Modern American Snipers

by Chris Martin

  CSM Greg Birch retired in 2007 following more than thirty years of service.

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  As is too often the case with the Ranger Regiment as a whole, Ranger snipers are frequently overlooked and underestimated, having failed to capture the public’s imagination in the way that Navy SEALs or Army Special Forces have.

  While widely unrecognized, the 75th Ranger Regiment boasts perhaps the purest expression of sniper in the inventory of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM, JSOC’s ostensible parent organization). They represent a rare breed in the United States military: dedicated snipers who focus on that demanding job full-time.

  By contrast, SEAL Team and SF snipers can be considered “part-time.” They have undergone extensive training to earn their sniper qualification—and they often go on to pursue more advanced, follow-up courses—but they also continue to serve in their previous positions once they reintegrate with their platoon or ODA (Operational Detachment-Alpha or “A-Team”).

  The amount of actual sniper work they receive can vary, from extreme workloads—as would prove to be the case for a number of SEAL snipers in Iraq—to being just one of several Green Berets on an experienced, flexible ODA that carry that particular qualification, along with countless others.

  Jack Murphy, who served as a 75th Ranger Regiment sniper and later an Army Special Forces Weapons Sergeant, explained, “In SF things are a little bit different. An ODA is expected to do everything. You take a guy—you can even take me as an example. I was a senior Weapons Sergeant. I had been to sniper school. I had been to SERE. I had been to language training. I had been to the HALO school. I had been to off-road driving schools.… That’s normal in SF.”

  Any given Special Forces sniper may also be scuba qualified and a French linguist. He may have also received medical training on top of all that. Murphy said, “You do have ODA guys sent to the Special Forces Sniper Course as slots become available; guys get sent and that happens all the time. But sniper is one of many, many hats those guys have to wear.

  “It makes things problematic. All the things I’m listing—you know how much time it takes to become proficient at all these different skill sets? What ends up happening, because you are a Green Beret, this sniper role just becomes one of many things you have to be and have to do. It’s not something you necessarily get to specialize in and go out to the range and do every week.”

  Besides the SF and SEAL part-timers, the conventional Army’s trained snipers often perform more mundane duties when actually deployed, and even the snipers of JSOC’s special mission units exist more in a hybrid, advanced reconnaissance role.

  Murphy said, “I would point out that the Rangers and the Marine Scout Snipers are close to being the only two elements that are dedicated full-time snipers in the military. Even the Delta guys, yeah, they’re snipers, but they’re also recce dudes and everything else.”

  Isaiah Burkhart, another former 3/75 Ranger sniper, added, “It might not be the old-school, ‘Hey, we’re going to set up in a hide site type thing’ that people think of when you say the word ‘sniper.’ We do more of a direct action thing, but we definitely placed accurate, effective fires on guys.”

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  Each Ranger battalion operates semi-independently from one another and the details may differ, but they each followed a similar path in revamping their sniper elements. Formerly, a small allotment of snipers were assigned by each rifle company to a dedicated “weapons platoon” that could be detached to support the company’s individual rifle platoons as necessary.

  “The problem with that was, Rangers have always been shorthanded,” Careaga explained. “When we go through the selection process, we’d rather be shorthanded than a bunch of guys who don’t meet the standard. So every time the line [rifle] platoons were short, they’d take guys from the snipers section.”

  Eventually, the snipers were consolidated under their respective Battalion Headquarters and Headquarters Company into dedicated sniper platoons, one per battalion.

  Even among the Ranger Regiment, the 3rd Battalion snipers are something of an outlier due to a convergence of factors. For 3/75, the transformation took place in the summer of ’98—just after 1/75 made the adjustment and prior to 2/75 following suit—and the battalion’s setting at Fort Benning played a contributing factor in forging a uniquely effective capability.

  The platoon was initially stood up by Tom Fuller in July ’98 and then quickly handed over to its second platoon sergeant, Lindsay Bunch.

