June 14, 2011 • 37 mins
Military snipers always work in pairs, and they're called force multipliers because of the profound effect a two-man team can have on a rival military. But how do they work? Join Josh and Chuck to learn more about snipers.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from housetop works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
(00:20):
You could call us something of a podcast sniping team,
taking out all MPR suckers ahead of us. That would
make me the spotter, which I like. Did you think
so you you're the spotter? I think I think it'd
be a good sniper. Actually, I think we could reasonably
trade off with that, you know, I mean, wouldn't you
eventually become envious? Like you know, I'm tired of spotting.
(00:42):
I want to pull the trigger. What's it like like, um,
Michael Douglas's teenage daughter in traffic thinking about shooting heroin?
You know, she starts out snorting it ends up shooting
it just because she's around it so much. I imagine
the same thing happens to spotters they've been so you
want to kill. I would just be good on the team,
you know. I can. I could lay somewhere for hours
(01:05):
at a time without moving. I'm sneaking quieter. You're not
allowed to be asleep though, Okay, yeah, it would be
a problem. So, Chuck, we're talking about military snipers. I
have a slight intro for this one. Alight, it's not
really an intro. It's just an interesting fact. And I
don't even know if it's true, so facts probably the
(01:26):
wrong word. But have you ever heard the old old adage,
the old superstition that you're not supposed to light three
cigarettes off of one match. I've never heard that. Actually, well,
it's a superstition and it is. That's just the real thing,
And apparently it has a fairly recent origins World War One. Actually,
it's that recent twentieth century um and it was based
(01:50):
on the idea that if you're in a trench and
you lit a match, you caught the attention of a sniper.
You lit your first cigarette, the sniper takes aim with
the second cigarette, and then when you're lighting the third cigarette,
sniper fires and that guy is dead. I like that, Yeah,
I buy that, until it's bad luck to like three
smokes off of winds one match. You know, a lot
(02:10):
of those phrase origins are military in nature. When you
when you go back and look at him, and I
buy that like a wall. Yeah. Yeah, that's Military's Army. Yeah,
Silent Scope. Do you ever play that game? No? Is
it a sniper game? Is it good? It's great? I
(02:32):
mean it's a stand up arcade game. I prefer the
sniper rifle on um Golden Eye yep. And I play
the Call of Duty game and it's to have a
sniper level where you have to take out this one
guy and account for the wind and all that. And
it's thrilling to me as a gun hating, peace loving
liberal hippie aging hippie. I still love it. Man. There's
(02:54):
something about it that's why little boys like playing with guns. Well,
that's why you picked this article. How terry sniper's work
this week? It's interesting this is a Chuck Bryant special,
meaning that you picked it, not that you wrote it. Um,
and uh, this was a Robert Valdi's special. Huh. This
guy got to the bottom of it, interviewed an actual
former Army ranger sniper. That enhanced it a lot. I
(03:17):
think definitely. The guy was anonymous and everything, which is
pretty awesome. Yeah. So, um, let's talk about sniper's chuckers, right,
there's a I guess we can we can reveal the
end the button of the article, right that where the
sniper wants everyone to know, we're not just like these
assassins that happens once in a while but very rarely,
(03:40):
and we have many, many other jobs. And probably the
biggest job that a sniper has is just reconnaissance, like
going and gathering information by being behind enemy lines and
spying on the enemy for days on end and then
reporting back what they see that. And they're highly highly
trained for that. They're not just highly trained for shooting.
(04:01):
They're highly trained observers too, yeah, big time. And but
if duty calls, they can uh, if they don't have
a specific assignment like to take out whatever this general is,
they can't have what they call targets of opportunity, And
that's when they can really take the wind out of
the sales of a battalion. If all of a sudden
(04:23):
the officers standing there, then he's not standing there, or
like the communications guy goes down, or later on even
some dude doing like you know, guard duty. Yeah, or equipment.
We found out later in this article actually and we
might as well spoil that. Yeah, this is not even
a human that's a material target. Yeah, like blow up
their generator or their ammunition bay or just anything that
(04:47):
would wreak havoc agree and make their job harder. And
then uh, I guess also because of this effect that
the effect that a sniper has is um. It's not
just um physical e g. You know, blowing someone away,
but it's also mental um and um. It has a
(05:08):
real dampening effect on morale. I would imagine the psychological
effect is probably pretty huge. Yeah, because you know, one
of the things about snipers is that you don't know
they're coming, and you don't see just all of a sudden,
the guy next to you is dead, and that's going
to shake you, especially like you said, when there's targets
of opportunity it happens randomly, or when it's like a
(05:28):
very well chosen person like you said, like an officer,
somebody who's like, you know, kind of the moral spiritual
leader of the team is suddenly dead. That has a
big effect, which makes UM snipers what are called force multipliers,
meaning just a one or two people UM can have
the effect of a you know, a big platoon you know,
(05:49):
charging in and shooting people. Yeah, and I always say
band name a lot, but if you're in a heavy
metal band. In your name isn't force multiplier, you might
want to think about changing it, Yeah, unless it's master
it on. They have a good name, so yes, they
they're actually trained to UM, to spy on the enemy
(06:10):
and and learn who the officers are, which is you
know you've always heard you're not supposed to salute in
the field of battle because it's pretty much that giveaway.
