"He's the deadliest weapon on the battlefield-- the sniper." "Once you've hunted man, nothing else matters." "There is nowhere to hide." "If we are looking at you, and you have deemed yourself a bad guy, we're going to be there to kill you." "From Vietnam to the longest kill shot in history..." "They thought that day was their lucky day, but it wasn't." "The world's most extreme shots... executed by men who live the sniper's creed: "One shot..." "One kill."" "Being a sniper in combat is a very radical situation." "You got to understand what you're doing." "You're hunting other human beings." "When you're looking through that scope and you take a target out, the immediate effect it has on those around them-- their whole agenda is now stopped." "Now it's my agenda." "I own them." "The hunting ground:" "Ramadi, Iraq, 2005." "When we first rolled into Ramadi, the IED rate was approximately 95 to a hundred IEDs a week." "Our-our mission was to just find people emplacing IEDs and to take them out." "GIs fighting in Iraq have a motto:" "Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet." "If we are looking at you, and you have deemed yourself a bad guy, we're going to be there to kill you." "The sniper first Sergeant James Gilliland." "Longest kill shot with a 7.62 caliber rifle." "Seven-tenths of a mile." "Once the individual takes that step and crosses the line," "then he comes into our world." "Um, he becomes, um, a target." "Gilliland and Shadow Team, a ten-man Army sniper unit, watch insurgent activity from hides throughout the city." "They rack up 276 kills in six months." "One of the biggest techniques that we use to find where our next targets were going to be is directly related to deer hunting or turkey hunting." "We'd observe an area, just like a lot of hunters do in pre-season, take mental pictures of what you're seeing, what you can and can't see from what angles." "Uh, you start learning the players, just like a hunter would learn, you know, what animals are in his hunting area." "You watch everything and you just kind of remember it in your head." "We knew pretty much everyone in the town and for some reason, a lot of them would wear masks, which was a big giveaway." "I don't know why they would even do that." "Yeah, you see a guy in a ski mask in Iraq, that's a bad guy." "Shadow Team sets up its main hide on the rooftop of the O.P. Hotel, overlooking Route Michigan, the major roadway through Ramadi." "It was the tallest building in the city, so obviously, we had 360-degree observation." "We were pretty much on the roof in a..." "what we called a crow's nest." "Gilliland preaches two things to his team:" "multiple weapon engagements and body shots... aka "center mass holds."" "Basically, center mass is just under the breastplate." "It would not only give you a larger target surface to hit, but also it could be used as, uh, desensitizing, um, in a way that you're not looking at the individual." "Instead of picking out a facial feature to engage, you are picking out a shirt button." "In the sniper game," "everybody wants to think that the head shot is the way to go." "I wanted to get away from that, especially in that environment." "Uh, there were multiple targets regularly, and if you wasted the time to take two well-aimed head shots, you could've taken five body shots and then come back and either captured or reengaged and killed the enemy." "We were probably engaging up to three or four targets a day, sometimes more." "We moved them back further and further into a point where they wouldn't do anything within 800 meters of us because they were scared of us." "We heard many times--naswas Iraqi for "sniper."" "And we'd hear over the intercoms of the mosques and stuff." "Always just warning them that we were out there, which helped us because, honestly, fear is a big factor." "Over six months, Shadow Team clears their sector of IEDs," "but the real danger will come from the rooftops." "We were overwatching one of the line companies." "They were doing a cordoned search in the industrial areas to the north side of the O.P." "A common practice for a lot of units to get the best observation they can get, they would go to the rooftops of buildings." "And when you do that, you skyline yourself." "Just like you can see a single tree on a mountain if it sticks up above the mountain." "And that's essentially what these guys were doing." "They were making targets of themselves." "I called and I was like, "Hey, you need to get off that roof right now." "And you know, lo and behold, a few minutes would go by and he'd be standing up again with a couple of the other guys." "I called back down there and was like," ""Hey, you know, you need to tell Jason he needs to get back down." "Everybody can see him." "If I can see him where I'm at, everybody else can see him." "When I saw this going on for the third time, I picked the radio up." "Right as I was going to go to key it to tell him," ""Hey, you need to get those guys down one more time..." "" Right before I pushed the the talk button... is when I saw him jerk and he fell." "Man down!" "We're being shot at from the hospital!" "We were providing overwatch and then you hear over the radio, "Man down." "omeone just got shot by an enemy sniper." "So we are just glued to the scopes, looking everywhere, trying to find this sniper." "So, we start looking at the hospital and Sergeant Gilliland saw the sniper in the window on one of the top floors." "I noticed on the fourth floor, there was a single individual standing in a bay window." "I could clearly make out a longer barrel Kalashnikov- type rifle." "We knew that from our building to that hospital was 1,250 meters or seven-tenths of a mile from our observation post." "The rifle I had in front of me was a standard-issue M24 sniper rifle." "The enemy sniper is 1,367 yards away." "The distance of 13 1/2 football fields-- nearly 500 yards beyond the maximum effective range of Gilliland's M24." "The perfect intent was not to make a one-round clean shot." "It was to, at that distance, suppress the target." "The M24 has a loopholed N3 Alpha scope, and that's a fixed-in power with mil-dots and a bullet-drop compensator." "You correlate the number to the amount of hundreds of yards that you're going to shoot." "I turned the turret to ten to shoot for a thousand yards." "A quick calculation, I estimated the bullet drop, decided that I needed to hold about three mils over the target to compensate for the drop." "At 1,367 yards, each mil-dot represents four feet." "The great distance and severe drop of the bullet, due to gravity and drag, means Gilliland must aim 12 feet above the target." "And also, in doing that, had to allow for the wind, which will push the round, as well as spin drift." "As the round is flying through the air and spinning, the force that is caused by the actual spin will cause it to rotate up and away from the center line of the bore, much like a top." "It would eventually start moving in the direction of the the spin." "It's the same way for the actual bullet." "It's measured and it's pretty constant, so you can use a formula to account for that." "Gilliland aims or "holds off" eight feet left of the target to compensate for a light wind and spin drift." "This compensation is known as "Kentucky windage."" "The crosshairs were completely off-target." "Once I was comfortable with where my sight was," "I just squeezed the round off." "I noticed, the target grimace and then, he fell back and, didn't see him come back up again." "After the guy went down," "I turned around and looked at my spotter," "I said, "Did you (beep) see that?" The report came back." "There was a single individual, male, on the fourth floor balcony with a single gunshot wound to the center of the chest." "And the angle was pretty, pretty severe." "So, the bullet actually entered, in one part and stopped somewhere inside the individual's body." "There's, there's so many factors to a shot like that." "And over a distance like that, it had to fall just perfect." "It was a one-in-a-million shot." "Gilliland's kill shot at seven-tenths of a mile with his M24 sniper rifle rewrites the record books for 7.62-caliber rifles." "In all honesty, I wasn't trying to necessarily engage the individual as much as I was trying to get around close enough to him to get him out of the window." "I wanted to stop him from engaging, you know, our guys." "but he got what he got." "Vietnam, 1969." "A Marine sniper faces hundreds of enemy soldiers less than 100 yards away." "I've got the reticle right on his forehead, and then as fast as I can move from one to the next, it was just, pow, pow, pow!" "At 16 different battles at 16 different positions, and you can't miss..." "Or you're dead." "Precision Weapons Section - Quantico, Virginia." "The life of the Marine sniper rifle begins here." "This is the M40X sniper rifle and this is basically the father to-- the M40A3 is the modern sniper rifles that we use today." "Much more difficult to shoot with this weapon system and that's one of the reasons those guys like" "Chuck Mawhinney or such legends, they were given just the basic hunting rifle and... unbelievable, you know, the devastation that they were able to inflict." "On