  “GM,” a former 3/75 sniper, said, “Every battalion does their own thing, you know what I mean? I know in 1st Batt, they call it SNOT—Sniper Observation Team. We never called it any of that stuff. It’s sniper section or sniper platoon. That’s it.

  “But 3rd Batt—here’s the deal—3rd has the worst quality of life because there’s nothing out there; it’s a military town, unlike Seattle or Savannah. But they have a lot of ranges, and they have the Army Marksmanship Unit there—the Army shooting team—ammo, ranges, all that stuff. Seriously, out of the three battalions, it’s the best one to train at because they have all those resources. The environment dictates that 3rd Batt has a good sniper platoon. Granted though, those guys have no lives.”

  The tremendous upside associated with being based in proximity to the U.S. Army’s Marksmanship Unit was cited by more than one Ranger sniper. The AMU was originally devised by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the ’50s with the intent of defeating the Soviet Union … not on the battlefield, but in international shooting competitions.

  The unit still exists in largely the same capacity, with a focus on competitive shooting, although it also serves in a recruiting, training, and R&D capacity.

  AMU boasts its own Custom Firearms Shop and develops weapons and ammunition of unequaled precision. And its success in the role for which it was originally founded is undeniable, having garnered dozens of Olympic medals.

  Its shooters are widely regarded as ballistic wizards. Shared ranges and ready access to that knowledge only pushed the 3/75 Ranger snipers to elevate their games accordingly as the sniper platoon took shape.

  “The AMU is a huge resource,” GM said. “You have the best shooters in the world. And you’re not talking about, ‘Hey, this guy is a good really shot.’ No, you flip through a magazine and you see he’s number one in the world. And you’re training with those guys. These guys went to other places throughout the U.S. and trained other tier units as well. They knew how to train special ops guys. At 3rd Batt you have that in your backyard at all times, to go shoot, pistol, rifle, whatever.”

  Burkhart added, “[AMU] are the best shooters out there. And the coach of the service rifle team, the high-power team, Emil Praslick … that guy—he can read wind better than anyone I’ve ever seen. It’s crazy when you’re sitting there and he would come out there and do a wind call. You’d shoot and he’d say, ‘Why don’t you try this?’ and then, yep, you’re dead on. You see a huge difference between someone who has the experience and a guy who just has a natural ability for it.”

  Over time, the 3/75 sniper platoon came to shoot at an AMU level while maintaining its operational, real-world focus.

  “Pre-GWOT, all they did was go to schools and shoot—that’s it,” GM said. “With the Army Marksmanship Unit there, they had the best shooters in the Army—in the world—there, at their fingertips. So the guys would go down and shoot all the time. Iron sights, M16s, out to one thousand yards plus, just really honing their skills.”

  The 3rd Battalion sniper platoon established a powerful foundation, honed their skills religiously on the ranges at Fort Benning—which far outstripped what existed in Savanah, Seattle, or just about anywhere else—and constantly cycled through other sniper schools. During this time of peace, the results of all that hard work manifested in a dominant stretch across a number of sniper competitions.

  GM said, “These guys got a lot of trigger time. A lot of trigger time. It was the perfect storm for guys to rea
lly hone their skills. These guys set up the foundation, set up the platoon, set up the standards of shooting, and built the relationships throughout the gun industry to make it a success. Guys liked it so much, they’d stay on for years on end which was unheard of. Three, four, five years, they’d stay a squad leader. Some of them would reject rank, too. They didn’t want to get promoted; they wanted to stay there.”

  Pete Careaga was one of the Ranger snipers who helped build that foundation and stayed on far longer than was initially proposed. He was in on the ground floor, having served in a rifle company’s weapon platoon’s sniper section before the 3/75 sniper platoon was consolidated.

  “The creation of Sniper Platoon did a few things to our benefit,” Careaga explained. “Beforehand, snipers kept rotating too fast in the sections. So nobody really knew how many rounds this rifle had—any of that stuff. But once the platoon came around training went up immeasurably.

