8

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF THE SHOT

They wouldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.

—Union General John Sedgwick, moments before being fatally shot in the face by a Confederate sniper at eight hundred yards

Jason Delgado and his sniper partner, Jesse Davenport, crouched on the rooftop under the hot Iraqi sun, scouting for potential targets. As the sporadic firefight triggered by a lone RPG continued to sputter, they were providing security overwatch for India Company and the rest of the battalion as it continued moving toward the Diyala River Bridge, the last gateway before Baghdad.

In the far distance they noticed a figure popping up over a rooftop parapet, shooting toward them at irregular intervals with what looked to be an AK-47. The guy would take a shot, duck down behind the short wall, then bob back up again and take either another look or another shot.

Of all the friends Delgado had gone through marine training with, Davenport was the only one who hung in all the way through sniper school. They’d been through so much together that they’d begun to have the kind of immediate, automatic rapport in battle that makes words all but unnecessary. They’d also both been through that initial test of combat, where the sense of How am I gonna do? is replaced by Okay, we got this. They had started relaxing into the flow of combat, shooting, moving, and communicating smoothly together.

The two friends rotated on the M40A1 sniper rifle, taking turns as shooter and spotter. Today Jesse happened to be on the long gun, Jason spotting for him.

Jesse nodded in the direction of the distant rooftop and said, “See that guy?”

“Yeah,” said Jason. No need to speak in sentences; they each knew what the other meant. Delgado pulled out his range finder and lased the building. It stood at eight hundred yards distant.

“Yo,” he said, “eight hundred.” He’s at eight hundred yards.

From a distance of eight hundred yards the guy wasn’t doing any damage at this point, but both snipers knew that once their element on the ground got closer, he was going to be a problem. They had to take him out.

Jesse set his BDC (bullet drop compensator) on 8. The M40 was equipped with an Unertl scope, which was a pretty basic piece of equipment and lacked the fine-tuned adjustment capacity of the kind of sniper scopes we were using in the SEAL teams. A bullet drop compensator offers a degree of adjustment, but there’s still a good amount of seat-of-the-pants involved.

Jesse sighted in and murmured, “Wind?” What have we got for wind?

Jason had already observed their surroundings and calculated direction and wind speed. On nearby rooftops he could see clothes hanging out to dry on lines, fabric coverings over open windows, even a flag or two here and there flapping in the breeze. Plenty enough visual clues to tell him that a mild wind was coming from the left. Before Jesse even asked the question, Jason had already determined that he needed to compensate for that breeze by adjusting his aim slightly to the left, that is, positioning the guy slightly to the right of his center of aim. So when Jesse said, “Wind?” Jason simply licked his finger, held it up, cocked his head thoughtfully, as if he were running through some arcane calculations based on exactly how the saliva on his finger dried, and said, “Uh, yeah, that’ll be one and a half right.”

In his best impression of an elegant British gentleman, Jesse replied, “Roger, one and a half right.”

Sometimes humor is the most efficient way to keep your cool in the midst of combat.

Jesse dialed one and a half right on the scope for windage. “On target.”

“On scope”—replied Jason—“fire when ready.”

This was the very definition of an implausible, if not impossible, shot.

Experienced snipers never go for a head shot if they can help it. For one thing, it’s way too easy to miss; the head doesn’t give you nearly the target acreage that a torso does. And besides, it isn’t necessary. Hit a person with a metal slug traveling at a velocity at or near the speed of sound, and you’re not going to “just wing him,” you’re going to do terminal damage. So no, snipers don’t aim for the head; they’ll aim for center mass, middle of the torso, every time. If possible.

Which, for Jesse, it wasn’t. The man’s body was tucked down behind the parapet. Worse, not only could Jesse see nothing but the man’s head, but he had only a brief sliver of the man’s face in view as he bobbed up to peek over the rim and ducked down again.

And he was shooting out to eight hundred yards, right at the upper limits of the gun’s maximum effective range. Eight football fields. That was a hell of a distance to nail some guy’s erratically bobbing head. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.

He took the shot.

Boom.

Nine tenths of a second later the guy lurched, grabbing his face as if he’d been smacked with a two-by-four, and flew backward.

“Holy shit!” Delgado murmured. It was Jesse’s first kill shot, and it was the craziest shot Jason had ever witnessed. Before long he’d see crazier.

*   *   *

I know I’ve repeatedly pointed out that stalking is the toughest part of sniper school, and that shooting occupies a relatively small portion of the sniper’s time in the field. But make no mistake: you also have to be an exceptional shooter.

You know how people have the expression, “Hey, it’s not rocket science.” Well, being a Spec Ops sniper is rocket science. Every round you fire is in essence a miniature rocket ship, launched on its own unique journey, and that journey is no more a simple straight line than a NASA mission to Mars. Understanding all the factors that affect that bullet’s flight and how to adjust to compensate for any variation in circumstances, no matter how slight or how great, is what separates the professional sniper from the aspiring one.

