We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.
—Archilochus, ancient Greek soldier and poet
Rob Furlong was pumped. Finally, after all the years of training and advancement through the system, he had been accepted into the Canadian Armed Forces sniper course and was getting ready to leave for the two-month program.
Early one morning he went to the basement of the quarters where he and his wife were living to retrieve some kit. Equipment in hand, he then headed back to the battalion area and made his way toward the desk where the battalion orderly sergeant and duty corporals hung their hats. As he neared the big stainless steel desk, Rob grew puzzled. Normally there’d be hardly anyone there at this hour, but today there was a crowd, maybe a hundred guys gathered there. It was barely six in the morning. What the hell’s going on? he thought.
Everyone was watching a television set stuck on the desk. Rob crowded in close to look. On the screen, he saw a skyscraper in flames, smoke billowing up into the sky.
He recognized the building: it was one of the World Trade Center towers in New York.
“This is crazy,” Rob heard someone say. “It looks like a passenger plane hit one of the towers there in the U.S.”
“That makes no sense at all,” said Rob. “What kind of idiot would be flying that low?”
As they stood watching a second plane crashed into the South Tower, and in that instant they all knew exactly what was happening. We were under attack. If this was happening in New York, it could just as well be happening there in Canada.
Reaction was instantaneous. The Canadian government started locking down the bases. The training workup scheduled for Rob’s battalion was immediately accelerated and shifted in content toward a focus on dealing with terrorist operations. By the time Rob checked in at sniper school, the whole concept of becoming a military sniper had assumed new meaning and implications.
This wasn’t going to be about marking time at a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. There was a war on.
* * *
When 9/11 happened, Jason Delgado was on the other side of the world, suffering through his six-month Okinawan jungle pre-sniper indoc. Nine o’clock in the morning New York time is 2200 hours (10:00 p.m.) Okinawa time, and that evening they happened to be in typhoon Condition 3 readiness, so when news of the attacks came they were already in lockdown and confined to barracks. As Rob quietly walked back to his station in Alberta that Tuesday morning, the young marines in Jason’s unit were running up and down the halls in Okinawa, guns drawn, screaming their brains out.
“Imagine two hundred drunk nineteen-year-old marines watching this shit going down on live television.” Jason shakes his head. “It was barely controlled chaos, man. Everyone wanted into the action, right now, immediately.”
At that moment Nick Irving was jogging home from high school in Maryland, images of the collapsing towers replaying in his racing mind, the urge to enlist screaming in his blood, his sniper training still seven years in the future.
Alex Morrison was lying in bed, listening to the radio, when he heard the news. He instantly got up, dressed in seconds, and was in the car driving in to work. A SEAL for over a decade by now, he’d been a sniper for seven years and been through multiple tours of duty. He knew he’d be doing more soon.
As for me, I was in Coronado, California, already packing my gear. I’d been through sniper school by this time and had deployed as a sniper in the Far East and Middle East in 2000, and was about to deploy once again. Our platoon happened to be next in rotation to go overseas, and would be among the first to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan.
Each of us went through a different sniper course, in a different branch of the armed services, at a different point in history. Each of those experiences and courses of instruction was distinct, and we’ll talk about some of those differences. But fundamentally, they were all the same. They were all sniper school. And sniper school was the most difficult, stressful training experience any of us had ever encountered.
Not physically; it’s the constant grueling intensity of mental concentration it demands that pushes you to the edge. In BUD/S you can commit yourself to going all out, make the decision that you’re not going to quit no matter what, and that will take you through it. It’s a kind of brute force of mind and body. It doesn’t work that way in sniper school. If you miss your target, you can’t just “dig deep and commit.” You can’t stay invisible and escape detection on a stalk simply by “giving it your all.” You have to get it right—not mostly right, not 99.9 percent right, but exactly right, or you’re out.
Through basic and advanced training you are forged and hammered into high-grade steel. In sniper school, that steel is milled into a precision instrument.
In sniper school the tolerances are all much tighter, the margin for error shrunk to an infinitesimal scale. Sniper school is not about being strong; it’s about being preternaturally precise. You have to focus all your attention into a tiny circle, a laserlike state of concentration we call front sight focus. Yet at the same time, you have to remain fully aware of everything and all conditions happening around you, called total situational awareness. It’s like using your brain as a scalpel and a broadsword at the same time.
Here’s an example of what this experience is like.
For me, possibly the single most stressful aspect of sniper school was something they called cold bore: the single shot we had to do first thing upon waking up every morning. The point of cold bore was to simulate conditions in the field, where you won’t have time to warm up or the luxury of taking practice shots. One shot, one kill. Like the old Bic pen commercial: first time, every time.
How murderously difficult is this?
Let me count the ways.
First, there’s you. No matter how good shape you’re in, you are not operating at your peak when you first wake up in the morning. Compound that with the fact that you’re still stressed out and exhausted from the days that came before. Your fingers, your reflexes, your sense perceptions and judgment are all compromised. And it’s not as if it will help any to wake yourself up an hour earlier so you can get all limbered up and awake, because that would mean just one less hour of sleep, making you even more sleep-deprived than you already are.
Then there’s your rifle. Like you, it’s just waking up, too.
When you shoot a bullet through the barrel of a rifle, you’re sending a blast of extremely hot gases exploding out through the metal barrel along with the round. That metal heats up fast, and as it does it expands, which means the interior bore through which the bullet travels gets more constricted, which in turn creates more friction and spits the round out the other end with slightly greater velocity. Which affects the shape of the arc it will travel and its range. All of which affects your accuracy.
Throughout the rest of the day you’ll be shooting through a barrel that is well warmed up. But not that first shot of the day. First thing in the morning, you’re shooting through the bore of a stone-cold barrel. And the nights would get damn cold out there in our tents in the California high desert, when I went through the NSW course in 2000.
We would get up at six o’clock or so; some guys had coffee, but coffee can mess with your nerves, so some of us would have just water and head right out onto the range. Whatever your morning routine was, the important thing was not to alter it. Consistency in performance makes a big difference. For me, coffee could wait. Everything could wait. All I could think about was that solitary bullet, that single target that lay out there waiting for me. Picture a man-sized silhouette, roughly the shape of a bowling pin, the top of the pin being his head and the body of the pin covering his vital organs. There’s a small ring at the center: the 10 ring. The rest of the bowling-pin silhouette is an 8. Anything outside of that is a zero.
