, too.
“No, man,” shouted Nick. “I’m good, I’m good. Are you good?”
“Yeah,” said Derek. “I’m good.”
Okay, that wasn’t going to work. This sonofabitch had them completely pinned down.
Still, he wasn’t hitting them, at least not yet, which was good. Not only did it mean they were still breathing, it also meant that his view of them was not perfect. He could catch glimpses of them coming up over the lip of the hole, and he was getting rounds on them down there, but he couldn’t peer down into the hole enough to see their bodies and fix their individual locations well.
Meanwhile, Nick was still thinking about that group of three fighters he’d seen.
From the shots the Chechen had taken so far, Nick knew at least roughly what direction he was shooting from: a little off from due north. Call it north-northwest.
Nick told Pemberton to start shooting his big .300 Win Mag in that direction, and to aim high. Suppressive fire—worth a shot.
Pemberton started cranking off round after round; BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. He wasn’t hitting anything but at least it gave Nick a chance to grab another glimpse.
“Okay, slow down, man,” he told Pemberton. Their ammo wasn’t going to last forever, and it looked like they might be out here a while. If they lived that long.
In that brief glimpse he’d seen that little knot of three guys again, huddling together on a rooftop at maybe five hundred yards, just to the right of due north. It was definitely a machine gun team: gunner, ammo bearer, and ammo loader. Damn, he thought, that’s exactly how we’d do it. They had just unloaded a belt of 7.62s at the Americans and were setting back up to shoot some more.
“Hey,” Nick shouted to Derek, “I’ve got three guys up here with a machine gun!”
Derek’s reply was eloquent in its economy. “Shoot them!”
Being down in the depression, with those three guys on the rooftop of a fairly tall building, Nick already had Dirty Diana positioned at a pretty good upward angle and didn’t really need to raise his head to shoot. He just pushed his gun barrel up over the lip of the hole and nuzzled it through the grass there, his scope sticking up just enough so that he could get a line of sight.
He got the three guys on his scope and dialed in. He thought it had to be the most uncomfortable, unorthodox firing position he’d ever shot from.
He squeezed the trigger.
And missed. High and to the right.
He compensated for elevation and windage, and fired again. His second shot connected with the gunner right in the upper corner of his chest. He spun away from the gun and disappeared.
Now a second member of the team jumped into the first guy’s place behind the machine gun, placing himself right in the spot Nick already had dialed in. Thank you very much, thought Irving, And have a nice day, as he squeezed the trigger and watched this round slam into the second guy and hurl him backward, too. Next in line, please?
But the third member of the machine gun team wasn’t playing. He started grabbing a few ammo belts. From his cramped and contorted firing position, Nick knew he probably wouldn’t hit this one, but he put a few rounds up there anyway, just to say, Hey, don’t come back to this position again. Leave the gun. And don’t take the cannoli. The guy ran.
Other than those three up on the rooftop, Nick wasn’t able to locate any other shooters visually, but he sure could hear a hell of a lot going on, as the thunderstorm of gunfire continued.
This wasn’t just a massive force of guys with guns. They were good. They had foreign professionals in there working with them, Chechens, Uzbeks, Pakistanis, hard-core fighters who trained them in how to work together as an effective fighting force. To Nick, it was eerie, almost as if they were fighting another ranger platoon, their movements were so efficiently organized.
At one point he heard footsteps slapping the ground very close by, and someone screaming “Allah akbar!” They were closing in.
Time to call in the bombs.
Derek grabbed his radio, fortunately (and miraculously) still functional, and keyed in his CO’s RTO.
“Hey, we need air support, now! We’re about to get captured or killed. Repeat: We are in immediate danger! Multiple enemy positions, request ordnance drops on all.”
And now they came face-to-face with what may be the Spec Ops warrior’s greatest enemy, worst nightmare, and true nemesis:
Rules of engagement.
This was 2009, remember. The American public was tired of war. Our economy was in the tank. Resources, patience, and political will were all stretched paper-thin. At this point the political leadership wanted the war to wind down, not escalate. We were supposed to be helping these people rebuild, not messing up their infrastructure.
Which meant that, even though Nick and his group were ridiculously outnumbered by a massive enemy force and all about to be killed, they couldn’t get an air strike—because it would hurt too many buildings.
