Sniper Elite

by Rob Maylor

  But when it came to the crunch their mortars landed 400 metres away from the target. We suggested, ‘Hand it over to our JTAC, he knows exactly where they are, he can adjust the mortars on target.’

  Wary of wasting more rounds, they decided to cease the fire mission. But then about 15 minutes later without warning they decided to fire more mortar bombs–and once more they landed nowhere near the target. It was a bitter pill to swallow.

  Suddenly we noticed the bad guys walking very cautiously out of the creek line. It was about an hour after the initial contact when they decided to make a run for it. They seemed to be coming towards us so we thought, ‘We’ll wait until they get to about the 700–800-metre mark before we engage.’ SG and I both had our SR25 sniper rifles. SG was lucky enough to have one of the new Schmidt & Bender two-turn 3–12 power scopes on his rifle. This scope allows greater elevation adjustment, which is needed when using the .338 or .50-calibre rifles. I still had the single turn scope, which took my 7.62 mm out to 1,000 metres; beyond that I had to start making adjustments using the mil dot reticle pattern.

  We both made the necessary adjustment for the range where we would engage these guys, and calculated the wind. We were going to wait until they walked in front of a large hill that was on an oblique angle to our right-hand side. This would shield a lot of the wind and give us a better chance of hitting them first shot.

  But as they came out of the creek line two snipers from 4RAR engaged them. They fired two shots that landed about 20 metres in front of them and about 15 metres to their left flank. SG and I were dumbfounded and also pretty annoyed. We wouldn’t have minded if they had both been killed, but now there were two armed men in the creek line, and one beyond them with an RPG with several rounds, and 4RAR were still working their way towards them.

  We watched these positions, waiting for them to make the next move. After about another hour and a half we saw another guy who was hunched over with what looked like a sack on his back. He quickly scurried from where the mountainside ran into a track, crossed the track and ran into the creek line. ‘What’s this dodgy bastard up to?’

  Anyway, these guys presented themselves. They must have been hiding just out of sight from us and when they stood up they were in plain view. They were 1,150 metres away. By any standard that is a very long range and a real tester in those conditions for a 7.62 mm rifle. We said, ‘They’re not going to be in range again so we’re going to have to engage them.’ We made the necessary adjustments, 1,150 metres for range, and 30 clicks right to compensate for the strong wind. We watched as the new guy opened his sack and began to take out some items of clothing. The two armed Taliban took their tops off and replaced them with the ones from the sack. Gumps said, ‘That’s it, fellas.’

  I raised the crosshairs directly above my target’s head and used the mil dot reticle pattern for a point of reference. I had previously shot this rifle out to 1,200 metres before we left Tarin Kowt and recorded my adjustment, so I knew exactly how much hold-off I needed.

  Gumps, who was assessing the wind for us, gave the ‘ready, ready’; we both started our breathing cycle. ‘Ready, ready, now relaxed, ready!’ We took up the final trigger pressure. ‘Stand by…fire!’

  Bang! We both fired at the same time but each round hit a metre to the right-hand side of them. We had slightly over-compensated for wind. Instantly we made a quick but slight adjustment by shifting the point of aim a fraction still using the reticle pattern as a reference point. The next two rounds found their mark and they fell to the ground. We could see they were still alive so we fired a few more rounds.

  You could see the effects of the wind on the rounds because as a gust came through it pushed them off target slightly to the left and when the wind dropped they landed just to the right. The atmospheric conditions were also good enough for us to observe the swirl from the rounds. This meant we could see exactly how the wind was affecting our rounds on their trajectory. So getting a round back on target took several attempts.

  The third guy with the RPG was still hidden in the rocks and they sent some kids to see if the two guys in the creek line were still alive. They knew we wouldn’t engage the kids, and shortly afterwards we observed several males walking into the creek line. They were carrying a large blanket to recover the deceased, and as they came out the bodies had been wrapped in the blanket and were being carried off.

  They also sent two kids up to the older guy with the RPG to shield him from us as they walked him away from his hiding spot. He was walking quite gingerly so it seemed like Gumps’ second round had winged him. The other guy who took the clothes in came out of the creek line with about six kids shielding him. The kids were also carrying the rifles of the deceased to be put back into circulation.

  4RAR had now entered our field of view and were continuing with their clearance. Soon after, it began to get dark and we decided to cut away from our OP locs under the cover of darkness, and walk back the 6 kilometres through the hills to where the vehicles dropped us off.

  Back at FOB Anaconda we were given a warning order for the drive back to Tarin Kowt. Our patrol was to conduct a night patrol through the village to the south to provide awareness of any enemy movement and early warning should the Taliban decide to hit our cars as they drove for the mountain pass early next morning. The territory was hostile but working at night was to our advantage. Wearing NVGs we could stealthily move in and around the green without anyone knowing we were there.

