Modern American Snipers Page 3

  They were further enabled by the Night Stalkers—the elite helicopter pilots who manned the specialized aircraft of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (160th SOAR)—along with their usual complement of attached Air Commandos from the 24th Special Tactics Squadron (24STS), JSOC’s Air Force special mission unit.

  The manifest also happened to show the inclusion of a small four-man DEVGRU sniper element, although it was considered nothing more than a token representation for the Navy unit.

  Ultimately, Operation Gothic Serpent merely replaced Operation Eagle Claw as the fiasco that reminded leaders exactly what can go wrong when it commits its most elite troops to the sorts of extreme-risk, extreme-reward operations for which they were designed.

  But even as an already risk-averse SOF environment hardened while the specter of terrorism continued to rise, the manhunt in Somalia also served as a precursor of what was to come … eventually. Though primitive by today’s standards, the technology and tactics innovated in Mogadishu served to add to that unbroken continuity that “makes the Unit so good.”

  Over time—and following a tectonic shift regarding the nation’s stomach for combating terrorism—the somewhat clumsy, uncoordinated attempts to take down Aidid would be transformed into the most efficient and lethal capability ever envisioned.

  It would also offer a preview of the capability and courage that exists within the ranks of JSOC’s snipers—capability and courage that would come to play such a defining role in subsequent conflicts.

  * * *

  The SEAL snipers from Red Squadron—Richard Kaiser, John Gay, Howard Wasdin, and Homer Nearpass—weren’t exactly embraced by their Delta counterparts. They weren’t exactly shunned either, but the tension in the air was irrefutable, as was the general feeling among the Delta operators that the presence of the SEALs added no particular value to the operation.

  This was a bitter rivalry born with SEAL Team Six’s very inception. While initially sold as a maritime complement to Delta Force—one that could, for example, rescue hostages aboard hijacked cruise ships—that would serve to round out the nation’s total CT solution, it was never truly envisioned as such.

  Founding commanding officer Richard Marcinko joked (or perhaps more accurately, opined) that a mud puddle or a canteen in the general vicinity was enough to justify SEAL Team Six’s right to an operation.

  Operators from both units presumed their superiority in their shared core competency of precision direct action, and thus considered their respective unit the more deserving when any potential high-profile operations surfaced (or landed). Delta Force and DEVGRU represented two apex predators claiming domain over a hunting ground barely large enough to feed one.

  “Unfortunately, the units have been politically pitted against each other; they compete for the same missions,” said former DEVGRU sniper Craig Sawyer, who experienced this frustration firsthand. “It’s unfortunate because both units are filled with heroes—highly capable men with red, white, and blue in their eyes. Brave as they come. Capable as they come. Mean as they come. Dedicated as they come. But they hated each other because they were pitted against each other.”

  The lack of delineation largely worked in opposition to Marcinko’s grander scheme. While Delta Force may have been continually stymied by operations rehearsed for but never executed, ST6 was discouraged to an even greater degree.

  The relatively rare missions that did come around were generally snared by the Army unit while SEAL Team Six found itself pushed aside again and again.

  According to those on the losing end, this wasn’t down to any assessment that Delta was the more capable unit (both had their champions and detractors), but rather a question of parentage.

  JSOC—which has operational control of both units—was dominated by Army generals throughout the first two decades of its existence. In fact, its first ten commanders came from the Army, including multiple officers who had served inside Delta Force.

  “I see them like two boys on a Little League baseball team who could pitch,” Sawyer explained. “But one of their daddies is the coach. So who do you think is going to get to pitch come game day?

  “It’s a horrible situation. It didn’t matter which unit was appropriate for the job, it just mattered whose daddy ran JSOC at the time. The politics cause the units to resent each other but it’s not their fault. That’s the situation that they’re in. If you took the guys and just let them hang out together, they’d probably get along like brothers.”

  On one occasion, DEVGRU even suffered the indignity of having its OTB (over the beach) gear commandeered by Delta Force to conduct a clear maritime op. At times the situation seemed so dire that some experienced SEAL Team Six operators—including Sawyer—actually considered leaving the Navy to take a shot at joining the Unit.