“Sorry,” came the answer, “we can’t drop any bombs there because we can’t accept anything over a point-one percent collateral damage.” In other words, there couldn’t be a building even anywhere in sight of where they dropped a bomb.
Now Derek was cursing a blue streak over the radio. But they wouldn’t budge.
Derek called back up and said, “Hey, drop bombs right here, right on us. We’re a minimum safe distance from those buildings. Just drop on our position.”
What the hell, he figured, they were going to die out there anyway, at least this way they could take some of these bad guys with them. But they wouldn’t do that, either. Instead, they sent in a B-2 stealth bomber and an F-16 to fly some three hundred feet overhead and drop a few flares.
That was it. That was the air support.
Nick couldn’t believe this was happening. What was a quick overflight supposed to do, frighten the enemy into dropping their guns, picking up their skirts, and running away? What were they thinking?
Of course it had no effect whatsoever.
The pace of the attack intensified.
Mogadishu Airport, 1995
That second shot felt good to Alex. He had the fleeting thought, I had to have gotten close that time—but he hadn’t had time to follow the round in his scope. The moment the shot was away he had to pour himself into the mechanics of the reload—
Pull out bolt—
Eject spent brass—
Slide in new round—
Slam bolt home—
Ratchet, in and down—
The comms guy had by now grabbed the spotting scope and moved a little farther away so he would be safely out of the Beast’s backblast. His eye was glued to the glass, watching Alex’s shot go downrange.
As Alex went through the whole reload routine he heard small arms rounds coming in overhead—dg, dg, dg, dg, dg, dg, dg, dg. Slamming the Beast back down onto his sandbag rampart to get ready for a third shot, he called back to the comms operator, “Gimme a correction.”
The comms guy said, “Son of a bitch.”
“What’s the correction, man?” repeated Alex. “Give me a fucking correction!”
Instead of answering, the comms guy just said, “God … damn.”
“Where’d the round hit?” shouted Alex. He reached over with his hand and gave the guy a whack. He needed that correction!
The comms guy wasn’t even hearing him. He was glued to that spotting scope. “Man, that had to hurt.”
“What do you mean?” Alex shouted. “What had to hurt?”
“That guy is down,” the comms guy said. Alex’s second shot—the one he’d made with no data to go on, no correction, on pure sniper’s instinct—had nailed the guy dead center. The RPG tube lay on the ground where it had dropped. Mr. Army Shirt was history.
It was Alex’s first kill shot, and if it had come half a minute later, it might have never come at all.
But there was no time to reflect on that, or reflect on anything, for that matter. The men around Mr. Army Shirt were now opening fire on the Americans.
He got back on the gun.
Shahikot Valley, 2002
Furlong’s .50 cal emitted one more BOOM as his third round exploded from the barrel, traveling at 2,700 feet per second, nearly 2,000 miles per hour, well more than twice the speed of sound. Yet even at that blinding speed the copper-jacketed slug would be flying for nearly four full seconds on its long arced journey over the valley floor below …
One Anaconda …
… pulled first in one direction by the first crosswind, then another by the second, and still another by the third, arcing up, up, up like a two-thousand-mile-an-hour pitch from a pitcher’s mound toward a home plate a mile and a half away, too far for the naked eye to see …
Two Anaconda …
… up, up, up until it reached a point, a little past midway, at which its trajectory flattened to zero arc and it began its inevitable downward arc …
Three Anaconda …
… now plummeting to meet that point where the imperfection of aim meets the corruptions of air and gravity to cancel each other out in a fraction of a second of calculated perfection—
Husaybah, 2004
Delgado had taken out the machine gun nest directly across the street, neutralizing the short end of the isosceles triangle that had the entire platoon pinned down. That at least bought them some slight freedom of movement. But the barrage of gunfire coming from the east, from the stronghold building, was a bigger problem. There were too many guns in that building for Jason to locate, let alone to take out one by one. And they were all still being shot at from multiple other directions, too.
Something big needed to happen, or they were all going to die. It was that simple.
They needed bigger guns.
What Jason really needed now was not his rifle but his radio. But Josh Mavica, who was serving as his RTO, was tens of yards away, hunkered down in the ditch like everyone else.
“Mavica,” Jason yelled. “Come to me, bitch! ’Cause I’m sure as hell not going to you!”
