Modern American Snipers (24 page)

In early September, the Rangers raided a safe house in Zanazil. Four terrorists were rounded up in the hit while Zayd was gunned down in a nearby field.

The following spring 3/75 was back in country and operating north of Baghdad, albeit this time in the Samarra/Tikrit area. And again, they dispatched another of the ten most wanted terrorists in country.

In late April 2006, Hamadi 'Abd al-Tahki al-Nissani, the emir of Samarra and Tikrit, was tracked to a location some fifteen kilometers north of Samarra.

The Rangers hit the compound in two MH-60 Black Hawks, rushing in low and landing on the “X”—less than one hundred meters from the target—in an L-shaped formation to isolate and contain the area.

The assault team breached the compound and immediately engaged in a heated firefight. Two terrorists inside the house were quickly killed, including one as he attempted to lob a grenade at the Rangers.

“And this other guy pops outside of a window,” Burkhart recalled. “My sniper buddy, Jake, and I were the first guys off the Black Hawk. It was this crazy brownout with dust everywhere.”

A tall and rotund figure emerged from the building and charged straight for the Black Hawk with his AK-47 in hand. It wasn't some ill-advised but admirable mad charge for the attacking force. Rather, the man was confused and disorientated by the swirling dirt and sounds created by the aircraft. Instead of escaping his fate, he sprinted directly to it.

Burkhart said, “We were moving toward the building. We were going to go set up in cover and secure the building, and the guy happened to be coming right at us. We didn't even use our scopes; we just used the lasers on our SR-25s.

“Jake and I both fired at the exact same time. He aimed the chest. I aimed the head. We both got the guy and he dropped.”

The assault element that had dismounted the Black Hawk just behind the snipers followed suit, firing at the fallen man who would later be positively identified as Hamadi Tahki.

“The rest of the guys opened up and popped another twenty rounds into him. Everybody was like, ‘We got him. We got him!'”

Burkhart laughed. “It's always a group effort.”

*   *   *

While built around rotating Ranger battalions, JSOC's task force in the north of the country also included a small Delta component. As the Rangers pulled off missions and targeted HVTs that previously only would have been tasked to a Tier 1 unit, the Mosul-based Unit operators elevated their operations to the next level yet.

B Squadron's deployment schedule was synced up with that of 3rd Battalion, allowing the two entities to develop enhanced coordination over time.

And while 3/75 was regularly adding X marks to the most wanted poster in the JOC with a succession of violent raids, a five-man recce element was doing the same in a considerably more clandestine fashion.

During the same '05 deployment in which the Rangers took out Abu Zayd, a small Delta sniper element led by “RS”—a B Squadron recce troop Sergeant Major—operated inside Mosul and the surrounding vicinity disguised as locals. Outfitted in Middle Eastern garments called
twabs
—but almost universally referred to by the American servicemen as “man dresses”—RS and his team tracked down their prey utilizing stealth and subterfuge.

“What these Delta guys were doing was basically assassinations,” one ex-Ranger said. “They were going out and just whackin' guys left and right. We were there as a QRF just in case they really got into something and we'd be thirty seconds out so we could respond.”

Another 3/75 Ranger added, “[RS] has probably killed more guys than cancer. He was doing low-vis target interdictions, vehicle to vehicle. It was basically high-level drive-by shootings.”

 

10

Punishment Due

By the conclusion of his first combat deployment as a U.S. SEAL Sniper Course–trained sniper, Chris Kyle had stacked up enough confirmed kills to solidly establish himself as one of the most lethal snipers in American military history.

Word of his accomplishments had just started filtering through the usual SEAL channels, but Kyle's status as an emerging historical figure was still largely unknown. However, one SEAL officer was keenly aware of what the big Texan had been up to.

The last time Lt. Larry Yatch had seen Kyle he was just another new guy on his first deployment. He wasn't “the Legend” at that point. If anything he had been rather unremarkable, although that was considered a positive in itself because it meant he hadn't done anything terribly boneheaded to draw attention to himself as new guys tend to do.