  Sawyer said, “When I was at DEVGRU, we kept training, developing solutions and equipment, and staging for certain operations and then losing them.… They would get handed to Delta. I realized, okay, the politics are stacked in their favor. Their dad is the coach.”

  Still exasperated by the experience, the former SEAL Team Six sniper continued, “I went to the Navy because SEAL Team were the baddest motherfuckers on the face of the planet; that’s what I had read and that’s what I was told. So I went to SEAL Team. Once I got in there I started learning about SEAL Team Six and that’s like the all-star team. If you really want to operate and to roll the dice and volunteer for something even riskier, more hard-core, but get a lot of sophisticated support and opportunity, then you go to that league there. I was like, ‘That’s me. That’s where I’m going.’

  “Once I saw that one unit was going to get most of the work and the other unit was going to get kicked to the side for political reasons, well, shoot, I’m going to go to the unit that is getting work, period. I don’t care what you call it. I wasn’t after a career in the military. I wasn’t after a collar device. I wasn’t after all the chest candy they loaded me down with after each campaign. I didn’t care about those things. I cared about kicking some ass. And not anybody’s ass—the ass of those who directly meant to do harm to those I care about. That’s where my head was at and that’s what I wanted to do.”

  Both ultimately chose not to (“My teammates were so bitter at me [for talking about it] … They would have hated my guts”), but the mere consideration serves to illustrate just how unloved the ST6’s operators felt by JSOC.

  * * *

  One of those former Delta commanders who had moved to the top seat at JSOC, General William Garrison, was the man in charge during Operation Gothic Serpent. He threw the SEALs a bone—a small one—but a bone nonetheless with the inclusion of the four DEVGRU snipers in Task Force Ranger.

  The SEAL Team Six snipers leveraged the fact that they weren’t as tightly integrated into the mission’s primary HVT (high-value target) effort, freeing them up to conduct the full spectrum of their expansive mission set. The snipers of DEVGRU and Delta Force specialize in executing extraordinarily demanding reconnaissance operations, the sort more typically associated with intelligence operatives, although often with an even greater degree of danger attached. As a result, both units refer to their snipers with the term “recce”—British for “recon” and indicative of their British heritage.

  Rather than stay in the relative safety of the hangar where the bulk of the task force was based, the DEVGRU snipers coordinated with the CIA and teamed with SIGINT (signals intelligence) specialists from the Army’s enigmatic Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA.

  The ISA remains among the “blackest” organizations in the DoD’s arsenal. Even insiders who casually toss around references to other JSOC units rarely make mention of “the Activity.” In Somalia, they came complete with their own dedicated aircraft, directional microphones, and other specialized equipment, which enabled its specialists to intercept communications traffic among the warlord’s men. While relatively basic by today’s standards, this allowed them to begin mapping out Aidid
’s network, providing them the actionable intelligence Delta needed to strike.

  Operating from their shared safe house deep in the heart of Mogadishu, DEVGRU recce operators Nearpass and Wasdin pulled clandestine vehicle reconnaissance despite the volatile nature of a city primed to explode.

  Masked behind keffiyeh headdresses and the flowery shirts favored by the locals, they helped to further pinpoint ISA’s potential targets armed with a 35mm camera. The four-man Black Team element also utilized their rare low-visibility surveillance skillets to map out escape and evasion routes and identify potential landing zones for 160th SOAR helos.

  Wasdin captured photographic evidence of weapons disguised as babies and bricks being transported by noncombatants.

  Commenting on their low-vis tasking and the nuances it can entail, the Georgian said, “I can tell you for a fact, we were the only ones issued a [keffiyeh]. Sometimes we wore it and sometimes we didn’t; it depended on which part of booger-eating country we were in.

  “We found out real quick that just because you were wearing a headdress didn’t mean you were wearing the right one. You’d find out the red-and-white-checkered one is good in some parts of town but in other parts it means something—like with the Crips and the Bloods over here. They each had their own headdress and body language.”