Someone by his shoulder laughed—DelFiorentino, probably. Delgado laughed, too. Hey, there was an excellent chance they would all be dead within the next ten to fifteen minutes. Sometimes you just have to laugh; it’s the only thing that keeps you going.
He heard Mavica say, “Oh, shit,” then yell out, “Okay!”
“Wait!” shouted Jason. He turned to DelFiorentino and yelled, “Pop smoke!” They popped off some high-concentrate smoke right there in the ditch and tossed it out into the street. That HC smoke is amazing stuff, it can give you a football field’s worth of total visual obscurity. Jason hoped he’d created enough of a temporary curtain to hide his RTO’s next move.
The moment after they popped those two HC smokes Jason saw Mavica lurch to his feet and make a Medal of Honor run toward him, bullets smacking the desert hardpack on either side of him as he ran, and the next moment he was sliding into Jason on a skid of trash like a base runner making an extremely close inside-the-park home run.
Jason got up close to Mavica and together they called for 81mm light mortar fire. (81mm is considered “light”; “heavy” mortar rockets are 120mm and bigger.) The light mortar platoon, back at Camp Husaybah a solid mile-plus away, responded.
The first few rounds hit a few hundred yards long.
Jason grabbed their Vectronix range finder—nearly identical to the one Rob Furlong and Tim McMeekin had used two years earlier in the Shahikot Valley—and trained it on the splash where those mortar rounds were hitting, double-clicked the Vector, went back to the main machine gun position they were trying to take out, clicked on that, and had his correction.
“Drop two hundred, fire for effect!”
Jason didn’t know how in God’s name they did it, but the mortar guys had their shit so dialed in that, out of that whole apartment complex, they managed to hit that one building dead on.
When the mortar rounds hit, something inside the house—propane tanks, Jason guessed or possibly munitions—detonated sympathetically. The house became a raging inferno.
In the temporary lull that followed the explosion of the stronghold building, they needed medevac for their wounded, and they needed it fast, because even though the machine gun nests were gone there was still a constant hail of gunfire coming their way, and it was already picking up steam again.
But all their medevac assets were gone. All that was left back at the camp was a lone Humvee and a seven-ton, which was a logistics vehicle. Word came back that the seven-ton was on its way—and then they saw it, hurtling down West End and banging a left at Route Train. It reached them and rolled up to the head of the line, where the wounded were, and pulled to a stop.
As it did, a rocket-propelled grenade streaked across the way and slammed into its fuel tank.
Everybody braced for the explosion.
Nothing happened.
Incredibly, even though the RPG had pierced the truck’s fuel tank, it somehow failed to ignite the fuel. Now, however, the truck was spraying fuel everywhere. The marines hastily loaded their injured onto the seven-ton. The truck turned around and started making its way back westward. As it drove past Jason and the others, it doused them with gasoline.
To this day, says Jason, he tends to freak out every time he smells gasoline.
They were now in a good news, bad news situation.
The good news was, they had now neutralized both arms of the L-shaped ambush’s pincers, Delgado’s two shots taking out the machine gun nest across the street, and the mortar assist destroying the nests in the stronghold building.
The bad news was, they were still pinned down. Because by this time a mob of fighters had mobilized in multiple locations and were raking them with gunfire from rooftop after rooftop after rooftop. They were being hit from every direction imaginable. It seemed to Delgado that the city was suddenly alive with eyes, all attached to fingers on automatic weapons, and all trained on them. This was beyond the snipers’ capacity to shoot at, beyond the capacity to call in mortar fire on. They were being shot at by an entire city.
So that was it. This is where you put your head down between your legs, thought Delgado, and kiss your ass good-bye.
Helmand Province, 2009
Once again, Nick took stock. Their platoon was pinned down in their own firefight a thousand yards away and couldn’t come help them. They couldn’t get any air support. They really, truly were on their own. Completely.
Okay.
Chess.
Who do you need to take off the board, Irv? Queen? Bishop? Knight?
Sniper.
Despite the barrage of gunfire coming at them from multiple directions, the single greatest threat they faced right now was that sniper, because he was targeting them more accurately than anyone on the board. He had to deal with the Chechen. Which presented a challenge: he didn’t know exactly where the guy was located. And he couldn’t get on ground level with eyes and scope long enough to scan the area and find him.