  4RAR were leaving that night so we got them to tactically insert us from one of their Bushmaster vehicles. As soon as we stepped out of the vehicle I instantly noticed how cold it was. Most of the boys had only packed a thin jacket into a day sack, as we didn’t anticipate it being that cold. Anaconda wasn’t all that far away and the nights there were quite comfortable. SG, who loves his comfort, was the only one who took out his big green puffy jacket that we had been issued. He also carried the TAC/SAT–quite a heavy radio used by the JTACs to call in an aircraft. I had to borrow a thin fleece jumper, which hardly provided any protection from the cold at all.

  As we patrolled we noticed that all the villagers were inside, it was now late September and the night temperature was freezing. A couple of times we held our breath as a local farmer exited his compound to have a shit in his field. We stayed motionless, but at the ready. When you’re on edge, as we were, every noise is amplified. These situations can be quite unpredictable as some of the locals carry firearms for their own protection and if startled could start blazing away blindly into the darkness, which would compromise our patrol.

  It was now 0200 hours and the air temperature was starting to drop rapidly. Gumps had decided to go ‘static’ for a couple of hours parallel to a well-used track to see if there was going to be any foot traffic. Within minutes I was absolutely freezing and had started to shiver. This was going to be a very painful two hours but Gumps cut it at the hour and a half mark as we needed to get the circulation going again. By that stage my ears were stinging and I could hardly move my hands.

  I was glad to be moving again but wasn’t warming up at all. We patrolled uneventfully the rest of the way and RVd with the troop at the mouth of the pass that we had been observing for the last hour. One of the boys who was very warmly wrapped up told us the temp was minus 2 degrees then smiled at us. No wonder I was so bloody cold! Back with our vehicles we could source some more cold weather clothing. One of the lads had thoughtfully made us a brew in a thermos flask before they left and handed it to Kabes.

  Late that morning we had reached the same steep and winding pass where we had all the trouble with the CV joints. We did survey the area for other avenues, but this was our best option. In Afghanistan even the best options can be bloody dangerous and this one was no exception. By now we had started to attract a fair amount of attention from the bad guys, and the radio chatter was running on full auto. There wasn’t a lot we could do about it; we just had to be super vigilant.

  We had started to climb the mo
untainous pass and it wasn’t long before a car had broken the first CV, which had to be fixed in place. The LRPVs generally weighed about 6 tonnes fully fuelled and loaded, so this was an enormous amount of strain on these cars, which weren’t designed to carry such a heavy load. We broke several on our journey to the top of the pass, but luckily we had been resupplied at FOB Anaconda. At the top of the pass our patrol saw some enemy movement close to 1,700 metres away. They looked like they were getting into a position where they could either observe us, or hit us with mortars.

  DM and Kabes put forward a plan of action to stalk them and give them the good news from across the valley. DM took his .338 sniper rifle and Kabes had his M4. The lie of the ground was extremely steep and the temperature that afternoon was around 34 degrees. They travelled very light and carried just one water bottle each in their chest webbing. As they got halfway towards their target I saw two blokes at the base of a tree on the ridgeline they were travelling. We warned them by radio and gave them a target indication. This meant that DM and Kabes would now have to disappear over the other side of the ridgeline and out of our sight. After a short time DM got back on the radio and informed us that they were approaching the enemy position.

  During a stalk we set our scopes to 300 metres in case we got unexpectedly compromised and we could then battle shoot quite effectively using the mil dots on the reticle pattern. DM and Kabes got within 80 metres of these blokes. DM got into position, placed the crosshairs on the target, and fired but the round missed. We saw the splash of dust, which seemed to land near; this spooked them and they vanished from our view. At that range and with the elevation set at 300 the barrel was pointing too high. So when they engaged, the round went straight over the top of the bad guy’s head. But it was enough to get these two blokes running, and they ran straight towards Kabes, who dropped both of them with head shots.

  They recovered an AK and a .303 with about 200 rounds per gun. We had been awake for 36 hours straight by now and DM and Kabes were members of the night patrol.

  With the boys back in location looking very drawn in the face and vehicles all fixed, we decided to hit the road again. That was when we got word via a captured radio that the enemy wanted someone to lay some IEDs in the road for us, and they needed it done in a hurry. As we crawled towards the bottom of the pass, the front car, which was Gumps’, stopped right in front of where a small creek line ran across the road–a favourite spot to plant IEDs. I was in the car about 20 metres behind them. All the combat indicators were there, but sometimes it’s not until something happens that you say, ‘Fuck, I saw it coming but didn’t actually realise it was going to happen so soon.’

  Gumps’ crew saw a guy about 50 metres in front of them sitting on a rock with a black bag in his hand. I couldn’t see him because we had just come around the corner but I heard Gumps say on the radio, ‘We’re going to move forward and talk to this guy.’

  As soon as they moved forward the guy legged it, and as they drove into the ditch, Boom! The bastard had laid an IED in the road, which exploded right underneath the gearbox. I think the right front wheel drove over the pressure plate.

  The pressure plates are made using a wooden box containing two saw blades with batteries connecting wires from the blades to a detonator. Once the saw blades are crushed together it completes the circuit and sends the electrical pulse to explode the detonator.

  The gearbox took the full force of the explosion and this protected our guys. The bad guys try to position the IED to go off under one of the front seats or to get the gunner in the back, which is what happened to Sean McCarthy in 2008. We also reckon that this time they used double Russian anti-tank mines, one stacked on top of the other. It caused a terrific amount of damage, but fortunately only threw the guys out of the car with minor injuries.