We’ve talked about dialing in adjustments and used the terms elevation and windage without really explaining what those things are. So let’s hit PAUSE for a moment, for a quick primer on how this all works, starting with those two terms and how a sniper uses them.

ELEVATION

Just because you look through your scope at a target in the distance and see a clear, unobstructed pathway between you and it for your bullet to travel, doesn’t mean there is a clear pathway. There may in fact be a branch or overhead wire or some other obstruction in the way. You just don’t see it. Why don’t you see it? Because the bullet isn’t going to go where you’re looking right now.

You think you’re looking at the bullet’s path. But you’re not.

Your bullet is not going to travel along a nice, neat, linear path defined by your line of sight. To reach your eye, light from the distant target travels a straight line. Actually, it doesn’t, not literally, because light itself curves—but at the distances we’re talking about that curvature is so minuscule that for all practical purposes you can ignore that and say your line of sight travels a perfectly straight line.

Your bullet doesn’t.

When you pitch a bullet toward a distant object it’s exactly like throwing a baseball: to get from here to there it has to travel in an arc—up, over, and down. The moment the bullet leaves the barrel it’s being slowed down by air resistance and tugged toward the ground by gravity. If you point your barrel directly at your target the bullet will never get there, because by the time it reaches its intended destination gravity will have pulled it down so that it flies below the target. Or, depending on how far you’re shooting and how high the target is, it may even plow into the ground before getting that far.

To compensate, you have to aim the barrel at a point above the target. How far above? That depends on a lot of factors, including the physical particulars of the weapon and ammo you’re using. Determining exactly how high above the target you have to aim is what we mean when we say “adjusting for elevation.”

By the way, this also means you cannot simply look down your line of sight when plotting your shot; you also need to be aware of the overhead space. In making a shot of any significant distance (say, three hundred yards or more), it’s not unusual to have your bullet knocked completely off course when it collides with an overhanging branch or other obstacle that you completely failed to notice, because it was placed far above your line of sight—but right smack in the bullet’s actual arc of travel.

WINDAGE

If you let go of a balloon on a windy day, what happens? The wind carries it away. Your bullet weighs more than a balloon and is hurled out of the barrel with considerable velocity, but that wind will still carry the damn thing away, or at least far enough off course so that there’s a decent chance it’ll miss your target even if your aim was dead-on perfect.

Which was why Jesse was relying on Jason to tell him exactly which way the wind was blowing, and how hard. Or more specifically, to tell him exactly how many degrees in which direction he needed to adjust his aim to compensate.

There are other factors, too. For example, there is spin drift, which is a bullet’s natural tendency to peel off clockwise, to the right, at a certain point in its trajectory, typically when it slows from supersonic to transonic speeds. If you’ve ever played with a toy top, you know that when it slows down to a certain point it starts to precess, that is, to wobble, and then spin out into a wider arc and fall. A high-speed bullet, which is spinning like a top, will do the same thing.

But spin drift only becomes a factor in very long shots, those going out to a thousand yards or further. Ditto the Coriolis effect, the impact of the earth’s rotation on the transit of the bullet in the air relative to what’s happening on the ground. We’ll come back to these and other more arcane considerations in a later chapter. For most of the shots we’re looking at here, elevation and windage are the central factors, the X and Y axis of making the shot.

*   *   *

So there you have it: point your rifle directly at your target, with perfect aim, and you’ll miss. Gravity and friction will pull your bullet down, and the wind will push it to one side or the other. Theoretically perfect aim would work in deep outer space, where there’s no wind and no significant gravitational pull. Here on earth, it’ll get you killed.

The art of the shot is not about perfect aim. It is the art of crafting the perfect imperfect aim—an aim with precisely the right set of imperfections such that gravity, wind, and other environmental forces will corrupt your imperfect shot and cancel out its imperfections, resulting in … perfection.

You have to aim wrong—just right.

To do that, you have two adjustable knobs, or turrets, located at about the midpoint of the scope: an elevation turret on top, and a windage turret on the right. The elevation turret is calibrated to adjust your scope to compensate for specific distances, and the windage turret for left-right adjustments to compensate for wind; they are both calibrated in minutes of angle (MOA), a minute being one sixtieth of a degree, or more typically in fractions of MOA. (Typically there is also a third knob on the left for focusing, which functions like a focus adjustment on any optics, like binoculars or a telescope. Most scopes these days also have a zoom control toward the front that lets you zoom from 10x up to 22x. But these two knobs don’t actually adjust the point of aim, only the clarity of the visual image.)

These turrets make a pronounced click you can clearly feel in your fingers, like the rings and knobs on a good camera, so you can make an accurate adjustment without taking your eye from the scope, purely by the feel of the clicks.

