TRIGGER MEN

MAJ. CHARLES GREENE, US ARMY RANGER

Charles Greene is a veteran soldier, long-time Ranger sniper, and combat veteran of both the Panama invasion (Operation Just Cause), and two tours in Iraq. Captain Greene was shot by an enemy sniper while leading a patrol of Iraqi special forces soldiers in Mosul. The following is his story, excerpted from Triggermen, by Hans Halberstadt.

“Halberstadt takes readers deeper inside the elusive world of snipers than anyone has ever been before.” Photos provided by Maj. Charles Green

RED ROMEO ON THE DROP ZONE

Late in 1989, due to several disputes between the US and Panama over corruption and drug smuggling, tensions escalated to the boiling point. American special operations forces from the Army, Navy, and Air Force were tasked with missions intended to neutralize Panamanian units and to capture the country’s president, Manuel Noriega.

The 75th Ranger Regiment (Task Force Red) was assigned two initial missions—the seizure of Tocumen/Torrijos Airport and the neutralization of a company of Panamanian infantry, and the seizure of another airport at Rio Hato where another two enemy infantry units were based. At the time, Charles Greene was a sergeant in Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Rangers. Along with elements of the regiment’s 2nd Battalion, these units became Task Force Red Romeo and jumped into combat at 0100 hours on 20 December 1989.

“KILL ANYTHING THAT IS NOT A RANGER”

When the time came to jump, my M24 sniper rifle was strapped to a Ranger Support Operations Vehicle (RSOV) that would be airlanded several hours after the initial airborne assault. Although I was a sniper, the standing operating procedure (SOP) at the time was that I would fight initially on the drop zone with an M16A2 and then later get the sniper rifle. The rationale behind this was that the rifles cost over $5,000 each, and because they were aluminum pillar bedded, they were not certified to be jumped. Although my rifle was a conventional M16A2, it had a Litton night sight that became very useful when we landed.

We came in at about 450 feet above the ground. I was carrying so much gear that I could barely move, but once I got out of the harness and got my rifle out of the weapon container, I could see a huge tractor-trailer driving right toward us on the drop zone. My orders were to kill anything that wasn’t a Ranger. The truck driver was not a Ranger, and he was about to run over a lot of Rangers with his truck.

In the night sight, the driver looked like he was right on top of me, but the range was actually more like seventy-five yards. The driver filled the scope. I shot him about six times—each time he must have stepped on the brake, because I could hear the air brake engage and release. About the time I finished killing the guy, he eased off to the side of the road and the truck stopped with him slumped over the wheel. Only then did two machine guns open up on the truck; the machine gunners had night observation devices (NODs) and must have seen me kill the man, but they waited till he was dead to shoot. The willingness to kill is not in every soldier, even in the Ranger Regiment, and I think these two gunners were reluctant to do the killing.

I turned around. The airfield control tower was only about two hundred meters away. From the catwalk at the top, Panamanian soldiers were firing down on Rangers as they landed. I started picking them off one at a time, and as I hit them, each fell to the ground below. This allowed the 2nd Ranger Battalion guys to make their way up inside the tower; they quickly eliminated any remaining resistance and took control of the position.

The funniest thing for me about the whole initial assault was a pickup truck. It was barreling down a side road adjacent to the drop zone with its headlights on! In the back of it were about six Panamanian defenders attempting to spray down the drop zone while fleeing. I took up the lead and began picking them off. The driver quickly realized his error and turned his lights off!

About this time a Panamanian armored car rolled onto the drop zone. This was a VP-150, a wheeled vehicle of Russian manufacture that mounted a heavy machine gun, which the Panamanians used to hose down the drop zone. Although I couldn’t defeat the VP-150, I started firing at the vehicle’s vision blocks to distract the driver and gunner long enough for somebody with more firepower to come along and take him out. That was done by the ever-present AC-130H Spectre gunship overhead. Just prior to my engaging the pickup, the gunship had fired once and missed, probably because it was going so fast. Then I was able to get the driver to stop for a moment and the Spectre gunship nailed him. I killed the survivors as they ran out of the burning vehicle. Then I fired up a motorcycle attempting to get off the drop zone before our H-hour mission was complete.

PLAYING POKER WITH A SNIPER TEAM

There are many ways to kill the enemy, and they often require you to be smarter than he is. For example, when I was assigned as an advisor to the Iraqi special forces, my unit began to come under harassing fire by an enemy mortar every day, and it was frustrating because my Iraqis were taking casualties. The enemy mortar team had a good routine—they hid their tube in a small truck under a pile of hay, and would roll into a firing position. Then they would quickly set up the weapon, fire three or four rounds at us, and drive away before an Apache gunship could find them. Our counter-artillery radar could calculate where the rounds were fired from, but by the time the data was processed the truck and its enemy team were long gone.

I called up our supporting American unit, 2nd Battalion, 325th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, and told Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, the commander, “You’ve got to help me, sir. My Iraqis are getting hammered; they are afraid to go out on patrol.” Lieutenant Colonel Gibson offered a sniper team and asked, “Where should we put them?”

