Ex-Sniper with 33 Confirmed Kills Reveals The Dark Side Of Being A Sniper
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
4
sentences flagged
Hate speech
2
sentences flagged
Summary
Sgt. Nicholas Irving, a.k.a. The Reaper, was the first Black sniper in the Army's 3rd Ranger Battalion that was deployed in combat. He has 33 confirmed kills in a matter of 4 months in a tour to Afghanistan. He talks about how he became a sniper, how he got into the military, and why he decided to become a sniper.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
As a sniper, like being able to see something and the intent behind it was more personal.
00:00:08.420
Some people say, oh, you get used to it. I never felt that.
00:00:11.220
Are you at a point right now where you can live your normal life and it doesn't haunt you anymore?
00:00:20.280
That was my idol, and I think that to this day that he is the best sniper godlike figure to me.
00:00:26.120
When he went in to go take out the Viet Cong commander, surrounded by himself, it was basically a suicide mission.
00:00:32.300
When he attached the unilateral scope to the Madu's .50 cal machine gun and sniped and took out a Vietnamese commander, it was like 1.2 miles away.
00:00:41.440
And that was where we get the Barrett sniper rifle from, to this day, the semi-automatic.
00:00:46.280
First confirmed versus the last confirmed. Was there meaning behind the last one?
00:00:54.000
I almost lost my life. My reconnaissance team pinned down by an enemy sniper and surrounded and watching the guy come in to save our life and watching him die like five minutes after that.
00:01:04.440
That was my determining factor. I was not going to re-enlist or anything.
00:01:07.340
My guest today is Nicholas Irving, a.k.a. The Reaper, who is a sniper, and not only any sniper, he was the first black sniper in Army's 3rd Ranger Battalion that was deployed in combat.
00:01:25.340
I believe he has 33 confirmed kills in a matter of four months in a tour to Afghanistan.
00:01:30.080
And he had a nickname for his, well, I'll just let him tell you when we get right into it.
00:01:35.880
So, Nicholas, having said that, thank you so much for being a guest on Bayatina.
00:01:41.840
So, first of all, thank you for your service, you know, for somebody to get in and then, you know, you go from Fort Benning to go to Afghanistan.
00:01:49.340
You got your 33 kills and you're putting yourself on the line and there's a lot of risk on that.
00:01:54.260
But what made a person like you say, I want to be a sniper?
00:02:01.840
To be honest, it was, well, I would say Charlie Sheen, but that stems from the movie Navy Seals, but it derives from my dad.
00:02:15.500
I was born in Augsburg, Germany, while they were both in the military.
00:02:19.360
And seeing my dad at a young age, I had to be maybe four years old, and I watched him raise the flag one day at his building, and he was wearing the Army green uniform, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.
00:02:36.280
So, wearing his military uniform and asking questions and watching movies about the military and reading books, it started as a very, very, very young kid and my mom and my dad.
00:02:54.680
So, geez, I don't know exactly, maybe at 90 something.
00:02:58.600
I honestly have no idea what the MOS was, but they were counterintelligence during the Cold War.
00:03:04.200
So, they like did Morse code and stuff like that.
00:03:07.040
So, they're, I mean, you have to score very high on the ASVAB to get any kind of military intelligence.
00:03:18.320
I remember when I went and took my test and they came back with the score.
00:03:33.240
What I don't know of is, so, you go in, you know, you got boot camp.
00:03:38.820
You know, I don't know if it's nine weeks, 12 weeks.
00:03:42.380
Then you have AIT, advanced individual training.
00:03:45.280
And then you have any kind of secondary, you know, schools that you take.
00:03:48.340
What is the process of becoming a sniper if you can walk us through it?
00:03:56.260
So, the pipeline or the cycle was a little bit extended.
00:04:01.380
I think it was 14 weeks with the Army basic training plus the AIT.
00:04:05.840
They changed it to where the basic training and AIT is all combined now.
00:04:22.580
That's five weeks of, you know, getting used to heights, which I'm, you know, terrified of.
00:04:31.040
And you should have five jumps out of, right out of airborne school.
00:04:36.760
After airborne school, I went to a selection course for Rangers, which was called Ranger Indoctrination Program, or RIP for short.
00:04:44.580
And that was about, that was a month-long course of just a physical beatdown.
00:04:51.800
And we had 85, 85 plus guys or candidates that tried out for this selection.
00:04:56.840
And we graduated seven, six of the original class.
00:05:00.680
And I was one of the six from that original class.
00:05:03.120
And everybody else quit or could not make the standards.
00:05:06.620
And from there, I went on to my unit, 3rd Ranger Battalion, and stayed there for six months.
00:05:17.320
Two deployments after that, we would deploy every six months.