  I went to run forward but one of our guys shouted, ‘Stop!’ He was concerned about the threat of a secondary device being planted there as well. Initially I thought, ‘Yeah, good call, mate.’ But then I thought, ‘No, bugger it, my mates are injured and they need help.’ So I ran forward with one other guy from my car and checked on the blokes.

  They were bruised and battered and one had cracked his elbow. They were all grey and black from the blast, which we thought was quite funny and had a bit of a chuckle at their expense–they looked a bit like the black and white minstrels. I shouted to SG, who had been in the back of the car and was a bit disorientated, ‘Where’s the bloke with the black bag?’ He tried to give me a target indication but he was slightly confused.

  He said, ‘I’ll shoot at the area. Watch the splash.’ Where he hit was like the entrance to a cave. ‘Good, he’s gone in there. Let’s go round the top and come in behind him.’ So three of us crossed the creek line and made our way onto the high ground tactically pepper-potting forward. As we got close I threw a grenade off the high ground and it landed at the entrance to the cave and exploded. We then quickly pepper-potted down to the entrance.

  We covered each other into the overhang. There was nothing there. One of the lads who was a tracker said, ‘Let’s go down and see if we can pick up this guy’s tracks.’ We did but only managed to track him about 20 metres where we could clearly see that he had climbed onto a motorbike and ridden off. The re-entrant that he rode up was so deep it had absorbed the sound of his bike. He got away to fight another day.

  As we moved back, the troop sergeant had already started to organise an air medical evacuation (AME) for the injured blokes. A couple of patrols had also organised themselves into providing security for us on the high ground. We jockeyed a few cars around and tried to make the damaged car towable. Some of the lads were picking up all the broken bits while scouting around for pieces of kit that were strewn over a large area. There was still the smell of HE in the air mixed in with diesel and engine oil from the damaged vehicle.

  It didn’t take too long to make the car towable. We then hooked it up to a solid ‘A’ frame and secured it to the rear of my car. The AME came in, which was a couple of American Blackhawks, and landed right beside us. The Americans run the AME and do an absolutely fantastic job over a huge area. They are always flanked by Apache gunships for their protection. The injured were carried to the aircraft and once on board they took off.

  We had intelligence suggesting that there had been a second device laid further down the road. Generally the Taliban will place an IED in an area that is constricted and no other way around, forcing us to drive through it. We had a couple of specialist engineers attached to us who had a bomb disposal dog able to sniff out small traces of explosive or firearms. The engineers set about clearing the rest of the road to ensure a safe exit from the mountain pass.

  This process was very slow and we inched forward to within 1,600 metres from the dasht. A few of the boys had remained on the high ground looking for the spotter who was reporting on us. We heard him report that we were coming up close to the next IED. Everybody instantly became extra vigilant, anticipating another device.

  The dog handler and his dog Razz were out front together with another engineer who was sweeping the ground with a mine detector. The mad thing was that Razz wouldn’t go any more than 20 metres away from his handler. We were about 500 metres down the track when suddenly the dog got all excited.

  He was interested in a spot similar to the location of the earlier IED: the road dipped down into a shallow creek line where the ground was quite loose, which would have made it easy to plant an IED. Razz became increasingly excited. I must have been about 150 metres back at this stage, and there were a few cars ahead of me. Razz then ran back to the engineer wagging his tail, letting him know that he had done a good job, but then ran back to the device and started to dig for it. Boom!–Razz was vapourised and we were briefly pelted by small stones that had been thrown into the air; a couple of the front cars were covered in Razz’s fur. The explosion blew the engineer over and knocked him out. This was a double whammy for him as he’d been sitting on the back of Gumps’ car whe
n they drove over the first one. He was pretty upset about his dog but it was a good thing that he was still alive. Not a good day for him.

  He was able to continue without an AME and was extracted from the field by Chinook when it came in that night to lift out the damaged car.

  The next morning we headed for the same village where we thought we were going to get contacted the previous week. This was undoubtedly the home of the IED facilitator, and they were already talking it up to attack us. They realised they didn’t do a very good job of it a week ago and all indications suggested that they were up for it this time. Sure enough, the bad guys came up on the radio again saying, ‘They’re coming towards us. We’re going to attack them this time.’ This was translated through our interpreter. I thought, ‘Christ, here we go.’

  We sat off the village observing it for some time trying to make an assessment of what the Taliban were actually going to do. We didn’t have any other option; we couldn’t drive around the village, as the topography wouldn’t allow it. We pushed closer, arranging the vehicles into fire support position, and two patrols went in on foot to clear the route. As there were only three of us left, with the other half of the patrol now in hospital, we joined these two patrols to boost up the fire power slightly.

  It was an eerie feeling entering the village, as everyone was hidden indoors. We tactically approached the bazaar, which seemed to be the hub of the village and where small groups of fighting-age males congregated. We expected to be hit at any moment; I could hear my heart pounding as I looked for any sign of trouble.