But these guys are trained to look and stare and
just you can tell. They can tell at least who
the higher ranks are by the way they carry themselves,
by what they're doing, by the way they're acting, and
they're trained to pick these people out and then pick
(06:31):
these people off, Chuck. There's a couple of other UM assignments.
I guess the sniper can land or positions that they
play roles. That's the word I'm looking for. There's the
famous Overwatch position where they're like up in a bell tower,
clock tower or something like that with a just a
three and sixty degree view of the battlefield. That's just
taking people off like um prior to the Nation in
(06:54):
Inglorious Bastards, saving Private Ryan because remember he took him
out through the scope yeh, I remember only in the movies,
but that was pretty cool. Yeah, only in the movies
or World War two. Um. And then that that's called
the overwatch position. I don't remember if I said they're not.
And then there's a blocking action, which is, um, basically
you are again up on a roof, but instead you're
(07:18):
helping to defend a position rather than maybe take it. Right. Right, Yeah,
you're helping out your buddies that are in the hiding
in the farmhouse below, right, because this is World War two. Right,
that's exactly right. Do you want to go ahead and
reveal the big secret about snipers, the supposed lone gunman?
(07:39):
It's not true. It isn't true. Have you've seen the
movie Shooter? Did you see that with Marky Mark? No,
I hate him. I don't hate him. No, I don't,
I I don't. I liked him in um three Kings. Yeah. Yeah,
I haven't seen The Boxer yet, but I'm sure i'll
like it. The Fighter the same thing, uh, and I have. Uh. Well, yeah, well,
(08:01):
Shooter is actually I had very low expectations and ended
up being a pretty decent movie. And um it is
buoyed by the great leave on Helm of the band
my favorite group ever. He's an actor in that. I
thought Tom Berenger was it, No, No, No, no different movie.
I think that might have been called Sniper. Tom Berenger
(08:22):
wasn't in that movie. So Leave Leave On Helm was
the He's the old timer who who apparently had something
to do with the Kennedy assassination too. Huh oh yeah, man,
he's been in lots of movies. Boogie Knights loved him
in Boogie Knights. He was awesome in that movie. Okay, okay, alright. Yes,
(08:42):
snipers working teams always, They never ever ever go alone.
It's not the way that military sniper units act. Yea.
They are, um so much so that their sniper rifles
are considered crew served weapons, like a you know, one
of those heavy machine and it's like belt fed bullets. Yeah,
it takes a defeat it bullets and one guy to
(09:04):
shoot it. That's a crew served um A weapon. Yeah, obviously,
UM so is a sniper rifle, not because it takes
two people to shoot it, but because it takes two
people to shoot it accurately, which is the whole point
it is. And uh a spotter is uh from what
we gather sort of a sniper in training. Um, you
(09:24):
will act as a spotter and the hopes that one
day you will actually be the sniper and lead your
own team and the sniper. I mean we're calling it
a team. It's two dudes, the sniper team. I'm sorry.
The sniper on the team is really the one in charge.
They're the one that he's to leave on helms of
the band helm. They get the orders, uh from from
(09:45):
the higher ups. They determine like the best route to
get there, the drop off points, all that stuff, right,
And I guess we should go ahead and walk through
the process because those are the first two steps. Let's
do you determine your drop off point for your objective,
which isn't gonna be you know, fifty yards away from
your objective. It's gonna be miles and miles away. Probably,
(10:05):
Like a day's walk is a good bed, Yeah, you're
gonna spend a day walk in there. You want to
get a good setup position and and verify that you
can camouflage that spot. Like, yeah, you're always thinking ahead.
When you're on your belly and you're you want to
move to your second position. You don't just say all right,
that looks decent over there, You've got to look at
everything around it, what's in your way to get there,
because you're gonna be belly crawling. And then when you
(10:27):
get there, what you can use to camouflage yourself. Uh,
they're gonna establish an escape route very important, and a
fallback position in case you get separated from your buddy.
