Hans Halberstadt - Trigger Men: Shadow Team, Spider-Man, the Magnificent Bastards, and the American Combat Sniper

TRIGGER MEN

Also by Hans Halberstadt

Roughneck Nine-One:

The Extraordinary Story of a Special Forces A-team at War

(with Sgt. 1st Class Frank Antenori, US Army [Retired])

Shadow Team, Spider-Man,
the Magnificent Bastards, and
the American Combat Sniper

Hans Halberstadt

ST. MARTINS PRESS NEW YORK

TRIGGER MEN. Copyright 2008 by Hans Halberstadt. Foreword copyright by Jack Coughlin. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Design by Level C

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Halberstadt, Hans.

Trigger men : shadow team, spider-man, the magnificent bastards, and the American combat sniper / Hans Halberstadt.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35456-5

ISBN-10: 0-312-35456-8

1. SnipersUnited States. 2. Sniping (Military science)History. 3. Iraq War, 2003Personal narratives, American. I. Title.

First Edition: March 2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my Ranger buddy Maj. Charles Greene
and
Shadow TeamStaff Sgt. James Gilliland,
Sgt. Harry Martinez, Spc. Aaron Arnold, Spc. Kevin McCaffrey,
Spc. Joseph Bennett, and the rest

B ooks like this one are necessarily a team effort, a collection of many voices, insights, and experiences within a single set of covers. Although I have written many books on military communities and military operations, this one is unique in several ways. For example, nearly every man who helped with this story is a veteran of combat; the vast majority of these men have slain other men in mortal combat, and they talked to me about the process in detail.

Maj. Charles Greene, my Ranger buddy, inspired this book with his stories of the jump into Panama and his brilliant sermons on the sniper mission, on the warrior ethos, and on the role of the soldier on the modern battlefield. As always, Rangers lead the way.

Thanks to Capt. Marc Messerschmitt (another Ranger and one of the best), Elsie Jackson at the Public Affairs shop at Fort Benning, Georgia, and the staff of the US Army Sniper School. I was able to follow Class 2006-3 from start to finish as they learned the arts of long-range precision military marksmanship. I am especially grateful to Capt. Ken Crowley, Master Sgt. Frank Valez, Staff Sgt. Larry Davis, Staff Sgt. Stan Pyro Crowder, and, from Class 2006-3, Staff Sgt. Timothy Johns, Sgt. Daniel Porter, and many members of the Omega Group attached to the school.

I am also grateful to Capt. Nick Gottuso of the Hillsborough (California) Police Department, captain of the San Mateo County North-Central Regional SWAT team and also of the sniper section of that team, for his mentorship, help, and hospitality on and off the range.

This book features one US Army sniper section, Shadow Team from 2nd Battalion, 69th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), augmented by four men from the Pennsylvania National Guard; this group of about a dozen snipers is perhaps the most successful sniper unit in modern combat operations. Most of the men on Shadow Team helped out with this text; their trust and candor have been a major contribution to the work. I salute Staff Sgt. James Gilliland, Spc. Aaron Arnold, Sgt. Sam Samuel, Spc. Kevin McCaffrey, Sgt. Seneca Locklear, Spc. Andy Bayette, Sgt. Bryan Pruett, Spc. Ulysses Collett, Sgt. Brad Finney, Spc. Michael Puffer; and also Staff Sgt. Harry Martinez, Spc. Joseph Bennett, Spc. Rick Taylor, and Spc. Jarrod York.

Also, and in no particular order:

Michael Haugen, Remington

Chris Barrett, Barrett Manufacturing

Jon Wiler, Barrett Manufacturing

Staff Sgt. Dillard Johnson

Roy Bryson, Burlingame Police Department/San Mateo County North-Central Regional SWAT Sniper Team Leader

John Matthews, Matthews Armaments

Staff Sgt. St. John, Ranger, Army Marksmanship Unit

US Army 6th Annual International Sniper Competition contestants and coaches

Gene Clark, Army Marksmanship Unit, Fort Benning, Georgia

And all American military snipers owe a great debt to Brian Sain and his support group, American Sniper.Org (www.americansniper.org)

Sgt. Jason Finch, USMC Scout-Sniper

Rob Riedsma, USMC Scout-Sniper (Ret.)

Jeff Chung, former Gunnery Sgt., USMC

Jim Gularte, USMC Scout-Sniper Association

Carl Taylor, USMC Scout-Sniper Association

Staff Sgt. Timothy La Sage, USMC Scout-Sniper

Ryan Cannon, USMC Scout-Sniper

Capt. Craig Roberts, US Army (Ret.)

I also thank Marc Resnick, Sarah Lumnah, Mark A. Fowler, and the editors and designers at St. Martins Press, including David Stanford Burr, Robert Berkel, Jerry Todd, for their cheerful assistance, considerate dead lines, excellent editing skills, and constant encouragement during the long production of this work. Building a book is a team sport, not an individual effort, and I am blessed to have the help of these marvelous people.

T his is a book about the business of hunting people on the modern battlefield and killing them in a calculated, methodical way. It is primarily about the preferred methods of killing people when they are not expecting to be killed, with some detailed accounts of exactly how this is done. This is the story of the ways people are selected and slain, sometimes at long range, sometimes at very close quarters, by soldiers who are, in effect, invisible to their targets. This is the story of the art and science of precision long-range marksmanship and the effect of a bullet on the human body. It is about ambush, battle, mayhem, slaughter, winning, losing, living, dying, and war.

There are many books about wars and warfare, and I have written a lot of them. With very few exceptionsmy own previous books includedthese accounts dance carefully around the essential part of the story: the details of the deliberate use of violence to resolve an argument and the terminal effects of that violence. You could read most of these books and never think of the pools of blood and shattered bones and pain that are so fundamental to the whole business of military-style conflict resolution, because we authors normally and cowardly omit that distasteful part of our stories.

We write this way because our readers seem to insist upon a kind of sanitized perspective; it is more comfortable for us all. Snipers are brave men (and, occasionally, brave women) and a proper understanding of their art and craft requires brave readers.

Snipers, I think, are perhaps the most honest and most moral men on the battlefield, but they are seldom viewed that way by others. It takes a special kind of moral courage to accept the role of judge, jury, and executioner, to look a man (or a woman, or even, in the most awful circumstances, a child) in the eye, then place the crosshairs of a Leupold Mark 4 scope on that persons chest or head, press the trigger of an M24 or M40 sniper rifle and send a 175-grain bullet slamming precisely into the spot under the crosshairs at tremendous velocity and ending a life. In the clean, tidy, safe world of civil society, doing this to another person is normally a detestable crime; on the battlefield it is the essence of the mission, the goal itself, honorable and commendable.