Three zeroes and you’re gone from the course.
I couldn’t change the temperature of the rifle (since it was locked overnight in a storage container), but I sure as hell could control the temperature of the round, and that was factor number three. Because even the bullet itself being cold makes a difference. If you take a bullet that’s been left out in the cold all night, chamber it, and shoot it as your first shot in the morning, its temperature affects chamber pressure, too. As Rob Furlong saw at that competition in Australia, heating a round will affect its performance—not a lot, maybe just a fraction of a fraction of a degree, but that could be the edge that makes the difference.
So I would sleep with that fucking bullet every night, snuggle up to it and keep it warm like my life depended on it. On the battlefield, it damn well could.
The first day of shooting phase, I missed my cold bore shot. For the rest of the day that zero hung over my head like the first trumpet of the apocalypse. I thought about almost nothing else all day. Which of course isn’t true, because sniper school is sniper school, which means that you have to think about a million different things every second, all day long. But that single dark thought kept running in the back of my mind like a tape loop: I missed—tomorrow morning I have to nail it.
The second morning, I missed again. Nerves. Damn.
Two zeroes. My stomach was in knots the whole day. Now I had to get an 8 or higher, not only on the third day but for the next ten days straight, every single day—or I would be flushed from the course and sent home.
I woke up every morning in a cold sweat. The thought of that cold bore sat on my back all day like a five-thousand-pound ruck.
The third day, I hit the target. An 80. I was safe, at least until the next morning. And the next. And the next after that. It was torture.
And that right there, that’s the essence of sniper school: the torture of constant maximum focus. As my sniper school training partner, Eric Davis, says, you can’t try the bullet into the bull’s-eye. You have to turn your brain and all your nerves and muscles into a computer-controlled laser beam and place the round in the bull’s-eye, again, and again, and again.
In Dante’s Inferno the final circle of hell is especially interesting: its victims are not thrown into some lake of fire but trapped in progressively deeper layers of ice. Nicely put, Dante. If the torture of boot camp and BUD/S were trials by fire, sniper school was being immobilized in a torture of ice.
* * *
On Monday, September 24, 2001, Rob Furlong and one of his PPCLI teammates landed in Wainwright, Alberta, where they and thirteen other Canadians met their sniper instructors—an encounter that went absolutely nothing like the way Rob expected it to.
“Hey, guys,” the instructors said. “How are you doing? Congratulations on being here. We want to tell you, you’ve accomplished a lot just to make it this far.”
Rob nearly did the classic drop-jaw dumb-face stare. How are you doing? Congratulations on being here? What planet did you guys beam down from?
Up to that point, every military course Rob had ever taken was not only physically demanding but over-the-top stressful in the way it was conducted. The instructors were invariably loud, often borderline abusive, and there was always a constant, pervasive sense of being pushed, pushed, pushed to one’s very limits, of being pushed to the breaking point and beyond. But the way these instructors were behaving? This was a novel experience. To Rob it felt surreal, as if he’d landed in some other universe. These guys were talking to their incoming students like they were human beings. Like they were adults.
What Rob was experiencing is what we call a “gentleman’s course.” There was no yelling or screaming, none of the typical wearing-you-to-a-pulp games and endless PTs, no piling on of extra stress.
“We do not have to stress you out,” the instructors explained. “You’ll be under so much pressure in this course, you’ll stress yourselves out. We don’t have to do anything to push you out. In fact, we’re going to do whatever we can to keep you in. And even then, many of you will fail the course.”
They were right, of course. At the time, the Canadian sniper program had about a 95 percent attrition rate. Rob was determined to be among the 5 percent.
True to their word, the instructors actually went out of their way to help the students—another first in Rob’s military training experience. They would come out to the candidates’ shacks at night after training was finished for the day and say, “Okay, guys, who needs help with this? Let’s go over what you did today.” And one by one they’d work with each guy there, helping them improve in whatever area was giving them trouble.
When my best friend, Glen Doherty, and I went through the NSW course a year earlier, we saw more than our share of assholes and abuse. Not Furlong. These guys weren’t just top sniper instructors, they were also Canadians, a people known for their general decency and good manners. The positive reinforcement was constant, and Rob never once witnessed an instructor being a jerk to any of the students or putting anybody down. On the contrary, they did everything in their power to mentor and teach their charges.
One instructor in particular stood out, a guy named Tim McMeekin. Tall (standing about six-two) and very physically fit, McMeekin was also very likable and easygoing. Rob liked him right away—a bond that would prove valuable in the very near future.
* * *
Rob’s two months of sniper school started with two weeks of classroom work: equipment, ballistics, and field craft, along with admin and logistic issues such as how rank structure and deployment works within sniper cells and within brigades, and more: a massive nonstop fourteen-day information download. They then moved on to the field phase, which lasted the full remaining six weeks of the program and started with practical instruction not in how to shoot but in how to see.
If you’re scanning hundreds of meters of landscape looking for a single well-hidden target, what do you look for? What makes something visible? Out of the dozen or so key visual attributes, including shape, size, contrast, color, silhouette, and others, the most significant is movement. Which is why all animals of prey in the natural world have the uncanny ability to stand stock-still for long minutes at a time: they know it is their movement, far more than their shape, size, position, or any other visual attribute, that will give them away. This had enormous implications to the sniper students, both as predator and as potential prey. As hunters, they began training themselves to force the attribute of movement to the top of their natural hierarchy of visual attention. As potentially the hunted, they knew they, too, would need to develop that capacity for complete stillness.
Next came techniques in how to conduct a visual search. Looking directly at an object is not necessarily the best way to see it. Because of the structure of the human retina, the nature and dispersal of its rods and cones, you may be better off looking to the left or to the right of that object, because you may see it more clearly with your peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is not as acute with detail. It’s difficult to read a page of text with peripheral vision, which is why you scan a page with your focal vision. But peripheral vision is much more sensitive to picking up movement and has a more acute sense of color (which is the second most important attribute, after movement).