But here’s the thing: in most situations you leave those knobs alone, especially windage. Instead of fussing with the knobs and readjusting the scope for each shot, in most cases you’re going to compensate manually by correcting in your reticle.

CORRECTING IN YOUR RETICLE

Before going into the field you will have “zeroed” your rifle, which means you’ve got your scope adjustments all set perfectly for your rifle, ammunition, and a given range, say, a hundred yards. With a properly zeroed sniper rifle, if you sight a target at three hundred yards, you’re good to go.

And if it’s further, or, for that matter, closer? And there’s wind involved? Typically, you make adjustments in your reticle.

The reticle is a high-precision version of scope crosshairs that features a series of tiny markings, called mil dots, that run vertically and horizontally through the field of vision, providing a precise scale of measurement. Mil stands for milliradian, which is a thousandth of a radian, a measure of angle. (Think degrees; not the same thing, but close enough to get the general concept.)

Most of the time, when you’re making adjustments for a shot, you make the adjustments in your head and then hold right or hold left a specific number of mil dots to compensate for wind, and hold over (farther) or hold forward (closer) a specific number of mil dots to compensate for elevation. For example, if you “hold one and a half right for wind” that means you move your rifle slightly to the left, so that the point you’re aiming at appears not in the dead center of your crosshairs but at 1.5 mil dots to the right of center. Which was exactly the direction Jason gave Jesse for his eight-hundred-yard shot.

Sometimes you might dial in your elevation, and hold for wind. Often you won’t even do that, and simply do all the compensating in the reticle.

At this point you’re probably wondering, Why? If a sniper’s optics are such finely calibrated precision instruments, why not just dial in everything? Why not lase the target for its exact distance, do your best to judge exact wind, and then simply dial it all into your magnificent weapon system for a perfect (that is, perfectly imperfect) shot?

If sniping was all about sitting there with all the time in the world to set up your one perfect shot, and then taking that one perfect shot, then packing up and going home, well, that might work.

But that’s not how it is.

Jesse’s first kill shot was a classic one-shot/one-kill situation. But that’s not always how it goes. In fact, that’s most often not how it goes. If you can make that hole-in-one shot, then fantastic. That makes you an expert marksman—but not necessarily an expert sniper. In the field of war, it’s often the second shot that makes the difference.

*   *   *

You take in an enormous amount of information in sniper school, but no matter how much you absorb and practice on the range, it’s never enough, because learning isn’t the same as doing. It’s only when you are dropped into the reality of war that you go through the final phase of the Killing School. As you engage in battle, your skills move from learned to known. They sink into your bones and become the stuff of instinct.

By the time the 3/4 Marines entered Baghdad, Jason’s and Jesse’s skill sets had clearly moved from learned to known.

I’m not sure exactly what our military planners were expecting to happen when American troops reached Baghdad, but it probably wasn’t what actually did happen. Once Saddam was toppled, the constrictive yoke of tyranny was removed, and the initial flush of celebratory relief was gone, the place imploded. A sprawl of looting, confusion, and random civilian violence spread out through the city. In hindsight, those days of post-“liberation” chaos offered strong hints of what was to come in the years ahead. All Jason and Jesse knew was that they had an urban mess on their hands, and they had to do their best to keep order. Days earlier they had been warriors spearheading a successful military campaign. Now they were urban police in an alien city in turmoil.

One day, about a week after Saddam’s statue came down, the two of them were standing sentinel over the city from atop a fifteen-story building in the government district. Suddenly they noticed a ruckus unfolding below them. Some idiot had run into the street with an AK-47 and was randomly shooting the thing off. The area was jam-packed. People were about to die—not American soldiers but ordinary Iraqi citizens doing their best to go about normal life. As if anything was “normal” in Iraq in mid-2003.

Jason was spotting that day. He ranged the guy at 180 yards and fed the dope to Jesse, who took him out with a single shot. One shot, one kill. Classic.

A few weeks later, on May 3, Jason and Jesse were once again providing overwatch, this time from the roof of one of the tallest buildings in Baghdad, some fifty-plus stories up. The power was out, and Jason vividly recalls hoofing it up thirty-six flights of stairs, then finding they needed to hoof another seventeen flights after that. Running up fifty stories with full gear, an M40, and ammo, is not for the faint of heart. “So this—is why—we ran around—for months carrying—those fucking PIG eggs,” he huffed.

By this time the chaos in Baghdad had deepened. Once again they saw a scene erupt below, this time a small group of men spraying bullets around with their AKs. The one who appeared to be the leader wore a blue tracksuit.

Jason instantly knew what he was looking at. They might be halfway around the world from where he came from, and this might be the center of one of the oldest cultures in the world rather than one of the newest. But the city is the city. Jason grew up in the streets. He knew a gang leader when he saw one. This was not just some random guy terrorizing a neighborhood, and he was no freedom fighter. That was a hood boss down there. And if they didn’t stop him, a lot of people were going to die.