target." "Fire when ready." "Say good night, fella." "From the time I touched that Remington 700," "I was in love with it and I wanted to be a sniper." "I'm gonna hunt something that's gonna hunt me back." "I love that" "The sniper, Chuck Mawhinney." "Most confirmed kills in Marine Corps history." "Mawhinney's hunting ground:" "the Arizona Territory, South Vietnam." "Nicknamed for its Wild West- style firefights." "The environment is target-rich." "That was a really hot area." "I mean, there was a lot of things going on." "It was easy to hide, it was easy to move through, as far as a sniper, you couldn't have found a better area." "Mawhinney's primary weapon:" "the M40 sniper rifle, deadly up to 1,094 yards-- the distance of 11 football fields." "You hit somebody out there at that distance," "It got towards the end, we didn't see a lot of people standing around out in the open anymore through long distances." "Valentine's Day, 1969." "Mawhinney is on a collision course with hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers." "And there was a monsoon coming in." "We had a large NVA force reported by aircraft moving towards our position and they said," ""I can't get air support for you because of the monsoon." "I talked with our CO about what was going on and I said," ""I would like to take the M14, the Starlight, my partner and go down and watch that river this evening and see if they try to cross it." We loaded up our gear and headed down." "Most sniper engagements are single targets at 300 to 1,000 yards." "Mawhinney faces the possibility of multiple targets within 100 yards of his position." "Our range is our safety, our stand off." "I can shoot you at 1,000 yards, you can't even see me at 1,000 yards." "But you're only 20, 30 yards away from me, you not only can see me, you can hear me, you can smell me and the enemy can taste you." "Mawhinney swaps his trusty bolt action M40 for his secondary weapon:" "a semiautomatic M14." "I knew that I had to do it as fast as I could." "The longer time I took was more time for them to start figuring out where we were," "what was going on..." "The M14, you put a magazine in, it's a semiautomatic weapon." "So, it automatically feeds." "That's less time for getting a new round in the chamber ready to fire." "Night falls." "Mawhinney and his spotter conceal themselves at their final firing position or "FFP."" "Their hide overlooks the shallowest part of the river-- the most likely crossing point." "When you're setting up a hide, you're obviously picking a place where you're gonna work from." "What I wanna do is, I want a good view of where I want to shoot at, and I want a good escape and evasion route." "he river runs from 9:00 to 3:00, providing a natural barrier between Mawhinney and the enemy." "A small mudbank at 12:00 offers protection from small arms fire, but allows a clear field of view." "Brush and foliage from 3:00 to 9:00 provide concealment." "Mawhinney's spotter is responsible for security in this sector." "If the mission is compromised, the Marines' escape route is at 5:00." "Mawhinney's eye:" "An AN/PVS-2 Starlight Scope." "A passive night vision system activated by ambient light." "Everything's in a real green tint through the Starlight and light things will show up brighter than others." "Like a face and skin and hands, it really lights up through the scope." "You gotta have some kind of external light for the Starlight to work." "If it's just pitch, pitch black, you can't see anything." "Mawhinney scans the river for any sign of the enemy." "So we sit through that night for a long time and about a half hour later we got some movement on the other side." "Somebody gets in the river and they start coming across, walking right straight at us." "Rifle's loaded, it's ready to go." "He's close enough to me and I hear water dripping off of him." "There's no way I can let him get between me and the company and that elephant grass 'cause we're gonna have a mess." "I've got the safety off and I'm putting pressure on the trigger." "I've got the reticle right in the middle of his face and I'm just getting ready to dispatch him." "And then pretty soon he retreats back in the river and goes back on to the other side." "And I told my partner, "This might really get interesting."" "Mawhinney waits for the NVA to appear." "He mentally visualizes his field of fire." "The Kill Zone is roughly the length of one football field." "You try to basically play the game before it comes to you." "You're anticipating what can happen and you're doing your strategy" " you know-- "What am I gonna do if they go here?" "How can I funnel them here?" "What do I need to do to put them in the disposition where I can eliminate the targets?"" "I had already pictured in my mind what was gonna take place." "So, when the actual targets actually show up, it's not something new." "Now you don't have to think about all that." "It's muscle memory, you've already built it in there." "Mawhinney assigns distances to his closest and farthest shots." "You're in a position where you don't have time to do an equation or get a proper range, then it's range guesstimation." "Chuck was not sitting there and doing calculations." "This was basically "swagging" it." "We call it a "scientific wild-ass guess -- a swag."" "Mawhinney dials in or "dopes his scope" for 50 yards: point of impact." "Maybe 45 minutes to an hour later, here they come." "He's out in the middle of nowhere by himself." "He's got his friendly forces to his rear and the enemy to his front, so he's in the middle." "If they rush and get across the river, he has very little chance of escaping and evading." "Imagine what they would do to a sniper if they caught him." "That would be torture for... forever." "If the situation came to the point that I knew we didn't have a chance, they were coming in on us, there was no way I was gonna be taken alive.?" "South Vietnam, Valentine's Day, 1969" "Marine sniper Chuck Mawhinney and his spotter set up an ambush along the Phu Bon Song River." "Less than 100 yards away, an NVA battalion heads straight for them." "I was never a real, real religious man, but when you're laying there and and there's just two of you, you can get more religious than you ever thought you could be." "So I wait until the first guy gets up about, just about knee-deep in the water." "I've got the reticule right on his forehead." "Just as he gets up, I pull the trigger." "And he hits, goes down." "And then as fast as I can move from one to the next, it was just pow, pow, pow!" "They don't know what to do and they don't know what's happening." "They just froze in the river." "And I'm just going from one to the next to the next to the next." "And you can see the hats fly up, bodies start going down the river." "Well, I shot 16 times." "16 went down the river." "Mawhinney stops the enemy, but he violates the sniper's cardinal rule:" "never fire more than two shots from a single position." "The hunter is now the hunted." "That's a lot of shooting at night, which tells everybody where you're at." "You could hear rounds coming our direction." "I tell my partner, "It's time to get out of here." So we beat feet back." "16 shots, 30 seconds." "Mawhinney vanishes into the jungle." "So many things go into making just one shot." "It's like its own little symphony." "That night, right there and then, Chuck was flawless." "He was a symphony." "How did Mawhinney stop an enemy force that outnumbered him by hundreds?" "It all starts with the Starlight scope, a crude early version of night vision technology." "The Starlight scope is like watching the old fuzzy TV with the bunny ears." "You have to, like, shake it six times just to get the channel to go in, and five seconds later it's out of focus again." "Where the AN PVS-10, our new night scopes, is like turning on HDTV." "So your targets aren't that easily defined." "Which is another thing that makes it incredible the amount of people he was able to put down." "With the overcast and what little bit of light we did have through that storm, at 50-60 meters, it was really getting really hard to see." "There were 16 head shots 'cause that's all I really had to shoot at." "The average human being is 36 inches from the waist up." "But Mawhinney can only see the enemy's head through his scope, reducing the target to a mere ten inches." "He's shooting at a relatively close range for a sniper, but when you throw in the fact that it's at night and these aren't stationary targets, they're moving." "He's got to find that ten inches as it moves from left to right, up and down." "And then he has to do the same thing over again, 16 different times." "So it's 16 different battles and 16 different positions and you can't miss or you're dead." "Mawhinney's M14 is in semiautomatic mode." "He hits a target every 1.9 seconds." "Prior planning prevents piss-poor performance." "If he decided to take out the Remington that night, you would have never been talking about Chuck right now 'cause he probably would have been killed." "The proximity of the target's very important to us." "That night, when he had that many people within a hundred yards, the choice that he had in his hand was the right choice." "Semi-automatic, he