And then you gotta locate your target, grab the gun
and get in position, right and um, getting in position
after you locate the target is probably not what snipers do.
(10:50):
They probably get in position and then locate the target.
Would say, you know, if they're shooting somebody's specific, like
maybe they arrive at the location of where they're you know,
going to be shooting the person or whatever. But you're
going to sit there, possibly for days on end. And
by sid I mean late flat on your stomach. What
is that prone or supine? I think prone? Prone, I
(11:13):
think curses. So the spotter is going to be on
the ground right next to and slightly behind you, basically
trying to line up their spotter scope, which is way
more powerful even than the rifle scope, as close to
the barrel of the gun as possible. Yeah, in the
same line as it and basically say okay, I've got
(11:35):
this guy and he is, um a thousand meters away. Yeah,
the wind is blowing at like six knots from the northeast,
it's sixty five degrees, it's got a barometric pressure and
a temperature of this humidity level is this? So you'd
make a great spotter. See all that. So all that
(11:56):
comes into consideration when you're trying to you know, you're
shooting oftentimes from a thousand yards away. Yeah, a thousand yards. Well, remember, um,
I think to become a sniper for Delta Force, remember
like it was yards minimum you had to you had
to have like eight or nine or nine accuracy from yards.
(12:19):
We talked about it. That was a while ago though.
So the sniper, how do they This was a cool
thing because I saw it on YouTube. This thing creates
a vapor trail the bullet does. Yeah, the spotters not
just you know watching. And also we should we should
say that if you're there for days on end, um,
the spotter and the sniper will probably trade off spot
(12:39):
or duty just so one can get rest or something
like that. And then exactly, um, but yes, when the
time finally comes and the shot is to be taken. Um,
the spotter watches to make sure that the sniper hit
the target. And like you're saying, a bullet, the bullets
that they're firing out of these fifty caliber guns are
(13:02):
seven point six too. Yeah, that's a big bullet. Those
are the ones that look like missiles. They move through
the air um in such a way that they create
a vapor trail. And the army ranger who was interviewed
for this article says, like it it looks you can
see through it, but it's distorted air, which I'd take
(13:24):
to mean like the matrix. That's exactly what it looks like. Oh,
you've seen it, well, it's on YouTube. Yeah you can see.
I mean you gotta look, but you can see it,
and it looks like the matrix thing and all the
other movies that copied it is like a hugely exaggerated obviously,
but it sort of looks like that. It looks like, uh,
the ABYSS, the little blob from the ABYSS traveling through
(13:45):
the air, cavitating the air? Is that the word I think? So?
Um so yeah, then the spotter says, you missed. That
doesn't happen very often. No, it doesn't um. But if
it does happen, these botter says, Okay, we need to
move it this way a little bit. Yeah, maybe down
a little probably uses more specific jargon than that, maybe
(14:09):
down a little, and then another SHOT's taken and then
another shot. Um. And the spotter is also going to
be the one who's carrying, like, um, something like an
M six teen or an M four some other assault rifle.
Because if somebody comes up on you, as anyone who
has ever played any video game when you're in hand
to hand combat or close combat, uh, this sniper rifle
(14:32):
is the worst weapon to have. Of all, you want
the automatic assault rifle. That's what you want. And that's
me in those games. I'm the one turning around fumbling
trying to reload while the guy's dispatching the face inter
shooting me exactly. And the relationship between these two guys
is obviously very key because they're spending hours and days
and days at a time with each other in very
(14:54):
close quiet quarters. Trust is huge, obviously because their lives
depend on each other and they usually don't have a
lot of support from their unit. They're out there alone
protecting their unit and their unit and platoon is depending
on them. If you screw up, a lot of times
your platoon is is not in good shape afterwards. So
very high pressure job, right, they're doing recon or they're
(15:16):
doing um, spearhead demoralization through selective assassination something like that. Right.
Um so yeah, they're they're like if the snipers out there,
probably shortly after a platoon is going to be on
their heels and the sniper has to relay whatever information
he's taking in. Um so yeah, if he screws up,
(15:36):
it can be problematic. Sure, Um you want to talk
about the rifles. Yeah, they don't just pull a rifle
off with shelf at Walmart and and go hide in
the woods, although some guys have. Remember Seemo Hia who
seem O Hia the White Death. Oh yeah, yeah, well
sure he had his plain old bolt action hunting hunting rifle.
(15:58):
Any from five cool with it? Uh These days, Josh,
it's a little more uh specialized than that. Um there
a lot of times it's called an M fourteen with
match grade upgrades. And match grade means that some professional
gunsmith is hone this thing to within a good centimeter.