This time it was Jesse spotting, Jason on the long gun. Jesse gave him the range: 446 yards. Jason got the ringleader in his sights, and took the shot.

Nothing.

He checked his aim, took another shot.

Nothing.

Had Jesse seen any splash—that is, the telltale puff of dirt or dust kicked up when the bullet hits the ground? He had not. They had no idea where the round had gone.

It occurred to Jason that there was also a very good possibility his zero was off. They’d been jumping in and out of Amtracs that day and had just run up more than fifty flights of stairs. That kind of thing gives your gun a good banging around. He needed to get his bearings—and he needed to do it somewhere away from the crowd.

He yelled over to Jesse, “Let’s swing over to the other side of the building. Find me something at 446 yards. I gotta zero my gun.”

They ran over to the other side of the roof and Jesse started lasing targets, quickly locating a water tank standing way down below them at about 430 yards. “Got it!” he shouted, and he pointed at the thing.

Delgado set his sight on the center of the water tower and Boom! took a shot. Pinggg! A flash of dust shot off the top of the structure. It was an enormous target, he’d been aiming dead center, and yet he’d barely nicked the very top of the damn thing!

He stared at it for a second. His zero couldn’t be that far off. And while 446 yards was a good distance, it certainly wasn’t far enough away for his shot to go so far afield.

Then he realized: the angle. “Holy shit,” he murmured.

And he thought about Scott McTigue.

*   *   *

The marines had a specialized high-angle course at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in California, with a curriculum basically identical to the private course Nick Irving would attend in California years later, but that was an advanced course, something Jason wouldn’t go through until later in his career. And they had other advanced sniper programs that covered this topic—but there hadn’t been time to put Jason through any of that. Iraq was happening, and the Corps needed snipers, so here he was. At that point, sitting up there on his skyscraper perch in the heart of Baghdad’s financial district, the only time he’d ever heard anything about the technique involved in high-angle shooting had been in back in Okinawa, when he was still a PIG going through his third indoc.

In a marine sniper platoon, the senior HOG in charge is called the chief scout. The chief scout is responsible for billeting, who goes onto what team, and all training. He spends a lot of his time teaching the younger guys everything he knows and everything he can think of to teach them. This is exactly what Jason himself would be doing in the future, when he became chief scout of his platoon in Husaybah. In Okinawa their chief scout was Scott McTigue.

McTigue had a dusty manual on high-angle shooting, and at one point during those six months he decided to throw that into his classes. It wasn’t that in-depth, and even McTigue didn’t have a complete command of it, so the PIGs learned the formula but didn’t really understand the physics of it. But Jason’s artist’s mind could visualize the whole scene in vivid 3-D. What he was doing was basic trigonometry: solving for x, the missing factor. As long as he could visualize it, he could do the calculations. Because this math was no abstraction. It wasn’t simply numbers. That guy on the ground with his AK-47 was about to kill a bunch of people.

Delgado started breaking down the math.

He was at the top of a tall building, let’s round its height to four hundred yards, while his target was at ground level, out from the building at a distance of about half the building’s height, or two hundred yards. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call the height of the building 4, and the distance from the base of the building to the target 2.

Shooting from the top of the building down to the level where the target was located would be a distance of 4, in terms of height. But from where Delgado stood going out horizontally to the target’s location—that is, from the base of his building out to the target, since Delgado stood directly above the building’s base—was a distance of only 2. So putting aside how far down he was shooting, he was shooting out only to a distance of 2, exactly as it would have been if he were standing at ground level at the building’s base.

That was significant because the horizontal distance from the building out to the target was the distance over which gravity would be affecting the bullet. Since that was the distance he had to mitigate for the effects of gravity, that was the elevation he needed to dial in on his scope.

But not for windage. Because the round’s actual path of flight from where he stood down to his target at ground level was not 2 but 4—actually a little longer than that, because he was really shooting along the hypotenuse of the triangle, which would be more like 4.46. And because the wind would be pushing on that bullet from the moment it left the barrel throughout the entire time it took to traverse that full distance, that was the distance he had to mitigate for wind.

Optically speaking, in other words, his target was about 446 yards away—that was the distance he needed for windage. But in ballistic terms, it was more like 200 yards away—that was his value for elevation.

He quickly set his windage, based on the actual distance to target, at 446 yards, and calculated his elevation (amount to compensate for gravity) at 200 yards, the distance he gauged from the building to the target.