00:05:20.660
So we would deploy for three months, four months, and come back and train up for six and keep that rotation up.
00:05:26.780
And I did three deployments to Iraq before I went to sniper school.
00:05:32.180
After that, then I officially, well, I had a few jobs before that.
00:05:36.020
I was a machine gunner, a machine gun team leader.
00:05:38.660
So I had my own little machine gun team and designated marksman.
00:05:43.160
And the step or the process or the designator right before sniper.
00:05:55.560
Held that for one deployment before I officially went on to sniper school, which was eight weeks long.
00:06:01.200
And before that, I had, like, our unit, special operations.
00:06:11.260
I went through two sniper schools that were not through the military.
00:06:16.660
They were private civilian run from guys who are really, really good at shooting.
00:06:22.900
That's why I learned how to shoot, you know, I think the best when it came to precision shooting.
00:06:28.780
Nicholas, was that in the state or was that out of the country?
00:06:33.280
And coincidentally, it was here in Texas where I ended up moving to.
00:06:45.420
And, yeah, went through two sniper schools in Texas, one in California, a little high-angle precision shooting course that was privately run, and then to the eight-week sniper course.
00:06:58.420
So, yeah, it was a long, long, long fight to get there.
00:07:02.600
So you got your one-station unit training, airborne school.
00:07:12.280
Out of 85-7, you were one of the 6th Battalion, then Afghanistan, and you deployed three times to Iraq.
00:07:23.340
You totally, I blocked this purposely out of my mind.
00:07:29.080
So after, you know, you serve in a ranger battalion, then we go to the 72-day ranger school.
00:07:34.560
And that's just the, you know, they starve you for, you know, however, 62 days.
00:07:40.000
I lost 35 pounds in that school, and I didn't sleep much.
00:07:43.360
So I got sick, and it was a bad, bad experience.
00:07:46.720
You normally lose a lot of weight, about 20 pounds, but I lost 35, and had to deploy after that.
00:07:57.560
So sniper school, you know, is it, you know how you're going, like, what I didn't know is, you and I can join the Navy, and while we're signing up to go into the Navy, we can say we want to go to Navy, be a Navy SEAL.
00:08:10.440
I didn't know you could do that right off the bat, right?
00:08:12.360
I thought it's kind of like you go in, and then you say, hey, I want to be an 18 Delta, I go become, I'm part of the 5th group, or 3rd group, or whatever.
00:08:18.980
So is sniper something you requested from day one, or was it something that came later on?
00:08:28.420
So, yeah, like when I first had my contract, I wanted to ask that, but there was no way.
00:08:32.980
They had no idea, you know, if I could shoot, no way of knowing if I could shoot well or anything like that, a team player, if I would even make it.
00:08:45.180
Is there automatic elimination that, okay, listen, we like you, you're great, but here's five things that automatically eliminates you from being in sniper school.
00:08:55.900
You know how back in the days they would say, if you're colorblind, if you're flat-footed, if you have asthma, you know, all these things they would say.
00:09:01.920
Was there any automatic disqualification of sniper school?
00:09:10.300
Before I wanted to join the Army, I wanted to be a Navy SEAL, like everybody else does.
00:09:15.180
And, you know, I went into, I did the whole process.
00:09:20.400
I went through a Navy SEA cadet corps my mom put me through, or, you know, I asked her to be in.
00:09:25.620
And I went through this little program called Baby SEALs.
00:09:28.740
And they put you through like a little mock Navy SEAL course, and you, you know, get scuba qualified and all this, like 15.
00:09:39.280
And I went into the Navy recruiter, and I took the color vision test, and it turned out that I was 100%, not 100%, but I was red-green colorblind.
00:09:51.160
So I went to the Army thinking that I could fool them and somehow cheat this color vision test, not with the intention of wanting to join the Army, but retaking this color vision test.
00:10:04.160
But this Army nurse was there, and she kind of like, I was crying a lot.
00:10:08.720
You know, it was a dream that I had of wanting to join the military.
00:10:11.140
And I was crying in the office on the little station where you take your physical at.
00:10:15.640
And she saw me crying, and she brought me into her office and asked what the problem was and found out that I was red-green colorblind.
00:10:22.820
So she pulled out this booklet, and she traced with her finger all the numbers that I couldn't see.
00:10:34.940
I had no idea what a Ranger was until I remember watching Black Hawk Down, but it didn't stand out to me.
00:10:42.300
I didn't find out what Rangers were, you know, pretty much until I, you know, signed the contract and was going in.
00:10:49.700
So neither Ranger or neither sniper was negotiated up front?
00:10:56.800
I asked for, I wanted something that was going to be the closest to Navy SEALs as possible.