(16:19):
You like that of accuracy? You were you were waiting
for a better reaction than that. I didn't know if
you thought that was a real word. So I think
match grade means like, um, like a shooting match like
competition grade. Yeah, probably because they use very similar rifles
for competition shooting. Yeah, where they're hollowed out. Yeah, that's Olympic.
(16:39):
I never understood that. I love it though. The guys
who ski and shoot, yeah, what's the point of that,
I don't know. I like it. They should add like
they should snowboard and shoot and just do all sorts
of things. You go up to half fife, then you
stop and you take a couple of shots. Yeah, kite
sailing and shooting. Yeah, And I'm sure there's some great
history to that, but I don't know it. So match
(17:00):
grade guns and also match grade handmade ammunition. So I
mean it's all just like very detailed that like that's
hollowed out. It's light. It's usually fiberglass because you don't
want the wood to warp, and UM ends up being
extremely accurate. The barrel doesn't touch the rest of the gun.
This is cool. The free floating barrel. It touches as
(17:20):
little as possible so that the initial explosion from the
bullet being fired causing the recoil in the barrel that
it doesn't kick as much, and just the rifles accuracy yeah,
disadjusted plus move maladjust to any kind of movements. Ben Yeah,
which is why they use more often than not bolt
(17:42):
action rifles, which had disadvantages in that you have to
load a single round, shoot it, and then unload that shell,
reload another round. But um, their motto was one shot,
one kill, so one shot is usually all you need.
But they do sometimes use the semi automatic rifles, but
which you have there are shells flying out of the gun,
(18:03):
which is not very smart. Right. Either way, you're gonna
be detected with movement possibly like when you do the
bolt action that's moving, that flying shell that's moving. But
the automatic or semi automatic rifles have more moving parts
than a BOWLT action. Checkers tend to prefer bowlt action. Yeah,
although they said they can their shoot it's their choice.
(18:25):
Shooters preference, Yeah, sniper's sniper's choice between eight and fifteen grand.
These things costs. Yeah, it's kind of pricey, but they
look really cool. Yeah, they do. Uh do we talk
about the scope, No, we haven't yet. I mean, we
talked about how the the spotter has a superior scope.
(18:46):
But yeah, the scope on the sniper rifle usually has
about a ten time magnification power. It's just you know, telescope,
a high powered telescope, mini telescope sorry, with um crosshairs
on it. Called redicules, right, is that what it has pronounced?
A targeting ridicule, ridiculation ridicule. I didn't know how it
(19:08):
was pronounced. I kept saying articular, and then I thought
it was ridicule. Uh, what you're looking at when you're
aiming though, Like we said, there's all sorts of variances
in the wind and everything will change the path of
your bullet. But um, you're looking at the point of
aim and the point of impact, and if you're firing
from six yards away, it's not gonna be what you're
(19:29):
aiming at. And this is accurate even in that Call
of Duty game, like you aim at the dude's head
and then you end up shooting like three ft to
the right of them, and every one goes, what was that?
And then it's over? What's over? Well, that little round
is over. If you don't get the guy, you're done.
You can't get off at a second shot. What happens.
I think you gotta start over so they don't come
(19:50):
at you or anything. No, no, they come at you
and then you start over eventually. But so you have
to aim over aim a lot of times because of
things like gravity. And that was the fact of the
show to me. The gravity one. If you drop a bullet,
If you aim a gun a sniper rifle and then
shoot it level to the ground and you drop a
(20:11):
bullet at the same height as the barrel, they're both
gonna hit the ground at the same time because of gravity.
That's that's the fact of the show for sure. Um, Chuck.
What you're talking about can be adjusted for in the
scope through the ballistic drop compensator, which is a little
dial so you don't have to go redo your whole
scope settings and all that. You can just adjust it
(20:33):
up or down or left or right just a little
bit to compensate for gravity. And um. The other like
wind and that's what you see him doing. Yeah, they're like,
you know, wind it two nots you seed Markey, Mark,
go click, that's all you need to do. That's it.
One little click, gun shoots itself, not true. Um. And
then there's also these things called Gillie suits, which, um,
(20:57):
anytime you see a sniper or you don't see a sniper,
and then all of a sudden he stands up from
the leaves and brush and all that in front of
you and he's wearing what looks like leaves and brush.
