“We’re not going to take him out like this. We need to collapse that house on top of him!” Mac said, the frustration coming through in his voice.
“Same shit, different day,” I agreed. Even with the noise of our fellow Rangers firing full cyclic, pumping out max firepower at our enemy with their M240 machine guns and M249 SAWs, I remembered our sniper instructor’s grave warnings about counter-sniper operations. The problem was that if I could shoot him, he could shoot me right back. It was as if we had invisible lines drawn between each other. The first man to slip or make an error was as good as dead.
Mac and I agreed that if this guy wasn’t in charge of this ambush, then he was the eyes and ears of our enemy. He was coordinating his sniper fire with the Taliban, who were ranging us with machine guns and RPGs, and he was having them rake us with machine-gun fire when he moved from one position to the other. We weren’t going to take him out with our probing fire.
I called my platoon leader. “Captain, this guy has us pinned down. We need to take him out!”
“Have you seen him or his muzzle flashes?”
“That’s a negative, but we know where he’s hiding and can locate him within a few meters. We can hammer him with sniper shots or rake those buildings with machine-gun fire, or you can bring in the Kiowas!” I replied.
However I was as a Ranger, I was respectful of authority and tried to keep my cool when I talked with our captain. But I felt that I needed to be as direct as possible to ensure that he understood that this lone enemy sniper was dominating the entire engagement.
“Wait,” he replied. I knew that meant he was going to talk with Major Dan.
“Captain?” I said, raising my voice a few octaves. I wanted him to make the decision, and I wanted him to make it right now.
I admit that I was getting pretty animated and was “leading” my captain all I could. I knew this Chechen was a hard target who was going to pin us down and pick us off like ducks in a shooting gallery unless we took him out. If we pulverized his defenses, we could force him to move and maybe expose his position. Then it would be a fair fight.
If I’d had my pick of all the options to take him down, it would be the Kiowas. I’d seen the Bell OH-58 Kiowa Warriors in action before, hosing down targets with their M134 miniguns and taking out harder targets with their FIM-92 Stinger missiles, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, and Hydra-70 rocket pods. Let the Kiowas spit out enough firepower and they could collapse the building down around this guy.
I wanted this guy dead and I wanted him dead now, or my buddies weren’t going to make it. It seemed like forever before the captain replied, and it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“Captain, this asshole is a pro. He’s buried in that building, deep in his hide site.”
“Roger, keep eyes on, out,” he replied. That was that. Sometimes you get your fire mission; sometimes you get your hands tied. This decision had been made well above both our pay grades.
I knew it was useless to argue with my platoon leader. I understood the ROE as well as he did, and they were restrictive. The enemy knew our ROE, and they didn’t have to be great strategists or tacticians to conceal themselves in a way that killed our ability to use some of our awesome firepower.
We had to follow the ROE to the letter of the law, even if it meant taking on a ruthless enemy with one hand tied behind our back. And truth be told, I knew deep down inside it was the right thing to do. If we didn’t follow our ROE, then we were no better than the Taliban. Doing the right thing was damn hard, but at the end of the day I realized it was a strength, not a shortcoming.
This was a lesson that would repeat itself over the course of our seven months in Afghanistan. Our commanding officer, Major Dan, had laid it all out to us in stark terms as soon as we had shown up in-country, and what he said made sense. It might seem easy to bend the rules, bring in all the firepower we could, drop the building right on top of the Chechen sniper, and try to justify it all later. But it would mean we had let our desire for violent revenge and self-preservation make us no better than the enemy.
So for now it was a chess game: their sniper was trying to target us, and Mac and I were trying to target him. Given how well this Chechen was hidden, we didn’t think we had much of a chance, but we weren’t going to give up.
It was about 0900 and the firefight had died down a bit. The Taliban were probing, trying to drive a wedge and somehow cause us to withdraw. Every time they probed, our machine guns and SAWs opened up and pinned them down. As this was happening, our three- and four-man fire teams worked in concert to cut down any of the enemy who were exposed.