A major part of being able to shoot something at extreme distances is being able to accurately quantify its exact range. Judging distance to target, or ranging, was another critical skill the students were taught. And they weren’t allowed to use laser range finders, or GPS, or any kind of advanced equipment. Instead, they learned to gauge an object’s range using the reticle of their weapon’s scope. (More on this in chapter 8.)
They learned how to build a ghillie suit, how to properly use camouflage, how to properly use depth, and how to move properly in ways to best avoid detection.
And then the stalks began.
That morning they got their orders: “Deployed in this area is an enemy OP [observation post] we think is roughly in this grid square,” an area of one square kilometer, or nearly 250 acres. The students were taken out in the back of a transport truck and dropped at the edge of the grid. On their maps, arcs were marked off that described a safe corridor, five hundred meters to the left and five hundred meters to the right. If they stepped outside that corridor, it was an instant fail. The actual corridor was also marked off with small bits of orange tape.
Now it was up to them to stalk through that lane to within shooting distance of their prey, without being seen.
And what was their prey? Two Canadian master snipers, extremely experienced guys, sitting backward in a pair of chairs and facing the direction the students were coming, their elbows resting on the backs of the chairs, their high-powered binoculars up, scouring the ground for any sign of approach.
Understand, these were master snipers, gods of their craft. They knew where the students were being dropped off. They knew where that one-kilometer corridor was. They knew exactly where the students were coming from, and they were sitting dead center, watching and waiting. The students had to stalk up to within one hundred to three hundred meters from their targets, fire two shots at them (blanks, of course), and then stalk back out again—and do all that without these two master snipers ever catching sight of them.
Rob disembarked from the back of the truck, hit the ground, and thought, Before I do anything else, I have to identify that OP. How could he stalk against something if he didn’t know where it was? A few of his fellow students took a more direct approach: without having any clue where those instructors were, they started sticking their heads up like periscopes (“turkey-necking,” they call it), in an effort to spot their targets.
“Freeze!” a voice yelled out. They’d barely gotten started, and one of the master snipers had seen something. The students all had to freeze in their tracks and wait for the walkers.
The walkers were four additional instructors who roamed the area dressed in orange marker vests, each with a radio on his back sporting a ten-foot antenna with a flag on the end. They were the hands of the master snipers at the OP; the stalk had now become a deadly game of tag, and the walkers were the hands that would do the tagging.
The master sniper who’d seen movement was now on his radio to one of the walkers, telling him what direction to walk. The walkers were not allowed to use any initiative of their own; they functioned purely as drones, extensions of the master snipers’ observations.
Following his instructions, the walker began plodding straight toward one of the students who’d been turkey-necking.
Meanwhile, Rob and everyone else stayed frozen in place. Once a Freeze! command was issued, if you continued moving, tried to slip lower to the ground, or did anything at all, and a walker saw you do it, that was an instant fail.
The walker continued on. The master sniper walked him straight up to the poor student, who crouched there paralyzed, unable to do anything but watch as his doom approached. The walker touched him.
Fail.
Now the rest of the students were free to move again. Rob continued. Crawling on his face, he eventually made his way to a location within three hundred meters from the OP. Poking his rifle and scope slowly through the foliage, he peered through the reticle at the master sniper’s head, took his measurement and made his calculation, hoping—no, trusting—that he was within 5 percent. He dialed the data into his elevation turret, adjusted for wind, took a breath, and spoke out loud.
“Sniper ready to fire.”
The closest walker heard him and walked over to within about twenty-five meters of where Rob lay prone, then repeated the line over his radio.
“Sniper ready to fire.”
Now the master sniper knew there was a sniper out there somewhere who had him in his sights. Rob knew that from this point on, he had to move with extreme precision.
The walker said, “Stand by for exposure.”
The master sniper raised a head-shaped sign with the single letter painted on it. They called this a “hunt’s head.” It would be either white-on-black or black-on-white, and feature one of the six letters S-N-I-P-E-R. In this case, it was the letter S, painted white on black.
He held up the hunt’s head for one, two, thr—and it was already down. A two-and-a-half-second exposure. If Rob didn’t see it clearly during that brief window, he would be unable to take the next step.
Which would be a fail.
“Sniper identifies sierra,” he said out loud.
“Sniper declares sierra,” the walker spoke over his radio.
After the briefest of pauses, the master sniper’s reply came back. “Roger that. Sierra. Have him fire his first shot.”
The walker nodded in Rob’s direction. “Okay, fire your first shot.”
A feeling of exultation began to rise, and Rob quickly tamped it down. This was no time to get self-congratulatory. In fact, this was exactly where things got difficult. Because with every new step in the process, the odds that the master sniper would finally be able to spot him increased. And in the next few seconds, they would increase astronomically.
Rob was about to give himself away—possibly.
Crack!
He fired his blank. The master snipers—both of them now—peered intently through their binos, looking for the slightest movement of a leaf, a twig, anything that would betray the unintended slight movement of a rifle barrel. Looking for a muzzle flash. Looking for the inadvertent movement of a stray foot or other body part, anything the student sniper may have neglected to keep in his full control as he squeezed the trigger.
They saw nothing.
“Okay,” came the voice over the radio, “move within seven.”
The walker now walked closer, coming to a stop just seven meters from where Rob lay.
“Indicate direction.”
The walker raised his arm and pointed directly toward Rob.
Meanwhile, Rob was unloading the casing from his first round, pocketing it (leaving a casing behind is an automatic fail) and easing a second round into the chamber, the whole time thinking about the fact that of all the visual clues the eye picks up, the most telltale is movement, and hoping—no, trusting—that the master sniper would not be able to detect any movement from him.
A lengthy pause. Then:
“Walker, move away. Have him fire a second shot.”
The walker backed away, then said, “Sniper, fire your second round.”
Rob fired his second round.
Another pause.
“Okay, walker, move to within three and indicate.”
You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me, thought Rob, even though he knew full well that this was what came next. How is he not going to see me? he added—and then immediately shut down that line of thought. No room for self-doubt. To pull off a successful stalk requires the patience of a sequoia and the unshakable confidence of a boulder.