That's called the Gillie suit, which has a pretty cool
little history to it. I like it. Go ahead. So
gillies um were the Irish game wardens Scottish game wardens
(21:19):
from days of your uh, and basically their job was
to keep an eye on the landowners um game right
while game that he liked to hunt um and the
gilly once in a while would have to basically catch
a deer or something like that, say bring it back
to the castle for the landowner to hunt in a
(21:43):
mock hunt and kill the deer. But he couldn't just
kill the deer and bring it. He had to bring
it alive. So this meant days of stalking a deer,
staying completely silent, camouflaging himself with stuff found in the
in the local environment, and then waiting for a deer
to walk by in jumping on it, grabbing it. Can
you imagine these dudes and then dragging it back to
(22:04):
the castle for this mock hunt. Yeah, so think about
how despised the nobleman must have been for his little
mock hunt in between glasses of sherry of a deer
that the Gillie caught with his bare hands after waiting
two days for it to walk past him, you know,
and then they just killed the deer like when they
(22:25):
bring it in because like his gout and his flaring
up so you can't even get out of his chair.
So yeah, it's like early internet hunting. Oh yeah, God.
They outlawed that pretty quickly, thank goodness, because it was awful.
I almost had to write an article on that. Did
you get out of it? Yeah? I refused. I said,
you know what, I'm not even gonna put this out
(22:45):
there as something that exists. And they went, you know what,
you may be right on this one. And then like
two weeks later they outlawed it controlling the flow of information.
Huh no, you know nice. I didn't want I didn't
want it happening. Yes, I stopped internet hunting single. So
the gilly suit is what they call what the sniper
wears now because of that cool history, and it's usually
(23:07):
like really reinforced on your torso because you're gonna be
crawling a lot, probably padded to help you out with comfort,
and you know it's not like you're really comfortable. It's
padded for comfort. Padded for comfort, and you've got a
netting all over you so you can work in twigs
like what you don't want our straight lines like the
antenna from your radio or the muzzle of your gun,
because nature didn't have straight lines like that, right, So
(23:29):
they make gilly suits for their guns. Yeah, um, can't
you see them having like it's the Special Ops barracks,
like gilly suit contests, like who's got the best one? Oh,
that's elaborate, you know. Yeah, yeah, I can't believe you
work that rock into it well. And when I envisioned
that SIT's that skit they like are putting the medal
around the winter and then a guy just rises up
(23:51):
behind him that they're never He comes off with the
back of his Gillie suit and steals his metal. Uh
we'll speak King of Special Ops. These are Special Ops
teams and uh Sniper teams are all a part of
Special Operations and they train all the time. If they're
(24:12):
not training specifically for a mission. They're studying the mission,
and their goal is to know every single thing about
everybody on that mission and memorize it, because if you're caught,
you don't want to have paper saying these are signals,
these are call signs or whatever, because I could just think,
you know, like being caught with the paper like this
(24:33):
is Corporal Todd Thompson's call sign ACE, you know, and
then the enemies like this, who's this Todd Thompson? Why
do you get ACE? That's the coolest one, right, because
he's the best one. Uh. The U S m C
is known even though all military branches have sniper teams
(24:54):
and schools, the Marines are obviously because they're the Marines.
They have what's known as the best school, the U
s m C. Scout Sniper School in the Marines actually
may have been the origin of the snipers in the U.
S military. Yeah, the leather necks, the original guys who
used to ride around in the eighteenth century on ships
(25:14):
were um often tasked with basically sniping from crow's nests
um other people on other ships during battles. I don't
think I knew what the leather necks were. Yeah, their Marines, Well,
I knew that, but I didn't know that it went
back that far. Yeah, nine eighteenth century. Well back then
they actually had next made of leather, right, that's pretty
(25:35):
cool human leather. Um, it is the best school, like
I said, and if you get in, even fewer graduate
because it's not just about being a good shooter. You
have to have the right temperament. You have to be
calm and not like some hot head. You have to
have confidence in your decisions, confidence in your in your
(25:56):
spot or yeah as this as this um this niper
who was interviewed for the article said he basically like,
you can't just be calling back like can I shoot
this guy? Or you have to make the decision and
make the right decision and confidence in your decision so
that you can say I am going to shoot this guy.
It works well alone and their little report card growing
up was probably a key for a future sniper. So
(26:19):
it's a two month course, Josh. Here at the Marine Corps, Uh,
they train in three main um disciplines marksmanship obviously, observation,
and stalking. Yeah, and let's talk about can we talk
about the games? I think we should like the Kim's game. Yeah,
I didn't see what that stood for I don't know
why they made it all caps because it's Um. It's
(26:41):
named after a Rudyard Tippling book Kim, So it's not
a boy's name, UM. And he was an Irish orphan
who grew up in India, was trained in intelligence and
in the book they would give him um trades of
like stones and gems and give him a minute to
look at it and then take it away and say
what did you just So that's what the Kim's game is.
