Army sniper in Afghanistan; another day at the "Office"
from military.com
Watch, Wait, Kill: the Sniper at Work
March 06, 2009
Fayetteville Observer
The Soldiers decided it was time to take the Taliban out.
On a Sunday in November 2007, Army sniper Tyler Juden, his spotter and two command officers climbed out of a Humvee and trekked about seven kilometers in the dark.
Shortly before sunrise the next day, they set up their position near the Khyber Pass, an insurgent stronghold.
For more than a month, Juden and his fellow snipers had studied maps and traced the arcs of the Taliban mortars to determine that they had been fired -- like clockwork -- from a ravine about three stories below Juden's current location.
The enemy hadn't thought to change its firing position, or its timing.
So at 9 a.m. that Wednesday, Juden found himself lying on his belly behind his sniper rifle on a freezing patch of mountain. He stared down into the ravine, propped up on his elbows and waited almost motionless along with the rest of his team.
But 9 o'clock came and passed.
Had the enemy seen and avoided them? Was their map reconnaissance off?
Juden worried that the mission was a bust, but only briefly. About 9:30, his spotter bumped him to get his attention.
"I guess they slept in that morning," Juden said.
Three men with AK-47s on their backs walked down a path about 700 meters away.
Next came the easy part.
The spotter beside Sgt. Juden helped him adjust his aim for wind, distance, temperature and other factors. Juden readied his weapon, an M-110 semi-automatic sniper rifle.
Most Soldiers only squeeze a trigger while reacting to a threat.
But unseen and not threatened, Juden watched what he knew would be the last minutes of those three lives in the ravine.
Juden locked onto his target, the third man in line, as they walked away from his position. Juden had been trained to kill from the back of the line forward, so no one gets the warning of a man falling in front of him.
The commanders on this mission called in air support and artillery fire. Juden's job was to wait for the diversionary artillery blast to mask the sound of his rifle.
For what seemed like an eternity, Juden kept an eye on his target and his finger ready to squeeze. It was enough time to consider who these men were and whether they had families. But Juden stayed focused, his mind too busy calculating and recalculating for wind and distance with each step the target took.
The artillery boomed. Juden sent his bullet toward the man in back of the group and saw him fall. The sniper rarely sees the impact of the bullet. But the spotter watches through a scope and can trace the wake of the bullet and see it travel toward its target. Think of "The Matrix."
As he lined up a second shot, Juden's spotter told him that the bullet had smashed directly between the man's shoulder blades.
Before Juden could fire off another round, Apache helicopters arrived and mopped up the other two men, who had scattered at the sound of the artillery.
"We never took any more indirect mortar fire," Juden said. "It kind of let them know they're not safe even on their home terrain."
A special breed
Becoming an Army sniper requires a special breed. Juden said there's a certain intelligence and professionalism expected. The lone holdover from a seven-man team that deployed to Afghanistan in 2007, the 23-year-old Juden became the section leader last fall. In November, after about 20 men tried out for the jobs, he handpicked the six men who will accompany him as snipers in Troop C, 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division.
The 4th Brigade has been training for weeks for a deployment later this year, possibly to Afghanistan.
The entire 82nd Airborne Division has maybe 100 snipers, 4th Brigade spokeswoman Maj. Michelle Baldanza said. It's a job that comes with a bit of swagger.
"People volunteer to be in infantry. People volunteer for Airborne," Juden said. "Everyone here was selected to be here. No one was assigned."
But the lifestyle isn't as glamorous as the title, he said. People write books and make movies about snipers, but the nitty-gritty of the job doesn't make its way into the public perception. It's not all long-range target practice on bad guys, Juden said.
"It all sounds great. It's great to be able to put a sniper tag on the front of your truck," he said. "Actually, when you go out and do it and you're sitting on a mountain for three days with limited food and water, it's not a whole lot of fun. It's not as appealing."
Marksmanship
It wouldn't be a stretch to say Juden spent most of his life training to be a sniper.
He fired his first shot as a 5-year-old boy in Arkansas City, Kan. His father used to take him along on hunting trips, where they'd kill quail or pheasants, turkey or deer.
For about as long as he can remember, he competed in marksmanship competitions.
In 2004, as a senior in high school, Juden won the south central regional long-range silhouette contest, defeating 20 competitors from six states who had won state competitions to earn their spots there.
He joined the Army in 2005, knowing he wanted to at least be in the infantry and dreaming of a spot on a sniper team.
He completed the required five weeks of Army sniper school at Fort Benning three years ago.
Juden said some snipers have trouble dealing mentally with this more intimate form of killing. As a sniper, he said, you can see a man's eye color or tell whether he recently shaved before you shoot him. It takes a certain mind-set and emotional stability to ensure there's no hesitation.
Juden remembers his first kill, when he was deployed to Afghanistan. He said it wasn't like he thought it would be afterward. It just felt like a mission that had to be done.
"You don't ever know if you're ready for it until that moment comes," he said. "For me, it was never a problem. I knew if I didn't do my job, they'd most likely be doing their job against one of my buddies later. That made it pretty easy for me to justify what we were doing."
Juden said his team completed more than 20 successful missions during its 15-month tour in Afghanistan. His elbows and knees felt like sandpaper when he got home.
That's not to say all 20 missions ended with enemy kills. Juden said he and his men all know their kill counts. How could they not? But he's not telling. A sniper is more than a trigger-man, he said.
"I don't think a sniper should be judged by the number of kills he has," he said.
Most of the job is about stealth and information gathering. New technology and gadgets allow the military to gather information from the sky in unmanned aircraft. But, Juden said, that doesn't make the sniper a relic of prior decades.
"When you think of sniper, you think of World War II," he said. "People think of snipers as outdated or kind of obsolete. But there's nothing like a two-man team of highly trained reconnaissance Soldiers who can make decisions and react to situations."