00:11:01.620
They said Rangers was it, except for Rangers, they don't swim.
00:11:09.880
Yeah, I mean, Ranger is, you know, I know Rangers, and they tell me the story, and it's not a –
00:11:25.440
So sniper school, were there any automatic disqualifications or no?
00:11:32.640
And so if you have color vision and 20-20 vision, if they cannot be corrected, that automatically disqualifies you.
00:11:41.040
I don't think there was anything else as far as being flat-footed.
00:11:46.200
But basically, eyesight was the number one thing that would immediately disqualify you.
00:11:51.120
Did they recruit you to become a sniper, or did you make the ask?
00:11:55.080
I had to ask my platoon, my first, my team leader.
00:11:59.820
Then it went up the chain of command before I could actually become – or put in the paperwork.
00:12:03.740
You have to put in this packet that's signed off by your chain of command.
00:12:10.260
They trust that you'll go and represent well, and you're a team player.
00:12:14.540
Or, you know, all these, you know, little pre-qualifications in this packet that you have to have submitted to sniper school.
00:12:22.760
They only accept so many per year, and that's when the courses start.
00:12:29.300
And, yeah, day one, it's, you know, the first day – I want to take that back.
00:12:35.140
The first day, you can get cut pretty easily where they shoot in.
00:12:39.220
It's called a shoot-in process where they give you a standard AR M4 rifle, iron sights, no scope on it,
00:12:45.900
and you have to be able to shoot a grouping, like five-inch grouping at – I forget how far, 25 meters or something like that.
00:12:54.220
And if you can't, that immediately disqualifies you day one.
00:12:59.840
You know, your bags are not even unpacked, and that can get you disqualified.
00:13:06.780
We had, like, two guys in our class who went in, and literally bags still packed.
00:13:12.480
As soon as we got there, an hour or two, as soon as the class initially started, they were already back home.
00:13:19.440
It's not like – so they're immediately getting – it's not like they're getting rid of 50%, but they're getting rid of the bottom 5%, bottom 10%.
0.71
00:13:30.460
I mean, if you go – I'm assuming – I'm assuming sniper school has to be very different than Ranger or Airborne.
00:13:38.040
Like, there's no screaming because it's more poised.
00:13:45.980
It was a – I want to say laid – a little bit more laid back.
00:13:50.140
There was rarely anybody that yelled, none of the instructors or anything.
00:13:54.300
It was like a personal – it was not like what you expect when you turn on and look at, like, drill sergeants are getting yelled at and stuff like that.
00:14:03.480
It was a really gentleman's course, if you want to call it that.
00:14:08.300
You're your own – you have your own responsibilities.
00:14:13.000
You have to get used to working as one man or two men, very small teams and have a lot of responsibilities.
00:14:18.360
So we had a lot of, you know, leeway when it came to that.
00:14:23.480
The – I guess the hard portion of sniper school that, you know, really stands out is the attention to detail.
00:14:30.740
There is a lot of attention to detail that is, you know, incorporated with sniper school.
00:14:37.500
I would honestly say the shooting portion maybe makes up 20%, 30% of all sniper school.
00:14:46.260
There's eight-hour, 12-hour days of sitting in a classroom, staying awake, watching hours of PowerPoint.
00:14:52.580
Or going out to the field and learning, you know, how to read the wind.
00:14:57.020
Or looking for, you know, a toothpick or a toothbrush in the woods with the binoculars and stuff like that.
00:15:09.140
So finding a toothpick or a toothbrush in the woods, like, you have to find it.
00:15:14.960
So you're literally sitting there and you have to find the toothbrush.
00:15:18.060
Yep, so there's a portion called target detection, and they place out small objects in the field, you know, 100 yards, a couple of hundred yards or however far away in front of you.
00:15:31.440
And you use your naked eyes, binoculars, and your spotting scope to find these 10 small objects.
00:15:38.260
It might be a bullet, a string, a military shoelace, toothbrush, small, small stuff like that.
00:15:47.880
A clear protractor was one I distinctly remember.
00:15:50.760
A clear protractor taped to the side of a building.
00:15:54.560
And what made it stand out were the numbers, like the little tick marks that are not normally on the side of a building.
00:16:01.480
So attention to detail, looking for really small things that don't fit, that was really, really, you know, harped on at Slipper School.
00:16:09.700
Nicholas, when you go to, when I meet a Ranger or a Special Forces or Delta, these are all gun-cold guys.
00:16:17.320
Like, you look at them, you know, like, respect.
00:16:25.820
So, you know, but you can see, like, this makes sense, right?
00:16:30.060
When you went to Sniper School, did you see a commonality amongst the soldiers?