could fire a shot every two seconds, not reload the weapon and get the most firepower down accurately as he could in that short amount of time." "The bolt-action M40 has a five-round magazine." "The M14 is semi-automatic and holds 20 rounds." "More rounds downrange faster mean more dead enemy soldiers." "A lot of people who are operators explain something called "violence of action."" "Massive firepower, you versus me," "I'm gonna put you down with massive firepower at a closer range." "What Chuck faced that night, at that range, he had to put 'em down fast." "That's why you start it near to far." "You don't hit somebody at a hundred yards and work up to the guy close to you, because by then he'd be on you." "So you put 'em down near to far like dominoes falling." "And, of course, they all became good swimmers down the river that night." "Violence of action is a good practice to have." "Each round Mawhinney fires leaves the muzzle at 2,800 feet per second, more than twice the speed of sound." "The bullet rotates at approximately 200,000 revolutions per minute, propelling it into the target in less than half a second." "The enemy is dead before he hears the gunshot." "I was in such a zone." "I would look through the rifle, but I'm the bullet." "Where do I got to hold this rifle to get me where I want to go?" "That was the only thing that was in my mind at that time." "All of this happens all at once, and it just becomes natural." "Marine Scout Sniper School, Quantico, Virginia." "Home to some of the top snipers in the world." "Today, one of them will try to duplicate Chuck Mawhinney's 16 hits in 30 seconds." "This is a range called Range 305." "Put the balloons up, obviously, because a shot, balloon busts, the guy is dead." "It simulates this soldier's head that Chuck had to hit." "A human head is ten inches long arms above their heads with their AK-47s, whatever they're carrying." "So... and they're wading through the water." "So, they would probably approach in a staggered column about ten feet apart." "So they had to be close enough they still can see each other and give hand-arm signals, but far enough that a machine gun won't take the whole gang out." "According to Chuck Mawhinney, in around 30 seconds, he shot 16 times." "After 30 seconds, there was 16 new human buoys going down the river." "With this modern-era weapon, semiautomatic 7.62 with this awesome scope, we're going to see if he can simulate that." "I give the command "up," engage the first target, and you'll have 30 seconds to engage 16 shots, 16 targets." "Shooter, ready." "Stand by." "Up!" "Cease fire." "15 shots, 15 kills-- 25 seconds." "The only surviving target:" "A purple balloon hidden by a berm." "The lavender balloon was actually a friendly." "He knew that and left him alone." "White nearly matches Mawhinney shopshooting." "But at far different circumstances." "That's just an amazing feat that Chuck did, 'cause these targets were not moving." "I knew where they were." "I didn't have guns pointed at me." "I wasn't laying there in the middle of the night." "And I had the Gout (sp?" ") sniper dayscope on there" "instead of a fuzzy starlight scope at night, so that's just utterly amazing that he was able to do that." "That night, Chuck said, "You know what?" "I own this river." "You're not crossing it."" "February 14th, 1969." "Think about St. Valentine's Day." "Yeah." "My little St. Valentine Day massacre present to the NVA." "Chuck Mawhinney is in Vietnam for 16 months." "He racks up 103 kills with 216 probables, giving him the most confirmed kills in Marine Corps history." "People have asked me if I had nightmares about Vietnam." "Yeah, I have, but never because of a hit." "I see a VC walking across the paddy -- he's about 300 meters from me-- and I got, like, a 19-inch hold." "I put it exactly where it should be, squeezed the rifle off." "And he turned around and looked at me." "And that look I'll never forget." "He just glared at me." "The look in the face never went away." "I can't..." "I can't see anybody I shot, but I can see him." "Now I have to think the rest of my life," ""Who'd he kill?" That's the one that haunts me." "35 years later, another sniper fights for his life in one of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history-- Fallujah." "Snipers are a force multiplier." "You can control an area with just you and your spotter." "Our shot-to-hit ratio is amazing." "Basically, it's 1.3 rounds per kill." "The sniper's main weapon is his ability to induce fear in the enemy, across a much wider group of men than maybe the one person he's just taken down." "That's a hell of a weapons system." "Fallujah, 2004." "The bloodiest battle of the year-old Iraq War is about to erupt." "Four U.S. security contractors are ambushed and mutilated." "Revenge is swift." "The Marines launch Operation Vigilant Resolve." "Our captain stood up on a vehicle, and he says, "Marines, this is our Tarawa... this is our Okinawa, this is our Khe Sanh, this is our time." "May the dogs of Fallujah eat hearty off... our dead enemy." "We're gonna take that city on." "I didn't care if it was the second coming of Christ," "Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, it didn't matter." "If they were posing a threat to my fellow Marines, I was gonna take 'em out." " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " "In the fiercest urban combat since Vietnam, the 21-year-old Marine is the only sniper attached to Echo Company." "It's one man against thousands." "The city was just like the Wild West." "We were vastly outnumbered." "If you mess up as a Marine sniper, you're gonna be on the front page of the news, because you're gonna be killed." "Place's mission-- provide cover for the Marines on the ground and take out enemy fighters and RPG teams." "He is at the tip of the spear." "The weapon:" "The m40a3 marine sniper rifle." "The M40A3's NATO round is devastating." "At a thousand yards, the bullet has more kinetic energy than a .357 fired at point-blank range." "In two words..." ""stopping power."" "Being a hunter of gunmen, we use weapons that are built and made to hunt people." "This is the same type of rifle that I used when I was in Fallujah." "It's the Marine Corp's M40A3 sniper rifle." "It was a Unertl scope, ten-power fixed." "Max effective range is a thousand yards." "Place sets up his hide, or final firing position, in a prime location-- a three-story building overlooking a long roadway." "They had to move across that main road to get to hides and weapons systems that were on the north side of the road," "and when they did that, they had to make a dash for their life." "That was where you were gonna make your money." "Place conceals his location by firing through loopholes, a key tactic in urban sniping." "There was about a five-foot wall on top of the roof, and we'd knocked out little holes that were about half the size of a basketball." "Then we'd move back about ten yards and set up a shooting position that gave us access to the vantage point of that road." "The insurgents, they would have to line up directly in my sights to take a shot," "which I felt very comfortable in that aspect." "The only thing that they had an advantage on us at that time was, because there was no roof on top, they would just start dropping mortars." "So you just kind of hope one doesn't have your name on it." "Place and his spotter "range the kill zone,"" "assigning distances to prominent landmarks and terrain features." "One of the first things you do when you get into a hide sight is you start making a range card, and really milling out targets and things that you know can provide you with yardage up and down the street." "Blown-up building on the left is at 525, or the shot-up car's at 300, so on and so forth." "Place's spotter I.D.'s targets and their their distance." "You come up with some type of language between you and your spotter where you can communicate yards." "You can put it in sectors, you can use sports theory" " left field, center field-- to give you an idea of where the target's located." "But for us, it was kind of one-dimensional, straight down an alleyway." "And we could just use yard markers at that point." "The targets that it presented was a sniper's dream world." "The kill zone is 880 yards long." "The range I had my sniper rifle set on was 550 yards." "It was kind of the center of our kill zone." "When you first look down the scope, you can't avoid the fact that it is a human being on the other end of that." "And that's when your heart starts to race, and you kind of get what they call buck fever." "And you have to calm that down and make sure that you're going through your fundamentals of marksmanship." "We were always taught take three big breaths and exhale." "You've exhaled all the air out of your lungs and you're not thinking about breathing at that point," "that's when you're the most relaxed." "And that's going to keep the most stability in your shooting platform." "The trigger pull on most sniper rifles is about two-and-a-half pounds." "So as long as you're consistent with applying that same point of pressure on your finger on that trigger, you're going to be accurate." "I shot so much that I started getting