There was a bit more than 600 meters between us and the closest insurgents, making hits difficult and confirmation more so. Our fire earlier in the day had been so intense we figured they must be taking casualties, but we never saw them fall and their probing fire continued. They knew the range of our weapons, and we knew the range of theirs. And they were smart. They knew if they only advanced to the edge of their village and probed from there, we couldn’t bring in air power to take them out, since there would be too much risk of collateral damage.
Meanwhile, our requests up the chain of command to bring in firepower to take out the sniper, as well as the other Taliban pouring fire on us, were being “considered,” but we weren’t optimistic we’d get the answers we wanted. So we waited and continued to fight. The fire from the enemy AK-47 rifles and PRK-670 light machine guns would get intense for a few minutes; we’d respond in kind with our M4s, M240 machine guns, and M249 SAWs; and then things would get quiet for a while. By midmorning things had really died down, and we figured the enemy was regrouping and likely repositioning.
They opened up on us again around midday and we fired back, but the fire on both sides was becoming less and less effective as we sized each other up. We were playing a waiting game, but we knew we had an ace up our sleeve: we owned the night. I’ll explain what I mean by that.
A few years ago, a secretary of the Army, John McHugh, made public a phrase we had previously kept private within U.S. military ranks. He said this in a public forum while visiting an Army laboratory that designs new NVDs (night-vision devices), and the phrase quickly entered into common usage. I can’t say I welcome letting potential adversaries know anything about U.S. military capabilities, but in this case the enemy has known about it for years.
Our nation has invested heavily in these NVDs, which allow images to be produced in levels of light approaching total darkness. An early version of this technology was used in World War II, and the technology has improved by leaps and bounds.
Meanwhile, word came down our chain of command that there’d be no relaxation of the ROE. That meant that, at best, we’d fight these bastards to a draw. It also meant that the 160th SOAR would be lifting us out of the Musa Qala District sometime after dark—but not before we capitalized on owning the night.
We’d been battling the Taliban in Afghanistan for over a decade, and we knew their tactics pretty well, as they knew ours. They’d keep fighting us in the daytime but would make a controlled withdrawal once darkness fell and melt back into the villages and the countryside. We didn’t have a large enough force to hunt them down as they fled into their home turf, and it was definitely unfriendly turf.
By early afternoon, I’d finally decided I wasn’t doing much good roaming among our fighting holes, so I made my way up to our sniper’s hide site. Hank, who was Mac’s spotter, and Marc were first on the rest plan, and they climbed down from the roof to sleep in the house below us. We didn’t give them a time hack as to when to relieve us. They were both experienced Ranger NCOs (non-commissioned officers), and they slept wearing their Secret Service–style earpieces and kept their radios on. If it hit the fan, they’d wake up and we’d all fight as a team.
Mac and I watched the space between our adversary’s little town and a village farther in the distance. Throughout the day, enemy fighters would come out of the town or village and make their way toward
us. We had our sniper rifles dialed in on the edge of the village. That distance was between 900 and 1,100 meters, and I spotted for Mac with Miss America’s scope. Mac would shoot first, and then I would shoot his “correction.” After I fired, he would shoot my correction.
I would fire while Mac was resetting. Resetting means he had to ride the recoil of his gun and settle back on target. By the time he was settled back on target, the impact of my round or its vapor trail would be visible in his scope. Then he simply measured the distance between the trace of my round and our intended target. That was his correction, and he basically just moved the spot in his scope where he saw impact over our intended target and fired. I timed my breathing and trigger squeeze after I heard his round. I had an instant to observe his trace or impact, and then I fired my correction, giving him just enough time to settle again and see my impact and trace. One of our drills was to practice this as fast as we could, over and over, until we sounded like a metronome. We had been shooting the same guns together for over a year now, sometimes every day for months on end. We knew each other’s weapons as well as we knew our own.
