The Way of the Sniper 
By: Rick Telander, speaking to ex-Navy SEAL Scott Tyler
Men’s Journal, Dec 2009
There is a decision you must make. The world is vast and unstructured. In it, things move seemingly at random. There comes a narrowing, a focusing, as the aperture reduces and reduces. The act, combined with training and skill and vision and, yes, philosophy, leads to a gradual, noiseless ratcheting down and down, like ripples in a pond going backward toward the pebble, closer and closer, smaller and smaller, the chaos dissipating into a tiny center of detailed clarity. And then the trigger.
To shoot a man from a distance is a fascinating, awe-inspiring thing. It is nearly mythic in its godlike bequeathal of power. You are here, and he is there, and the connective and intensely private embrace is one of death. The two parties are linked by the flight of a tiny projectile traveling at supersonic speed, arriving to do its work well before the sound does and a moment after the powder flash and smoke are visible. To see that brief flash and to recognize, if only for a millisecond, that you will be the recipient of the explosive message, after which you will cease to exist, must be among the more horrifying recognitions there is. If the chamber noise is reduced and the blast light dulled, the impact – a far-off head exploding, an arm abruptly detached, a body suddenly pierced by an invisible drill – occurs in a world without context or reason for the enemy, and is therefore not just terrifying but dispiriting.
“Long-range target interdiction: That’s the two-dollar phrase,” says Tyler, who sometimes speaks so quietly that you find yourself studying his lips. “In a conventional war you’re on the battlefield, and if you look over and your buddy’s head blows up and then you see another friend go down, it freaks you out. It demoralizes you; it makes you question things. It’s a psychological thing. You, as a sniper, try for the highest-ranking person, if you can, to create that chaos. But in an insurgency, as we have now, when the enemy comes out in ones and twos, sometimes right in the cities, without ever being a big force, it’s all ambush. So it can be better to have snipers rather than a man on every corner. A sniper team can stay hidden.”
Part of being a great sniper is having the ability, the mind-set, to blend in, to disguise oneself, to become part of the landscape, to feel and react like soil, like leaves blowing in the wind. In The Ultimate Sniper, a technical guide for advanced snipers that Tyler references again and again, there is a section on Ghillie suits, the camouflage outfits that are designed to resemble the surrounding landscape. “A properly made Ghillie suit so well conceals the wearer that it never fails to impress first-time viewers,” writes the author, retired army special forces major John L. Plaster. At sniper school, when an instructor talks about the suits, the point is reinforced when, after a spell, an innocuous part of the ground in front of the recruits slowly rises up and becomes human.
“The most important thing about a Ghillie suit is that you can attach other things to it,” says Tyler. “It has loops everywhere, and you gather whatever’s in your environment – leaves and grass and branches – and tape or string or zip-tie them on. It’s a layman’s myth that you cover yourself with burlap and you look like Chewbacca and that’s that.”
Snipers, whenever possible, work as two-man teams – one man spotting with a powerful scope, another shooting. But often even harder than shooting is the act of getting within range. It consists of patience almost beyond belief. There is the high crawl, the elbow crawl, the low crawl, and the sniper crawl. “The sniper crawl is the lowest, slowest movement technique…” Plaster writes, “used when movement must be so slow that there is no visible action to detect. [The sniper] creeps along, only four inches per move, using just fingers and toes to propel himself.” With a rifle, of course.
Then come the difficult decisions. “I liked the cut-and-dry, liked it if a guy had a gun and was shooting at our troops, and we shot him,” says Tyler. “It’s a situation of less ambivalence. Nobody wants to go out and murder someone. You don’t shoot just because you can. You have the trigger depressed and there is that final quarter-pound of pressure, and if you make a bad call.… Well, a ‘bad kill’ can create more insurgents, bad feelings, an international incident. But the biggest thing is, you have to live with it.”