Only when I say “he quickly set his windage,” that’s a gross oversimplification. Their M40A1 was, remember, outfitted with an Unertl scope. The Unertl was the most advanced sniper scope of its time … in the sixties. This was essentially the scope Carlos Hathcock used in Vietnam, and the Corps was just about to phase it out (the company that manufactured it would close its doors in 2008) and replace it with the more advanced Schmidt & Bender, a very decent piece of equipment. But that was a few years away. Unertl is what they were still using at the time. As Jason says, “It was the oldest, most brutish, diesel engine of scopes. You had to do a lot of Kentucky windage.”

Kentucky windage meaning seat-of-your-pants guesswork.

“None of my shots were particularly glorious,” says Jason. “Because that’s not what it’s about. There’s this great mystique around the idea of one shot, one kill. But one-shot/one-kills are extremely difficult, very rare, and usually very lucky. Let’s talk about reality. Tell me what happened after you missed your first shot, let me know what you do then. Because that’s what it is to be a sniper. In real combat, that’s what we do.”

Sniping is problem-solving under pressure. When you’ve got targets moving downrange and don’t have time to sit there and dial in wind, what do you do? You have to become comfortable with the reticle, to be able to translate what’s happening out in your battlefield into the world of mil dots on your scope.

To adjust on the fly, in other words, and make it work.

Kentucky windage.

He shot off a few more rounds, enough to pop a few holes in the water tank. Once he saw water spurt out a hole in the center of the tank, he had it.

“Okay,” he said to Jesse, “let’s go.”

They ran back to the other side of the rooftop and, sure enough, that tracksuit-clad dipshit was still over there, terrorizing the neighborhood with his AK, yelling at people and spraying the neighborhood with lead. The AK isn’t a terribly accurate gun but its rate of fire on full auto is a hundred rounds per minute, nearly two shots per second. That’s a lot of damage, a lot of tragedy, a lot of death.

Jason sighted him and instantly took the shot.

The man went down like a puppet with his strings snapped.

Just as with his first kill shot weeks earlier, in Jisr Diyala, what happened next was so unexpected that Delgado almost didn’t believe his eyes were giving him accurate information. A moment after going down, the guy sat up again.

Jason thought, What the hell is going on? He knew he’d hit the man. He saw the impact, saw the guy go down, and could see blood pouring out of his back, around the kidneys. So why was he sitting up? And how was he sitting up?

Again, Hollywood prepares you for the perfect movie death, the one where you shoot the guy and he just goes down and stays down—but it doesn’t always work that way. Death is a strange character. It’s not tame, or predictable, or calm, the way you’ll often see it portrayed in movies (even the “violent” ones) or television shows (even the “realistic” ones).

Death has its own rules. Death is wild.

So this guy, having been mortally wounded by a 7.62 round to the kidneys, sat up again and then, as Jason stared at him, he gently lay back down again, crossed his legs, then crossed his arms over his chest, and in that mummylike pose, quietly died.

“It was the craziest thing.” Delgado shakes his head, thinking about it. “He was already gone the moment I hit him. But he didn’t just die—he took the time to get ready to die. And then he died.”

*   *   *

Of course, you don’t have to do all the math in your head, strictly speaking. This is the twenty-first century, after all. Every sniper program these days schools its students in how to use sniper software. As Apple used to say, “There’s an app for that.”

Still, anyone who really knows an art knows that you don’t know it until you know it in your fingers, flesh, and muscles. Painting by numbers will take you only so far.

Nick Irving is not a big fan of ballistics calculators. “I’ve seen sharpshooters who act like their sole mission in life is to master this calculator,” he comments. “That may be fine for match shooting—but I wouldn’t want them watching my back in the field.”

He invokes his hero, Carlos Hathcock, pointing out that the White Feather and others like him did what they did using basic mathematics.

“Basic math didn’t fail those guys,” he says, “it never failed me, and it won’t fail the next guy. If you rely on your calculator, what do you do when the battery suddenly runs out?”

Irving had the chance to call on that basic math when he faced a unique ballistic challenge during a deployment in Marjah, in southern Afghanistan.

On a mission one day as he was lying in prone position doing overwatch, he spotted an enemy fighter with a machine gun at a pretty good distance, coming around a corner. Nick estimated the guy’s range at about five hundred yards and figured he could drop him fairly easily.

Nick always kept Dirty Diana dialed in at three hundred yards, the average range of his typical kill. If he had to make a shot at less than three hundred, he’d just hold forward; if it was more than that, as in this case, he would just hold over.

He got the man in his scope and held over for an additional two hundred yards, which meant raising his rifle slightly, so his aim was 2 mils high in his scope’s reticle.

He took the shot.

Missed. And not by a little. Nick saw the splash and was startled to see that his round had hit more than a full 2 mils low, as well as 1 mil to the left. He scanned the area for clues, and as he did he realized that the urban terrain was not at all level; the fighter stood on higher ground, and the disparity in elevation had affected Nick’s depth perception, making the man seem closer than he actually was.

The guy was not five hundred yards away. He was a good half mile away, or more—and there was significant wind involved.