(27:02):
It's very similar to that. It's based on that. Well,
go ahead, explain it. Well. It teaches observational skills, right
and basically um with this game, Uh, the guys in
sniper School are presented a tray and it has you know,
fifteen twenty things on it, and they're told to look
at it for you know, thirty seconds or a minute
or something. Then the trays removed and they say what
(27:24):
did you see? And say there was a paper clip? Right,
You can't say well, there's a paper clip because they
want to leave it to the guys who are analyzing
the intelligence you're sending back to determine what it was
you saw. So you say, well, I saw a piece
of wire bent around into um an oval three times
(27:44):
or something like that. Ever slip and you can just
say paper clip. But and then as as school goes along,
the training, this observational training through the Kim's game apparently
gets more and more difficult, where they show you something
in the morning, then you go out and practice all day,
and then at night they say, write down what you
(28:05):
saw this morning. Yeah, and they'll add more things and
give you less time to look at it to begin with,
Because when I first read it, I was like, that's
not too hard. It's like a wine cork and a
paper clip and uh and a CB radio done. But
then as it gets harder, I was like, oh, there's
a method here, right, and not being able to call
something what you know it is like, how would you
(28:25):
describe a wine cork? I would say I have thousands
of these around my home. Lungs are coated with the
dust of them. I could say it's a cork in
a spherical cork with a red stain on one end.
It would be tubular, wouldn't it tubular? It wouldn't be spherical,
(28:47):
it wouldn't be conical. And then right now there's someone
standing behind it's the gun. Yeah, exactly, we'd be the
worst sniper team ever. Actually. Um. And then another another
good game I guess you could call it is how
they trained to stalk, right, Yeah, that is really cool.
So stalking is moving from say your drop zone or wherever,
(29:08):
to the place where you're going to set up without
being identified, without being seen or noticed. But you have
to make your way there and there may or may
not be people watching you, are able to see you,
but you need to get to the point you need
to get to. So you have to practice that. That's
called stalking, and they practice it by basically saying, Okay,
here's a nice grassy field. Um, you guys stay here,
(29:31):
and we're gonna put two people a thousand meters away
and we're going to look for you, and you need
to make it within a hundred and fifty meters of
us without us seeing you. And they're looking for you.
Not only that, they have two people out there in
the field looking for you walking around. So apparently that's
like real life on hyper drive that never ever would happen.
(29:53):
But I guess the idea is if you can pass that,
then you know you'll be fine out in the field.
It's like we're an ankle, which makes sense. And then
they have to take a shot from the hundred and
fifty meters with blanks, obviously, and then they have to
move from that position. They have to take the shot
without being detected, and then move from that position to
another position and take another shot without being detected, which
(30:18):
apparently you very rarely, if ever moved to another position
and take a second shot, and you definitely are never
within a hundred and fifty of your target. So they overtrain,
which is a good thing. Another little game they play
is is just strictly observational from a distance. They will
hide things in a field, very small things like a
ballpoint pin hanging from a little shrubbery brush, and you
(30:41):
get out there with your spot or with your scope
and binoculars and you gotta pick this stuff out. And
basically just canvas, you know, he said that. The guy
in here said. You just block off one little, small,
tiny block at a time, stare at it through your
binoculars for five minutes, then move on to the next
little block until you find something and chuck you were
talking about when they were um with gravity is one
(31:04):
of the biggest problems for accuracy, right well, there's there's
a a unit of measurement that snipers use to adjust
for these variables. It's called minute of angle m o
A and UM. Apparently one point zero four seven inches
UM for every hundred yards is the the the inaccuracy
(31:30):
that's going to develop as the bullet travels. Right. Yeah,
So if you're a thousand yards away like they say
you can be, or more, you could potentially be off
by ten inches, which means you could potentially miss your
target altogether unless you account for wind and humidity and
barometric pressure and temperature, the temperatures. I thought this was
very interesting. Cold air is denser, which means it creates
(31:51):
more drag, right, which is pretty cool. You have to
account for that UM and then the other one UM.
Depending on your distance. UM. Someone may or may not
hear you. If you're six hundred yards away or more,
potentially you are not going to even hear that little
sonic boom crack because the bullet leaves the muzzle at
(32:13):
the speed of sound. You won't even hear that. So
you could be eight hundreds away and dudes could be
standing there. And that's when you see in the movie
that they see the little buff of dirt behind them
and they're just like what was that? Yeah? So six
is where the seven point six two millimeter round is
dragged into sub sonic speed, meaning it travels less than
(32:38):
the speed of sound, meaning it makes a sound where
anything over that is like you said, suddenly there's just
bullets appearing. And the guy who was interviewed from this
head a great quote. He said, Um, you can basically
just take shots at somebody. And the guy who has
interviewed for this article had this great quote. He said,
if you're shooting at a target eight a thousand meters out,
(33:00):
you could be shooting at that person all day long
and they don't even know they're being shot at. Why
are these oil cans exploding he hates them? Uh, Yeah,
that's pretty cool. And that's a very good place to
end because the goal of the snipers to not get caught,
so they want to get as far away as they
can from the target while still being within an accurate range. Done. Done,
(33:26):
Do you got anything else? I got nothing else? Military
snipers if you were expecting like the DC sniper or
um Charles what was his name, Whitman, Yes, Uh, they're
not military snipers. Although Charles Whitman was in the military.
