somebody, somewhere, and hopes he hit it.
My job is very different. Through the powerful telescope on my rifle, I see the expressions on the faces of my victims at the moment I quench that spark of life in their eyes. You don’t dwell on that point, because you are just doing your job, and the sniper’s one true commandment is “Thou Shalt Kill.”
We soften the ultimate severity of what we do in vague terms such as “removing the threat” and “controlling the battlefield,” which puts us firmly into the military matrix, where national security interests easily scrub away any personal guilt, like soap and water removing a spot of dirt. When I “smoke-check a target,” as we call killing someone, I feel nothing at all, other than a bit of professional satisfaction.
I never enjoy taking a human life, for only a homicidal maniac would do so. An experienced sniper can hate what he what he does when he pulls the trigger, but at the same time, he understands the important fact that he is involved in something much larger than himself. I always knew there was a good reason for what I did-if I didn’t get him, he would get us-so I put him in my crosshairs and squeezed the trigger without remorse.
With that mindset, a good sniper, over time, becomes almost immune to sharp emotional reactions. I never have nightmares, at least not the usual sort, but I do have the occasional surprise nocturnal visitor. Those who have fallen to my rifle will sometimes drop by in my dreams, vague acquaintances who show up for a while and then leave again. The line is long.
By the dawn of the twenty-first century, as wars changed, the sniper had become almost irrelevant on a shifting battlefield. We were no longer the marksmen who picked off the Viet Cong in rice paddies, any more than we were the seaborne Marines who fired on the Barbary pirates from the rigging of American sailing ships. We had thermal optics, night vision lenses, handcrafted weapons, satellite communications, and other toys straight out of science fiction, but our basic mission remained the same. We were prisoners of yesterday’s success.
Although I was making noises about changing that, my suggestions to create Mobile Sniper Strike Teams were not warmly received by military tacticians who still considered snipers to be little more than support troops, like bakers and truck drivers. It became plain that this would be an uphill battle all the way.
Our last big war had been Vietnam, some thirty years earlier, and after that adventure was done, the whole machine remained poised for another two decades to fight the Soviet Union in a huge land battle. Advances in technology, new weaponry, plans, and training mirrored those threats until they simply evaporated with the demise of the USSR. Since then, the overwhelming majority of U.S. military deployments have been in cities and towns, not in Asian jungles or on sweeping European terrain. These latest dangerous conflicts are an entirely different kind of warfare, but our tactics were slow to change.
Tangled urban environments sharply inhibit the advantages of our smart bombs, overhead imagery, and standoff robotics, and jet fighter-bombers and aircraft carriers cannot hold territory. When a bad guy hides deep in a building or mixes in among civilians, he cannot be readily seen and identified, so his low tech beats our high tech: If you can’t find him, you can’t kill him.
General Robert Alexander once observed, “The infantry soldier, using intelligently the firepower of his rifle, is still, as always since the introduction of firearms, the dominant factor of victory… In war the machine, while it may assist the man, can never replace him.” Sooner or later, the ultimate weapon is the guy on the ground with a gun. Guys like me.
But the Pentagon’s planners virtually left snipers out of their future assessments, deeming us to be irrelevant. In modern conflicts, the airpower would strike hard, then the armor would move fast, computerized weapons systems would smother all resistance, and helicopters would deliver to the battlefield soldiers loaded with specialized gear, superwarriors from Silicon Valley. The image of a sniper hiding in a hole somewhere, waiting for a specific target, virtually relegated us to the status of anachronism, and we were valued about as much as some old Army mule. It was as if our age-old craft, which had evolved from the days of bows and arrows, could not change again to meet the new challenges. What nonsense. These people apparently believed their press clippings and thought that things always go right in battle.
A good sniper is trained to think for himself, and I had spent a lot of time in the wild places and had spent countless hours considering the puzzle facing shooters like myself if we were to have a future in this game. I knew the way out was to prove the usefulness of the Mobile Sniper Strike Team concept, but how could I challenge the beliefs of senior officers and military thinkers from around the world? Just talking about the problem did no good. I was, after all, just a staff sergeant, and they were officers, and military protocol, yeah, yeah.
The difference, of course, was that they didn’t have my experience, they were not Marine sergeants, and, most important, they were not snipers! Just because they had read Carlos Hathcock’s biography did not mean they were right.
I wasn’t feeling loved, which is never a good thing with a sniper. So, being just as stubborn as that old Army mule, I decided to stop arguing and start doing. I needed a showcase in which my boys and I could upset the groupthink mentality that was betting everything on technology, and I decided that the best way to get the attention of the strategists at the top of the pyramid was to simply go out and kill a whole bunch of people.
4
The chance fell into my lap during January 2001, when the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, a think tank that prepares the Corps for the latest wrinkles in warfare, dreamed up Project Metropolis, or ProMet.
ProMet would unfold in various scenarios. Some units, known as OPFOR, the Opposition Force, would defend a make-believe city while the USFOR, or U.S. Force, attacked. When one phase was completed, a new exercise was begun to familiarize Marines with how to fight in cities, or Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain, known in the trade as MOUT. As usual, specific roles were given to the armored units, the infantry, the artillery, and the support teams, but the snipers were swept aside. When I raised hell, I was bluntly told that snipers were unimportant in a big battle because we simply could not survive in urban combat.
I was running a platoon of ten school-trained snipers and six scouts, plus myself, a medic, and a lieutenant who was in overall command. We could put a lot of trouble on the street, and I argued that to leave such firepower on the shelf was asinine. Lieutenant Bryan Ziegler, the platoon leader, was a true believer and made the same points I did, only in more polite ways, but he had no better luck. They just would not listen to us.
Finally, I had a showdown with a senior planner who told me this was to be a mixture of the lessons learned in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and Central Asia. Hell’s bells. I reminded him that I had been in most of those places, including spending six memorably unpleasant months in lovely downtown Mogadishu, where I had proven that mobility multiplied the effectiveness of snipers in urban environments. He was right that a prepositioned sniper was a duck that would soon be dead, but set us free to move and hunt on our own, and the paradigm changed dramatically.
They finally told me to be quiet. Lieutenant Ziegler wisely quieted things down, but our good cop-bad cop routine had worked. To shut us up, we were told to find some way to make ourselves useful and were given eight days to train independently while bigger units prepared for a full-fledged ProMet invasion. We would work with the defending forces.
Nobody said we had to play by the rules.
Marines across the country were involved in such training. On one exercise, another Marine unit in full combat gear had “invaded” North Little Rock, Arkansas, where they stopped and questioned motorists going to the supermarkets and dry cleaners. The population happily pretended to be the residents of some unknown hostile land, but it simply was not realistic. American cities were no place for a military shootout, and we didn’t want an Abrams tank accidentally squashing somebody’s SUV.
So the War Lab guys had decided to use the real thing and leased a couple of abandoned military bases, including the former George Air Force Base outside of Victorville, California, some ninety miles northeast of Los Angeles. The Mojave Desert base once had been a huge facility of more than 5,300 acres, with thousands of men