Jack Nicklaus, arguably the greatest golfer of all time, said that 90 percent of the shot is setting it up, and the last 10 percent is actually taking the shot. It’s the same thing with marksmanship: 10 percent is execution, being a surgeon with the bullet. The rest of it, the 90 percent, is all surveying the scene, doing the math, and planning.

For Irving, in other words, it was a lot like chess.

The first thing he needed was to find the range to target, so he could either dial it up on his scope or know by how much he needed to hold over.

Nick liked working in meters. Forty inches, which is basically a meter, is the standard measurement from groin to top of the head. To convert inches to millimeters you multiply by 25.4; 40 x 25.4 comes out to 1,016. Then you take that number and divide it by how tall (from groin to top of head) the guy is in your scope. Let’s say he shows up on your reticle as 2 mils tall, groin to crown; you would divide 1,016 by 2 to get 508. There’s your range in meters.

An old-school ranger had taught him how to simplify that. “You guys want to be fast at this?” he said. “Chop it down.”

First of all, it’s not practical to do that kind of math on paper. Ninety-nine percent of the time, a sniper is operating at night. And besides, who has time to pull out a piece of paper and a pen?

The old ranger taught him to simplify things by rounding down. They would take the 1,016 down to an even thousand and use that as the constant for height. If the guy showed up as 1 mil tall in his scope, Nick knew he was 1,000 meters away; if he was 2 mils tall, then he was at 500 meters. He might actually be 508 meters away, but that was close enough: you might not hit him in the chest, where you were aiming, but in the gut or sternum. You don’t care about finesse here; you just want to put him down.

They had formulas for width and the height of the head, too: five hundred, two hundred. One thousand, five hundred, two hundred: those were their three constants.

Of course Nick wasn’t sitting there with pen and paper going through all that math in the moment. He had already been through that math, a thousand times, ten thousand times. Like a concert pianist whose fingers know where to go without conscious thought, or a major league slugger who automatically adjusts his swing to match his instantaneous estimate of the speed of the pitch coming at him, he had trained exhaustively, at every range, every wind condition, every angle, to the point where he could remember setting up a shot so similar to this one that he could say, “Right, I know exactly what to do.”

Nick realized that the wind had also fooled him. A small stream ran through the city between his location and his target’s location. The stream ran left to right—but the fact that his bullet had impacted at 1 mil to the left of his target told him that the wind was moving from right to left.

He held 1 mil to the right, then cranked upward 2 mils … plus a smidgen.

He released the shot.

Meanwhile, the fighter he was shooting at had seen Nick’s first bullet hit the ground near him. At the same moment that Nick was watching the little spray of dirt kicking up and parsing through what it meant for his follow-up shot, the guy was staring at it, too, and processing its implications for him. He looked up in Nick’s direction and squinted, no doubt trying to see if he could locate where the shot had come from. It was a fatal miscalculation on his part, because he didn’t have the luxury of time to determine where the shot had come from. By the time he was raising his head to squint into the distance, Nick’s second 7.62mm round was about halfway through its journey in his direction.

Nick caught a glint off the tail end of the bullet an instant before it reached a half mile. Shit, he thought, it’s off. He could clearly see the path it was on, and that path would take it just a short distance off to the man’s right. His shot was going to miss.

And then in the last fraction of a second, like a sailboat unfurling its canvas as it reaches the open water, the round caught that right-to-left wind—and an instant later it connected with its target.

The man went down, dead before he hit the ground. He did not sit back up, cross his legs, or light a cigarette.

*   *   *

An excellent example of that kind of from-the-hip calculation happened to Jason one night on his 2004 deployment in western Iraq, when he and his sniper team were out in the city on a quiet LPOP (listening post and observation post) and suddenly heard a large explosion. They had been there only a few weeks, and this was one of the first explosions they heard there. (These were the days when the phenomenon of IEDs was not yet that commonplace.)

They ran downstairs and out onto the street to go see what had happened. As Jason began heading in the direction the sound had come from, he saw a car barreling down the street coming in his direction.

Jason swung his rifle up so he could look through the scope, saw that it was a civilian in the car, and he was heading straight for them. It seemed like a pretty safe bet that this dude was running away from whatever the hell had just happened. There was a curfew in the city and nobody was supposed to be out on the streets right now, let alone speeding away from the site of an explosion.

A moment later the guy sped by. Jason had a second sniper team stationed a bit farther down the road and called them on his radio: “Sierra 4! Sierra 4! Sierra 3! I’ve got some joker coming straight toward you in a vehicle. I want you to run a snap VCP—” A vehicle checkpoint, which meant they would stop the car and check the guy out.

“Roger!” said the other team. Jason stood out in the middle of the street and watched the car disappear over a slight crest in the road about two hundred yards away.

