Modern American Snipers (11 page)

In addition to augmenting the troops of their individual color squadrons, DEVGRU's snipers are viewed as a modular, separable asset (hence the collective “Black Team” nickname for the unit's snipers across the squadrons). And as such, the sniper teams not only seamlessly integrate with assault teams during direct action missions, they are also capable of conducting low-visibility operations on their own. (Delta's basic assaulter/sniper troop structure is thought to be roughly the same.)

Should a DEVGRU squadron require a rapid injection of talent into its sniper ranks, exceptions to the seniority rule have been known to be made at the Squadron Master Chief's discretion. Howard Wasdin was one of those rare examples. “Waz-man” was still just an FNG (new guy) when he was given the green light to become an ST6 sniper.

Another example is fellow Red Squadron alumnus Sawyer. In fact, the Texan only served as an assaulter for a matter of weeks before he was allowed to join Black Team.

He explained, “Normally that's a senior position—you need to be in an assault team for a period of years before they consider letting you go back there, because you do operate more autonomously with more equipment and responsibility relative to an assaulter.

“But I was already a decorated combat veteran when I went to DEVGRU. At the time I went there, that was rare. And I had been a sniper instructor—not just a sniper. And I had prior service—I had been in the Marine Corps. So I came in with a higher set of experience and qualifications than my peers did at that time. So when there were several senior snipers that retired in rapid succession, they had a need to push somebody back there to fill those empty slots.”

Sawyer admitted he was torn. He was looking forward to filling the assaulter role and the camaraderie that comes along with it, “but when you're given an early promotion, so to speak, you don't refuse it.”

Once in, the advanced training begins and is handled largely in-house. Sawyer explained, “We trained ourselves. There was nobody really training us because who on the face of the planet knew what we needed to do more than we did? We were afforded every luxury and support item that was required. And as professionals, there was no excuse to fail. We knew that was on us, so we trained ourselves accordingly. We traveled all over the place, in different locations, and under every condition, just to be prepared for anything.”

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In the earliest days of Delta Force, back when it was still racing to assemble an operational force, it could not afford to take the time to scout and groom sniper prospects over a matter of years. To hasten the process, the Unit's psychologist identified several key traits thought to predict success in that role.

According to the Unit's founder and first commanding officer, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, they sought operators boasting such traits as “poise, patience, concentration, stability, calmness, and meticulousness about details.”

B Squadron plank owner Eric Haney noted in his memoirs,
Inside Delta Force,
the original Unit snipers selected with these characteristics in mind came across as intelligent men, almost academic in their mannerisms.

Following decades of evolution shaped by each successive victory and failure, Delta Force now targets a slightly different breed of warrior for the recce role. While those originally cited traits retain their value in the position, they alone are not enough.

As explained by a retired Delta sniper who served multiple combat deployments post-9/11, “Do-gooder can't fight. You have to be a good person—have a good heart and good intentions—but you also have to be ready to fuck these motherfuckers up and get bad, only to see the job through.”

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Since 9/11, the Unit's recce team rooms have been occupied by men who go by “Don,” “Bob,” and “John.” While those names may lack a certain marquee-ready quality, the warriors themselves are far from average. To those behind the curtain of black operations, they are legends.

That “John”—John McPhee—serves as a prime example of the sort of overwhelming talent, training, courage, and accomplishment that has been boasted by the recce ranks over the past decade.

Lethal from any range and a wide variety of weaponry, McPhee epitomized all aspects of the impossibly demanding position during his long tenure with the A Squadron recce troop.

Raised on the South Side of Chicago, the former Army Ranger and Green Beret was already well established as a Delta sniper when the towers fell in September 2001.

McPhee was a key player in the initial post-9/11 hunt for the likes of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Mohammed Omar.

While he took part in the first Battle of Tora Bora in December of 2001, McPhee's legend was cemented (at least in a mainstream sense) in 2002 when he conducted a “singleton” operation that was later detailed in
Kill Bin Laden,
which was authored by A Squadron officer Dalton Fury.

Listed there by his call name “Shrek,” the book's opening vignette describes how McPhee—thickly bearded and decked out in perahan tunban and pakol-style hat—effortlessly melted into the Afghan population in order to secure actionable intelligence—actual eyes on one Awal Malim Gul.

Gul, a suspected al-Qaeda sympathizer, was believed to have sheltered a desperate and wounded bin Laden after he escaped Tora Bora. It was thought the al-Qaeda emir fled north to Gul's home in the Pachir Agam valley near Jalalabad.

McPhee casts an imposing figure—his size, attitude, and skills make for the perfect storm of intimidation. An alpha even among a legion of type A's, the sniper carries himself with a confidence that can border on menacing. Almost by definition, that should make him the antithesis of the “gray man”—those with an unexceptional presence that allows them to be exceptional undercover operatives.

However, McPhee was not only able to turn that quality on, but do so in hostile territory. He went unnoticed in an alien country on the other side of the planet, with customs, dress, and language far removed from those most Americans are comfortable with—one of the hardest targets imaginable.

“That comes down to demeanor,” explained McPhee. “And demeanor is a learned skill.”

It also comes down to being blessed with rare intelligence—McPhee registered one of the higher IQ scores ever to be recorded by an operator during the selection process. While the Unit prizes mental acumen—and boasts men with Ph.D.'s and master's degrees in its operator ranks—there's a ceiling at which point a stratospheric intelligence quotient is actually considered a detractor. It's been said men who are too smart won't run toward machine-gun fire, but, as Shrek discovered years later over beers with the Unit psychologist, the shrink showed his intelligence by giving the Chicago native the green light despite an unacceptably high score on his entrance exam.