Each rifle a sniper uses has unique characteristics that are compounded by the ammunition and many, many exterior factors. There is wind. There is humidity. There is the spin of the Earth. There is even the fact that as a rifle is fired, its barrel heats up, the metal contracts, and the bullets are propelled faster. As a sniper Tyler had a “quiver of rifles,” including a huge .50-caliber McMillan Brothers bolt-action, a .300 Winmag, and an MK 12, which he liked because it was light and small, though it “didn’t pack much of a punch” in the recoil. But his favorite was a CheyTac .408, a weapon he discovered late in his career and never used on a human. “It was accurate up to 2,500 yards,” he says. “The round had a very stable flight. Most rounds, when they go from supersonic to subsonic, start to tumble. This one tumbles and then restabilizes.”
I ask Tyler about the drama shots we see from snipers in the movies, like how they always seem to be shooting one another through their scopes. “It’s mostly Hollywood,” he says. “Head shots seldom happen. Anywhere from here to here” – he indicates the lower chest to the neck – “is good. There are so many variables. A shot that’s off by an inch at 100 yards will be off by 10 inches or more at a thousand yards.”
To ensure he’s as accurate as possible, Tyler meticulously charts the results from his practice shooting, logging all the variances he can think of – temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, direction. He’s looking for patterns – not just, say, how one type of bullet might vary from another, but how one particular batch of that bullet might vary. “That way when it comes down to game time you know what’s going to happen,” he says.
In combat Tyler never took a shot from more than 400 yards. But at a practice range in Idaho, he once hit a foot-square metal target from 1,600 yards. He was shooting across a valley, amid a furious wind and rain, and still hit the target on his first try. “We used the ballistic computers to deal with the environmental conditions,” he says matter-of-factly. That bullet was in the air for well over a second, rising, spiraling, descending, and fading to the right like a Tom Brady Hail Mary pass.
As astonishing as that feat was, it doesn’t come close to the long-distance killing record that was recently set by a Canadian sniper in Afghanistan. His fatal shot traveled 2,657 yards – more than a mile and a half. That bullet was in the air for four seconds and dropped 146 feet, while also curving to the side a good amount. “Those Canadians,” Tyler says, “they’re raising the bar pretty high.”
The range is now silent, even though 15 men have come by from various spots, shuffling and eager, to see the SEAL shoot.
“Going hot,” Tyler says.
He appears to have no breathing at all, no motion, no nothing. His feet are laid out flat on their sides behind him because snipers do not give the enemy even the sight of raised heels as targets.
There is an explosion, and then silence. He racks the bolt, and a bright, smoking casing pops out. He picks it up and lays it carefully to his right. He shoots again.
When he shoots, Tyler keeps both eyes open and lets the floating circular reticules hover like a halo around the target. “I try to get in a good pattern of breathing, try to relax everything. I’ll pull the slack off the trigger and know I’m at the point where only the mechanism is barely keeping the hammer back. You do not slap the trigger. You have to be in the moment. It’s a little bit of an out-of-body experience.” High-powered rifles are incredibly loud. They can be deafening. But Tyler has shot in war zones without muffling devices or earplugs. And a strange thing happens. “I don’t hear the blast,” he says. “I don’t hear anything.”
He mentions that many hunters – regular guys out for deer, longhorn, elk – flinch at the last moment, because they’re not relaxed. Because they’re thinking of what they’re doing. A sniper can do what he does because – after months and months of training and study and reflection – he knows that he has done it all before thousands of times, effortlessly. “It’s like golf,” Tyler says, “except every time you swing there’s an explosion in your face.”
This gun, a gun he never used before, misfires three times on the range, and the scope has never been accurately adjusted, but when we walk the 218 yards – two football fields, two end zones – to the target, the Styrofoam square has three patterns of three holes, each of which could be covered by a quarter.
It’s worth noting that Tyler does not especially like guns. He owns only a shotgun, which he has never shot and which he needed when he lived up in the hills of the Sierras with his wife and young daughter (he is recently divorced) as protection from meandering bears. He has never hunted, never killed an animal, never even shot at an animal.
Hemingway once wrote: “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.” But that is not strictly the case for Tyler. He left the service voluntarily, because he felt his principles were being violated by a superior’s decisions. It had to do with responsibility – his for the men under him. And he could not live with his conscience.