Countersniping: going sniper to sniper. In all his training, they really hadn’t spent much time on this topic. The speech Nick remembered getting in one of his sniper schools went something like this:
“If you ever find yourself up against a serious sniper, number one, you’re a lucky son of a bitch, and number two, just drop a JDAM on ’im. Don’t ever go out there and try to duke it out with the guy, ’cause you have no idea what his skill set is.”
Good advice.
No help here.
There weren’t any JDAMs coming their way, and as far as whether to go up and duke it out with the guy, Nick didn’t have the luxury of choice. He was in a corner and on his own—up against a sniper who’d been picking off Soviet soldiers years before Nick was born.
Nick had always wanted to follow in Carlos Hathcock’s footsteps.
Well, here he was.
Only for the next few moments he wasn’t here. He was back at home in Jessup, Maryland, a high school sophomore, watching a video of an old documentary from the sixties. Staring at the TV set, he was listening to a grizzled old sniper talk on-screen about the snap-bang theory.
“When you hear that snap,” the guy was saying, “you start counting from one to five in the space of one second, 1-2-3-4-5. Whatever number you land on by the time you hear the bang is how far away the guy is.”
A quick-and-dirty method of ranging by ear, the guy explained, this works exactly the same way as judging the distance of a thunderstorm: when you see the lightning flash, you count until you hear thunder—counting the seconds, in other words, until the sound waves from the lightning catch up to the speed of light. Only in this case, you’re counting fractions of a second.
Because the sniper’s bullet travels faster than the speed of sound, the sssnap! of the bullet cracking the sound barrier as it passes your ear (the “lightning”) happens well before the bang of the rifle’s report—that is, the initial explosion of powder that started the bullet’s journey: the “thunder”—reaches your ear. Exactly how long that gap is depends on the exact speed of that particular bullet. A typical sniper round will leave the muzzle at a velocity of about 2,700 fps, or 900 yards per second, but start slowing almost immediately. This equation was supposed to work up to about five hundred yards, by which point the bullet will have slowed down to more or less 1,800 fps, depending on altitude and other environmental conditions. The way the math and physics work out, you can estimate that the gap between bullet’s flight and sound’s flight will be about one hundred yards per one fifth of a second.
Thus: when you hear the sssssnap! you count to five in the space of one second, and when you hear the bang, you’ve got your range.
What the hell. Nick decided to give this snap-bang theory a shot.
To do it, he needed to get the Chechen to shoot at him once more. Which was insane, because he’d been getting closer and closer with each shot.
The shooter’s elevation was spot on. The only reason he hadn’t hit one of them yet was that his rounds were missing them laterally, to the right or to the left. Nick understood that the only thing messing with the Chechen’s perfectly placed shots was the wind.
They’d been out there for a few hours now, and the hot desert sun was well over the horizon. As it struck the ground at different points and heated up different features of the landscape at different rates, this produced temperature differentials that generated a variable wind, what the snipers called a “shift wind.” It was the hardest kind of wind to read correctly, because it was fishtailing and constantly changing.
So far, it had saved their lives. Had it been high noon, when it would become completely calm, they would have been dead already.
And at that, it wouldn’t save them long, because the Chechen was missing only by inches. Every shot got closer and closer. Two inches. An inch. A half inch. Within another five or ten minutes, without question, he would connect with at least a body part, if not a head.
For all Nick knew that five or ten minutes might already be up; the sniper might have finally gotten him perfectly dialed in. Or he might just get lucky this time. But Nick didn’t see any other option. He needed the shot to take the range.
Here goes.
He poked his head up again, and the moment he did he heard another loud sssnap! of another supersonic round creasing the air right next to his head. As he ducked back down he immediately started his rapid count:
One–two–three–four–fi—
Boom! He heard the thunder of the sniper rifle’s report just before completing his five-count.
Shit. This guy was barely five hundred yards away. For a machine gun nest, five hundred yards was pretty far. For a sniper, it was like reaching across the dining room table. This was bad.
Okay, he had range: five hundred yards. But five hundred yards, where? There were dozens of buildings out there. And he couldn’t exactly pop his head up to scan them all.
But then, he didn’t have to pop his head up, did he? He didn’t need to physically look at all those buildings. He already had them all stored in his brain.
Keep in memory.