I told him that based on the fire detection radar information and other intel, the enemy team might be operating out of a building, which I showed him on the map. There was nothing sure about it, just a suspicion. But there was also a good overwatch position from a four-story building a few hundred meters away.

A squad was infiltrated into the overwatch position—a sniper/spotter team and a security element to protect them, and they settled in to wait. Sure enough, the team didn’t have long to wait. I heard them firing, one deliberate shot at a time. The sniper team watched the enemy crew drive up, position the base plate, and begin to set up a 60mm mortar. The enemy gunner was almost ready to shoot when his ammo handler ran up with four prepared rounds. A good mortar crew could have all four in the air and be back on the road before the first landed, but not this time. The snipers took out the first guy, then the second, before they really understood what was happening. When a platoon moved forward to investigate, both of the enemy were dead.

Nearby, in a small building that we had searched many times before, they found ninety mortar rounds. That is one way you can use a sniper team, to take out an enemy mortar team, but it was done with a certain amount of risk. If an enemy platoon had compromised that squad, they could have quickly been rolled up and killed.

COMPOUND UNDER MORTAR FIRE

One of the things that has been driving all of us in the sniper community nuts is the problems conventional-force commanders have understanding two things about snipers—how to employ the ones the commander “owns,” and how to deal with the enemy’s snipers.

For example, not long after the incident with the enemy mortar team, our compound came under mortar fire again—six rounds this time, killing one of my men, wounding two others—this time from an 82mm mortar, and it was causing serious problems.

I called the 82nd Airborne again because we had no suitable weapons of our own to deal with this threat. They handed me off to a company commander.

“Okay, Chuck,” the company commander said, “we’ll do some crater analysis and figure out where they are.” “No, don’t do that,” I answered. “Your guys are going to get shot by one of the enemy snipers!” “I’ll send a rifle squad along with the crater analysis guys to protect them,” he said.

THIS IS NOT A LAB, IT IS HELL

“I would not recommend that! We are taking sniper fire here every day, right in that area!” I told him. (I would ultimately be shot by a sniper myself, right in this same neighborhood.) But he wasn’t convinced and insisted on doing it his way. Pretty soon I saw his squad of infantry walking over from their nearby combat outpost. Two fire teams took up positions, one on each side of the road, and the crater analysis team was out in the street looking at the hole. I had my binos out and was behind good cover, looking for the sniper that I was sure would find such easy targets irresistible. Sure enough, I heard the first shot and turned to see one of the 82nd guys drop like a sack of rocks.

THE CIRCLE OF DEATH

I arrived in Mosul on 12 January 2004 and was assigned as an advisor to an Iraqi special forces battalion in the area. From the day I arrived and started conducting operations in our sector, we were taking harassing fire from an enemy sniper. This sniper probably wasn’t school-trained, but he could have been. Some of the insurgents had been to schools operated by the Fedeyeen and others; we will never know where he learned to shoot. But he had an SVD, a Russian-made sniper rifle, and he was taking shots at my guys from six hundred to one thousand yards away. I know the distances because I had enough experience in this business to use the interval between the impact of the bullet and the sound of the shot to estimate the shooter’s range. This guy shot at me and missed numerous times, but ultimately my luck ran out. While he was not up to American standards, he was learning his business, and his misses were closer and closer day by day.

We’d typically go out and conduct combat patrols three or four times every day. Although we’d change our operational patterns, the enemy’s pattern never changed. Every day we‘d take a few mortar  rounds, then this guy would get in a few shots at us. Several times this guy wounded or killed times one of my Iraqi soldiers. He made some good shots.

THE ENEMY ALWAYS GETS THE FIRST SHOT

As painful as it was, I often had to intentionally use our Iraqi force to draw fire from the hidden insurgent snipers.  Knowing how the insurgents operated, one of my Marine Corps scout-snipers or I would sit in an overwatch hide scanning rooflines and the terrain as our patrols came and went. This strategy proved fruitful on more than a few occasions. This cat-and-mouse game went on for about a week, with one or two of my guys being hit every day or so. At this stage of the war it was frustrating because you couldn’t engage an enemy until he had demonstrated hostile intent. Consequently, in most engagements the enemy got the first shot.

True to form, one of my patrolling Iraqi soldiers was shot—he was hit in the groin. While the other guys were attending to him, I was able to triangulate the path of the bullet that indicated the sniper’s general firing position. The sniper’s bullet went through the cab of the pickup truck in which the Iraqi soldier was riding and made two holes—one in the windshield, the other in the rear window—before hitting my soldier. Since the truck was stopped at the time of the shot, lining up the holes easily showed where the bullet came from—an apartment building a couple of blocks away. However, from my position this information alone did not make him a sure thing. Then he made a Sniper 101 mistake: he took another shot directly at me and missed! His muzzle flash betrayed the terrorist’s concealed position. I could easily see his hide from about four hundred yards away. I had an FN FAL [Belgian-made 7.62 x 51mm semiautomatic rifle] and killed him instantly.