He admits he is still searching now, trying to come up with a lifestyle that embraces all that he is, all that he has done. Without a permanent address, he’s basically living in his pickup truck. He’s dating, and he wants to marry again, have more children, continue his art, and live “in a Mongolian yurt along the Pacific coast.”
A nice vision. But it must coexist with Tyler’s memory of, for instance, the first time he was fired upon in Baghdad: “We were in the back of a Humvee and I thought it was cigarette ashes flicked from a car. Heard nothing, had no idea where it was coming from. Just sparks skipping across stones.” The man riding next to Tyler said, “Motherfucker! The turret guy just hit me in the back of the head with the turret!” But the turret was high up. He’d been shot in the neck. By a sniper.
A man, a thinking man, a philosophical man, chooses to be a sniper, to fight his war from a distance. And why would he do so?
Maybe because he can say this, as Scott Tyler does: “If you’re shooting from 700 yards, you become the scope, you go down it, you become the tip of the bullet, you project yourself 700 yards. You’re there.”
Guns in America and the limit of shame
By: Jon Lee Anderson
New Yorker, December 16, 2012
What does it take for a society to be sickened by its own behavior and to change its attitudes? That can be asked about questions of power and political repression—and also about distinctive national pathologies. When did a majority of South African Boers realize that Apartheid was reprehensible? How about whites in the American South? When will the Japanese force their whalers to stop, finally realizing that their persistence has caused widespread international revulsion and opprobrium? When will the British realize that public drunkenness—a practice now internationally associated with them as a nation—is something to be embarrassed about? When will we Americans realize that our society is an unacceptably violent one, that this is how the rest of the world sees us, and that much of that violence is associated with guns? Will it be the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School? Where is our threshold for self-awareness?
A few years ago, the British found their own threshold— with guns—after an event not unlike the heartbreaking tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. On March 13, 1995, in the small Scottish town of Dunblane, a forty-three-year-old man, Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school with four handguns and opened fire, methodically killing sixteen children and one adult teacher before killing himself. The unprecedented massacre of children led, within two years, to legislation that imposed a total ban on the private ownership of handguns in the United Kingdom. Today, no one in the United Kingdom can privately own a handgun or a semiautomatic weapon. (There are exceptions made for some historic and antique weapons, and the ban does not encompass Northern Ireland.) There was not much hand wringing or heated debate over this legislation. It was discussed, and enacted, with overwhelming public support, in response to the mood of national shame and grief over the killings.
There is still violence in Britain. In recent years, there has been a disquieting upsurge of violence amongst teen-agers in large British cities. Much of it is gang related, and almost all of it involves knives. Knives are not hard to obtain, but kill far fewer people than guns do. After the movie-theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado, the Guardian did the math, comparing gun homicides in the U.S. to England and Wales in one year: 9,146 to forty-one. Even taking into account the difference in population, the rates of gun homicide per a hundred thousand people are 2.97 versus .07.
In China, where private gun ownership is also banned, but where social alienation is clearly becoming a larger problem, there have been a distressing number of recent attacks by deranged knife-wielding men on schoolchildren. On Friday, in fact, as Evan Osnos writes, in an incident with uncanny similarities to the Newtown massacre, a young man walked into the Chenpeng Village Primary School near the city of Xinyang, south of Beijing, and attacked the schoolchildren with a knife as they arrived at school. Twenty-two children were injured before the assailant, said to be a thirty-four-year-old man, was subdued and arrested by police—but there were no deaths. If he had been using a gun, the likelihood is that most of those children would now be dead.
A heated debate on new gun-control legislation has been sparked off by the Sandy Hook massacre. But if past patterns are anything to go by, it’s unlikely that anything will change yet in the United States. What will it require for a majority of Americans to realize that they have a national problem that needs to be urgently addressed? We have lost four Presidents to gunmen in our short history as a nation, and very nearly lost several more. Last year, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s promising political career was cut short by a gunman who shot her in the head, killed six others and wounded thirteen more. Gifford spends her days now in therapy attempting to recover basic abilities like speech and eyesight, both of which were severely affected by her wounds.
