Every man owes a death. There are no exceptions.
—Stephen King, The Green Mile
I have an unusual relationship with death.
For most of us, death is a mystery, a thing we fear and seek to avoid, evade, or deny, even to the point of pretending it doesn’t exist, at least until we reach our sixties or seventies and it starts coming around to claim the lives of those we know and love.
For me, the face of death is as familiar as the barista at my local coffee shop.
* * *
In the freezing morning hours of March 4, 2002, I sit with seven of my teammates in an MH-47 Chinook helicopter, code name Razor 1. We’re not moving; we’re tied down at Bagram Air Base in northern Afghanistan, waiting for the word to go. We have been deployed as a QRF (quick reaction force) to fly out to the Shahikot Valley, near the Pakistan border about a hundred miles south of here, to rescue Neil Roberts, a fellow Navy SEAL who has been shot down on a mountaintop there, along with a team of SEALs who went in to get him out and got pinned down themselves by enemy fire.
Finally the word comes—only it isn’t “GO,” it’s “Get Off.”
At the last minute, for reasons we are never told (no doubt political), we are yanked off the bird and replaced by a team of U.S. Army Rangers who fly off in our place while we sit on our hands. Five members of that rescue team—the team that replaced us, the team that should have been us—never come back. Neither does Roberts. Instead, he becomes the first U.S. Navy SEAL killed in the young conflict people are already calling the War on Terror.
A few weeks later, another SEAL named Matthew Bourgeois steps out of a Humvee on the outskirts of Kandahar and onto a land mine. The bizarre thing is, I stood there, on that exact same spot, two months ago, when the Humvee I was riding in parked right there—directly on top of a live antitank land mine. The only reason the damn thing didn’t blow us to pieces is that whoever set it up did a lousy job.
But not this time. Unlike the one underneath my Humvee’s wheel, the device Matthew just stepped on has been set correctly. A fraction of a second later he becomes Afghanistan’s Navy SEAL casualty #2.
* * *
You could say I had cheated death once again, but I didn’t see it that way. Orpheus may have tricked Hades; Ingmar Bergman may have had Max von Sydow play chess with Death; but those are only stories. In real life, death isn’t something you cheat or outmaneuver. Death is like the wind: it blows where it wants to blow. You can’t argue with death; you can’t stop it. Best you can do, as any sailor will tell you, is your damnedest to harness it.
We never really left Afghanistan, and soon we were in Iraq, too, and many other parts of the world, and more deaths followed. In 2012 I started writing a book, Among Heroes, honoring friends of mine who had given their lives in the course of the War on Terror. While I was still working on the first draft, my best friend in the world, Glen Doherty, was killed in Benghazi. Before the manuscript was finished, another SEAL sniper friend, Chris Kyle, died in Texas while trying to help out a suffering vet. I had thought the book was my idea; but death was writing it with me.
As many thinkers over the ages have pointed out, your relationship with death colors your relationship with life, perhaps even determines it. Crazy Horse rode into battle at the Little Bighorn saying, “Today is a good day to die.” That’s not simply a declaration of balls and bravery. Embracing death is the only thing that allows you to fully embrace being alive. “The fear of death follows from the fear of life,” said Mark Twain. “A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
As I said, I have an unusual relationship with death, but then, so does every Special Operations sniper.
The sniper plays many roles in modern warfare. He or she is a master of observation and reconnaissance, often the commander’s prime instrument of detailed intelligence behind enemy lines. Snipers are master trackers, often devoting hours or days to following a trail and observing people’s movements without ever firing a single shot. They serve as assets of psychological warfare; a single sniper can sow confusion and insecurity in the minds of thousands of enemy troops. Advanced military sniper training, probably the most exacting and excruciating of any course of training anywhere on earth, schools its students in an astonishing range of skills and disciplines, from digital photography and satellite communications to physics to memorization techniques that any Las Vegas huckster would kill to own.
Still, while these are all real and true aspects of what is one of the world’s most complex skill sets, the fact remains that the sniper’s fundamental task is brutally simple. It is the sniper’s job to compose, choreograph, and execute a death.
The experience of killing, of course, is hardly unique to snipers. That is the nature of war; every soldier, sailor, and airman is put in a position to come face-to-face with death, and many do. A line of tanks, a formation of aircraft, a company of infantry: these are all tasked with delivering death—but in a messier, more haphazard, and more massive way. They pour out huge amounts of money and matériel onto the battlefield, slaughtering dozens or hundreds, destroying buildings and towns, despoiling environments.
The sniper’s charge is to dole out death to an individual, singularly and instantaneously.
The killing that a sniper delivers is different from that of the rest of war. For one thing, it is vastly more precise, more efficient, and, to be frank, more economical. In Vietnam, killing a single NVA or Vietcong took American infantry firing roughly fifty thousand rounds, at the cost of well over $2,000. For an American sniper to dispatch one enemy fighter took an average of 1.3 rounds. Total cost: 27 cents.
The sniper’s kill is also more personal. It’s one thing to charge onto a battlefield in the heat of a firefight, or hurl a grenade over a wall, even shoot someone with a sidearm as you run through a building, adrenaline soaking your muscle fibers and nerve endings. But when you sit concealed in a hide site for hours, even days, watching someone, noting his every move, getting to know his daily routine, his mannerisms, assembling an entire profile of his personality and intentions through exhaustive observation, it’s an entirely different experience. A sniper may know his target intimately before the moment comes to squeeze the trigger.
Finally, the way a sniper kills another human being is vastly more deliberate. More conscious. “More cold-blooded,” you could say—but if you do, then you’ve never walked in a sniper’s shoes. Chris Kyle, arguably the most famous of twenty-first-century snipers, was often asked about how he felt about all the people he’d killed, and Chris always turned it around: it wasn’t about the people he killed, it was about the boys he kept from being killed. Most military snipers you talk to will say the same thing. Their goal out there in the field isn’t to take lives so much as it is to save them.
But make no mistake: while preservation of life may be the goal, inflicting death is the means. The sniper, possibly more than any other military figure, embodies the inherent contradictions and ironies of war. The aim of war is to squelch or settle conflict; in other words, to enable the people whom the warrior represents to live in peace. When you go to war, your ultimate purpose is to remove barriers that keep societies from going about their normal lives; to promote the peace, to protect and preserve the living.
Which you do by killing.
The sniper’s mission is to deliver life by delivering death.
This is the story of the people who do that: who they are, how they do what they do, and the training that produces them.