He's in the Marines, remember in full metal jacket. Yeah
it wasn't Oswald too, or no, yeah, he's a marine too.
(33:47):
Do you have it? Yea, I think they were both
sharpshooters too. Do you have it? Well, okay, those are okay,
Well they made an appearance then all right, okay. If
you want to know more about snipers, Um, you should
type in snipers in the handy search bar how stuff
works dot Com and has some cool flash games inside
of it and very cool links and cool pictures and
(34:08):
if you're into that kind of thing, you're gonna love
this article that's Snipers in the search bar at how
stuff works dot Com. Since I said that, it's time
for listener mail, Josh, I'm gonna call this from a
fan with MS multiple score rosis. I have a very
very good friend of mine that has MS and it
(34:32):
was afflicted with it later in life and is late twenties.
I believe it's very sad, but so she writes, Um,
Josh and Chuck, perhaps I could tell you about the
fact that I've been living with MS for over twenty
two years and I found it a nonprofit called soft
Serve matters that will empower people with chronic analysis. But
maybe I should leave with I was listening to is
(34:54):
Bhuton onto something with their gross national and happiness because
I feel the need to tell you I believe that
some people are just born with the happy gene. I
am living proof of that, having started it in kindergarten um.
In spite of the fact that I have a decreasing
have had decreasing abilities since my twentieth birthday, and a
six figured debt that my husband and I accrued while
(35:17):
getting our advanced degrees, I am uber happy. Or maybe
it's just a denial to all of these challenges. My
default is happy, happy, joy joy. I made that reference
just to amuse you. Uh. It may have something to
do with the fact that I come from a family
of armchair comedians and married a man based on his
humor alone. Well not really, but doesn't that sound good?
(35:37):
We have a nine year old who is freaking hysterical.
Nature or nurture, I ask. I'll go with nature since
it supports my theory, though clearly nurture as a major player.
So while I figure out the approach to email you guys,
let me just say I love your work. And for
the administrative section of this email, I employ to check
out these links. And she has a blog that I
(35:59):
would like to pug and it is M S l
O L dot WordPress dot com and that is Amy
G and Amy. Like I said, my really good friend
Billy has MS. So it's very uh dear to my
heart cause and anything we can do to help you
spread the word, just email us back and we'll do
so cool. That was a good one, Chuck, Thank you,
Thank you Amy, thanks for being an armchair comedian yourself. Yeah. Yeah, okay, Um,
(36:26):
and I guess thanks to your whole family for that
really husband good. Yeah. If you find something funny that
other people may not, we love that stuff and we
want to hear about it, Um, send us an email
with it to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(36:47):
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought
to you by the rein into two thousand twelve. Camry,
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from housetop works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
(00:20):
You could call us something of a podcast sniping team,
taking out all MPR suckers ahead of us. That would
make me the spotter, which I like. Did you think
so you you're the spotter? I think I think it'd
be a good sniper. Actually, I think we could reasonably
trade off with that, you know, I mean, wouldn't you
eventually become envious? Like you know, I'm tired of spotting.
(00:42):
I want to pull the trigger. What's it like like, um,
Michael Douglas's teenage daughter in traffic thinking about shooting heroin?
You know, she starts out snorting it ends up shooting
it just because she's around it so much. I imagine
the same thing happens to spotters they've been so you
want to kill. I would just be good on the team,
you know. I can. I could lay somewhere for hours
(01:05):
at a time without moving. I'm sneaking quieter. You're not
allowed to be asleep though, Okay, yeah, it would be
a problem. So, Chuck, we're talking about military snipers. I
have a slight intro for this one. Alight, it's not
really an intro. It's just an interesting fact. And I
don't even know if it's true, so facts probably the
(01:26):
wrong word. But have you ever heard the old old adage,
the old superstition that you're not supposed to light three
cigarettes off of one match. I've never heard that. Actually, well,
it's a superstition and it is. That's just the real thing,
And apparently it has a fairly recent origins World War One. Actually,
it's that recent twentieth century um and it was based
(01:50):
on the idea that if you're in a trench and
you lit a match, you caught the attention of a sniper.