But Americans seem to take the shooting of their politicians in stride. Would even another, much larger school massacre bring about change? If the numbers are on a truly epic scale—an American scale—perhaps enough people will finally say “enough.” If someone murdered a hundred schoolchildren in a single day with guns, would a majority of Americans agree to true restrictions on them? What is our national threshold for shame?
larssss: Knights Armament Chainsaw
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
MY TRAINING TOOK OVER. I CALLED MY PARENTS. THEN I CALLED 911.
I’m terrible at noting lyrics, even to songs I really like, until something else brings them to my attention. Here, it’s the fact that Vampire Weekend’s ‘Giving Up The Gun’ is on some level about Japanese history, something I’m actually reasonably familiar with. Though to be fair, ‘Tokugawa’ doesn’t stand out when it’s sung by Ezra Koenig quite as much as it might do with other, more straightforward artists.
So here there are references to swords, the rising sun, and the fading past, but the central idea is something even more specific:
“I got the idea for the song from a book my Dad gave me called Giving Up The Gun. It’s a history book about the time when Japan expelled all the foreigners from the country, closed off all trade, and stopped using guns and reverted back to the sword. It seems unimaginable now that humanity could willingly go back to an older technology. It got me thinking about whether you could give up the things that you have and go back to a simpler way of life.”
(NME)
Naturally, the lyrical references abound in ambiguities: there is martial (and/or musical) strength in “wrists of steel”, a sense of identity in physical skill; but it certainly seems to me that “when I was 17” refers more to the idea of the modern youth than the older approach of manhood. The sound of “rifle hits” is also allegorical, bringing the subject of the song back to music - “I heard you play guitar/Down at a seedy bar/Where skinheads used to fight” - but it’s music through history, as indicated by the past tense. On the one hand, ”Tokugawa smile and garbage style” refers to the period of Japan’s isolation, and on the other, to something else again.
“You felt the coming wave/Told me we’d all be brave/You said you wouldn’t flinch” is classic samurai attitude, with a bit of Hokusai and/or Kamikaze thrown in. When I read the lyrics first, I though they were possibly referring to the samurai rebellion against the Meiji government of the 19th century, led by Saigo Takamori, who “the night before the final assault… behaved like a samurai of old, listening to the music of the Satsuma lute, and performing an ancient sword dance, and composing poetry”, the last of which summed up his obsolescence in the face of modernity:
If I were a drop of dew,
I could take shelter on a leaf tip
But being a man,
I have no place in this whole world
Giving Up The Gun is the tale of the original Tokugawan shogunate, and their self-imposed isolation from Dutch and Portuguese influence, rather than the later opening up and modernisation of the Meiji empire, but much of the culture is continuous. Conservatism of a sort is a theme here - “But in the years that passed/Since I saw you last/You haven’t moved an inch”; “You’re right back where you started from”. Locating either the guitarist or the warrior, they have seemingly reverted to their pasts.
Opposing this, and despite the conclusion of the book itself that “men are less the passive victims of their own knowledge and skills than most men in the West suppose”, the song urges progress (or at least motion - in which direction is onwards?) - “Go on, go on, go on” - but only in the best tradition of individualism, perhaps of creative and expressive freedom - “I see you shine in your own way”. So whether it’s really about guns or guitars, ‘Giving Up The Gun’ has a sense of history and of people’s place in it, and I really like that. Even if I can’t work out where the tennis fits in.
May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver?
I have, by now, got rather fond of Mr. James Bond. I like most of the things about him, with the exception of his rather deplorable taste in firearms. In particular, I dislike a man who comes into contact with all sorts of formidable people using a .25 Beretta. This sort of gun is really a lady’s gun, and not a really nice lady at that. If Mr. Bond has to use a light gun he would be better off with a .22 rim fire; the lead bullet would cause more shocking effect than the jacketed type of the .25.
May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver?