Shrek traveled among the locals unnoticed and closed in on Gul's residence, hidden alongside a ridgeline in the immediate vicinity of nearly forty other homes. Leveraging the 360-degree, total situational awareness that is drilled into recce operators, he invisibly gathered video evidence and the exact coordinates of Gul's location.

Once McPhee had enabled the assault team's advance—showcasing impressive creativity and composure despite the immense pressure—the target was detained in a lightning assault on the compound.

The captive was later transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where he remained until 2011. Gul, who the Taliban requested in a proposed trade for captured American soldier Bowe Bergdahl, collapsed and died while exercising on an elliptical machine only months ahead of the raid that killed bin Laden.

The HVT capture of Awal Malim Gul was the Unit's first after 9/11. It would be followed by hundreds more—if not thousands more—over the next decade.

While the tracking of Gul is Shrek's only singleton op known to the public, it is far from the only one to have been executed.

He added to his legend as Delta Force continued to hone its manhunting capabilities during subsequent deployments to Iraq.

While the sprawling, tightly assembled mazes of buildings that hid the enemy in Iraq was in stark contrast to the rural, fortified compounds that did the same in Afghanistan, recce operators like Shrek relied on the exact same skill sets to conduct close target reconnaissance and pinpoint the location of prey in both countries. The lessons learned were directly applicable despite the divergent conditions.

“It's the same philosophy either way,” the Unit sniper explained. “There's more technology involved in Iraq—there isn't just one building every one thousand meters.… In Iraq if you're off by ten meters, you're in the wrong location, but the approach is the same.”

McPhee also expanded his collection of war trophies that heavily hint at the pivotal role he played in that warzone as well. To go with Mullah Omar's green and red Korans, McPhee added one of Saddam Hussein's most iconic hats, a sweater that belonged to the deposed dictator (now complete with a Shrek-sized, stretched-out neck hole), and a new moniker: “the Sheriff of Baghdad.”

A master practitioner of low-visibility operations and practically all relevant forms of armed combat, McPhee may very well be every bit as deadly when unarmed, as evidenced by the 2005 Budweiser World Cup Super Heavyweight Jiu-Jitsu Championship. Further emphasizing that notion is the fact that Shrek served as a one-on-one room instructor with the Unit, actively training other operators in hand-to-hand combat. That position is not assigned—it is earned. A prospective teacher must first defeat five fighters in a row before being awarded the role. And there's no concern an instructor will act like a tenured professor once he's in as that same standard is required to retain the position.

McPhee retired in 2011 following more than twenty years of service. More than a decade of that was spent in combat during a period marked by the most intense special operations campaign in military history.

The vast majority of McPhee's work over those years remains completely unknown outside the smallest of circles, but even the slivers that have come to light are worthy of modern-day folk hero status.

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Once selected for duty with a recce team, a newly minted JSOC sniper doesn't so much change careers as he accepts additional tasking and responsibilities.

The reconnaissance aspect of the position in particular requires an extra layer of maturity and savviness, and that drives the multiyear process.

However, a fortuitous by-product of this grooming system is that the sniper teams are loaded up with operators who rank as some of the preeminent assaulters and close-quarter combat experts in the world, fresh from years of training and experience operating at the highest level.

Shrek explained, “The recce troops recruit the guys who are good at everything. When I was an assaulter, I didn't want to be a sniper. I thought they were the fat, old guys. But once I was drafted, I learned in a hurry that these were actually the best guys in the Unit at CQB [close quarters battle]. No one in the world can touch them in combat marksmanship.

“All that matters is training and experience. Your average assaulter has two years of experience at that level. Most guys in a recce troop have five or six years in the Unit, and a team leader there usually has more than a decade.”

This reality has earned Delta's snipers an alternate designation—“advanced assaulter”—that presents an entirely different mental image.

Vickers added, “They want guys over there on the sniper side of the house who are still assaulters at heart.”

Not only are those CQB skills retained, they are continually refined. While perhaps originally just a secondary consideration (at best), the snipers' expertise in this regard pays significant dividends during direct action missions, and in multiple ways.

When tasked with overwatch duty—covering the raid from a nearby position as the assault team hits an objective—the snipers' intrinsic knowledge of this exacting and highly dangerous science allows for tighter integration. This is true even when doors are breached and bullets are slung in confined spaces while the sniper is on the glass of magnified optics from afar.

“You need to be an assaulter first so that you understand what they do—what they are going through and what they are thinking,” ex-DEVGRU sniper Sawyer explained. “When you are covering them, you can do it much more effectively. The better you understand them, the more effective sniper for them you can be.”

While somewhat removed from the fray, direct action overwatch is a critical task and one taken very seriously by the snipers who are charged with watching over their teammates' safety. Sawyer said, “I'll tell you what … having been there, I always wanted to carry the biggest, most powerful weapons I could as a sniper to make sure I covered for my brothers against any potential threat.

“It was a heavy responsibility and one that I appreciated and was glad to be able to provide to cover my brothers as they solved problems in the worst possible circumstances—halfway around the world in the middle of the night in enemy territory where you stirred up a hornet's nest and they're all coming to get you. The snipers' job is to keep people off of the assaulters and eliminate any threats upon initiation of the hit and afterward. It's definitely a heavy responsibility, but one that I welcomed.”

Additionally, a sniper's assaulter background may need to manifest itself at a moment's notice as the overwatch assignment transitions into something else in a fast-moving raid. According to the former SEAL Team Six sniper, “At any moment, you may need to perform that room clearance to unite directly with the main assault team to work in with them. And it happens often. It always remains a part of your job.”

And these sharpened talents are frequently called upon in an even more direct manner. The snipers are not confined to overwatch duty during takedown operations. In fact, to maximize its effectiveness at shredding through enemy networks, the Unit exploits the prodigious door-kicking and room-clearing skills of its snipers “every night, every assault,” according to McPhee.