It's not as if he had many opportunities to stand out either. Their shared deployment back in 2003 just as the Iraq War was kicking off had been disheartening to all of Team Three—and an utter debacle in the eyes of both Yatch and Kyle, who had expected so much more from their first experience in combat.

SEAL Team Three's embarrassing opening in Iraq had been softened somewhat by the deeds of its snipers the following year in the Second Battle of Fallujah and elsewhere, albeit largely in an augmentee capacity rather than as part of a larger ST3 campaign.

But now the SEAL officer was placed in a position to address the deficiencies that had afflicted the Teams from the ground floor. Following his '03 deployment, Yatch was assigned two senior chiefs, a warrant officer, and a mammoth task: to head up Naval Special Warfare Group One's nascent internal intelligence effort, then known as “NSWG-1 Special Activities.”

It also provided him an opportunity to closely monitor Kyle's mounting success in Iraq. He paid closer attention than he normally might due to the fact that the Texan hailed from Team Three's CHARLIE platoon—Yatch's former outfit back when his was a third O. And its OIC, Lt. Leif Babin, was also an old friend. Their connection went back to their very first day at the Naval Academy together, further solidifying his interest.

And what he observed astonished him. “At Group One I spent a lot of time reading the intel traffic,” the SEAL officer said. “I remember very vividly reading all of those after-action reports and just being amazed.”

The macabre statistics alone were undeniable. “You'd read that he'd had nineteen confirmed kills in a twenty-four-hour period. It was almost unbelievable. It was also neat to read that those guys were finally getting into it. That was a testament to the leadership.”

*   *   *

Whereas the Joint Special Operations Command—including SEAL Team Six—had hugely benefited from its amped-up intelligence emphasis, the vanilla SEALs had found themselves handcuffed. Worse than that, they'd even needlessly been put into danger on occasion due to an ill-suited ad hoc intelligence apparatus—one devised for blue water analysis, not commando raids.

JSOC was increasingly able to parlay the efforts of its organic assets into actionable intelligence. The Activity efficiently secured high-tech signals and low-tech human intelligence in order to “prepare the environment.” Meanwhile, this effort was further augmented by the AFO capabilities provided by its special mission units' recce snipers.

Without the ability to find and fix, JSOC's much-vaunted finishers would have been relegated nonfactors. And in fact, they too had been largely caged prior to the world-altering strikes on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, and even in its immediate wake. But by late in 2004, JSOC's shooters were finishing Iraq's innumerable targets in extraordinary numbers.

However, this capability was virtually nonexistent on the “white” side of American special operations—as evidenced by the inability of the SEALs to operate effectively once the Iraq War set into motion, along with the need for Naval Special Warfare Group One to divvy up the integral intelligence section of Task Unit Raider for use by CJSOTF-AP's SEAL task units.

In an attempt to transform this weakness into a strength, Lt. Yatch precommissioned the SEAL's own “Activity”: NSWG-1 Special Activities grew into what officially became known as “Naval Special Warfare Support Activity One.”

Support Activity One was designed to provide the regular SEAL Teams with its own Activity/AFO analogue of sorts, which would allow it to develop actionable intelligence internally. And it would, in part, recruit from the ranks of the SEALs to do so.

While clearly influenced by JSOC's more recent successes, its inspiration actually traced back considerably further.

“This was in the effort of what we call preparing the battlefield,” Yatch explained. “The philosophy was to go in ahead of time and make sure we were more successful. But really it was going back to our core tactics that allowed the SEALs to be so effective in Vietnam. There, SEALs went out, gathered intelligence, processed that intelligence, got other forms of intelligence where needed, planned the next op, and then executed it. It was a closed loop.”

Intelligence developed outside the Teams and later handed off for them to execute too often resulted in missions that went sideways. “It was either not good enough, old, or just plain wrong,” Yatch said. “With the SEALs developing their own intelligence, they could actually plan and execute missions very effectively because they knew the degree of reliability of their intel. We got away from that after Vietnam.”

Following the humiliation of Team Three's initial foray in the Iraq War, Larry was motivated to bring about change. “We got back from that and learned and said, ‘We need to go back to our roots.'”