The walker stepped to within three meters and again pointed toward where Rob lay—not directly down at the ground, but just in that compass direction, in a straight horizontal.
But the master snipers still could not see him. So they went to the next step: they turned around in their chairs and faced the other direction.
“Sniper is not under observation.”
Now the walker (who was also master sniper–qualified) came over and hunkered down to where Rob was. “Okay, what distance are you at?”
“I range at 220,” replied Rob.
The walker stood up, took out his laser range finder, lased the chairs, and nodded. “Okay, you’re good at 220.” He then got down behind the gun and checked the elevation and windage Rob had set. Both were good.
Now, as Rob rolled away to give him room, the walker got down behind the gun, pulled out the bolt, and peered through the barrel to ensure that there were no obstructions and that Rob had set himself up with a clear window to shoot through. If he saw a twig, branch, leaf, or other obstruction in the bullet’s path, that would be an automatic fail.
There were no obstructions.
He rolled out, gave Rob his bolt back to reinstall, and got back on his radio. “Everything is good here. Sniper has passed up to this point.”
Up to this point, he thought. Right.
Now came the hard part. Now he had to stalk all the way back out again. Undetected. Which was far tougher, because now the master sniper knew exactly where he was starting from. On top of that, he knew they would check his slug trail, that is, what he left behind, if anything. If he lost track of a piece of equipment, left a compass behind, a set of cutters, some stray pieces of camouflage, an empty casing, anything at all: fail. There were some thirteen specific steps to the stalk, thirteen distinct points where messing up would mean a fail.
They had eight graded stalk scenarios throughout the next few weeks. And they were black-and-white, pass-or-fail: you had to pass every single stage of those stalks flawlessly, or you failed the entire thing completely.
As he started crawling backward on his belly, maneuvering his way toward turning around without being caught, Rob flashed back on what the instructors had said on their first day at the course. We don’t have to stress you out—you’ll stress yourselves out.
One of Rob’s classmates, who had earned the nickname Mil Dot because he wore his hair so close-cropped, nearly buckled under the pressure. As the stalking phase stretched on, entire patches of Mil Dot’s hair began falling out from the stress. Mil Dot would not make it through the course. Neither would quite a few others.
* * *
In fact, stalking is where most people fail in sniper school—every sniper school, no matter what branch or what country. Stalking is the essence of the sniper experience; it’s the spy in warrior/assassin/spy, the ability to slip undetected through terrain and conditions where no human being should be able to pass without notice, to move like a whisper and evaporate like mist. It is, more than any other aspect, the skill that distinguishes an expert sniper from a mere expert marksman.
And stalking is a bitch.
Stalking is a lot like flying. You can climb into a car and drive off without paying all that much attention to what you’re doing. Not so in a plane. When you fly, there are a hundred things you have to check before you leave the runway, a constellation of data you have to be aware of and keep track of. The instrument panel of even a fairly simple plane is vastly more complex than the dashboard of your car, and for good reason.
That’s what it’s like to stalk. Constant, total, detailed situational awareness.
In stalking we talk about having a strategic checklist, very much like what you use as a pilot. As you start out you ask yourself, which way is the sun shining? Before you move, you make sure you’re not getting shadows on your face. Which way are the leaves reflecting? Where’s the target in relation to you and your shadow? You make sure your background matches, your foreground matches. You make sure you’re moving forward, directly toward the target, and not laterally, which is much easier to detect. You check to see if your next movement is going to be silent, or cause any sound. You need to be thinking about dead space, cover versus concealment, and contingency, that is, how the hell you’re getting out of there if it all goes to shit. Just like a pilot about to take off, you run that checklist just before you move—only on a stalk, you run it every time you move.
You never know when someone might be staring straight in your direction, so you have to assume he is always staring straight in your direction. In the case of the stalks in training, he is.
This takes enormous concentration, and you can’t let that concentration waver, not even for a single move. If you don’t have the discipline and mental fortitude to be continually going over your checklist and holding all the items in your head, you’ll fail. The moment you say, “Shit, I just need to move”—that’s the moment you get busted.
The truth about stalking is that in order to be able to successfully execute a complete stalk, get in, take the shot, and get out undetected, you have to go through the entire stalk—in minute detail, with not a single detail omitted or neglected—in your head.
And that’s the bottom line of stalking: you fail, or pass, in your mind.
As Alex Morrison learned, the hard way, when he went through the SEAL sniper course back in 1991.
Still being fairly new to shooting firearms, Alex struggled with the marksmanship portion of the course. Shooting did not click for him, at least not right away, and he had to pour himself onto it, listening and watching with the greatest concentration possible as the instructors demonstrated, absorbing every minute detail he could, and putting in dozens of extra hours on the range.
The good thing about the NSW course, even in those early days, was that he could pour in those dozens of hours. The SEAL course is resourced like no other; they plow all the time and money, ammo and opportunity it takes to turn you into an expert shooter. The students spent five weeks on the range, and all they did was shoot, shoot, shoot. Some of their instructors were civilians, national match shooters who donated their time, purely out of patriotism and the fun of having such dedicated students. By the time the marksmanship phase was over, Alex could shoot.
While shooting did not come naturally to him, stalking did. All those years hunting fish with a polespear were burned into his bones and muscles, and hunting men on the ground wasn’t really all that different.
Ironically, though, it was the stalking that did him in. It was, in fact, what did in most of his class. Those early stalks were so insanely difficult, and the quality of teaching so poor, that out of a class of sixteen, that cadre of instructors succeeded in graduating only four snipers, a dismal pass rate.
It was summer when Alex went through the program, and he remembers the stalks as ordeals of absolute misery. Lying out on the forest floor, sweating like a sow in a sauna, he soon discovered he had become very attractive to the local insect population. During one stalk he crawled across an anthill: red harvester ants. Those little fuckers are often mistaken for fire ants, and it’s not hard to see why. Their bites are painful, and they feel like they last forever. Alex became harvester ant food. But there was nothing to do but be still, stay focused, and keep pushing slowly forward, dragging his body over the hill and on toward the target. At the end of the exercise, he was blanketed in bites.
Still, the misery would have been fine if he’d passed. He didn’t.
