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Sniper

AVB

Jesus of Cool, I'm bad, I'm nationwide
Joined
Nov 14, 2003
Messages
23,580
I don't often agree with the Washington Post but this was well worth reading. The author is wrong on a few minor points but not enough to discount what he is saying.



The three quick shots off the fantail of the USS Bainbridge that terminated the piracy incident in the Indian Ocean early Sunday night made a number of points for various pointy-headed political pundits to chew on, cudlike, for a few weeks. But one they'll probably miss is the following: The three shots make clear to a wider public what has been clear to people who pay attention to such things -- we are in the golden age of the sniper.

He has become a kind of chivalric hero. He is the state, speaking in thunder, restoring order to the moral universe. Or he is civilization, informing the barbarians of the fecklessness of their plight. He is the line in the sand, the point of the spear, the man with the rifle, one of the few, the proud. He is also the intellectual of combat, in some ways, bringing a cool logic to what is normally hot, messy and exhausting.

We vest in him the right to kill in our name and it seems, at least to some extent, we no longer hold it against him that he does so from a long way out, usually in darkness and silence. Instead, we wish him godspeed. He's no longer Lee Harvey Oswald. He's Carlos Hatchcock, the legendary Marine Corps sniper, or Chuck Mawhinney, who holds the Marine Corps sniper kill record in Vietnam, or the two posthumous Battle of Mogadishu Medal of Honor recipients, the Delta snipers Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon. And now, he is the Navy SEALs who shot the Somali pirates and saved Capt. Richard Phillips.

Technology and necessity have combined to make the sniper the go-to guy in military operations, even given him a kind of glamour.

The business of felling a bad guy with one shot has never been more refined. Briefly -- this isn't Guns & Ammo, after all -- new optical hardware and ballistic innovations have made the sniper more effective than he's ever been. Since Vietnam, the military sniper weapon has been a bolt-action .30-caliber Remington rifle, effective to a thousand yards. In the past two decades, however, heavier-caliber weapons have been deployed to greatly further the shooter's range.

Now, using .50-caliber weapons, snipers regularly hit beyond a mile, and there's a whole new lineup of weapons between .30 and .50 calibers -- the .338 Lapua, the .416 Barrett, the .408 CheyTac -- that commandeer the range between 1,000 and 2,000 yards. On top of that, laser range-finding and chip-driven portable software enable the shooter to solve heretofore impenetrable ballistic equations, and index their sights precisely for that one-shot kill way, way out there.

Sunday's mission demanded the utmost in skill and concentration, this after an arduous trek inward (by parachute and small boat to the Bainbridge at near dark on Saturday). Details will emerge, but I'm guessing the three SEALs were each equipped with a rifle called the SR-25, said to be the choice of SEAL snipers. It's a semiautomatic, for fast follow-up shots, and looks like an M-16 on growth hormones.

It almost certainly wears a tube at the muzzle, what you would call a silencer, what the community calls a suppressor. The point, for this kind of shooting, is that it's unlikely the three shooters would try to fire simultaneously; they probably shot over a few seconds, and the unthwarted report of the first rifle might have caused Targets 2 and 3 to withdraw. As it transpired, no pirate likely figured out what happened to his colleagues in the seconds before it happened to him.

Perhaps the pirates didn't realize the SEALs would be equipped with the refined technology of night vision. They thought they were safe, crouching behind the cabin of their life boat, peering over it at the big dark bulk of the Bainbridge 50 feet or so ahead. Actually, they were quite obvious to the shooters eyeing them through a somewhat awkward device, like a telescopic lens, but bloated, more complex, more powerful, built around the ability to intensify the ambient light. To the snipers, the pirates were as green as the witch in "The Wizard of Oz," and their eyes glowed. Meanwhile, some kind of index point -- cross hairs, a chevron, a simple glowing dot -- marked the bullet's point of impact, having been adjusted to the proper range in advance.

One thing that suggests the Navy may have had this ending in mind all along was the command decision to tow the lifeboat to calmer waters. Even at a relatively short range, shooting for blood from one vessel to another in high, rough seas would be a challenge difficult to meet, much less three times, more or less simultaneously.