To my amazement, another sniper picked up where the dead one left off. On 10 January, he hit one of my fellow advisors, a Marine Corps gunny sergeant, in the neck. Luckily, it was a flesh wound. Our routine was a  four-kilometer foot patrol through the slum areas of the city. As was typical of these dismounted patrols, the insurgents would shadow us, waiting until we were almost done for the day; then just as we were pulling into our safe area, they’d hit us.

A KILLING ZONE

Two days later, we were conducting a cordon and search with two Iraqi companies. As we reached a place all US forces fondly nicknamed the Circle of Death, on main supply route (MSR) Tampa, an enemy unit heavily engaged my unit. My assistant team leader, USMC Captain Derrick Szopa, took a bullet to the front of his Kevlar helmet, destroying the night-vision goggle mounting bracket. The impact knocked him out for about thirty seconds. Alongside him, one of the Iraqis was hit and killed instantly. Two more were wounded.

As I was assessing the situation, we started receiving RPG rounds. Our Iraqis were finally returning effective fire when I got hit. The bullet impacted on the left side of my jaw, entering at about a forty-five-degree angle, traveling through my ear canal, finally resting in the base of my skull. This knocked me to my knees. Then I got up, continued to fight and assess the situation for a few moments before dropping to my knees again and losing consciousness temporarily.

ALLIED IRAQI COMMANDOS TAKE CHARGE

I was lucky. The guy was at about six hundred yards or so, which allowed the bullet to bleed off some of its kinetic energy. Anything closer and it would have blown my head off. My Iraqi special forces soldiers were extremely loyal. When I got hit, there had to be some retribution. Up to that point, they’d been solid soldiers, but not particularly aggressive; afterward, I heard that they started kicking ass.

While I was being medevaced, my remaining two American advisors and our Iraqis got the fight under control—they killed a couple of the enemy, captured a bunch, and ran off the rest. Later one of the captured terrorists bragged to my Iraqi soldiers that he knew about an insurgent team that was killing Americans, and from him they got enough information to conduct a raid on a nearby enemy safe house. During the ensuing fight, one insurgent came out fighting and was instantly shot down at the door.

Inside, my guys captured two more and killed a third—a sniper with an SVD. We think this was the guy that shot me.

THE ILLUSIVE SNIPER TEAM

One standard method for inserting a sniper team is to attach them to an infantry unit conducting a cordon-and-search mission. While the infantry are kicking in doors and moving through the neighborhood, the sniper team dismounts from a Stryker wheeled armored vehicle and quietly moves into a building where they occupy a hide site; in other words, they go to ground and stay hidden. The Stryker unit finishes its mission and goes away, leaving the snipers in position. Two days later the Strykers come back, conduct a raid, and the sniper team hops back on the vehicle.

As an example, my Iraqi commando battalion found a large cache  of RPG rounds in an abandoned school. There were hundreds of these rounds, and we reported the find. I was ordered to get everybody out of the building, and we moved to another nearby location where we could still see the school.

About 1400 hours the next day, a van pulled up and several Americans got out. They wore sterile uniforms and had long hair and beards—they could have been from any of several units: Navy SEALs, Blackwater contractors, Delta, or the Ranger long-hair teams. They took their gear into a four-story building overlooking the school. This looked interesting and I was anxious to get into any fight that might develop, so I walked over and introduced myself. They were setting up a .50cal sniper rifle.

“Hi, I’m Captain Greene, and I’m the advisor to the Iraqi commando battalion that found the cache of RPG rounds,” I told them. We chatted for a while and caught up on the war without getting too specific about our roles. They invited me to hang out with them for a while, but without mentioning who they were or what unit they came from.

“So, what the hell are you guys doing and what’s your objective? You’re in my AOR [area of responsibility],” I said, “and I would like to know what’s going on.”

TAKING OUT AN RPG CACHE

“There’s an RPG cache down the road,” the mystery sniper said, “and we’re going to overwatch it for a while and see who shows up.” “I know about the rounds—we found them,” I said. “What do you think is going to happen?” “Well, somebody will usually come by to take some of the rounds and when they do, we’ll shoot them.”

We sat there for about three hours. I was watching through binos when a little guy appeared on the otherwise empty street. He behaved suspiciously, looking nervous, checking left and right. Then he headed for the RPG rocket cache. I was still watching through the binos when the .50cal rifle fired.

The range to the guy was only about 350 or 400 meters. When looked through the binos again, I could see the man thrashing on the road. Another little guy appeared and went to the guy on the ground. BOOM! The sniper fired again, killing this guy also.

When I looked around at the team, they were already busy packing up their gear and getting ready to go. “You can take the cache down now,” one of them said, and they climbed back in their van and drove away. I still have no idea whom they worked for. We picked up the bodies, cleaned out the RPG rounds, and went back to our patrols.

From Trigger Men by Hans Halberstadt. Copyright (c) 2008 by the author and reprinted by permisson of St. Martin's Press, LLC.