  The snipers also leveraged the more lethal aspects of their advanced training. After climbing a six-story tower to make a positive identification of Osman Hassan Ali Atto, Delta Force launched a raid on the target building.

  While Atto—a powerful figure in the khat (a local narcotic) trade and Aidid’s second in command—escaped minutes prior to the assault, Wasdin came up big in the clutch. Spotting a Somali armed with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) and with a circling Black Hawk in his sights, the sniper connected from 846 yards away with his .300 Win Mag.

  The shot went straight through the militiaman’s face and erased the threat, earning the SEALs a bit of respect from onlooking Unit snipers in the process.

  Wasdin admitted the shot wasn’t quite as precise as it appeared, although he kept the Delta snipers in the dark about that fact at the time. He said, “You have to have a little bit of luck, because at those ranges, even the rotation of the Earth is going to be playing with it one way or the other. Just a tiny bit of wind at a thousand yards can move a bullet eight to ten inches laterally. I have no qualms telling people I was actually aiming for the sternum. I just got lucky to not miss left or right, but vertically. It would have been just as easy to shoot him in the groin as it was in the head.”

  Days later, Atto was successfully ensared. The Somali warlord’s Fiat 124 sedan was brought to a halt when a 160th SOAR helicopter swooped into position and a Delta sniper destroyed its engine block from the air. Atto attempted to flee the scene but was run down by Delta assaulters who swarmed down from the helo as Atto’s gun-toting bodyguard was incapacitated by sniper fire.

  The small SEAL sniper contingent also added to their significant contribution to the overall mission by pulling “Eyes of Mogadishu” duty—utilizing conventional military QRF (Quick Reaction Force) UH-60 Black Hawks of the 101st Airborne Division as aerial sniper platforms—as well as escorting CIA assets throughout the threatening city.

  * * *

  Less than two weeks after the apprehension of Atto, Task Force Ranger attempted a daylight raid to round up more of Aidid’s top lieutenants. The resulting events have been extensively covered across books, television, and film.

  The full package of 160th SOAR Black Hawks and Little Birds hit the target location. Delta operators flowed through the objective and rounded up the prisoners precisely as planned. 3/75 Rangers fast-roped in to cordon off the area, while an awaiting twelve-vehicle convoy was in position to extract the assaulters and their quarry back to the hangar.

  The initial outburst of hostile fire was greater than anticipated, and a Ranger—PFC Todd Blackburn—was gravely wounded when he missed the rope and fell seventy feet to the earth.

  This already chaotic situation ripped free of any semblance of control or coordination when Super 6-1—the MH-60L Black Hawk piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Three (CW3), Clifton “Elvis” Wolcott—was hit by RPG fire and crashed several blocks away.

  Delta snipers Dan Busch and Jim Smith had survived the Super 6-1 crash and actively attempted to defend the site. Busch eventually succumbed to injuries he suffered in the attempt.

  Three vehicles from the convoy—including one with SEAL sniper Richard Kaiser—immediately transported Blackburn back to base so that he could be rendered aid. The miniconvoy was torn apart by withering enemy fire in the process with another Ranger—SGT Dominick Pilla—killed as they attempted to negotiate their way back to the hangar.

  The remainder of the extraction vehicles later became known as “the lost convoy.” They would ultimately fail in their bid to make the short drive to the Super 6-1’s crash site just a few blocks away but were repeatedly foiled by a bewildering series of events, marked by delayed instructions, wrong turns, and massive bloodshed.

  SEAL snipers John Gay, Howard Wasdin, and Homer Nearpass were among this unfortunate lot. Early in the engagement, Wasdin and a Unit operator silently advanced through an alley on foot and eliminated a pair of Somali gunners who were firing down on the assault element from a nearby fifth-floor window.

  Then Wasdin was hit in the knee by a ricocheted round. While others rushed to the downed Wasdin, Nearpass stepped in and dropped multiple targets. He calmly aimed down the Trijicon ACOG of his suppressed CAR-15 to pick off one rushing attacker after another.