00:16:45.880
Was it a lot of, you know, I'm not a, you know, I'm more like sports.
00:16:49.540
You know, some kids do better at tennis because it's a one-man game or golf or boxing versus teams, 20, 30, 40, 50 people.
00:16:56.980
What sense did you notice amongst the Sniper School?
00:17:01.880
But now looking back at it, that's a really good question.
00:17:05.260
And I would say it's a really, wow, the commonality would be, I would say the loner aspect.
00:17:12.660
Everyone has that, I guess they were the nerds or maybe didn't have that many friends in school.
00:17:18.820
Not because of, it was just they chose to maybe, quieter, more reserved, people who like to think a lot, or people who think more than they talk.
00:17:30.780
You know, I would say that was one of the biggest characteristics of, you could tell a Sniper, if you put him in the crowd of people, you would be able to tell who the Sniper is.
00:17:39.820
They don't look like the chiseled, you know, you know, guy you see on the poster or anything like that.
00:17:45.540
They were just like your average, really, really average, average, average guy.
00:17:55.280
Some guys I looked at and I was just like, I don't know what you're doing here, you know.
00:18:02.660
But there was one guy on my team and I'm not like, we all made fun of him, but he was very, he wasn't, he called, he knew he was not attractive to the eye, you know.
00:18:13.620
And he was just a very average, very below, maybe a little bit below average looking guy, maybe.
00:18:18.920
And, but he was the best shot and he outshot everybody on the team, the best shot to this day.
00:18:26.060
If I had to go up against this guy, I would lose the best, pure talent, best shot I've ever seen in my life.
00:18:32.640
But as far as looks, you would not be able to tell.
00:18:35.780
And he was really, really heavy into like a WWF or WWE.
00:18:46.200
So, you know, did you, did you guys, I'm assuming there's a level of camaraderie build.
00:18:50.980
Is there follow-up till today where you guys keep contact with each other?
00:18:54.080
Is there, is there some kind of a, you know, community of snipers being friends together?
00:19:00.260
I, I talked to my spotter to this day, to, not spotter, my original spotter I've talked to.
00:19:06.900
And I have a friend that was not my spotter, but we were in the same sniper platoon together.
00:19:12.080
We still, we, I mean, hung out for years after we got out of the military.
00:19:16.620
We shot at this little facility, help instruct different military units at a facility that we went to go shoot at at one point in our careers and keep in contact.
00:19:28.460
And as my old team leader who got shot on a mission that I was in, he's a, I think he's a preacher now.
00:19:36.100
I want to say he's a preacher, but we keep in contact here and there on, on Instagram and Facebook and stuff like that.
00:19:42.440
But yeah, I don't think that there's not one guy or one sniper that I don't have contact with, or at least, you know, six degrees of separation somewhere on social media.
00:19:54.460
I bet that makes sense because I mean, how many are there? It's not like it's a community of 300,000 or 600,000 small community.
00:20:01.160
So, and, and to do that, you have to be part of a very elite community to decide to do that.
00:20:07.820
I remember going out there, even just trying to shoot something that was, you know, 200 meters away from you, 100 meters away from you, 300 meters from you.
00:20:15.460
And then you're looking at numbers, you got to be, how do you even do that to go, you know, that far with some of the things, you know, you guys.
00:20:24.720
Is the mindset of, would you consider yourself a superstitious person or no?
00:20:33.900
Would you say that's common amongst your peers or no?
00:20:36.460
I would, I would say so. I think that, oh yeah. Oh yeah.
00:20:41.320
Especially like on the last deployment, there's a big superstitious, I was big into it.
00:20:48.820
It's it's, you're going to get shot. You're going to get wounded or you're going to die.
00:20:53.720
And for me, it legitimately, it legitimately was my worst, scariest deployment.
00:20:58.360
And I noticed that amongst everybody who I saw get out, either they got shot and it was just this thing that happened.
00:21:07.160
And if things would not go right before a mission or something was out of place or something didn't happen as normal.
00:21:15.400
Oh yeah. There's a big superstition amongst that.
00:21:23.780
You know, we kind of weird me out a little bit doing missions on the holiday.
00:21:27.360
I can see that because, you know, there is, there's so many attention, like stuff that has to do with details.
00:21:34.240
Like, look, everything's got to be good for me to feel comfortable to make this.
00:21:40.280
So fast forward to you going on your tours and it's 33 confirmed in four months.
00:21:49.160
What is the difference between your first confirmed versus your 33rd confirmed?
00:21:53.300
What was the difference between Nicholas on his first versus the 33rd?
00:22:02.980
And my first as a sniper, well, I killed 33 as a sniper, as a machine gunner.