The day dragged on, and the enemy continued to attack us at random intervals. The Chechen sniper would crack off a few rounds aimed at our cupola to keep our heads down, and then the rest of our Rangers would be on the receiving end of a rapid barrage of machine-gun fire. We were still catching some amateur fighters when they made the mistake of crossing open ground, but we had to make our shots count, and quickly, because the enemy sniper would answer with his own rounds. This guy was too damn good, and by now some of his rounds had made it through the window of our hide site.
If you’ve taken enough enemy fire, you get really attuned to how a bullet sounds. When a round hits an exterior wall, you hear a smack sound. But when a sniper puts a round through a window of your hide site, you hear a zip as it whistles past you, and then a smack as it hits the interior wall. Then you typically hear the soft sound of adobe dust falling from the wall where the shot hit. We were hearing plenty of zip-smacks, and it forced us to keep our heads down.
It doesn’t matter how many firefights you’ve been in—effective sniper fire inside your hide site will rattle you to your core. It’s especially unnerving when you realize that if you didn’t have the restrictive ROE you were being forced to comply with, your 60mm mortars could rain high explosive death down on the enemy.
It was late in the afternoon, getting near evening, and the fighting had become sporadic, with long periods of quiet. Marc had come to the hide site to relieve me, and I could have gone down into the main house and caught some sleep, but I tucked myself into a corner of the hide site instead. I was completely exhausted, but it felt better to stay with my sniper buddies than to go below and sleep in the Afghan home. Hide sites and fighting positions felt a lot more like home than the strangeness of trying to sleep in a home surrounded by the possessions of people whose language, culture, and daily habits were so unfamiliar.
I had just dozed off when I was startled awake by the now familiar zip-smack of a sniper’s round hitting our position, followed by a coordinated barrage of enemy machine-gun fire. Mac was crouched below the windowsill, protecting himself from enemy fire. The enemy machine-gun fire intensified and there were a few pops of M4’s from our side, but we didn’t bother answering with our own machine guns.
It was jarring getting fired on by the enemy’s heavy weapons and not responding in kind, but we were going to need the ammo we had left to fight our way out of there come nightfall, and our enemy—those left alive—were smart enough not to expose themselves. When one of our machine gunners did fire during the day, the enemy sniper drew a bead on them.
Remarkably, none of our guys were hit, but we all knew it was dumb luck. It’s hard to describe the frustration you feel when you know that you and your buddies are escaping death by feet—even inches—and you also know that you have four of your own snipers conducting counter-fire and that you have mortars and a specially designed RAWS, as well as on-call air support to rain death on this ruthless bastard who’s trying to kill us.
Suddenly, a sniper round snuck through our window with a zip-smack and bored its way into the wall behind me, inches above my head. Fine Afghan adobe dust poured down my collar. That was it. I wasn’t afraid of death, but I wasn’t going to let myself be a sitting duck, either.
Major Dan had set up his command and control position just below our window. He was facing us, watching the bullets make little waterfalls of sand on the exterior wall of our position. I popped up, fully framed by the window, and yelled, “Hey, sir!” to get his attention. In my rattled state of mind, I thought this would convince him that we should quit relying on dumb luck to stay alive.
Major Dan stared at me in disbelief, which I took as an acknowledgment that he’d heard me. Now that I’d made myself a target, evenly timed enemy sniper rounds were snapping into the walls around me, just a foot or two away from my head, like hands moving around a clock.
“Sir, am I really supposed to sit here and get shot at all day, or can I kill this fucking guy?” The words just came out of me before I knew what I was saying.
But before you could say “insubordination,” First Sergeant Hutch saved me.
“You’re going to sit there and get shot at, Sierra. Get the fuck DOWN,” he ordered.
“Roger that!” I replied angrily, as I moved back and down from the window.
Meanwhile, Mac was listening to his platoon’s radio frequency, and they were discussing our exfil plan (for exfiltration, the Army term for pulling us out of there). That was no surprise, as we’d walked into a hornet’s nest. Our simple plan to round up some Taliban had unraveled for the same reason many military operations fall apart: the enemy gets a vote. In this case, the enemy had us where they wanted us—able to crush them but prevented from doing so by hugely restrictive ROE.