So what is going on in the sniper's mind as he waits -- I'm guessing he's prone, the most stable shooting position -- in the dark, on the overhang at the extreme rear of the ship? He's crucially aware of his breathing rhythm, because he wants to fire between breaths. He probably doesn't think much about trigger pull. He wouldn't be here if he didn't know how to pull a tri gger. He's not "pulling" it in the sense of exerting his muscle against it, so much as urging it to cooperate it, massaging it into doing his bidding. If he hurries, if his finger is misplaced on its curve or catches on the trigger guard beneath it, it can all go wrong.

It can go wrong, too, if he neglects the follow-through, because like all athletic endeavors, shooting or pitching or throwing or tossing a crumple of paper into a wastebasket, the issue is the wholeness of motion, even long after the missile is dispatched.

Oh, and he has to do all that on instant notice with someone's life on the line, and if he misses, the burden of shame will be crushing.

What does he feel? The joke, much told, is that when asked what he felt when he took a man's life, the sniper answered, "Recoil." I suspect that's nonsense. But I also suspect these men are pure alphas, with unnatural levels of aggression and strength, which is magnified by their willingness to drive such larger questions down deeper and hold them far away from the duty mind. What they feel, then, is simple: None of your damn business.
 
Interesting and well-written, thanks.

It seems that the cult of the warrior - the individual warrior who changes the course of a battle, by virtue of skill and courage - is a universal human trait. The Chanson de Roland, for example, deals with the last stand of Roland, singlehandedly holding the rear-guard of Charlemagne's army against the Moors until his death.

This also brings to mind the canonical individual warrior-hero, Achilles, who slew Hector with a single blow to the neck. He embodies glory in war, but also its destructiveness and darkness. The first two lines of the Iliad lay it out directly:

Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus,
the destructive rage that sent countless ills on the Achaeans.
Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades,
and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures.
 
To everyone out there who doesn't understand what it means to be an American, please read above. The entire circumstance of what happened was to save the life of ONE SINGLE UNITED STATES CITIZEN. A cargo boat captain from New England. A nobody. He's not a Kennedy, or Rockefeller, or even on the damn school board. He is, to the men who saved his life, the hundreds of sailors on the boat, the President of the United States, simply an American citizen.

To those who think the American government can not ever do right, keep in mind the actions taken for a citizen. That could be you, me, or our children, but these are the lengths OUR country goes to for ITS people. For me, it was one of the days I was proudest of my country, and thankful for the privilege to be a citizen.



Edit: Spelling.
 
Nice.

Well done. A damned shame it was neccessary.
 
I don't shoot that often, but that seemed like very difficult shots. The variables change dramaticaly at night and in a pitching sea. My hats off to the Seal sniper team and the men and women of the US Navy!
 
Interesting and well-written, thanks.

It seems that the cult of the warrior - the individual warrior who changes the course of a battle, by virtue of skill and courage - is a universal human trait. The Chanson de Roland, for example, deals with the last stand of Roland, singlehandedly holding the rear-guard of Charlemagne's army against the Moors until his death.

This also brings to mind the canonical individual warrior-hero, Achilles, who slew Hector with a single blow to the neck. He embodies glory in war, but also its destructiveness and darkness. The first two lines of the Iliad lay it out directly:

Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus,
the destructive rage that sent countless ills on the Achaeans.
Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades,
and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures.

What a wonderfully literate response to a great read! Kudos!

I can't help but add a bit of Chesterson:

"I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers,
As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.
How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,
When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.
The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose,—
You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes."

~Boar
 
King Henry V - Act 3. Scene I
 
Great read!

Instills pride doesn't it?

It's a damn shame that we have those among us who will only feel sorry for the pirates.
 
To Boar and Marcos: Those are nice attempts at verse, but as any semi-educated individual knows; all good poetry contains the word Nantucket somewhere in the poem. Duh. :laugh:


Ray, you mentioned the writer was wrong on a couple of minor points. For those of us who don't have military experience, what are those points?
 
It's a damn shame that we have those among us who will only feel sorry for the pirates.

Those are the same people who spend $10 in gas to safely deliver their captured house spider to a safe environment (see 'Moki siting' thread). Thankfully, there aren't that many people who are that nuts, and there aren't that many people who will feel sorry for the pirates.
 
Well, first he got the 50 cal info wrong. The 50 cal BMG round does not have the ballistics to shoot a mile with that much accuracy. The CheyTac is the leader there with certified groups at 2200 yards. Secondly, he is saying that the snipers were most likely at the extreme end of the ship which IMO is unlikely because it is the middle of the ship that is the most stable. Third, while the order may have come down on "an instant's notice" you can be sure that the position was prepped and practiced many times before, it wasn't like they were going in cold.