This was just like the KIMS games in sniper school. Although pulling off memory tricks when you’re sitting in Fort Benning is one thing. When you’re pinned to the ground like a bug by expert sniper fire, after five days of no sleep, things are a little different. And the barrage of gunfire was continuing around him without letup. He was dimly aware that Pemberton sighted a guy on a rooftop at about a thousand yards, ten football fields. Boom. He dropped him. Nice work, Mike. But Nick wasn’t thinking about that. He couldn’t afford to think about any of it right now.
Never mind. Just get the job done.
Irving lay back in that hole and closed his eyes. He let the image of the entire scene come up, and scanned it in his mind:
Over there, at about one o’clock, was where the machine gun nest was that Nick took care of … but the Chechen’s shots didn’t come from there, did they? No. Scanning left, scanning left … there!
He recalled one tall building, about two hundred yards to the left of center. Its window was open, covered by a black curtain. That looked like an excellent position.
If it were me out there, he thought, that’s where I’d be.
He smiled.
I’ve got you, he thought.
He opened his eyes.
He quickly detailed to Pemberton where the building was and told him to train his Win Mag scope on that window. “I’m going to make a bunch of movement. If you see something happening there, shoot it.”
He wasn’t about to pick his head up again, but he didn’t think he needed to. He would just start moving around in his foxhole, making it look like he was about to get up, jump to his feet and start running or something, and as he did—sssssnap! A round smacked the ground right behind him.
“I saw him!” Pemberton yelled. “I fucking saw him!”
Just before the round hit Pemberton had seen the curtain move and a little flash go off.
They’d found him.
Nick leapt up and they both started putting rounds on that window. A moment later one of Pemberton’s big .300 rounds hit the curtain and made it move again. He’d put a round right through it.
But the Chechen wasn’t there anymore.
He was still shooting at them, and doing a damn decent job of keeping them pinned down, if not quite as well as before. How could he be shooting at them if he wasn’t there?
Nick knew exactly what he’d done. He’d pulled back to a position deep in that room, and instead of firing at them through the window he was now firing through a small hole in the wall somewhere.
It’s called “loophole shooting.” It was damnably difficult but not really new: in principle, it was essentially the same thing as medieval archers shooting through the tiny slits in a castle’s crenellated walls. Only with the archer sitting maybe ten or twelve feet back. At a target five football fields away. And being pretty damn spot on.
This was one of the many innovations Eric and I learned about at the NSW course, when we would debrief our graduates as they rotated back from deployment. By 2006 we were showing our guys how to build shooting loopholes, and how to defend against them. By the time Nick was being pinned down in Helmand Province, this feature had already shown up on the menu at other sniper courses, too—including some of the advanced courses Nick went through. Later that year, the fall 2009 International Sniper Competition would feature a loophole shooting event for the first time, testing marksmen’s ability to shoot from a third-story rafter through a three-inch hole and strike a target 150 meters away.
Meanwhile, the Chechen was practicing his own version of that competition event, with Nick as target. And while he wasn’t doing bad, it was a losing proposition. After having Nick backed into a corner for hours, Nick had now turned the tables and backed him into a corner himself.
There was no way they were going to nail that sniper now, but at least they’d located him and forced him back into the depths of his aerial hide. They hadn’t bought their safety, but they’d at least bought a little freedom to move.
And perhaps another few minutes to live.
Mogadishu Airport, 1995
Alex’s team was now taking heavy fire from the Somalis gathered down to the southwest. He scanned the fighting position just to the left of the man he’d just shot. Nobody there.
He swung the .50 a little to the right to check the fighting position on the guy’s other side. There! The man with the PKM had his big machine gun rested on the top of a sandbag, a huge muzzle plume emanating from it like a corona around a lunar eclipse.
Alex did some quick mental calculations and put his crosshairs smack in the middle of the muzzle plume. He forced himself to relax and ran his mental program: frontsightfocusfrontsightfocusfrontsightfocusbreathbreathbreathsqueezesquee BREAK—
He sent a round downrange.
No time to see where it landed—
Pull bolt—
Eject brass—
Slide round—
Slam bolt—
Ratchet in—
He got his gun back up on the sandbag, got on the scope, and took a look. The picture had changed. The big PKM machine gun was now a twisted, mangled piece of metal spilling out over the front of the sandbag. There was a big divot in the sandbag where the guy had been standing. The guy himself had fallen out to the side. He was torn nearly in half, still alive.