A few seconds passed. Then he heard from the other team on his radio, yelling, “Hey, man, we tried to stop him. He’s coming back up your way!”

Evidently the guy had seen the other snipers, done a fast U-turn, and started hauling ass back in Jason’s direction. He hadn’t seen Jason when he blew past the first time and didn’t realize he was there. He didn’t realize he was playing chicken with a marine sniper.

Jason raised his rifle, setting the butt onto his shoulder, and waited, standing on the edge of the street like a sheriff in a Western—only this wasn’t a six-shooter, this was a forty-four-inch, high-speed bolt-action M40 sniper rifle with an effective firing range of eight hundred meters.

Go ahead, thought Delgado. Make my day.

The car came back up over the crest and started screaming toward him.

Jason put a round straight into the car’s hood, which seemed like a pretty clear message that said, “I recommend you stop the car.”

The man did not stop the car. In fact, Jason heard the engine opening up as the guy accelerated further.

Jason shot back the bolt on the M40, but by the time he had racked in a second round the car was already speeding past him. He whipped his body around in an effort to track with the guy, pulling his rifle around with him.

As the car shot off in the other direction, he fired.

His two spotters, standing at his left and his right with M4s, both fired as well, as the vehicle zoomed away from the three of them.

The car kept going for another two blocks or so, then suddenly decelerated, rolled off to the side of the road, and stopped.

Yeah, thought Delgado, one of us hit this motherfucker!

As they came running toward the vehicle, a man opened the driver’s-side door and came out with his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot!” he said. “Please, don’t shoot!” And then he got down on the curb and sat there, his hands still up.

Delgado and the others were still a block away, and he started yelling toward them, “Don’t shoot no more! Don’t shoot!” Speaking perfect English. They finally reached him, guns trained on him, and stopped. He slowly lowered his hands and lit a cigarette, then started talking.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t do anything, I’m sorry! I have daughters. I have daughters. Please, don’t kill me. I have two daughters.” He seemed totally sincere.

Shit, thought Jason, we just lit this guy up for no reason. We’re gonna have some explaining to do.

At least they hadn’t actually hit him.

Jason was pissed. A bomb had gone off, their adrenaline had been flowing. Why hadn’t the guy stopped his car? What the hell was he doing out past curfew anyway?

Just then the man pointed to his armpit and said, “I’m shot! I’m shot! Please, take me to hospital. I’m shot!”

Jason looked, and sure enough, he was bleeding out of his side. One of the guys with the M4s must have landed a round.

They went over and began inspecting his car. They found a single bullet hole in the hood of the trunk that went right in through the trunk and into the car, through the right rear passenger seat, and into the driver’s seat, right by his shoulder. They could see the seat cushion, where it had punched through. It was a hole made by a 7.62 round—later confirmed at the hospital when they dug the slug out of the guy.

It was Jason’s round.

When they popped the trunk, they also found a bunch of cell phone parts, SIM cards, wire cutters, and electrical tape. This was the guy who’d set off the IED. They later discovered he had been arrested before by the U.S. military for subversive activities, but eventually let go.

“Okay, asshole,” said Jason, “you can turn off the charm now.”

After a brief hospital stay, the man was on his way to Guantánamo.

He hadn’t expected to actually hit the guy with his shot-from-the-hip. It was pure instinct and muscle memory.

As Jason said, “None of my shots was particularly glorious.” Maybe not, but this one was pretty damn spectacular.

*   *   *

Alex Morrison had a pretty damn spectacular shot, too, in the late summer of 2009 in an area just north of Kandahar. He and a few dozen other SEALs were there with a FAST (foreign-deployed advisory and support team) from the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). These FAST teams are typically manned by former military, many of them ex-SEALs, and they’re trained and outfitted like a SEAL platoon because their missions are so freaking dangerous. They were there with Alex and the other SEALs for a classic disruption operation: seize a known enemy compound and sit on it for a day, see how much damage you can do and how much Taliban economic flow you can disrupt.

They inserted at first light. They took two compounds, side by side, right on the river next to a big open area. From the moment they hit the ground they were taking sporadic fire. By noon it was coming at them from every point on the compass.

Alex wasn’t packing a sniper rifle on this op; instead, he had a Mark 17, a new assault rifle also called SCAR Heavy, “SCAR” for Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle, and “heavy” meaning it was chambered for 7.62mm rounds rather than the 5.56 rounds fired by the “light” version. He was using a special solid-core bullet made for penetrating surfaces like windows and walls.

SEAL snipers weren’t using SRs that much in Afghanistan, because the shots were typically a fairly good distance, and they preferred the carrying power of that big .30 cal boomstick. Typically one sniper would bring his .30 cal, and everyone would rotate on and off that rifle. When they got that first shipment of SCAR Heavies, all the snipers pulled the NightForce scopes off their SR-25s and mounted them on the SCAR Heavies. With that assault rifle, they were getting kills out to eight hundred yards.