  “Before most snipers just went to the sniper school at Fort Benning and that was it. But once it became a platoon, we started sending guys through every sniper school we could think of. The Marine Scout Sniper Course, Canada, the SAS course, the Navy SEAL Sniper Course, all sorts of advanced courses … Pretty much any school you could think of, military or civilian, we would send guys there.

  “It was just an incredible training environment. We were shooting pretty much every day and night. We had, like, one week for maintenance and the other times we were just shooting. When I was there, my M24 was re-barreled twice, that’s how much we shot just training. The amount of weapons we had too … I had two M24s, SR-25, and Barrett, an M4, a pistol just assigned to me. It was just insane. It was actually the best place to be a sniper. I had talked to some Special Forces guys and they do go to the schools and they are kind of designated snipers but they don’t do it enough.

  “I was there exactly seven years even though initially it was supposed to be an eighteen-month billet. We soon realized we can’t do eighteen months. There’s too much training required. Once the guys get the training, they are very valuable.”

  All of that training quickly developed a reputation for the 3/75 sniper platoon.

  “We did get a lot of notoriety on our skills,” Careaga confirmed. “We would send the guys to all the schools, but we also sent them to all the competitions. And we won. The 10th Special Forces Group [Airborne] International Sniper Competition in Colorado, we won that like every time we went. The Marines Scout Sniper comp, the Canadian International Sniper Concentration … We were just winning competitions because we trained so much. That also contributed to us sending so many snipers to the AMU. We started sending guys for the summer trips. Before that there were pretty much zero ex-Rangers in the teams. The AMU used to hire just junior shooters who had already been doing that style of shooting. And once we started going there, they realized these guys actually have some skill and they started hiring from Ranger Battalion.”

  Among the other Ranger snipers who built the pre-9/11 foundation were Jared Van Aalst (“VA”) and Robby Johnson (“RJ”)—the Ranger who would later make the video-game-like propane tank triple kill at the Haditha Dam.

  The close relationship between the AMU and the Rangers resulted in significant cross-pollination. Burkhart explained, “When I got there, Jared Van Aalst and Robby Johnson were the guys who were in charge of the section. They were both guys who had been in the platoon before and then got picked up by Army Marksmanship Unit to be summer shooters and then they ended up staying on there for a couple years. They went and shot competitions and then came back and took over the sniper platoon.”

  Van Aalst graduated high school in 1993—the same year eighteen members of Task Force Ranger died in the Battle of Mogadishu. After taking a year to travel the world, he returned home to attend college and got a small taste of soldiering in ROTC. That was all that was required to decide the life of a Ranger was the one he would pursue.

  Following a few years in the battalion, Van Aalst joined the newly revamped sniper platoon in ’98 in its formative months. He ascended to the role of squad leader in ’01 before leaving for the AMU—just prior to the attacks of September eleventh.

  What he had pegged as a plum assignment was transformed into a ball and chain that kept him out of the fight. Anxious to earn his stripes in combat, Van Aalst sought a return to the Regiment and was finally brought back as the 3/75 sniper platoon sergeant in 2003.

  Described as “idiosyncratic,” Van Aalst had developed a taste for fine wine and good cigars. He also brought a corporate attitude to the sniper platoon, devouring leadership handbooks and emulating the techniques of successful businesspeople … to mixed reception.

  However, while it was sometimes difficult to decipher, behind the cold façade, Van Aalst managed to see his soldiers as people and not merely sub-MOA machines.

  VA and RJ developed a pipeline for their snipers. New recruits would typically go straight to the U.S. Army Sniper School and, if time permitted, follow that up with additional, advanced training, whether taught internally or via outside courses.

  With his first deployment as a sniper looming, Isaiah Burkhart had yet to go through the basic Army Sniper course. He explained, “A couple other of the new guys in the section got slots and I was really pissed off about it. ‘This is bullshit!’ I felt I was doing better than these other guys.”