After that first course Alex spent the next few years schooling himself, analyzing where he’d gone wrong and what he needed to do different next time. The stalks were essentially just like hunting fish with a polespear—but the details were different, and those details were what he needed to master.
He realized that he’d been relying way too much on his ghillie suit. Now he started working more with the natural vegetation he encountered in his stalk. He learned to sit tight at the start of the stalk and not move a muscle until he’d located that OP, then—and only then—pick out the exact route he’d take.
Typically, once he arrived at his destination and built his final firing position, he would pull plants from around him and stick them into the rubber bands that covered his bipod, turning his gun into a giant veg fan. But as he came to understand how to work with the ambient light, he realized that this wasn’t always the way to go. If the sun happened to be behind him, that tactic wouldn’t cut it: the instructor could still see him silhouetted against the veg fan. When he found himself in that situation, he knew he needed to get something behind him to prevent silhouetting. If he was facing into the sun, on the other hand, then he’d use a bunch of light-colored veg in front of him to reflect light back toward the OP, so the instructor’s view would be compromised.
Bit by bit, he assembled his skill set, until he knew he could make it all work.
In 1994, three years after his first shot at it, Alex went back and redid the course, and this time he was ready. He was the first one to finish on every stalk and came through the scout phase of the course with a perfect score.
* * *
Earlier I said the stress of sniper school isn’t primarily physical, and that’s generally true. For example, it’s true of the Canadian Armed Forces course, and the Naval Special Warfare course, and the Army Special Operations Target Interdiction Course (SOTIC).
Then there’s the Marine Corps: the exception that proves the rule.
Unlike Rob’s experience at Wainwright, the school Jason Delgado encountered when he arrived at Pendleton in late 2002 was no gentleman’s course. In terms of how it dished out stress and abuse, it was less like the SEAL sniper program and more like BUD/S. It even had its own Hell Week. In Okinawa Jason had been so thoroughly prepared that by the time he showed up for the Scout Sniper Basic Course (SSBC), he figured he was more than ready. Maybe so, but that didn’t make the experience any easier. For Jason, sniper school turned out to be just one more stop on his guided tour through hell.
The marines ran their school more like a selection program, so in addition to all the instruction and sniper-skill-set training, there were also the push-ups and PTs and shouting and being kept up late at night and constant harassment and all the rest of what in the military they call “fuck-fuck games.” As Jason learned his first day there.
The first thing he noticed was that they couldn’t walk anywhere; everywhere they went, they ran. You want to go get a drink of water? You run. Time for chow? You run. And when you finish, you run back. His old nighttime training companion was there: good old sleep deprivation. And when they picked on you, it was not like a schoolyard kind of picking on you, it was, “Hey, grab your 210-pound partner with his sixty-or-seventy-pound ruck, put him on your motherfucking shoulder, with your ruck on, and go run four or five hundred yards and then run back here—and hurry up!” And some days the temperature soared to more than 100 degrees.
The first day started with a basic physical exam, not so different from first days he’d experienced before—except that this one went at a blinding pace, everything happening so fast it was like they’d been swept up in a whirlwind. One minute he was going through a PFT (pulmonary function test) and having a drink of water, the next moment he was stripped down to PT gear, out on a field doing crunches, then pull-ups, then a three-mile run (a fast run) and then back to the classroom—
Where they already had a list of classmates who were cut.
What? Yes: cut. Gone. Barely a few hours had passed, and already six guys were out of the course. Jason’s sniper class started out with thirty-four men. They lost half a dozen that day and eight more by the end of week one.
To Jason, this was all business as usual. His view was, hey, if the instructors weren’t going to be hard on them, they wouldn’t respect the course and it wouldn’t be worth going through it.
“It’s that marine mentality,” he says. “We love punishment. We get kicked in the ass and say, ‘Thank you, sir, may we please have another?’”
* * *
If punishment was what Jason expected, the marine course did not disappoint.
The twelve solid weeks of SSBC (recently scaled back to ten) was broken down into phases: academics, field craft, marksmanship, stalking, tactical operations without troops (or TOWOTs, pronounced toots; more on those shortly), Hell Week, a mission/field week, and a concluding PIG party followed by graduation—for those who were still left standing.
The Corps being the Corps, the academics were incredibly rigorous. The classes covered the math of milliradians (mil dot calculations) and range estimation, elevation and windage, scope theory, fundamentals of a solid shooting position, ballistics, weapon systems, history, classroom instructions on observation techniques, sniper missions, radio operations, and the format for calling for fire, close air support, or nine-line medevac (so-called because there are nine distinct lines of information to the call: location; radio call sign; number of patients by priority of urgency; special equipment required; number of patients as ambulatory or not; description of enemy troops in the area; how the pickup site will be marked; how many patients are U.S. or non-, military or non-, or prisoner of war; and description of terrain, including whether or not there is nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons contamination in the area).
Whatever they learned one day, they would be tested first thing the next morning, for a pass-or-fail grade. Which meant that before the day’s classes began, the students had to rip through exhaustive testing on everything from the day before. If you had four classes on Tuesday, then you’d have four exams Wednesday morning before the day’s classes started.
Field craft consisted of the usual observation techniques, KIMS (keep in memory systems) games, concealment, field sketches, and so forth. In the stalking phase, they were graded on ten separate stalks, similar to Rob’s eight stalks, and just as with the Canadian course, it was the toughest phase of the school.
Finally it came time for the shooting portion—and on his first day on the range, Delgado had what he describes as the worst experience of his military training. To which he adds: “And it was my own damn fault.”
He and his partner for the day, Aaron Winterle, were shooting string after string of fire on the M40A1 bolt-action sniper rifle. Jason had just gotten finished with one string and started getting up from his firing position to prepare for what came next. Their lead instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Healy, asked Jason if he had cleared his weapon.
Duh, is what Jason thought. What he said was, “Yessir, Sergeant Healy!”
“Just clear it agin,” said Healy, in his deceptively relaxed Southern drawl. “For mah sake.”
From the deadly calm of his voice, Jason should have known right then that he was screwed. But he was still too green to get that. Without a second thought, he obliged. He racked the bolt on the M40 to the rear to demonstrate that the chamber was empty—and to his horror, a bright, shiny round catapulted out of the gun. Pingggggg!