As I said, minor points but not enough to change the story by any means.



To Boar and Marcos: Those are nice attempts at verse, but as any semi-educated individual knows; all good poetry contains the word Nantucket somewhere in the poem. Duh. :laugh:


Ray, you mentioned the writer was wrong on a couple of minor points. For those of us who don't have military experience, what are those points?
 
It's a damn shame that we have those among us who will only feel sorry for the pirates.

Those are the same people who spend $10 in gas to safely deliver their captured house spider to a safe environment (see 'Moki siting' thread). Thankfully, there aren't that many people who are that nuts, and there aren't that many people who will feel sorry for the pirates.

True! But here's the sad part, thanks to political correctness, those "few" nuts will garner more attention than the "many" just by opening their mouth.
 
It's a damn shame that we have those among us who will only feel sorry for the pirates.

Those are the same people who spend $10 in gas to safely deliver their captured house spider to a safe environment (see 'Moki siting' thread). Thankfully, there aren't that many people who are that nuts, and there aren't that many people who will feel sorry for the pirates.

True! But here's the sad part, thanks to political correctness, those "few" nuts will garner more attention than the "many" just by opening their mouth.

That's what I was about to say. Great read AVB, keep up the good work.
 
Great read AVB I work in a field with some of this stuff.. Tech I call it on an outside looking in.. I work in Aerospace mainly but time to time I work with Ballistic and you have opened my eyes with this read.. Thank You..
 
Well, first he got the 50 cal info wrong. The 50 cal BMG round does not have the ballistics to shoot a mile with that much accuracy. The CheyTac is the leader there with certified groups at 2200 yards. Secondly, he is saying that the snipers were most likely at the extreme end of the ship which IMO is unlikely because it is the middle of the ship that is the most stable. Third, while the order may have come down on "an instant's notice" you can be sure that the position was prepped and practiced many times before, it wasn't like they were going in cold.

As I said, minor points but not enough to change the story by any means.



To Boar and Marcos: Those are nice attempts at verse, but as any semi-educated individual knows; all good poetry contains the word Nantucket somewhere in the poem. Duh. :laugh:


Ray, you mentioned the writer was wrong on a couple of minor points. For those of us who don't have military experience, what are those points?

A few points before I say anything. I'm not military and I didn't stay at a holiday inn lastnight. This is my SWAG taken from various sources, a few of which are more informed on the matter than the general public and press.

From what I've gathered, 4 shooters from Seal Team Six parachuted in from a fixed wing plane and met the Bainbridge, quickly setting up overwatch. I imagine this is why action was not taken when the captain first jumped overboard, because the SEAL team wasn't in place yet and the President didn't want to chance it. Anyway, one of the skinnies had a laceration to the hand and requested medical assistance. We said, "Sure, come on over and we'll patch you up!" and so over he comes in a little inflatable. Once there, we realize this might be a good time to try something sneaky, so Commander Castellano orders the lifeboat to be towed in closer to the ship, ultimately with it being only a little under 30 yards away from the stern of the Bainbridge. The snipers, comfortable with the range and motion of the ocean, confirm that they can take the shot, but their current rules of engagement restrain them from taking action until the Captain's life is in imminent danger. They then wait until one of the skinnies has his rifle pointed in the direction of the Captain and, feeling that the Captain's life is in "imminent danger", take the shot. The two remaining skinnies, who were waiting on their buddy with the cut finger at the hatch, pop their heads up like gophers to see what's going on and get popped as well. The first skinny with the cut finger says, "Hey friends, what's going on?" We inform him of the situation and clap him in irons after he "gives up" and is thrown in the brig.

Can't say enough about the shooters involved and the military in general. "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." Gentlemen, I sleep pretty damn well.
 
The color commentary isn't really welcome, Merlin. I'm assuming it was a momentary lapse in judgement, so please take this opportunity to edit it out.
 
The color commentary isn't really welcome, Merlin. I'm assuming it was a momentary lapse in judgement, so please take this opportunity to edit it out.
There wasn't any sort of racial comment anywhere in my post. "Skinny" is a slang term for combatants from Somalia, of which I hold no respect for and will certainly not apologize for any derogatory remarks made about them. If they don't want to be ridiculed, maybe they shouldn't slaughter innocent women and children of their own country as well as United States military personnel there for aide work.
 
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