“Balls, we’re going into that village as soon as it’s dark,” Mac said. “Better go below and get some rest. Could be another long night.” He used my old nickname from my time in the Mortar Platoon, but he didn’t mention anything about the stunt I had just pulled.
“Good call, man,” I said, and carried my kit, as well as Miss America, on tired bones down to where we had made makeshift sleeping areas inside the house. I was pretty sure I would be in a heap of trouble when we got back. Everyone knows you don’t get to yell at your commanding officer in the heat of a battle. You might get away with it behind closed doors during an animated discussion, but it’s not okay to do it in front of half of his company.
I was lucky that I hadn’t lost my life a moment ago, and I’d be lucky if I had a career when we got back to Kandahar. I rolled these two things over and over in my mind, and as night fell on the Afghan moonscape, I finally sank into an inky, restless slumber.
After nightfall, we did a Reconnaissance-in-Force (an operation used to probe an enemy’s disposition) to gather whatever intelligence we could. Our platoon, 2nd, went into the surrounding villages to see if any Taliban had stayed behind. As we expected, they’d all melted away. Mac and I had told our assault squad leaders where we were certain the Chechen sniper had holed up. Sure enough, they found 7.62 × 54R shell casings, and the extractor marks looked like they came from the Russian-made Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle. Based on the enemy sniper’s rate and accuracy of fire, the spread of his rounds, and the other back-of-the-envelope math we were able to do, we were now certain this guy was a Chechen sniper—and a damned experienced one at that.
An enemy sniper can be the most dangerous man on the battlefield. I say “can” because with less restrictive ROE we could easily take out a sniper with our own mortars or call in air support—anything from Kiowas to Apaches to A-10 “Warthogs” to AC-130 gunships. In this case, our ROE wouldn’t let us use any of those tactics; it was just sniper against sniper. Counter-sniper is the most dangerous thing a sniper can do because all your special techniques are neutralized. The enemy knows everything you’re doing. You�
��re no longer invisible, and you’re no longer far enough away to be out of range.
It boils down to how well you were trained, your skill at applying your training, and, in this case, your equipment. I knew full well that if I had had the Chechen’s gun and he had had Miss America, I wouldn’t be here to write this book. It’s probably the most frustrating aspect of my entire rotation to Afghanistan. They say you fight the way you train. In the case of a Ranger sniper, I’m trained to call for close air support, and my equipment means I have an invisible line to that aircraft. Said another way, it’s not just about being a sniper who can put a bullet somewhere specific. I’m an organic limb of the team. I’m the eyes for its machine guns. I can tell a commander where to put his mortar rounds. And perhaps most deadly to the enemy, I have a radio connected to Kiowas, Apaches, A-10s, AC-130 gunships, and other air support I’m not able to talk about here. Restrictive ROE takes all that away, and I’m just one dude with one rifle.
It took us several hours to clear the village, ensuring that there was no enemy hiding there, and then we walked to the southwest to reach our exfil site. I remember my legs feeling like lead. It was the first time in a long while when I felt like my tank was completely empty. It was a hard-earned lesson in pacing. The march was all but silent. After an op like this, we didn’t have much energy left for communicating. You’re so tired that you become an Army robot. You just march. But while you do, you pull security, you triple-check every task, and you keep performing to standard.
Our 160th SOAR brothers lifted us out of there and back to KAF. We all were bone-weary from our Musa Qala District op and frankly a bit shaken by how good the enemy had been. We had known this rotation to Afghanistan wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, and we now also knew we needed to reassess our enemy. I also knew that someone had to speak up about the ROE we were dealing with.
We mustered in our TOC (Tactical Operations Center) at KAF the next evening and sat down to do the AAR (After Action Review) of our mission. AARs are an important part of what we do, and we never skip them. It’s all part of the learning process and how we up our game for the next mission.
When the Killer Man Comes Page 4