In all the excitement of finally getting onto the range and firing this weapon system, he’d forgotten to clear his weapon. He thought he’d done it. He was sure he’d done it. Except that he hadn’t. And of course Healy had known.
It felt to Jason like it took five minutes for that damn round to pinwheel gently through the air and finally arc to the ground between him and Sergeant Healy. Jason stared at the fallen round.
Without turning Healy softly said, “Sergeant Wright?” Wright, their PT instructor—yes, they had drill sergeants even in sniper school—had materialized instantly behind Healy like a sadistic genie called up from hell’s magic lamp. “Take Del-ga-do here and his shootin’ partner. They need … encouragement.”
The round of PT Jason and Aaron went through at the hands of Sergeant Wright that afternoon was the worst PT Jason ever experienced, before or since. After close to two hours straight in the 112 degree humidity, they both went down for heat injuries.
Jason never again forgot to clear his weapon.
The lowest point came with the aptly named Hell Week. These days it’s mandatory that the students get at least one meal a day, but when Jason went through it he didn’t eat for five days straight. Or sleep, either.
Hell Week started out with something physical, of course: five-mile ruck run, PIG egg run, and more, on into the night. When they got back to the squad bay, they had to work up a TOWOT—an 89- to 150-page op order, spelling out every last thing in detail. What shoelaces they were bringing, what kind of ammunition they were bringing, where they were keeping their dog tags, where they were keeping the first-aid kits, with a diagram drawn up of the marine’s body detailing where each thing would be kept, actions on the objective … it was an enormous amount of detail, covering every aspect of a mission one could possibly think of.
The marines were already sleep-deprived and had spent hours becoming physically exhausted. Now they had to stay awake all night sitting at desks, focusing on this maddeningly detailed report, making sure they got every piece in and every piece right. And the sergeants kept playing distracting shit over the sound system in the background, a soundtrack of someone speaking in Arabic, interspersed with bits of English translation. It was intensely hot and stuffy in the room. People were getting delusional. Jason recalls at one point writing something about blue balloons and a lobster, and then something about monkeys grabbing his gear. It seemed to make sense at the time. But hallucinating or not, he kept writing. Most of the class failed that one.
The next day, they did something else physical—a fifty-pound ruck run for a couple miles, stretcher carries, and whatever else the instructors had dreamed up for them that day—and when they got back, nicely exhausted, they had to do terrain models for an upcoming mission. These models needed to be as detailed and realistic as possible. They got elaborate with these things, using yarn for the gridlines and carefully spray-painting everything to make it all look as real as possible. By the time they were finished with them, these creations were going to be little works of art.
At this point they had gone without sleep for three days.
As they worked, the instructors stopped them and said, “Hey, what does this mean—” and they said something in Arabic. Jason recognized it as one of the phrases they’d played the night before while they were trying to distract the students from writing their TOWOTs. For some reason, Jason had retained it. Nobody else had a clue. He raised his hand.
“Delgado?” demanded an instructor.
“It means, ‘Hey, could you please speak a little more slowly?’”
“Congratulations, Delgado!” the guy said. “You got yourself a reward coming.”
Jason’s reward was better than cash, better than food, better than anything else he could have dreamed up: it was a big, steaming cup of hot coffee. After three days of no sleep? Pure heaven. He sat there downing his hot coffee, thinking, Ohhh yeahhhh, I’m the man.… As he drank he felt a crazy surge of energy coursing through his veins. It was the most glorious feeling he could remember ever having. He was on cloud nine, ready to take on the world.
He got up, walked back over to resume work on his terrain models.
“Okay, everybody, stop working,” the instructor called out. “Break time. You’ve got thirty minutes to take a nap.”
Jason fell from cloud nine, back to earth—and below.
Everyone else in the class gave an audible, collective sigh of relief and hit the floor. In seconds they were all asleep. For the next thirty minutes Jason lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, cursing under his breath. It was the first time in Hell Week they’d been given a chance to sleep. It was also the last time in Hell Week they were given the chance to sleep. And Jason went through it stone-cold awake.
But he completed Hell Week, and every other aspect of the course. After that terrible first day on the range, Jason had had a rough time of the shooting portion. He and his shooting partner, Jesse Davenport, were both crack shots, but they were not experienced spotters. The first week of the shooting phase they ran three qualifications and took the best score out of three. Jason flunked the first two outright and squeaked by on the third. But if the first day on the range was his worst training experience ever, the last day of sniper school was his best, when he was awarded the top-of-class position of High Shooter.
Of the original thirty-four who started the class, just twelve were left at graduation. Three were Navy SEALs and two were Marine Corps officers and seven plain marines, including Jason and Jesse. Shortly after graduating, the two friends were on their way to Iraq with Third Battalion, Fourth Marines, as part of the push north into Baghdad.
* * *
Within weeks after buying himself a George Foreman grill and eating that steak he had hallucinated during Ranger School, Nick Irving was off to train again. For the next seven months, he was at home with his wife for a total of no more than three or four weeks. The rest of that time he was steeped in a steady procession of sniper course after sniper course.
This wasn’t 2000, when I went through the SEAL course, or ’01 or ’02, when Furlong and Delgado took their versions of the course. And it sure wasn’t 1991, when Alex took his first shot at the program. It was 2008, and the United States was seven years deep into protracted war on multiple fronts. The rangers were operating at an insanely high op tempo and spread thin over two theaters. They needed qualified snipers, and they needed them fast.
The quick-and-dirty, five-week basic army course Nick would attend was not an advanced Spec Ops course, and it didn’t have a reputation for producing the best snipers. But Nick had a powerful advantage: he was a ranger, and the 75th Ranger Regiment had their own training pipeline, which included a whole range of schools, some of them put on by specialized civilian operations that had been teaching everyone from Tier 1 Spec Ops groups to FBI/HRT (hostage rescue team) and Secret Service snipers for decades. Even better, they had their own in-house “school” of instruction, a sort of pre–sniper school prep reminiscent of Delgado’s six-month Okinawa indoc, only this was a two-week intensive crash course in street-smart veteran sniper fundamentals, taught by guys who’d been at the craft for decades.