blisters." "Place owns the kill zone." "But a missed shot could mean more Marines die on the ground." "He stays on the scope around the clock." "They say to only be on a scope for about 30 to 45 minutes at a time and then rest your eyes." "But when you're in Iraq looking down a scope," "it almost becomes something of obsession." "You won't come off the scope." "And you try to get whatever sleep you can get." "Anytime you close your eyes, you have a crosshair," "which is kind of burned in to your eyeball" "Place's kills mount-- 12 dead." "But he faces an enemy hell-bent on destroying him and his fellow Marines." "The insurgents started counterattacking about twice a day." "They're very exposed when they're attacking because they try to take up positions they feel like are safe to the Marines on the ground, and that exposes them." "Place's top priority: taking out insurgent RPG gunners." "They got comfortable with where they shot the RPGs from, and we picked up on a lot of targets from the back blast of those rockets." "They would shoot from the same spot, and that was a bad decision on their part." "Place uses the "Ambush Method."" "And there's two ways of engaging a target as a sniper." "You can track it, which means you put your crosshairs on the target and you follow it." "And you use a proper lead and you shoot it or you can ambush it" " meaning you put your scope out in the direction the target's walking, and as the target comes into your scope, you fire at the prescribed dope on the weapon." ""Kill one man, terrorize a thousand."" "Place and his M40A3 push RPG teams out beyond their effective range." "He tightens his grip on the kill zone with a single, devastating kill shot." "That particular target was right at 515 yards." "Place must thread the needle, putting a single round inside" "a ten-inch target from five football fields away." "And I just said, "I got him."" "I held right at the upper throat and fired." "And that hit right in the lower lip, at the jaw, went through his face and out the back of his head." "That was my first clean kill shot." "It's instantaneous incapacitation." "It's just "cease to exist." No flinching, no nerve endings, it's over." "You aim for what they call "the Fatal T," and it's to aim for brain's stem base clean." "If you can hit that, he's going to die before he hits the ground." "It's going to cut off all signals to the body." "I'd had over 19 kills in that area." "The dead bodies would lay out in the street, and there's a lot of wild dogs and they would feed on the bodies." "And that had a devastating affect, I'm sure, to the insurgents, seeing their friends laying out in the street getting chewed on by a dog." "When I first arrived, someone said," ""Hey, First Sarge, come take a look at this."" "And I looked through his loophole and I saw eight bodies" " dead bodies of our enemy-- that, uh, whatever they're trying to do wasn't working and, uh, looking back at Corporal Place, he just kind of smiled and said," ""Just doing my job." People say snipers are a combat multiplier." "He owned that whole area." "19 kills." "Place's sharpshooting allows Marines to push further into the city." "But the battle still rages." "His most difficult and deadly shot is yet to come." "Long before the sniper pulls the trigger on the battlefield, he must master the art of the kill shot on a firing range." "We'd qualify on these inanimate pieces of paper." "Everyone that's a human being moves." "It's hard enough to hit somebody when he's like this." "No one's gonna be like this for you and say, "Go ahead."" "That's why we just focus on the core, right here, and to put him down." "You want to get that perfect shot, but if you can hit anywhere in the vital organs, it's gonna be a kill shot." "Fallujah, 2004." "The sniper:" "Ethan place." "Four days, 19 kills." "Dead bodies litter the street, a warning to insurgents: you could be next." "The ammo:62 Nato rounds, a deadly combination of accuracy and stopping power." "Our sniper round is 7.62 by 51, which means it has more powder and it has more "ass to the round."" "We use a 175-grain round, and that's a fairly heavy round." "The heavier the grain you go, the more knockdown power it's gonna have, 'cause it's a big round that's impacting that person." "You have two aspects of terminal ballistics:" "the crush factor and the tear factor of the round." "The crush factor being what the round's gonna eliminate from the body and it's gonna pass out, like the exit hole probably the size of a half-dollar." "The tissue that gets blown out of the body that's just crushed." "Then you have a tear factor, which is the tissue that is torn by the projectile when it's in the body." "The tear factor could be 12 to 18 inches in length, and the damage that it's gonna cause, it's gonna be absolutely devastating." "Place's kill shots push insurgents back into the shadows." "But there is nowhere to hide." "Distance is the sniper's ally." "Unfortunately for a lot of the insurgents, when we start engaging them, they would move back." "If we hit them at 500 yards, it was having higher killing effects than at 200 or 300 yards, even." "The rule of thumb is that the closer they are, the bullet's moving at a faster pace, so it's-it's not gonna do as much damage." "And as they back off a little bit, the round's not going too fast." "It just zips through the body." "It's gonna be able to expand a little bit in the body and cause more damage." "Operation Vigilant Resolve, day five." "Fighting intensifies and Place pushes further into the city." "He takes the fight to the enemy from a new rooftop hide overlooking a major supply line for insurgent weapons." "The second position, we were looking directly down at a main alleyway." "It had a bunch of small alleyways connecting to it that the insurgents would have to cross to get movement back and forth." "You'd be surprised how fast some of those guys can run." "We used to joke that the slow ones are all gone." "So anybody that's left is-is the top of the food chain." "They were fast." "They ran like the wind." "We call it "limited exposure targets."" "Very difficult to hit a running man at 400, 500 yards, crossing an alley, and try and track him." "Almost impossible." "Place was famous for hitting those guys on a dead sprint." "A missed shot means an insurgent lives on to fight and kill more Marines." "With American lives at stake," "Place is confronted with one of the most difficult shots a sniper will ever face." "He has less than two seconds to hit a man on a dead run, six football fields away." "There was man in a white outfit, sandals on, AK-47, and he'd been turkey-peeking back and forth." "He was looking through a black door that they had that was swung open outside a house." "And I don't think he understood that we could see his head and could identify a weapon." "Right as he started to dash across, I was able to get a good mil-hold... fire... and the round carried and hit him right in the upper part of the face." "It was immediate incapacitation shot, killed him before he hit the ground." "In less than two seconds," "Place takes out the sprinting insurgent from 600 yards." "Well, the most difficult thing about those type of shots is trying to guess the speed in which the target's target's moving." "The average sprinting target moves at 8.6 miles per hour." "To compensate for this," "Place must aim several feet in front of the running insurgent." "This is known as "leading the target."" "If we have a running target, you're not holding the crosshairs of the reticle on the target, so the reticle may be to the right or the left of the individual, depending upon where they're running." "And when you squeeze the trigger, they're gonna basically run into the bullet." "The distance, or lead, is measured in mils." "At 600 yards, one mil represents roughly 21 inches." "The lead that I led the individual that was coming across the street was right at about four-and-a-half mils, which is a-- that's a pretty big lead." "Anything more than that, you're really stretching the capabilities of the scope." "A four-and-a-half- mil lead at 600 yards means Place must aim eight feet in front of the target." "If he's off by one mil, he misses by two feet." "Traveling at 2,550 feet per second, the 175-grain round enters the cranial cavity, severing the brain stem in one-half millionth of a second." "In my scope, I witnessed that one shot-- boomp." "This lump of crap fell, weapon fell, no movement." "That's how deadly he was." "And no one ever came out of that position again." "30 days, 32 kills." "Ethan Place plays a critical role in the fight for Fallujah." "His sharpshooting saves countless Marines and wreaks havoc on insurgent fighters and RPG teams." "When they came to the negotiation table, one of the first things they wanted was the snipers to be pulled back." "We were extremely effective at eliminating threats." "But the ability not to know where or when it's coming, uh, just was devastating on them." "He received a Silver Star." "That gentleman saved our bacon a lot, but he owned that whole area." " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " " Untranslated subtitle " "Marine Sniper School " " Quantico, Virginia." "Five years after his 