Alex watched.
The man lay there on the ground, propped up on one elbow, looking down at himself in shock and disbelief. His guts were spilling out of him.
An image popped into Alex’s mind: it looked like one of those gag spring-loaded snakes that pop up out of a can.
Two of the guy’s buddies went over and grabbed hold of him, but as they did he went completely limp.
Alex’s shot had destroyed both the machine gun and the man shooting it.
Shahikot Valley, 2002
For nearly four full seconds the long, copper-plated .50 cal bullet arced up and over the Afghan valley and down, pushing against the air and weaving back and forth through the crosswinds—
—and IMPACT.
“Holy shit,” whispered Tim, almost reverently. Rob’s third round had torn into the man’s torso on the far side of Shahikot Valley and flung his lifeless body onto the desert floor.
This time there was no ambiguity or hesitation in the others’ reaction. The man’s two companions took off like a pair of spooked hares, scrambling into a nearby wadi. There would be no chance of engaging them.
Tim and Rob looked at each other, stunned, as the improbability of what they’d just done sunk in. This was no harassing fire. They’d ranged an enemy fighter, aimed, adjusted, and delivered a surgically precise kill shot at a distance of more than a mile and a half. Yes, in the past few days they’d taken some crazy-long shots. But this was far and away the farthest kill shot they’d taken.
What they didn’t realize at the time was this: it was the farthest kill shot anyone had ever taken.
Husaybah, 2004
… and kiss your ass good-bye, thought Delgado—
And just at that moment, the roaring of twin Bushmaster machine guns erupted just behind him. He turned and looked, saw nothing. Then looked up.
Two Bell AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters hovered in the air just yards above them, unleashing their full fury on the southern edge of Husaybah. This attack bird is one vicious machine, with its 20mm cannon, 70mm (2.75-inch) rockets, and handful of TOW missiles. The two Huey Cobras hovered directly overhead like avenging angels, unloading into the city with their cannons and rockets. Delgado felt his hair standing up.
For a moment, the marines forgot all about being under fire themselves. They all started clapping and howling and jumping around. They were just so happy to see those killing machines.
It didn’t take long for the two Cobras to clear the area and give the marines the chance to finally climb out of that garbage ditch and get on the move. They hoofed due east to the site of the stronghold complex, snipped the wire fence surrounding it, and approached the building itself. Fire was still raging inside.
The lieutenant in charge of Kilo 1 turned to a marine who had an AT4 84mm antitank rocket, a monster of a thing, and said, “Hey, launch that shit in there just for GP”—GP meaning general purpose, that is, just to be damn sure. The kid launched his AT4 into the building. It damn near collapsed the thing.
The marines kept walking eastward, heading to the Iraqi Republic Railroad train station to rendezvous with the rest of Third Battalion. The day was far from over.
And their war was just getting started.
Helmand Province, 2009
At this point Nick Irving and his buddies had been mired in a continuous firefight for close to three hours. Good news: the assault team had successfully gotten their HVT. Time for exfil. Bad news: one of their snipers from Second Platoon, a guy named Walkens, had been hit. Not too bad, he was only hit in the foot, but it still sucked.
Worse news. Nick and Pemberton may have pushed the Chechen sniper back into a corner, but they were still being ground down by the ongoing barrage of overwhelming forces—and running low on ammo themselves. They were, in fact, in deep shit and it was getting deeper by the minute.
Over the din of gunfire Derek shouted, “Listen. I’ve got a grenade and I’ve got smoke.”
He didn’t have to explain. The looks on their faces told Nick that the others got the idea. If things got truly hopeless, if they reached the point of no return—which was pretty much where they were now—they could all jump on Derek’s grenade, he’d pull the pin, and they’d call it a day. That was Plan A.
Plan B? He could pop smoke and they could all leap to their feet and just run the hell out of there. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid making their last stand against what sure as shit looked like the entire Bolivian army.
What was Butch’s last line again?
For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.
At that point, either one of those plans sounded okay to Nick. Make a last stand, or eat the grenade: either way meant their time was up.
“What the hell,” shouted Nick. Pemberton looked back at him, agreeing with his eyes. They’d pop smoke and make a run for it. The two friends bumped fists and nodded at Derek.
Time to go.