Before starting, the group of about twenty students had to pass a physical fitness test—two-mile runs with full kit, obstacle course, the usual—followed by a battery of psychological testing, which included a lengthy series of what seemed to Irving like the strangest questions.
“Who do you love more, your mom or your dad?” Nick wondered what the best answer was to that.
“Do you like flowers more than you like cake?” If I say flowers, he thought, I’m going to sound gay, but if I say cake, then that makes me seem like I’m stuck in a child’s mentality.
On and on they went, nearly six hours of questions like that, Nick second-guessing himself the whole way through. What the hell. He just threw down answers and hoped for the best. After the battery of questions he had to talk with a psychiatrist for a while. A few of the aspiring snipers did not make it through this part of the process.
After psychological evaluations came grilling by the board. Nick was ushered into a room where he sat at one end of a long table, facing about ten senior snipers at the other end. These guys had absolute power to say yea or nay. You could pass every other qual, be outstanding in every way, but if they didn’t want you in the section, if they didn’t think you were a guy who could carry on the ranger sniper tradition, they could just say no, and that was that. They said yes.
Then the training began. They were issued all kinds of equipment, some Nick had never seen before, some he had no idea what it was used for. Weird-looking rucksacks. A snowsuit. A ghillie suit for woodland environments. An urban setup. Different poles and sticks and ladders. A ladder you could fit into a cargo pocket but use to scale up onto a fourteen-foot roof.
And their sniper rifles.
Nick was given a Barrett M82 .50 cal sniper rifle, an absolute monster; an MC24 .30 cal sniper rifle, which was a brand-new configuration of the M24 and pretty serious boom stick itself; and an SR-25. Nick shot them all, learned them all, and became proficient on them all. But the moment they put that SR-25 in his hands, it was love at first touch.
That night Nick thought back to an experience he’d had in Mosul the previous year, when he was still a Stryker driver and machine gunner. Nick’s unit had walked into an ambush and found themselves in a major firefight. One of his team leaders plugged an iPod into the internal speakers of Nick’s Stryker, and they fought their way through that ambush with Michael Jackson’s hit single “Dirty Diana” playing at full volume.
Nick had grown up listening to Michael Jackson and couldn’t imagine a better name.
Dirty Diana it was.
He spent the next two weeks on the range, every day, six to eight hours straight, shooting the M24 and Dirty Diana. At the same time, the senior snipers did their best to teach them everything they knew—the math of long-range shooting, tricks of the trade in stalking and concealment, the salient points of internal ballistics and external ballistics and terminal ballistics—even as they kept feeding them more rounds to shoot, an endless, unlimited all-you-can-eat ammunition buffet. By the time Nick left his unit and headed off to the army basic sniper course, he was schooled.
* * *
Once they got to the actual sniper course, though, it wasn’t the shooting that killed them. Nick rates the army sniper course as being the single most difficult experience of his entire military training, and the difficulty had nothing to do with marksmanship. It was the field craft and stalking that washed out some 70 percent of the class. For a while, Nick thought he might be among the casualties.
One of their first topics was target detection, which involved being able to spot small items in a large field of vision that were out of place. To Nick this was absolutely baffling. His first day out on the course, he wasn’t able to locate a single one of the objects they’d hidden out there.
The instructor then went out onto the course and, while the students watched, he walked around and touched each item, one by one. Nick thought, Holy shit—there’s no way I’ll ever train my eye to see things like that!
Nick knew he could shoot, and he thought he would be pretty good at the stalking part. But he worried about his vision. He’d barely managed to get into the service in the first place despite his color blindness. Would his eyes finally betray him? Would that be his fatal weakness, the thing that kept him from doing what he’d always wanted to do and sent him back to the regiment as a machine gunner or assaulter?
He thought, Maybe I’m just not cut out to be a sniper.
But as the course progressed, he started to get a sense of how it worked. Exactly as in Rob Furlong’s course in Canada, they were taught how to see differently, to look for key distinguishing elements such as color, shine, shadow, and line. Hard lines rarely occur in nature. Certain shadows just don’t make sense in a natural setting. During one practice session the instructor called time, walked out onto the course, and put his hand on a little toothbrush head, tucked halfway in behind a rock and partially covered with leaves.
“How do you guys not see this toothbrush head?”
“Man,” said someone, “it’s the size of a pinky! And it’s covered with leaves!”
“Yeah,” said the instructor, “but look at this. See this straight line, and how it contrasts with the curved edges of the leaves?”
And all at once, Nick could see exactly what he meant. It wasn’t about simply having good eyesight. It was about using your eyes—really, about using your mind—to single out small things that just didn’t fit into the larger picture. A few days later he was acing the tests.
One morning for PT they did a five-mile run. When they got back from the run, they ran through a series of push-ups and sit-ups, and just as muscle fatigue was starting to set in the instructors pulled them into the classroom, sat them down, gave them each a pen and a piece of paper, and said: “Along that route you ran this morning there were twenty military items. You have one minute to write them all down.”
They had placed twenty random objects out there all over that course—on the road, in the trees, on road signs, back in the woods—and they were all either very small or otherwise visually obscured: a bullet taped to the pole of a STOP sign; a ghillie suit hanging up in a tree deep in the forest, maybe thirty yards off the route they were running. And all without letting their students know ahead of time that this was anything but an ordinary morning run. The instructors were devious.
Nick and the others sat there staring at their pieces of paper, trying their best to pull up details of memories they didn’t even know they had. Meanwhile the instructors put on loud rock ’n’ roll music, started flashing the lights on and off and banging on trash cans. They even flipped over a few empty desks—anything to compound the distraction. The students had one minute to finish.
And, amazingly, they did. It seemed almost like magic to Nick, but both his capacity to see and his power of visual recall were building, just as his physique and physical stamina had been built up in basic training years earlier.
Finally, it was time for the stalking itself, where (exactly as in the marine course) they had to pass at least seven out of their ten graded stalks. A lot of the students didn’t have the patience to do what it took to outwit their instructor, a former marine Spec Ops who’d served in Vietnam and could pick out a sniper in full ghillie at a thousand yards with the naked eye. Under that guy’s eagle gaze it could take thirty minutes to an hour to move just five feet.