600-yard kill shot in Fallujah," "Ethan Place reunites with Sergeant Major Bill Skiles to try and duplicate the feat." "The subfreezing conditions are the extreme opposite of those in Iraq, providing the ultimate test for the former sniper." "We're at the 600-yard line here in Quantico, Virginia." "Trying to simulate down the range of 600 yards of two target fronts that simulates parts of buildings, and to simulate how our enemy would run across our lines lines and this great American behind you would intercept them sometimes with bullets." "You ready?" "Ready as one can be." "Can't feel my fingers." "Little different from, uh, Fallujah, huh?" "Yeah." "Sure as hell wasn't snowing then." "In Iraq, Place worked in temperatures in excess of 120 degrees." "Hotter rounds flew further and faster." "Here, Place's shot is complicated by subfreezing temperatures and a 15-mile-per- hour wind." "He gets on target or zeroes his rifle for 600 yards point of impact." "Prolonged exposure to heat or cold can alter a bullet's minute of angle, or trajectory." "At 600 yards, a 20-degree drop in temperature can increase air density, causing a bullet to miss its target low by six inches." "For a sniper, that could be the difference between life and death." "Now, I will call his wind for him." "We're gonna simulate a running man between the two target frames." "We're gonna go right to left first, then left to right, do a couple passes each." "Hopefully, we can correct his lead so he can get his hits." "Just like Fallujah, Place will have less than two seconds to hit the target at 600 yards." "Go ahead and run them." "Stand by" "Go ahead and start running." "By the vapor trail, looked like it appeared to be -- went over his right shoulder." "Place misses just behind the target by a few inches." "Okay, this time, yeah, he was supposed to come right to left last time." "Now he's gonna go right to left like I wanted." "The wind picks up, complicating Place's second shot." "He must decrease his lead so he doesn't miss wide in front of the target." "Get about a three-mil lead this time, all right?" "'Cause you're trailing a little bit." "You're dead center, Ethan-- you see it?" "That was dead center, guys." "In 1.3 seconds, Place hits the target in the chest." "Hey, one shot's lucky-- do it again." "Tell them to pull it out so you can do it again." "Right edge." "Go ahead and run it." "Wind's good." "With the target moving in the opposite direction," "Place increases his lead to compensate for the wind." "It's a hit!" "Up and down." "Again, it's called limited exposure targets." "Overseas, we had many of our bad guys that want to run or sprint across with supplies, with weaponry." "Sometimes we only have a one-second, two-second exposure." "That time, he came up, started sprinting." "Ethan knocked him down in the first second at 600 yards." "Got him in the kidney." "Toast." "Two hits, two shots." "That's awesome." "Unload." "It's like old times." "Well, the second one felt real good." "How you doing?" "Good." "You see up here the first shot that I hit was dead on." "It was 600 yards." "That'll be a devastating kill." "Probably take just a minute or two for them to pass away, but the second shot, I was a little off." "Uh, the wind probably effected it a little bit." "It was a little bit of a trail shot, but it'd be more upper kidney shot, and that's still gonna be a devastating shot at those ranges." "Not the tightest group you'd hope for but still, at the same time, considering, uh, two kill shots, you're still gonna have two kills." "His fundamentals of marksmanship , he has not lost it." "His own fundamentals of weapon to shoulder, and his own body, his breathing, his pulse, his delivery, his eyes, his lead that's what is phenomenal, he still has." "I miss that smell a lot." "Love that." "Gets addicting, and you miss it." "From the war-torn streets of Fallujah to the killing fields of Vietnam, a legendary sniper goes head-to-head with a deadly foe." "By looks of things, I was just the quickest on the trigger." "Otherwise, he'd have killed me." "My worst nightmare is an enenmy sniper, and the reason for that is, a sniper is the most deadly weapon on the battlefield." "He can wait there all day." "The situation doesn't present itself, he comes back tomorrow to get you." "He only has to get lucky once." "The bottom line is, it's the ultimate challenge as far as soldiering is concerned." "It's just you against somebody else." "Vietnam, 1966." "I really didn't like to kill 'em." "But to pit myself against another living," "breathing human being who could kill me just as quick as I could him" " that was the challenge of it." "carlos Hathcock, Marine Corps legend." "The hunting ground:" "Hill 55." "We had eliminated most of the enemy snipers in that area." "The intelligence folks had told us that someone was being sent down to challenge us." "The sniper is known only as The Cobra." "If he kills Hathcock, he collects a $30,000 bounty." "This North Vietnamese sniper was sent down there to get me, which I really didn't appreciate." "The Cobra stalks Hill 55, home base for the 1st Division Marine Scout, Sniper School." "With one shot, he issues a challenge to Hathcock:" ""Come and get me."" "Well, the killer gunner's setting right outside my door of my hooch." "And, uh, I watched him die." "Took a vow, right then, I was gonna get him somehow or another." " Untranslated subtitle " "The Cobra-- he was operating about 1,000 yards outside the wire." "He would come down a canal." "During low light, he would crawl into his position." "That's where he was living, hanging his hat." "Carlos wanted to go get him." "When he started shooting, I got John Burke, who was my partner, and we went out, and out-trailed him." "Very cagey, very smart individual." "And I figured he was close to being as good as I was, but there ain't no way." "Ain't nobody that good." "Hathcock and Burke track the Cobra for two days." "They discover muddy footprints and push deeper into the jungle." "A deadly game of cat and mouse is underway." "They say it takes a crook to catch a crook." "It takes a sniper to neutralize a sniper." "The sniper that knows more about his enemy than his enemy knows about him is gonna be the man that wins." "Hathcock looks for signs of the Cobra." "Anything from broken twigs and grass to footprints and crushed lichen." "Basic elements of the hunt, or man-tracking." "Snipers are trained to find the minute details." "If there is just the wrong color within a certain area of foliage you've got to start asking yourself why is that." "And that could be the one thing that gives the sniper away." "Every breeze, every insect, every smell immediately goes into your computer, your mind, and you're able to analyze it and come up with a decision as to what it means." "In Carlos's case, he was able to do that almost instinctively." "The tracks left by the Cobra are a little too obvious." "Hathcock smells a trap." "He and Burke drop into a sniper low crawl, moving forward four inches at a time." "Everything you do has to be extremely well thought out, and normally very slowly carried out." "The hunt moves further into the jungle." "Hathcock knows that somewhere out there, the Cobra is watching and waiting." "There is that heightened tension." "There's an inbuilt level of stress that is constantly there." "Your senses are kind of heightened." "You're listening harder than maybe you would do before." "If you've got another professional that's hunting you down and it really is a competition of who's gonna make the first mistake, and whether you're in a position to spot that mistake." "The Cobra is on the move." "He sneaks around Hathcock's right flank for an ambush." "It was the case of two very, very good soldiers constantly trying to outthink each other." "A snapped twig gives away the Cobra's position." "Hathcock and Burke sprint for cover." "The next mistake is made by Hathcock." "It nearly gets him killed." "I fell in an old rotted tree, and he made a shot." "Burke and I both thought he was hit." "I noticed a hole in his canteen." "I said, "You ain't hurt." You know?" ""You ain't hurt." "Just killed the devil out of your canteen, that's all."" "Before Hathcock can return fire, the Cobra vanishes into the jungle." "He started running." "The bad guy started running." "Yeah." "And we moseyed around and mangled around, and we worked around to where I was in his old spot." "He was in my old spot." "Less than 300 yards separate the snipers." "The hunter and the hunted are finally face to face." "By then-- it was afternoon-- which was a bad thing for him, 'cause he was facing the sun." "The sun glinted off his lens of his scope, I guess." "I shot it where the glint was." "It just happened to be the right time." "By the looks of things, I was just the quickest on the trigger." "How do I know he would have killed me?" "'Cause I shot right through his scope, right straight through his scope, didn't touch the sides." "And it didn't do his eyesight no good on that side, either." "Yeah, it hit him in the eye and took off the right side of his head." "At 300 yards, Hathcock fired directly into the Cobra's Soviet-made PU Scope" "The shot is only possible at both snipers weapons