00:22:10.360
I would maybe as much as a sniper, maybe a little bit less, but it was a, it was a bit.
00:22:16.040
And the first one as an 18 year old kid, I had a dream about it for many, many years.
00:22:28.100
I think of how close it was like being able to see something and the intent behind it was more personal.
00:22:34.980
So I had the sniper kills set everything apart from any other kill.
00:22:39.620
And every sniper kill that I had was all weird, not weird, but they all felt different.
00:22:48.460
I never, there was nothing that feeling that some people say, oh, you get used to it.
00:22:51.960
I never felt that I never felt used to killing anything.
00:22:56.880
I would have this weird set of emotions that I would go through.
00:23:01.100
And the motto for our sniper community is without warning, without remorse, without warning part,
00:23:10.200
But the remorse part for me personally was every single time I felt some weird way about it.
00:23:15.400
I'm not sure if it, you know, derives from coming from a religious background and,
00:23:18.620
you know, growing up in church and stuff like that.
00:23:23.640
It was a weird experience for me to after the fact, really weird.
00:23:28.380
You're the first person that I've heard say the disposition that you have.
00:23:31.960
It's typically the other way around, which is it's part of my job.
00:23:37.200
And, you know, you know, you know, it's almost like a script that you hear, but you're saying.
00:23:41.160
Did you, when you were active, did you have contact with your parents?
00:23:46.700
So when the first time it happened as a sniper, did you call your mom and dad and try to process
00:23:57.940
I remember going to, I was in Iraq and I went to across the street to this MWR place.
00:24:05.960
Um, but it's the, we had like computers and stuff in there and internet access.
00:24:12.380
Um, we could go in there and go online and make phone calls.
00:24:21.120
And he told me, Hey, don't talk about that stuff.
00:24:26.800
And we never talked about it after anytime after, but it was my very first kill ever,
00:24:33.180
It was like, uh, just eight, a little bit over 18.
00:24:42.160
Second one was to Mosul and third was to Baghdad.
00:24:48.000
MWR United States army families and moral welfare, welfare and recreation programs.
00:24:56.980
So, so, so you call your dad and dad says, Easton, this is not something we talked about.
00:25:01.180
So you're kind of like, okay, I'm going to keep it to myself.
00:25:03.420
And you go back at it and you have in 33 total and each one of them has a different
00:25:10.300
Are you at a point right now where you can live your normal life and it doesn't haunt you
00:25:18.780
Um, I think that maybe over time, I don't think it'd ever go away because it happened.
00:25:24.180
Like there was a point in time where I never wanted to forget any of this stuff.
00:25:28.500
I thought it was, it was just stuck and I was fine with it.
00:25:31.180
It was who I, it made me who I was at that moment, but then it started to like really
00:25:39.000
And that guy did not intermingle with this world, you know, too well.
00:25:44.160
So it took some time and it honestly, legitimately was the birth of my son, uh, four years ago,
00:25:50.320
four years ago was the complete 100% turnaround.
00:25:53.580
You know, from being, I had to be, it was just a weird, weird thing.
00:25:58.120
I, from everything I've ever, ever experienced watching my son being born in the room was
00:26:09.980
It was just really, really intense, really weird and, and scary.
00:26:17.260
That was a different scared though, but it changed me in a good way.
00:26:30.600
It was like, I have to be cool for this guy or different for this guy.
00:26:44.440
Me and my son share the same birthday and weird, weird, weird thing happened.
00:26:49.820
My son was born, well, he had this heart condition.
00:26:55.600
And my wife's sister just lost her baby 12 hours after she was born.
00:27:08.960
And the doctors were going to, you know, induce labor.
00:27:17.880
But when I first met my wife 13 years ago, I told her I wanted to have a child no later than 30.
00:27:34.520
November 28th, 1990 is when I came to America from Germany.
00:27:49.160
And 1990 is when we moved to Florida and America from Germany.
00:27:52.160
Let me tell you, November 28th, 1990 is when I left Germany and I came to America.
00:28:00.440
I was in Germany by a military camp in Erlangen that had a refugee camp.
00:28:08.780
I came to America, landed in New York, ended up in Glendale, California.
00:28:19.720
So November 20th has got a lot of meaning for both of us.
00:28:24.020
And, you know, for me, it's me coming to the States.
00:28:28.060
And you said, when I asked you, I said, tell me about the first versus the last, number
00:28:33.580
And you said, I had some that wasn't even the confirmed snipers.
00:28:52.980
My very, oh, my very first one deployed was the most emotional one.
00:28:59.300
When you said the first confirmed versus the last confirmed, you said the last confirmed
00:29:05.860
It almost like the enemy was somebody that took out a friend or something.