Nick reached down deep in his memory banks, recalling every detail he’d ever read or watched about snipers, and did his best to channel Carlos Hathcock. An inch at a time, Irv, he told himself, just one inch at a time. Out of the ten graded stalks, he didn’t fail a single one.
* * *
After successfully graduating the army sniper course, Nick plunged into a rapid-fire sequence of specialized training programs all over the United States, ping-ponging around the country for program after program.
First up was a privately run, two-week extreme-range precision shooting course, put on by an outfit down in South Texas called Rifles Only. The guys at Rifles Only trained snipers from SWAT teams, FBI, ATF, SEALs, SAS, DEVGRU, you name it, anybody and everybody who specialized in long-range precision. And of course, Army Rangers.
There was no stalking in this course, no field craft, nothing but ballistics and high-precision marksmanship at extreme ranges.
They taught their students a lot of math and techniques to be very, very precise with the gun. There were high winds at this place, which was ideal, because on those long-range shots, the wind is typically what will mess up the shot.
It was very high-paced and very long hours, starting off at seven in the morning and ending typically around six at night. Sometimes they shot at night with thermals. The course went for two weeks straight without a single break.
Irving was in the class with seven other rangers. Over their two weeks there they shot so many thousands of rounds Nick couldn’t even estimate the number. It took an eighteen-wheeler flatbed truck to bring in all the ammo they used, just for the eight of them. By the end of that course, the whole right side of his chest was purple with bruises.
In sniper school they’d trained on a twenty-inch-by-forty-inch target, standard for military snipers. In Texas they were set up with circular targets that were three inches in diameter. Dude, thought Nick, there’s no way I’m going to hit a three-inch target at three hundred yards! None of them thought they could do it. But they did. Next they were given targets the size and shape of a human head—at a thousand yards. They didn’t think they could make that, either. And of course they did.
Back from the precision course, Nick had time to clean his guns, kiss his wife, and check in with command—and then he was out to the West Coast, to another course being run by Rifles Only, only this time in the high mountains of California.
Talk about a change in terrain and climate. Nick spent the next three weeks hiking up and down mountains thousands of feet high in the bitter cold. The place did a very credible job of simulating the environment of northern and eastern Afghanistan.
This was another high-precision shooting school, only the focus was on extreme long distances—1,800 yards, 2,000 yards, distances of more than a mile—and on high-angle shooting, which requires a whole different math than straight-line shooting. They were shooting very long distances at extreme angles, from the top of the mountain down to the base. They learned to use the Pythagorean theorem to compensate for shooting up or down an extreme slope; they called it “slope dope.” (More on this later.) The wind was vicious up there and often unpredictable, and Nick also learned a good deal about the different qualities of wind beyond the basic speed and direction. He also got to experience the impact of altitude on a shot. The higher you get, the colder it gets, but at the same time, as the air is thinner the bullet travels farther and faster.
Once again, it was long hours of nonstop shooting, tens of thousands of rounds. All the while, Nick was keenly aware that this present luxury, having an unlimited supply of ammunition to shoot, was something he would not have in the field. In the field, ammunition was liable to be in very short supply. The time would come when he would need to make every round count. His life, and other lives, would depend on it.
There was more. Nick went through an urban sniper course, being schooled in the art of the urban hide—exact same principles as a jungle or desert hide, only in a theater of buildings and busy streets. He went through the 75th Regiment’s Designated Marksman course run by the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit (AMU), the best shooters in the world. These guys go on to compete in the Olympics; they are just phenomenal to watch. He was supposed to go on to the army’s elite Spec Ops course, SOTIC—but there just wasn’t time. We were neck-deep in war and he was needed overseas.
After more than a half year of nearly continuous sniper training, Nick had a two-week break before boarding a big C-17 transport plane. Next stop: Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
* * *
A little more than seven years earlier, as our combat experience in Afghanistan was just getting started, Rob Furlong was entering the last few days of his sniper school experience, starting with their final training exercise (FTX), a two-day mock mission. The course brought in members of the police force, who tracked the students with dogs and dog handlers. Rob had to evade both humans and dogs, reach his target, and take it out. When he successfully got within killing range and set up his final firing position (FFP), he looked through his scope and saw something that quite eloquently expressed the mood of the day: over the target the instructors had pasted a life-sized picture of Osama bin Laden.
Rob got a kick out of placing a round square through bin Laden’s head.
But the final ex was not quite final. Still to come were the final stalks, the most difficult of the course. At the conclusion of these two stalks, once a student had successfully reached his FFP without detection, the instructors removed themselves from the OP and steel targets were positioned in their place. Now the students had to end their stalk by firing live rounds at the targets to ensure that, yes, they had indeed established the proper windows for clean passage of their rounds, and done everything they needed to do to complete the mission successfully.
Rob still vividly remembers the sound of his round striking steel in his final shot on that sniper course. It was a huge relief, the most memorable moment in all of his military training.
They held their graduation right then and there, out on the course, immediately after they’d all fired their last shots. The commanding officer of the training facility, a colonel, came out onto the field, carrying the five certificates with him, his presence at the event an indication of how important this particular course was regarded.
The students stood in a knot, still in their ghillies and cam paint, as the colonel presented each with their hog’s tooth and certificate right there in the field.
“Congratulations,” he told the group. “What you’ve achieved here, very few have done. Now go wash up and turn in your kit—and then you’re going to go have a few drinks together. You’ve earned it.”
As the others started heading back to their quarters, the colonel turned to Rob and addressed him quietly.
“Unfortunately, Furlong,” he said, “you won’t be joining the others in the evening’s festivities.”
Oh shit, thought Rob. What’s going on?
“You need to report back to Edmonton,” added the commander. “Now.”
The Canadian sniper course normally had an extremely high attrition rate; 95 percent was not uncommon. But this class had been anything but normal. The caliber (pun clearly intended) was exceptionally high, and so was the pass rate. Out of a class of fifteen who started in the course, a full one third made it to graduation. Of those five graduates, one had been selected to go straight to deployment.
Rob shook all his classmates’ hands, went back to his barracks, packed up his gear, and made the drive back to Edmonton.
Time to go to war.