are poniting directly to one another" "I would say the scope was about the size of a quarter." "Those scopes were about 5.5 inches long, steel body and there are just an objective lens and an observation lens." "It came down to a reflective light ray off the enemy's objective lens." "That could have been something as simple as fatigue or just a momentary lapse of concentration where he forgot to focus on the fact that the sun is constantly moving." "One in a million shot." "It's not dumb luck that you can get the enemy but all to go down the scope was just luck." "I would say the scope was about the size of quarter" "Those scopes were about 5.5 inches long steel body and just an object land zone" "43 years later, another Marine sniper sets out to replicate Carlos Hathcock's one-in-a-million shot." " Untranslated subtitle " "The sniper:" "Staff sergeant steve Reichert, USMC Retired." "Our mannequin's name is Dead Fred." "What we're trying to do is set up a shot simulating what Carlos Hathcock did in Vietnam, where he sent his round on through the scope, into the brain housing group." "Steve is using the M40A1 Marine sniper rifle." "The round is Remington .308 caliber." "This round, at 1,000 yards, has more kinetic energy than a .357 at point blank." "So this needs to be about three inches in front of his eye." "Guy's got a little bit of rigor mortis." "Reichert is at 30 yards, but the difference in the speed of the round is negligible from Hathcock's 300-yard shot." "The bullet will hit the scope at nearly 2,550 feet per second." "Going hot." "Reichert will experiment with various scopes to compare the flight path and terminal ballistics of each shot." "Reichert's first target is a modern-day variable power scope." "Eh, it didn't come out the back end." "There's some bullet fragments there." "It appears to be the bullet actually stopped inside the scope." "There's still some bullet fragments in there." "So as that bullet hit the first lens, it probably started to jag started to tear off." "The lead core started to rip up." "If you were the guy behind that scope right now," "you'd probably have a lot of glass in your face and a black eye, but... you'd live to fight another day." "One shot, one black eye." "Reichert sets up another scope for a second attempt." "The second shot fails to make it through the scope." "The scopes we're shooting now are modern variable power scopes." "They have a lot more lenses, basically a lot more internal components." "The scope Carlos shot into that day probably had one or two lenses but not as many as these scopes." "When that round hits the first piece of glass, it's going to start to deform the bullet." "It's a full metal jacket like we just shot -- encountered more resistance, impacted more objects, came back here, hit more lenses, and by then it was traveling slow enough not to even break the glass on the back end." "We'll try it again with a , a modern red dot scope." "In size and internal setup, it's very similar to the PU scope" "Carlos Hathcock shot through with the addition of maybe one extra lens right in the center." "We might have better luck with this scope." "That one looked like it worked." "It hit the first lens, broke up not too much the jacket started to come apart-- punched out the second lens and right above the eye." "You can see that the lead core was pretty much intact." "It went through the head." "Punched through the head on the back end here, kept on going." "This guy would be more than dead." "If this would have been a real person, he would have complete cranial evacuation." "We call it a canoe." "Basically his head would have popped open and I'd probably be looking straight down his neck right now." "Yeah, a little bit messy." "The scope he encountered-- the PU scope-- it was similar to this, and Carlos being an outstanding marksman," "I have no doubt after doing this that... the shot Carlos pulled off was definitely doable." "One shot, one shattered scope, one dead Cobra." "Another chapter in the legendary life of Carlos Hathcock." "It isn't the art of taking someone's life." "To me it's how many Marines we can save." "We will pick the time and place to do harm to you if you have premonition to do harm to us." "First time I pulled the trigger on a live person," "I never thought about the consequences." "I was basically just afraid not to screw up." "I didn't want to miss." "This is a live situation." "If I screw up, people die around you." "Lutayfiyah, Iraq-- April 9, 2004." "14 Fox Company Marines patrol the roadway into Lutayfiyah." "Their mission:" "Look for roadside bombs and insurgents." "A Marine and his spotter overwatch the patrol from atop an oil tank 1,000 yards away." "I had set up a little observation post atop the towers," "so we could look down into the city, see what's going on, see if anybody's moving around, just look for suspicious activity." "Toted the .50-cal up there with me." "You just never know when you might need it." "Reichert's weapon: the Barrett M82-A3 Special Application Scoped Rifle, a .50-caliber beast." "The weapon was a .50-caliber" "semiautomatic Barrett M82-A3." "It holds about ten rounds of .50-caliber ammunition." "It has a barrel periscope." "Max effective range, I'd say, is 2,000 yards." "With that weapon and that round, you could stop a car or a truck." "Reichert chooses the .50-cal" "over his standard M40a3." "If we had strongwinds or anything else," "I wanted something that would actually buck the wind a little bit better, and if the insurgents actually took up cover positions, whether inside a building or behind a car, I wanted something that could actually punch through the material and take them out." "All is quiet on the ground below until Reichert's spotter picks up an object on the road." "Corporal Tucker noticed an animal in the road that wasn't there the night before." "I got on the scope and zoomed into it, and we saw just a little bit of glint coming off what we thought was a wire." "They had mentioned to us in the past-- the insurgents are starting to emplace IEDs into dead animals, tossing them on the side of the road." "Reichert radios the Marines on the ground." "We've got a potential IED in 20 yards around the bend." "led!" "Roger that." "We're setting up a perimeter." "They cordon off the area surrounding the IED." "Get it set!" "When we actually saw the glint coming off the wires, we felt good, like, "Hey, we've done our job." "Maybe we can actually get that IED taken care of, disarm it, and nobody gets hurt."" "We're set up at the back side!" "Staff Sarge Roberts, how you doing?" "All clear!" "IED is secure." "We were just watching them set up that perimeter around the IED, and then 30 seconds later, everything erupted." "We got hit with a RPG first, and then the AKs started coming." "Being that far away, I could actually see things unfold" " where the insurgents appeared from and launched the RPGs, and then you just saw dirt and dust kicking up everywhere from machine gun fire the Marines were taking." "Once I saw the firefight start to erupt, I made a quick range estimation, put the correct dope on the scope, and then just started scanning for targets of opportunity." "The insurgents are 1,350 yards away, a distance of more than three-quarters of a mile." "Reichert adjusts his range -- or "dopes the scope"-- to 10+2: 1,000 yard s plus two minutes of angle." "The Marines on the ground fight their way into the town and take cover in an abandoned schoolhouse." "They are greatly outnumbered." "All the other insurgents in the city heard gunfire." "We were like, "Yeah, it's party time,"" "so they grabbed their little AKs and went to the gunfire." "We noticed one or two guys pop up on top of the roof, and that's when we went to work." "The first guy, I saw him pop up from the roof, swung the crosshairs over to him, flipped the weapon on kill," "shot the round downrange." "Corporal Tucker immediately advised me, "Hey, you're way low,"" "and then it clicked on my head:" "they've obviously changed positions." "Made another quick dope change on the scope , sent the next round downrange..." "That hit its mark." "It was just a pink mist." "Even at three quarters of a mile, the .50-cal is devastating." "This actually was mainly designed for armor personnel carrier vehicles-- hard targets  so when you hit a soft target-- a person-- they just rip apart." "When that rifle went off, I thought, "Oh, man, what the hell is that behind me?"" "I didn't know he was actively engaging targets at the time." "The Marines are pinned down, taking heavy fire." "We noticed three insurgents climbing up the back of a stairwell." "Looked like one of them had an RPK, a belt-fed machine gun, slung over his back." "They ducked down behind a wall." "We immediately put the crosshairs on where I thought they were." "If the insurgents get their machine gun set up, the Marines on the ground are in trouble." "The insurgents are more than 1,600 meters away, a distance of one mile." "Complicating the shot further," "Reichert must fire through a brick wall to hit them." "He has the perfect ammo for the job:" "the Raufoss, Mark 211 .50-caliber round." "When the Raufoss round impacts a concrete wall, it punches a small .50-caliber hole on