00:29:11.380
I would say it had more maybe along the lines of the mission with where I lost my friend
00:29:17.780
If that's the one that were not my last, killed my last mission, where it changed my life,
00:29:25.080
where I was never, that was my determining factor.
00:29:27.560
I was not going to, you know, reenlist or anything.
00:29:29.500
My last mission, when I almost lost my life, my reconnaissance team pinned down by an enemy
00:29:35.120
sniper and surrounded and watching the guy come in to save our life and watching him die
00:29:40.360
like five minutes after that was when, you know, I think was my determining factor.
00:29:45.220
I don't think any kill actually, you know, different from any other kill.
00:29:58.960
It was a sadness, but not like a sad as in I wanted to cry necessarily.
00:30:04.500
Maybe an emptiness, maybe like it didn't feel good.
00:30:08.960
You know, I don't, I don't, I don't want to say it felt great.
00:30:19.840
So, so your, your MK11 rifle, why the nickname?
00:30:23.480
You know, you put the nickname, the modified version of the SR-25 sniper rifle, nicknamed
00:30:31.560
Listen, my first ever memory of Michael Jackson was sitting on my mom's lap, watching him
00:30:39.220
He was performing and he rips his shirt off on stage.
00:30:42.920
And for some reason, all that, the, the, the fireworks and stuff stuck with me and Michael
00:30:48.960
Jackson fan ever since moonwalking at the age of, you know, five or six.
00:30:53.300
And I love, I love Michael Jackson and had Michael Jackson on, you know, on my playlist,
00:30:59.640
but it derives from this operation we were doing in Iraq and my, uh, this, yeah, we're
00:31:05.820
riding around in strikers and in the striker, it's like a modified, I want to say a mini,
00:31:11.380
if you think of a mini tank, but with wheels, there's eight wheels on it, 40 ton vehicle.
00:31:19.060
There's someone behind me who's like in charge of looking out on top so I can drive.
00:31:24.820
We get into a firefight and this song, uh, on his playlist, the iPod, iPad or iPod, it
00:31:31.200
was at the time we had plugged in into the internal speakers and he had Dirty Diana playing
00:31:36.300
in on the internal speakers during this firefight in Iraq.
00:31:39.320
And that was like my moment, or I guess my moment where I knew that, I don't know, I was
00:31:45.740
going to name something after it, but at the time it wasn't a sniper rifle.
00:31:48.700
It was just, I love Michael Jackson, but when I got my rifle in battalion, I had to name
00:31:53.700
it Dirty Diana just out of remembrance for, you know, Michael Jackson.
00:32:08.960
And I said, that's a very unique name to give your rifle.
00:32:11.440
So, you know, let's go to a different direction with sniper.
00:32:14.720
So did you, did you study, like, were you one to study who's the greatest sniper of all
00:32:29.500
I was obsessed to the point my dad took my books, my library books away.
00:32:36.300
I had to be seventh or eighth grade at the time.
00:32:38.900
I was getting in trouble in school from, I would go to the library and either if I had
00:32:44.680
a library card or I would steal some books and check out a few other ones.
00:32:49.220
But all the military books that revolved around sniping and all the Vietnam special operation
00:32:59.100
And I learned Jesse Ventura was a Navy SEAL from, like, one of these books.
00:33:03.160
And one of my idols at the time was Carlos Hathcock, a Marine sniper.
00:33:10.160
And I had VHS tapes that I would come home after school and watch and was consuming up
00:33:14.840
way too much of my time, interfering with schoolwork and got in trouble for it.
00:33:21.140
And I think that to this day that he is the best hands down sniper of all time, regardless
00:33:27.680
But Carlos Hathcock, in my opinion, is the top of the top when it comes to snipers.
00:33:38.600
His ingenuity and the mission that sets him apart from all, and I idolized him for it,
00:33:44.720
even on my first reconnaissance mission, was when he went in to go take out the Viet Cong
0.68
00:33:51.460
He stalked in, like, 1,000 yards on his stomach, surrounded by himself.
00:33:55.700
It was basically a suicide mission, and took out a commander, a Vietnamese commander, then
00:34:01.480
had to crawl back out while being chased by a whole brigade or something like that from
00:34:05.500
enemy troops, getting bit by bugs and putting grass and stuff through the back of his, the
00:34:12.160
slits in the back of his uniform to essentially make a ghillie suit.
00:34:15.720
His ingenuity was, I think, would set him apart for me.
00:34:18.600
And when he attached the unertal scope to the Madu's .50-cal machine gun and sniped someone
00:34:27.220
off of a bike, it was like 1.2 miles away, I think.
00:34:31.800
And that was where we get the Barrett sniper rifle from, to this day, the semi-automatic.