  Van Aalst pulled Burkhart aside: “Hey, since we’re getting ready to go on this deployment, I didn’t want to send you off to school and then directly to Iraq and not give you any time to spend with your wife.”

  “That was cool,” Burkhart said. “Maybe that was an excuse and I was a turd, but it seemed legitimate. He actually cared about the personnel in his section.”

  The reality was, the training inside the sniper platoon was so strong that 3rd Battalion snipers were being given the tools to excel before they had even attended the Army’s baseline training course.

  GM, a former sniper with the battalion, explained, “They’d start out with the basics. They had a template. You’d take a new guy, you’d put him on iron sights with an M16A2—old school M16—and if he can shoot iron sights with the M16A2 out to a thousand, he can do anything. They had a little pipeline. You start with this, you bump up to this, you go onto this. After that you were constantly doing ranges or constantly going to schools.”

  Burkhart continued, “I went on my first deployment [as a sniper] and I hadn’t even gone to sniper school. But we had been training at the range four or five days a week, and these guys who were teaching me were just amazing shots. And our whole section went to the Marine High Angle Course.”

  Even as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq raged, the 3/75 Ranger sniper platoon continued to run roughshod through competitions. During Burkhart’s time with the section, they had teams that won the International Sniper Competition, the Canadian International Competition, and the Special Operations Sniper Competition, defeating snipers from Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and Special Forces in the process.

  “Our guys were really on point so I was learning from amazing marksmen,” Burkhart said. “I didn’t feel like I was really far behind.”

  Van Aalst finally made his first combat deployment in 2004 to Afghanistan. But just as Iraq was heating up, Afghanistan had begun to cool, with the initial postinvasion flurry of activity followed by a slower-paced game of cat and mouse.

  “Most of the time we were in support of actual direct action elements,” said Murphy, who went to Afghanistan on his first deployment as a 3/75 sniper a few months later in late ’04. “It wasn’t like Carlos Hathcock stuff, going out with a spotter for five days and hiding out, looking to shoot some communist general or something like that. We were going out there with actual rifle platoons and we would support them however they could best employ precision fire.”

  During Murphy’s three-month deployment, they ran a couple dozen missions. That pace would pale in comparison to what was to come in subsequent deployments. However, the more measured spe
ed did allow the snipers to operate with the sort of creativity that would prove impossible due to the punishing operational tempo the Rangers would inflict on their adversaries in the more target-rich Iraq AO in the months and years ahead.

  The 3/75 snipers pushed their operational boundaries in search of targets with a dearth of obvious objectives to keep them busy.

  Additionally, the line platoons still did not know how to best leverage the battalion’s potent sniper capability. However, Careaga saw that as an opportunity rather than a handicap and one that resulted in two combat jumps in the opening months of the Afghanistan War for the sniper.

  “They just didn’t know how to use snipers properly, so we just told them how we could best be used. And that was just awesome,” Careaga said. “They didn’t know but we did. It wasn’t a bad thing. I think it actually worked better for us. It allowed us to pretty much pick our own missions.”

  On multiple occasions, Van Aalst led a team of six snipers through the night, a loose pack of shadows shifting from observation post to observation post. In the final hours of darkness they built hide sites so they could scan the valley below for targets in the following hours.

  “We did that quite a bit,” Careaga said. “Afghanistan, with all that open terrain, was more permissive to that kind of mission.”

  Their initiative and ingenuity resulted in a handful of kills in what otherwise was an uneventful deployment.

  Murphy and his sniper partner also conducted a handful of recon patrols that bordered on clandestine. At various times decked out in civilian attire, traditional Afghani robes, or Afghani military uniforms, they traveled in NSTVs—nonstandard tactical vehicles—to scout out potential overwatch positions for upcoming raids.

  Most memorable of these atypical ops were the aerial platform support missions.

  “Of course those stand out in my mind,” Murphy said. “On one occasion we went out at night—me and the other sniper on one side of a Little Bird and a rifleman on the other side just in case we needed to get off the helicopter and take someone prisoner.