one side." "Then the RDX explodes." "You have the tungsten steel penetrator punching through, zirconium sparks on the other side." "You basically have a shotgun blast" "and shrapnel and a penetrating dart flying through." "Reichert's spotter gives him last-minute adjustments for the shot." "It's really crucial to ensure the communication flowing back and forth are accurate and you're actually making the changes to the scope." "Tactical breathing steadies Reichert's aim." "He fires." "The round landed exactly where we wanted it to." "The Raufoss round blasts through the concrete wall at a speed" "in excess of 2,500 feet per second." "The explosion obliterates the insurgents." "The wall on the opposite side of that stairwell just turned red." "We didn't see the... the three of them get up." "Reichert stays on the .50" "for the next 12 hours." "His sharpshooting halts the insurgents' attack and saves Marines on the ground." "For his heroic actions, he receives the Bronze Star for Valor." "T1G Training Facilities, 2009." "Five years later, Steve Reichert is back behind the M82-A3, the weapon he used to take out insurgents from a mile away." "It's a mini-explosion going off about four feet in front of your face." "A large overpressure, a lot of noise." "It's not a pleasant gun to shoot all day long." "30 or 40 rounds, and you want to quit." "Still a great weapon system." "April, 2004-- my weapon system, the M82-A3, was loaded with magazines full of the Mark 211 Raufoss round and the, the business end of these rounds are what the bad guys were experiencing." "Same weapon, same round, same sniper." "Reichert will fire the .50-caliber" "Raufoss rounds into a nine-inch-thick cinderblock wall," "the same type of wall insurgents hid behind when he made his one-mile kill shot." "Once this round impacts the target, the RDX will detonate, kind of create a mini-shape charge, so if there are any flammable liquids, gas" "anything of that nature-- it immediately detonates or catches fire." "The 671-grain round hits the wall at 2,850 feet per second." "An incendiary mix in the nose of the bullet ignites explosives in its core, launching a tungsten steel penetrator through the concrete." "So, what we have here is a solid filled concrete wall." "You can see where the initial blast and explosion took effect." "Back in April, I saw 3 insurgents come in here from back stairs of the building, I pick where I thought they would be sent a round gradually into the wall, ground detonated and you had that shock and blast, coming in to where the insurgents were." "The jelly would give you good sense of if there's a real person sitting here, what would happen to him after this round penetrates?" "You can actually see where the steel penetrator worked all the way through a good nine inches of solid concrete and popped out the other end." "To simulate the insurgents hiding behind the wall, Reichert adds a block of ballistic gelatin," "the same consistency as human tissue." "Double hearing protection." "The overpressure on this weapon system is quite significant, so, uh..." "I'm already deaf in one ear from an IED ; don't need the other ear gone." "Firing." "The Raufoss round blasts through the wall and into the ballistic gelatin." "This should be interesting." "Never done an actual test like this before." "Never actually seen it in slow motion." "Obviously, the Mark 211 round penetrated that first block, no problem." "The explosion started to happen on the first panel of the block, blew out the second panel of the block, and then the gelatin block itself, caught the majority of the fragmentation." "The wound cavity is massive." "And then, the majority of the jacket-- the actual tungsten steel penetrator-- actually penetrated out the back end -- no surprise there-- and then punched through this concrete block, and then continued on." "If there were a person back here, they would be in many pieces right now." "Ballistics Expert Fernando Coelho analyzes the damage." "Blade is going about three inches now, and it's already in the cavity." "Coelho worked with numerous government agencies for 20 years." "There is actual cement material throughout the... the wound path." "This is just devastating." "'Cause you could have had three people back-to-back, and this round would have most likely gone through all three." "One mile, one brick wall, three insurgents... gone." "I just knew I had 14 guys on the deck down there, and they were receiving fire." "The distance didn't really click till, you know, that night." "Even at that distance, with that round, as long as your rounds find their marks, you can definitely change the dynamics on the battlefield." "Good for us, bad for them." "High in the mountains of Afghanistan, a Canadian sniper will eclipse" "Reichert's one-mile kill shot, taking out a Taliban fighter one and a half miles away." "I don't know if they just thought that today was their lucky day, but... you know... it wasn't" "A .50-caliber round leaves the muzzle at 2,700 feet per second." "A combination of power and accuracy, the Tac-50 is capable of taking out a vehicle 20 football fields away." "The very first time I fired the Tac-50 was an awakening to know that there's something out there with that much power." "How would I describe it?" "Probably an enemy's worst nightmare." "The sniper:" "Rob Furlong." "Longest kill shot in history." "One and a half miles." "March, 2002." "U.S. forces launch Operation Anaconda." "The mission:" "Destroy al-qaeda and Taliban forces in the Shah-i-Kot Valley." "The terrain is rugged and unforgiving." "The mountains filled with enemy fighters." "Furlong is part of a Canadian sniper team attached to U.S. Special Forces." "It's pretty humbling coming into somebody's home turf." "Pushing into that valley that day, I'm almost in awe." "Moving into a fishbowl and we could see all these Taliban fighters, they're up on the higher ground." "I had no experience in operating in those kind of altitudes." "Furlong's weapon:" "The McMillan Tac-50." "A sniper rifle with a max effective range of 2,190 yards." "The very first target we engaged was 1,500 meters." "That was the closest target we would engage during Operation Anaconda." "We want to be close enough to the target that we can guarantee one shot, one kill." "When you're shooting at a human-sized target at 1,500 meters, there's so many variables to take into place." "Furlong works at elevations as high as 10,000 feet." "The extreme altitude has a dramatic effect on long-range shots." "Every thousand feet you go up, it's a whole new set of equations." "Because the air's getting thinner, so therefore, your muzzle velocities are increasing your time of flight." "It's actually shorter from the distance further down." "Winds played a huge factor what our, uh, hit ratio..." "Not a lot of one-round hits." "Reason being is we're dealing with, at times," "I remember at least three crosswinds and you just, you wait for that perfect moment." "It's great if I can get the winds to die out." "But how many times does three crosswinds die out?" "They don't" "We were so effective." "We had shut down all resupply lines and the guys who would try to use them would actually get down on their faces and crawl." "Within a week, Furlong runs out of his Canadian-made ammo." "We had somebody offer us, uh, American-made ammunition and when we started using it we noticed that it was a hotter round." "We were getting a lot longer distances out of this round." "Whether that round was a lighter round, whether it was a faster burning propellant, I don't know." "Every shot that we made was new for us." "Whether the U.S. rounds are more aerodynamic or simply have a faster burning propellant, the results are dramatic." "Furlong and his team take out enemy targets more than a mile away." "But his longest shot is yet to come." "The Shah-i-Kot Valley." "Mean altitude: 9,000 Feet" "When somebody's walking on a river valley floor, I'm up at 8,500 feet." "I'm looking down." "It's almost like being on the clouds looking at someone." "We had observed a three-man Taliban team and one of them had an RPK, which is a 7.62 machine gun on his shoulder, and it was decided that we would engage the Taliban fighter with the RPK on his shoulder." "My partner liaises the target, gives me the distance." "He starts to give me varying wind direction." "It's everything I'm using to enter in data into my scope, or in this case," ""What am I gonna do to be able to reach that range?"" "You're talking about a mile and a half's distance and they're looking for a man-sized target on the side of a mountain." "Now, that in itself is quite a feat, to actually find that guy in the first place." "Furlong looks for any way to get more distance on his shot." "He resorts to an old sniper trick." "It was a very warm day." "We had our ammo laid out in the sun-- anything to increase range." "It's not gonna make a huge difference, but it'll make a little difference for how propellant acts." "A faster burn allowing the round to travel slightly further." "Because of the extreme angle and the distance, Furlong uses the ambush method" " leading the target or allowing it to walk into the path of the bullet." "I max out my elevation drum." "My windage