00:34:36.780
He was like the person who invented or threw the theory out there to put a scope on a .50-cal
00:34:47.060
But that's what stood out in his persona about him.
00:34:50.360
He was just a white feather, his persona, and I don't know, he's a sniper god-like figure
00:34:57.920
Yeah, so I looked up a few things to see kind of what the numbers look like.
00:35:01.600
So Craig Harrison, British sniper, killed a Taliban fighter 2,475 meters away.
00:35:10.040
Like, and then another Canadian, I couldn't find out what the name was.
00:35:14.200
I kept looking to see what's, they won't release his name.
00:35:21.020
Yeah, the second one is 3,540 meters, which is over two miles.
00:35:28.660
And they're not disclosing the name for whatever reason.
00:35:31.240
So if you can kind of put us, give us some perspective.
00:35:40.080
My furthest shot is 2,022 meters on a steel target.
00:35:46.940
That took the bullet a few seconds to get there.
00:35:51.300
Let's say, so 1.2 miles, well, 2,022 meters, let's say it's 1.1, 1.2 miles.
00:35:58.220
You're looking at flight time, five, six seconds.
00:36:05.820
Five, six seconds of flight time, three, four, five.
00:36:14.600
With the average sniper rifle, 7.62, that would take the bullet 1.7 seconds to get there.
00:36:23.980
So amplify that over time to, let's say, 2,000, you have to factor in the fact that the bullet is slowing down now, too.
00:36:31.980
So that 1.2 seconds or two seconds at 1,000 meters doubled, it's like four or five seconds.
00:36:43.120
I would never attempt a shot like that just because what you're looking at, the scope, you would, that's phenomenal.
00:36:50.460
Like, you're not really looking at anything at that point.
00:36:53.200
Like, imagine looking at the crosshair and the scope, aiming at a crosshair.
00:36:58.000
That's what I, that's what that would look like.
00:37:00.460
It's, to get to that, that is a lot of, that's confidence, confidence and time, confidence.
00:37:11.040
Because is there a little bit of assumption and luck behind it?
00:37:13.600
I would say a lot of luck, but confidence to even attempt to take that shot.
00:37:19.580
I don't think I would have, I would, I know who I am.
00:37:28.580
Why do you say you would never attempt that shot?
00:37:30.020
I'm not, I've never even done math out to that point.
00:37:38.020
I don't even, I just wouldn't even do, I'm not comfortable.
00:37:41.760
I know for a fact, if I did hit, I know it would be 100% luck.
00:37:49.340
I would pull the trigger if I would take the shot, but if I hit him, pure luck.
00:37:53.680
I would never be able to do that one more time or ever again.
00:38:02.220
I mean, 2,200 meters is not like it's, I mean, when I, when I earlier said 100, 200, 300 meters,
00:38:08.600
I meant to say 100, 200, 300 yards, because there's a big difference between, but 2,200 meters?
00:38:15.140
I would say a mile shot, maybe not the average, but well, of course not, but a mile to a sniper
00:38:29.260
My furthest shot on a human target was half mile, but on a steel target, 2,022 meters,
00:38:36.920
That took two shots within three shots to get.
0.94
00:38:43.140
That is, you're looking at a crosshair through a crosshair, or aiming at a crosshair with
00:38:50.380
Looking at a mile away at a human size target is, I'm trying to make a comparison to what
00:38:57.660
It's something very, if you stood across your standard size room and maybe looked at the
00:39:03.480
little hole inside of the wall socket, that's probably from maybe 30 feet away, that's what
00:39:17.420
I mean, what your, your eyes, is it then more on your vision?
00:39:24.280
Is it then more on how you set up your, is it then more on your, you know, breathing?
00:39:31.200
What, what, what is, like, you know, in bodybuilding, they say it's diet, then it's how you lift
00:39:36.160
weights, then it's cardio, let's just say, right?
00:39:49.520
I would say the ability to calm, no, the ability to understand nature.
00:39:57.400
If you don't understand wind, or you don't understand the humidity, how the temperature
00:40:02.500
affects the bullet, if you don't have a really, really good grasp on that, then you won't
00:40:10.680
The wind could literally, you won't, you could barely feel, feel the wind, but at a
00:40:17.940
So you have to have a really, really, really good grasp.
00:40:24.720
Once you understand nature, then that converts to math.
00:40:31.920
Then everything after that, you just pull the trigger.
00:40:34.180
You just lay behind the gun, a slab of meat behind the gun is what we refer, or refer to
00:41:04.220
I'm completely terrible at math, but it was not the type of math that I had no real, I
00:41:10.920
guess, real intention to even, it didn't excite me.
00:41:14.220
But after learning what you could do with math applied to a bullet, like the Pythagoras
00:41:19.580
or the Pythagoras theorem are the, what's another equation?
