Thread: Sniper School Teaches 'Very Personal Way To Kill'

Dallas Morning News
July 7, 2005
Pg. 1

Sniper School Teaches 'Very Personal Way To Kill'

By Richard Whittle, The Dallas Morning News

QUANTICO, Va. – On a grassy rifle range at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Gunnery Sgt. Robert Reidsma explained his extraordinary profession as a dozen combat veterans trained to join it.

"There's a lot of romanticism associated with it," Sgt. Reidsma said as his students cracked the air with high-powered rifles aimed at man-sized paper targets 10 football fields away. "But really, the Marine sniper is nothing more than a highly trained infantryman."

In a sense, that's true. But the sniper does something ordinary infantrymen don't do. With calm calculation, usually from hiding, he stalks an unsuspecting enemy through the scope of a long-range precision rifle. Then he kills him.

As one Marine sniper puts it: "You're out here to hunt man."

Fabled in fiction and feared in fact for their ability to pick off enemy leaders and change the course of battles, snipers today are key weapons for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan – wars where the foe fights by ambush and hides among civilians.

Each Marine infantry battalion includes a platoon of 16 snipers. The sharps******* played a key role in November's assault on the Iraqi insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.

Technically, they are "scout/snipers," and for three weeks before the battle, they infiltrated the edges of the city and gathered intelligence on enemy positions. They also shot insurgents who ventured out to launch attacks.

"We were shaping the battlefield," said one who took part, speaking on the condition that he be identified only as "Staff Sgt. Sniper."

"We would go in, push in about 300 to 400 yards as a team, maybe a three- to six-man team," he said. "We'd wait for guys to come out who were setting up IEDs [roadside bombs] and shooting mortars. What we'd do is, we'd eliminate 'em at that point."

Sniping takes a toll on an enemy, literally and psychologically, he said. "If you can't find somebody, you don't know where they're at, and people are dying, and you can't figure out why and where and how far [away the shooter is], it's like a ghost warrior," he said proudly.

Andrew Krepinevich, a retired lieutenant colonel who wrote a book on the Army's conduct of the Vietnam War, said that in guerrilla warfare, snipers take on an even more important role.

"Firepower," he said, "is a lot less important than precise, discriminate fire."

Face to face

Sniping also takes a toll on the snipers. For one thing, they often operate beyond front lines and are prime targets themselves.

"There are enemy snipers in Iraq," Sgt. Reidsma said. "It's a big concern."

Snipers also bear psychological burdens, for a target's face often fills the scope before they fire.

"It's a very personal way to kill," said Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin, a recently retired Marine sniper. "The only more personal way is to stab somebody."

Partly for that reason, not everyone is cut out for this work.

Candidates at the Army's sniper school at Fort Benning, Ga., undergo a psychological evaluation. The Marines don't, said Sgt. Reidsma, the Quantico school's senior instructor.

"It's left more to the [applicant's] command and commander to say, 'Yes, this is a good, mature, balanced individual,' " he said.

Beyond the right psychological makeup, a sniper needs the intelligence and mental and physical stamina to master a large set of special skills. Those include using mathematical formulas to calculate the effects of distance and wind on bullet trajectory and enduring sun, rain or jungle slime and insects for hours while stalking a target or getting away.

During a 10-week course, taught in a small, white stucco building in a back corner of Quantico and on the base's ranges, students must become proficient with the M40A3 Sniper Rifle, which fires a clip of five deadly 7.62 mm rounds – a cartridge 2.8 inches long. The weapon is equipped with a scope that makes objects 1,000 yards distant appear an arm's length away.

Students train to operate in two-man teams – shooter and spotter. To pass their final tests, they must hit 28 of 35 targets, including 10 that move, from 300 to 1,000 yards – more than half a mile away.

'Just a target'

On average, six to nine of the 24 students in each sniper school class fail, but usually not because of poor marksmanship. Three to six will flunk because of inadequate patience and skill at stalking. Two or three others won't grasp observation and surveillance techniques or some aspect of the math, Sgt. Reidsma said.

Shooting is only part of the job. Emphasis also is placed on learning to use special camouflage gear, such as the ghillie suit, which a sniper constructs by tucking natural vegetation into a special mesh uniform.

How to deal psychologically with killing people is "not technically part of the training," said Sgt. Reidsma, 37, a Williamston, Mich., native whose ready smile, wire-rimmed glasses and patient manner lend him a gentle air that belies his trade. "We do talk about it, of course."

Sniper school students are taught to "dehumanize" those they shoot.

When he is in combat, said Staff Sgt. Sniper: "It's just a target, and that's all it is. The target comes up and presents itself, and the target goes down, and you move on to the next one."

They're also taught to remember that those they kill posed a threat to fellow Marines.

Killing also comes up when they watch a security-camera video of a woman who stayed on her feet after being shot in the chest point-blank with a .357- caliber Magnum pistol. The point is clear: While their motto is "One Shot, One Kill," one shot may not be enough.

Who applies to be a sniper?

"It's usually the country kid, the kid who grew up in the hills of Tennessee or Texas or something, grew up with a love for hunting," said former sniper Coughlin, co-author of a book on his experiences – Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper. But city boys apply as well, said Mr. Coughlin, who grew up in a Boston suburb.

Texans in ranks

The current class at Quantico includes three Texans – two Marines and one Navy SEAL who declined to be interviewed.

Cpl. John Stalvey, 22, of Conroe, Texas, a veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, and Sgt. Matt Walker, 27, of San Antonio, who fought in Iraq in 2003, said they applied because they wanted a bigger challenge.

Cpl. Stalvey, a Baptist preacher's kid and a 2001 graduate of Faith Baptist Christian Academy in Ludowici, Ga., was inspired partly by working with snipers in Afghanistan. They would perch on mountainsides and protect Marine patrols as they hunted al- Qaeda and Taliban insurgents.

Cpl. Stalvey said he doesn't know whether he killed anyone in Afghanistan, but the possibility doesn't rattle him.

"I look at it not as shooting a person, but shooting a threat," he said.

Veteran snipers don't often discuss their job except with other snipers. Movies and books portraying them as psychopaths and ruthless bushwhackers make their work hard to explain to outsiders, even friends and family, they said.

Sgt. Dagan Van Oosten, 25, of Polo, Ill., an instructor at the Quantico school whose arms ripple with muscles and fairly drip tattoos, said even some fellow Marines vilify snipers.

As he descended from a roof where he had been sniping one day in Iraq and walked past a chow line, Sgt. Van Oosten said, he heard a Marine sneer in a stage whisper: "Hooo-raaa. Sniper: swift ... silent ... murderer."

And when his wife, herself a Marine, has told fellow service members what her husband does, Sgt. Van Oosten added, "They often say, 'Oh, that must be awful.' "

No official records are kept of how many foes are killed by U.S. military snipers – a statistic that was dropped from sniper service records after the Vietnam War.

"Staff Sgt. Sniper" said every sniper keeps a tally, at least in his head. People who go into such special-operations jobs are by nature intensely competitive, he said.

"It is like an Alpha-male ... contest," he said. "Everyone tries to outdo everybody."

Even so, said Sgt. Van Oosten: "It's not a numbers game. You're not out there to index targets [shoot people] indiscriminately.

"Like a guardian angel, we watch over other Marines."