Their ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, coming in from manned aircraft, Predators, and other sources) told them there was a white minivan driving around, picking up fighters, driving a big circle around the Americans, and then dropping the fighters off again. This van was repositioning the Tali forces to maintain maximum tactical advantage.

In most situations, there’s a key pressure point where, if you take care of that point, the rest of the deal starts to come unraveled. Loggers know this. When a logjam happens, there is usually one critical log holding the mess in place, and once they pull it out, the rest of the knot comes apart; they call it the kingpin log.

This minivan was a kingpin log, and Alex meant to yank it out of there.

Word came over the comms: “The van left…” And a few minutes later, “Okay, the van’s back.”

Peering down through an alleyway between two buildings out the other side, he caught a glimpse of a white minivan stopping. It was straight to his north, about 250 yards away, positioned perpendicular to him, so that he was looking at its passenger side.

He spoke into his comms: “Hey, you got eyes on the van?”

The reply came back: “Yeah, it’s directly to your north, at about two-fifty.”

Bingo. He put his crosshairs on the passenger’s shoulder and squeezed off a round—BOOM!—and saw his round hit the side of the vehicle.

As he watched through his scope, he saw a weird scene unfold. At first the passenger started jerking. A split second later, the driver slumped forward over the steering wheel. Then the jerking stopped. Neither man moved.

Alex had pulled out the kingpin log, all right. His shot had taken out both men at once—two guys with one bullet.

*   *   *

Sometimes the most critical calculation a sniper needs to make has nothing to do with the mechanics of the shot itself but with the timing of the shot, and the decision as to whether or not to pull the trigger. As Nick Irving experienced one day in Marjah, not long after his half-mile-plus shot.

Before you can serve as a sniper in the rangers, you have to do years of being an actual ranger, which involves kicking in doors, clearing rooms, close quarters combat, and that sort of thing.

Now that Nick was a sniper, he was working at more distant ranges. His average shot was at about three hundred yards, which is not extremely far, but hardly close-range. On this day, though, he found himself in an unusually close-range situation.

He was out on a mission with the platoon when a guy came walking toward them, slowly, very deliberately, doing the whole “I’m gonna blow you guys up with a suicide vest” walk. Irving had by this time witnessed suicide bombers blow themselves up just like this at least a half a dozen times. He knew what he was seeing.

The other guys in the platoon yelled at the man to stop. He kept walking toward them.

Nick told the rest of the guys to go ahead and move out, continuing on their mission, while he and his spotter stayed in place to keep an eye on this guy. They remained back as the platoon moved on, until the rest of the guys were about a hundred yards away. His spotter stayed a few yards back.

Now it was just Nick and the vest dude, one-on-one, talking.

Nick’s unit had already been in close to a dozen firefights that night. Frankly, he was getting pretty tired of being pinned down and shot at, and didn’t have much humor for this guy. He got on his radio to call it in.

Most of the shots Nick took on this deployment he didn’t bother to call in. He didn’t need to. The ROEs (rules of engagement) were fairly liberal for a ranger sniper, at least at this point. If the man had a weapon, Nick was free to use his judgment. However, this guy didn’t have a visible weapon. It was pretty obvious to everyone there that he intended grievous bodily harm. Blowing them all up with a suicide vest seemed to qualify as “grievous bodily harm.” But still.

“I have a guy at thirty yards walking toward me, ignoring commands to stop, looks like a vest. Permission to shoot.”

“Roger that,” came the reply. “Take him.”

Nick kept calling over to the guy in Pashtun. The dude just continued slowly walking closer, staring at Nick with that fuck-you-I’m-gonna-kill-you glare.

Nick put a red laser dot on his eye. He didn’t seem to care.

Nick then put the laser dot on his chest and said, “Dude, I’m gonna do this.” The man may or may not have understood English, but he could not possibly have failed to grasp the general meaning. Especially with the red dot sitting on his chest and the Army Ranger twenty-five yards away, pointing a rifle at him.

Nick had decided that if he could persuade the man to stop walking, he wouldn’t shoot. If he and his spotter could get the guy to keep his hands free, where they could see them, if they could get him down on the ground with his arms stretched out, they would be able to bag him and tag him.

He just kept coming.

Oh, man, thought Nick, I really don’t want to get blown up. Nick called out for him to stop a few more times, in Pashtun.

He kept coming.

“Roger that,” said Nick. He figured twenty feet was about as close as he wanted it to go. “I was young and cocky,” he says. “I thought I could probably survive a blast at twenty feet away. Which of course,” he adds, “I probably couldn’t have.”

When the guy got to the twenty-foot mark Nick shot hit him square in the chest, and he dropped in place, without having the opportunity to detonate the vest.

It was the closest shot Nick ever took.

There was no math involved.