00:41:23.960
A simple equation, like A, what is it, A squared plus B squared equals C squared.
00:41:32.420
If I wanted to shoot off of a rooftop, that's the exact, or somewhat the exact equation I
00:41:36.660
would use for that, multiplied by cosines and stuff.
00:41:40.060
But you find out a lot about how to hit a target by using math.
00:41:46.000
Everything inside the scope is all like mil radian anyways.
00:41:48.940
So to find the distance to a target, you can use your scope reticle and the little dots
00:41:54.960
in there represent measurements, units of measurement.
00:41:58.680
And that's how I would figure out how far away a target is by looking at the size of a target
00:42:03.460
with these little dots in there, multiplied by a number, a constant number, depending on
00:42:09.240
the size of the target, divided by how many dots I see in my scope.
00:42:16.220
Unbelievable to be thinking about how math, maybe that's another commonality amongst the
00:42:20.220
guys is that you have to be somewhat good at numbers to be able to do what you guys do.
00:42:25.720
And I found they're good at working stuff out in their head a lot.
00:42:31.620
Maybe that's why I think the guys are quiet the way they are.
00:42:35.240
There's a lot of talkative stuff, but everything happens up here.
00:42:45.600
So do you still, do you still carry, you know, do you still have guns and you go shooting
00:42:53.460
Literally an hour and a half before I started this interview, I was at the range.
00:43:06.200
I write other people's books and I just now have enough time to where I can work on
00:43:13.500
Not so much like military, but you know, the things that used to excite me as a kid, you
00:43:18.180
know, like fiction or, you know, science fiction and stuff like that.
00:43:23.040
And history and, you know, books that may not pertain so much towards combat, you know,
00:43:31.060
I tell you, you got an impressive resume for a guy that had a 1.7 GPA becomes a sniper when
00:43:37.320
And then after leaving the army becomes an author that needs to write.
00:43:41.800
So, so whatever that 1.8 GPA was, maybe not a lot of accuracy behind it.
00:43:46.360
Uh, uh, final question here about, uh, uh, your four-year-old son one day comes up to you.
00:43:56.080
Do you encourage him or discourage him or let him do whatever he wants to do?
00:43:58.700
I would tell him, yes, only under one condition.
00:44:04.960
You can be the precision shooters in the Olympics.
00:44:08.000
Those, the, the ones that, that ski are, they cross country ski and then they shoot.
00:44:14.000
I would train him, uh, invest all the time I ever needed if he only did that, but to take
00:44:29.180
I've changed after, I'm telling you, I've changed my views on a lot.
00:44:33.480
Like there was a point in my life where I lost spirituality.
00:44:38.500
And having the birth of him and, and getting, seeing things differently and understanding
00:44:44.720
things differently, getting back into spirituality and the understanding of how things work and
00:44:51.940
I just don't, I don't see the need to want to put that if he were to take another life
00:44:58.980
and how it would affect him potentially after the fact, you know, I was able to, I feel
00:45:03.120
that I'm able to, or was able to recoup or recover from the, the, the mental aspect
00:45:12.160
And I just wouldn't want that burden to be on anybody, you know, let alone my son.
00:45:18.760
I think that there's a time like for, for, for sport.
00:45:24.660
And if it was a last resort defending my family, but to, to take life, it's, it's weird.
00:45:33.120
I think we should step away from killing it for a little bit and love, love everybody for,
00:45:40.240
I, I, I think America definitely needs to work on that a little bit the next few years.
00:45:47.460
We need to maybe listen to a little bit more Bob Marley and a little bit more EZE or maybe
00:45:54.400
get off a little bit of Tupac for a couple of years.
00:46:01.620
Well, I, I, I know you're a big fan of San Antonio.
00:46:03.820
It sounds like you're a diehard San Antonio guy yourself.
00:46:16.720
But anyways, man, I really enjoyed talking to you.
00:46:25.680
What an incredible story for people that are watching this.
00:46:27.820
I know you got another, uh, real cool, uh, skit that you did with inside insider where
00:46:52.020
Wouldn't recommend his four-year-old son to be a sniper if he wanted to be one.
00:46:55.360
Every single one of the confirmed messed with his head a little bit up until the kid was
00:47:01.240
Just a very genuine guy that you could tell he was thinking about the right answer, the
00:47:07.760
most accurate answer to give during the interview.
00:47:14.000
And if you enjoyed this interview, I think you will also enjoy the interview with Taya Kyle,
00:47:17.980
who was the wife of Chris Kyle, the American sniper played by Bradley Cooper.
00:47:22.360
If you've never watched that one, it's a very, very different angle.