is maxed out, so I'm halfing out my scope, and what I mean by that is, I'm leading with my mil-dots, but I'm also using my mil-dots for elevation, as well." "So, I'm kind of halfing my scope to where I believe my point of aim is." "When you have a scope, uh, usually this is what everybody's thinking about for a point of aim." "If I'm leading a target, uh, and I have a target walking from right to left, he's walking and I'm waiting for him to hit this point right here." "Once that target is at my point of aim, that's when the shot's released." "That's an ambush." "Not releasing on the crosshairs." "You release-- this is what you're using for a point of aim and that's one mil." "Basically with a four mil lead, and a four mil for elevation," "your point of aim roughly would be in this area." "Furlong aims 4 mils, or roughly 15 feet above, and approximately 4 mils or 15 feet to the left of his target." "These holds compensate for bullet drop, wind and spin drift." "Furlong steadies himself, takes aim and fires." "And from my partner, it's miss." "Off three." "For whatever reason, when dealing with the Taliban, they didn't show a lot of fear." "You would shoot at them sometimes and, uh, they wouldn't even move." "And they knew they were being shot at." "Like, the splash would hit by their feet or an object next to them." "I don't know if they just thought that today was their lucky day but, you know... it wasn't." "Furlong's spotter follows the vapor trail or swirl of the bullet on his first shot, then observes the splash or dirt kicked up by the round as it hits the ground." "To quantify that, if you could imagine the observer watched a .50-caliber bullet at a mile and a half away impact the ground, and then he called adjustments from where the bullet landed to where he knew the bullet had to be to hit the enemy." "Furlong sets up for his second shot." "They go three different directions -- not too far-- roughly 20 to 30 feet, to where they scatter." "But I can see them." "Furlong fires his second shot." "He misses, hitting the Taliban soldier's backpack." "Well, between the second and third, there was no correction needed." "I knew exactly what had to happen and I wanted to get that third shot downrange." "One and a half miles separate Furlong and his target." "He fires." "Furlong's round leaves the rifle at 2,700 feet per second." "Time of flight:" "Four seconds." "Target eliminated." "I know he went down but that's about it." "If a .50-cal round hit you, you're not gonna live to tell about it." "It's a devastating round." "You're talking about a projectile going through you that's roughly a little bit larger than your thumb." "Rob Furlong's mile- and-a-half kill shot shatters Carlos Hathcock's previous record by 157 yards." "I knew who Carlos Hathcock was, but didn't know what the distance was." "I don't know if it really has hit me." "I always just took it as, uh, I was just doing my job." "Rob Furlong's record still stands today, but high in the mountains of Arizona, an ex-Navy SEAL tries to duplicate his shot from a mile and a half away." "Ballistics is a science... of the certain weapon, and the certain caliber, the certain bullet." "How you can take a small piece of steel that's formed in a cone and shoot it down" "another tube of steel at a high rate of speed and then be accurate enough to repeat that over and over and over again." "Before that sniper pulls the trigger and delivers that shot he must outguess Mother Nature." "External ballistics is the art of that bullet handling Mother Nature." "You might see a faster bullet at different elevations." "With drag and gravity and other things that come into play" "will help the bullet hit differently." "The bullet's flight path itself, understanding time of flight, understanding heat on both the bullet, the rifle, the wind" " snipers must be attuned to that." "Operation Anaconda." "March, 2002." "One of the most extreme ballistic environments a sniper will ever face." "Canadian sniper Rob Furlong battles dizzying altitudes, shifting crosswinds and treacherous mountains." "He takes out a Taliban machine gunner from a mile and a half away." "The longest kill shot in history." "I've joked about it, and maybe if I spend the next month trying to replicate it" "" " I don't know, could I do it again?" "I would like to think I can." "I mean, were all the stars and moons aligned that day?" "I don't know." "McMillan Training Facility" " North Range." "Northwest Arizona." "Ryan McMillan, ex-Navy SEAL, will try to replicate Rob Furlong's mile-and-a-half kill shot using the same weapon:" "a McMillan Tac-50 Long Range Sniper Rifle." "This shot is really one of the most difficult shots you can ever imagine." "Not only the distance at 2,430 meters, but also the wind, the environmental factors, everything that goes into it that makes it a very difficult shot." "Mark Spicer, former British Army Sniper and Director of Training for McMillan Group International," "drives out to set up the target for the shot." "You can see now, because we've been going such a distance already, just how far away this target is." "What we've got is a white paper human representative target of a terrorist armed with the sort archetypical AK-47 associated with terrorism in general." "What we attached was the high visibility flag to the top of the mass." "Now, what that flag will do is that will give me an indication of exactly what the wind is doing at the target end." "Okay, this target itself is at 2,400 meters." "If you now look around up to the top of the hillside you can see the white vehicle that's on the ridgeline." "That's going to be what the firing point is." "If you look straight out here you can see a wash that runs up into the base of the mountains here." "If you follow that wash all the way up, there's a patch of trees on the right." "Just to the left of that patch of trees is our target." "As you can see how far away that is and how difficult of a shot that must've been to make." "The mountainous terrain is similar to Afghanistan, but the elevation is almost 7,000 feet lower." "Heavier air means Ryan's shots won't carry as fast or as far." "My chances of making this shot are pretty slim." "But we're going to give it a shot anyway." "I'm going to first shoot with this, uh, ball M33 ammo." "What I'm going to do here is just get on target with this." "You want me to aim at the wash first, Mark?" "So we can see some splash?" "Just to the right of the target." "Ryan aims at a sandy spot near the target." "Hitting the sand creates a visible "splash" for his spotter." "Mark can then give him corrections based on that impact and get him onto the target a mile-and-a-half downrange." "Spotter on." "Shooter ready." "Send it." "Ryan's shot impacts somewhere in the vegetation surrounding the target." "There is no visible splash." "The dense vegetation around the target makes it difficult to detect any sign of the round's impact." "Ryan takes aim at a patch of dirt." "You have any idea if it's high or low?" "Mark is looking for "swirl," the vapor trail of the bullet, created as it displaces the air in its path." "Spotters use swirl to pick up the flight path of the bullet." "The wind kicks up, blowing gusts of 15 to 20 miles per hour across the range." "Conditions make it virtually impossible to detect the bullet's vapor trail." "Not a thing." "I didn't see a damn thing either." "On this day, Ryan McMillan, ex-Navy Seal and expert marksman, can't outguess Mother Nature." "With the terrain here, um, it's very similar to what you would see in Afghanistan." "They have different directions of wind." "And as I look at the target-- flags on the target right now, they're going from left to right." "So every different place that we can actually see the wind is going in a different direction." "From right to left here at the-- at the, uh, shooter." "Also right to left at the first spot and left to right back in the valley." "And the place that affects your bullet the most is right at muzzle." "So if you have a wind going one way, from let's say right to left at the muzzle," "it's going to push your bullet longer down its path and it's going to affect it more." "And then by the time it gets to the target you just never know." "It's a very difficult shot." "You want to take a shot at it?" "No." "From Rob Furlong's record-breaking shot to Ethan Place's sharpshooting on a Fallujah rooftop... somewhere, a lone bullet hurtles through space on a collision course with an unwitting target." "On the other end of that shot is a sniper possessing a mastery of ballistics, marksmanship and, most importantly, the mindset of "One shot, one kill." "Understand that you are a hunter of man and this is what you do and then focus on the reticle." "That'll get you through." "It's hard to find somebody who has a mindset to be that disciplined, be that dedicated to something." "And it's extreme to find that person... to redefine marksmanship to another level." "A sniper is the most deadly weapon on the battlefield." "'Cause he's got patience, he's got the skill set, and he can hide, blend and deceive." "There's no place you can hide from a sniper." "If the sniper wants you, he's going to get you." "Subtitles by Mohannad Musallam"