Initially, a number of hand-picked SEALs would receive specialized training—either ASOT (Advanced Special Operations Techniques) or AFO (the aforementioned Advance Force Operations). Those who trained in ASOT would focus on human intelligence—developing and running sources. Meanwhile, the SEALs with advanced AFO training would learn to use technology to support the ASOT operations, along with individual platoons, by gathering and collecting intelligence through tracking and tagging items by means of technical surveillance.

Having recently tracked Kyle's exploits in Fallujah and elsewhere, when it came time to select an all-star team of operators to provide Naval Special Warfare with this enhanced capability, Yatch was quick to recruit the Texan to complete the three-month AFO pipeline.

“After Chris's platoon got back [in 2005], I was ramping up the Support Activity,” he said. “When we're looking to pull people into this—which is a very sensitive group—of course I'm going to pick Chris.”

Kyle was sent to New Orleans where he learned basic electronics and the finer points of building and utilizing covert camera systems. He was taught how to conduct countersurveillance, both on foot and in vehicles, along with surreptitious entry—picking locks and “borrowing” other people's cars when necessary (for example, to successfully complete his training).

Just as he added sniper and navigation skills to his toolset following his first deployment, Kyle learned to operate in a manner closer to a DEVGRU Black Team sniper following his second. His training was now loosely akin to what the real-world realization of the Hollywood fantasy that is James Bond or Jason Bourne might be—well, with a thick Texas drawl anyway.

*   *   *

Despite the new assortment of skills, Kyle's focus immediately snapped back into sniper mode when he redeployed in 2006. And he was presented with what can only be described as a target-rich environment in the city of Ramadi.

The reverberations of the remarkably violent offensive that unhinged AQI from its booby-trapped stronghold of Fallujah were felt some twenty-five miles west in Ramadi.

The capital of Anbar Province and home to a half-million residents, Ramadi replaced Fallujah as the most dangerous city on the planet in '05 and '06. This was no coincidence—following the dedicated campaign to rip Zarqawi's forces from Fallujah, al-Qaeda in Iraq regrouped, picked up shop, and reestablished their business of dealing out widespread slaughter from a new central location.

Ramadi now stood as the destination point for foreign jihadists who flooded into the nation, driven by a confused notion of achieving paradise by bringing about hell.

In April 2006, Zarqawi's men launched multiple simultaneous attacks in the city, setting about the conditions for another coalition/insurgent showdown.

Contrary to the unrestrained leveling of Fallujah, a combined American-Iraqi force of nearly eight thousand soldiers planned a more deliberate attack on Ramadi. The brunt of the fire and manpower would be delivered by conventional Marine and big Army forces—the 1st Armored Division; I MEF; the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Infantry Divisions; and the 101
st
Airborne Division chief among them. However, mobile SEAL sniper elements would provide precision fire and overwatch throughout.

*   *   *

It was at the Battle of Ramadi that Chris Kyle became more than just an accomplished sniper; he established himself a transcendent warrior—a symbol to friend and foe alike.

Seemingly more at ease on the two-way range than he was back in the nation he risked his life to defend, Kyle took pleasure and pride in removing unprecedented numbers of enemies from the fight.

Kyle slaughtered leagues of insurgents in Ramadi. His accumulating confirmed kill tally not only quickly surpassed that of Carlos Hathcock, but also Hathcock's USMC contemporaries Eric England and Chuck Mawhinney, along with that of Vietnam-era Army sniper Adelbert Waldron III. The SEAL had established himself the most lethal sniper in American military history and showed no signs of relenting.

And it wasn't just the prolific kill count that was reminiscent of Hathcock—it was also the stories that came along with each successive notch.

The Texan first earned his “Legend” tag back at Fallujah in 2004 when he delivered a kill shot from his .300 Win Mag from sixteen hundred yards away. Later, he would one-up that. To prevent the ambush of an Army convoy, he eliminated an RPG-armed terrorist from a distance of twenty-one hundred yards with a .338 Lapua.