  An attached 24STS Air Force Combat Control Team (CCT) later described Nearpass as the embodiment of what SEALs were meant to be. Utterly unconcerned for his safety in those moments, he even flashed a broad grin as the action intensified.

  Back in their vehicle and trapped in the center of a blistering spherical attack, Nearpass and Wasdin went through their ten thirty-round magazines and then several more taken off an injured Ranger. Out of ammunition and with the entire city seemingly descending upon them in a nonstop barrage of AK-47s and RPG fire, Wasdin drew his SIG P226 9mm sidearm.

  Face-to-face with an adversary at near-point-blank range, the SEAL’s first shot somehow missed. The Somali’s did not; the Georgian was struck in the right shinbone, nearly ripping the limb from his body. Wasdin instinctively pulled the pistol’s trigger twice more, putting his attacker down with a tight group to his head.

  Nearpass dragged the incapacitated half of his shooting pair to the passenger seat, draped his mangled leg over the hood, and took the wheel himself, all the while keeping the badly wounded Wasdin as calm as possible. As the crippled Hummer limped along, the injured SEAL was struck with yet another round, this time to the left ankle.

  The Humvee finally expired. Completely surrounded and with militiamen from multiple factions closing in fast, the QRF at last arrived to rescue the lost convoy.

  “There is a Bible verse that says, ‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,’” Wasdin said. “To be a SEAL sniper, you’re on the cutting edge, you’re on the tip of the spear. You’re more likely to die than anybody else. You have to have it in your heart that you love your country and your fellow Americans so much that you are willing to be that person to lay down your life. In Somalia there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to die.”

  He reflected on making the sniper shot to prevent a Black Hawk from being hit weeks earlier yet being haunted by not being able to do again. “I shot those guys in Mogadishu that were trying to shoot down the Black Hawk.… I was happy that that happened, but you know what? It still eats my butt to this day that I wasn’t able to get the one guy who shot down the bird that my buddy Dan Busch was on. What would I give to be able to make that shot? I’d love to be able to go back. And make that shot and kill the guy in the doorway who shot me in the Humvee that almost shot my leg off.

  “I think any elite warrior isn’t going to be
patting themselves on the back going, ‘Look what I did here.’ Because that’s not perfection. Of course, we always strive for perfection but that’s unattainable, unachievable.”

  * * *

  As the convoy—along with a number of Delta operators and Rangers who left on foot following the initial takedown—attempted to make their way to the Super 6-1 crash site, another MH-60L Black Hawk was impacted by an RPG and helplessly circled down to a shattering collision with the dirt several blocks away.

  Initially, the Super 6-4 survivors were defended from a distance, as Delta snipers Brad Halling, Gary Gordon, and Randy Shughart thinned the initial rush to the site with accurate sniper fire from aboard Super 6-1.

  However, that was only a temporary measure and there were no reinforcements available. The entire ground force had already been committed to the first crash site and was now either lost or pinned down.

  A mob collected and strode toward Super 6-4 pilot CW3 Michael Durant and his crew. Sniper team leader Gordon requested that he and Shughart be put down to defend Super 6-4. His request was denied.

  He made another request. Again, denied.

  The third request was accepted.

  Super 6-1 pilots James Francis Yacone and Mike Goffena maneuvered their bird into position and the sniper pair fast-roped in some one hundred meters away. From there they rapidly made their way through a maze of shanties to arrive at the downed Black Hawk.

  Similar to the way Nearpass was described, Durant later recalled the sense of composed efficiency with which his two-man cavalry operated. They matter-of-factly moved the crew into defendable positions and then set about whittling away at an onrushing bloodthirsty flock.

  Eventually, Maine-native Gordon reported that he was hit, more with a sense of irritation than fear or pain. After he fell, Shughart retrieved Gordon’s CAR-15 and handed it to Durant to use in his own defense.

  Nebraskan Shughart returned to tend to the pack with his M14, firing deliberate, precise shots. He inevitably ran out of ammunition and was overrun.