You lit your first cigarette, the sniper takes aim with
the second cigarette, and then when you're lighting the third cigarette,
sniper fires and that guy is dead. I like that, Yeah,
I buy that, until it's bad luck to like three
smokes off of winds one match. You know, a lot
(02:10):
of those phrase origins are military in nature. When you
when you go back and look at him, and I
buy that like a wall. Yeah. Yeah, that's Military's Army. Yeah,
Silent Scope. Do you ever play that game? No? Is
it a sniper game? Is it good? It's great? I
(02:32):
mean it's a stand up arcade game. I prefer the
sniper rifle on um Golden Eye yep. And I play
the Call of Duty game and it's to have a
sniper level where you have to take out this one
guy and account for the wind and all that. And
it's thrilling to me as a gun hating, peace loving
liberal hippie aging hippie. I still love it. Man. There's
(02:54):
something about it that's why little boys like playing with guns. Well,
that's why you picked this article. How terry sniper's work
this week? It's interesting this is a Chuck Bryant special,
meaning that you picked it, not that you wrote it. Um,
and uh, this was a Robert Valdi's special. Huh. This
guy got to the bottom of it, interviewed an actual
former Army ranger sniper. That enhanced it a lot. I
(03:17):
think definitely. The guy was anonymous and everything, which is
pretty awesome. Yeah. So, um, let's talk about sniper's chuckers, right,
there's a I guess we can we can reveal the
end the button of the article, right that where the
sniper wants everyone to know, we're not just like these
assassins that happens once in a while but very rarely,
(03:40):
and we have many, many other jobs. And probably the
biggest job that a sniper has is just reconnaissance, like
going and gathering information by being behind enemy lines and
spying on the enemy for days on end and then
reporting back what they see that. And they're highly highly
trained for that. They're not just highly trained for shooting.
(04:01):
They're highly trained observers too, yeah, big time. And but
if duty calls, they can uh, if they don't have
a specific assignment like to take out whatever this general is,
they can't have what they call targets of opportunity, And
that's when they can really take the wind out of
the sales of a battalion. If all of a sudden
(04:23):
the officers standing there, then he's not standing there, or
like the communications guy goes down, or later on even
some dude doing like you know, guard duty. Yeah, or equipment.
We found out later in this article actually and we
might as well spoil that. Yeah, this is not even
a human that's a material target. Yeah, like blow up
their generator or their ammunition bay or just anything that
(04:47):
would wreak havoc agree and make their job harder. And
then uh, I guess also because of this effect that
the effect that a sniper has is um. It's not
just um physical e g. You know, blowing someone away,
but it's also mental um and um. It has a
(05:08):
real dampening effect on morale. I would imagine the psychological
effect is probably pretty huge. Yeah, because you know, one
of the things about snipers is that you don't know
they're coming, and you don't see just all of a sudden,
the guy next to you is dead, and that's going
to shake you, especially like you said, when there's targets
of opportunity it happens randomly, or when it's like a
(05:28):
very well chosen person like you said, like an officer,
somebody who's like, you know, kind of the moral spiritual
leader of the team is suddenly dead. That has a
big effect, which makes UM snipers what are called force multipliers,
meaning just a one or two people UM can have
the effect of a you know, a big platoon you know,
(05:49):
charging in and shooting people. Yeah, and I always say
band name a lot, but if you're in a heavy
metal band. In your name isn't force multiplier, you might
want to think about changing it, Yeah, unless it's master
it on. They have a good name, so yes, they
they're actually trained to UM, to spy on the enemy
(06:10):
and and learn who the officers are, which is you
know you've always heard you're not supposed to salute in
the field of battle because it's pretty much that giveaway.
But these guys are trained to look and stare and
just you can tell. They can tell at least who
the higher ranks are by the way they carry themselves,
by what they're doing, by the way they're acting, and
they're trained to pick these people out and then pick
(06:31):
these people off, Chuck. There's a couple of other UM assignments.
I guess the sniper can land or positions that they
play roles. That's the word I'm looking for. There's the
famous Overwatch position where they're like up in a bell tower,
clock tower or something like that with a just a
three and sixty degree view of the battlefield. That's just
taking people off like um prior to the Nation in
(06:54):
Inglorious Bastards, saving Private Ryan because remember he took him
out through the scope yeh, I remember only in the movies,
but that was pretty cool. Yeah, only in the movies
or World War two. Um. And then that that's called
the overwatch position. I don't remember if I said they're not.
And then there's a blocking action, which is, um, basically
you are again up on a roof, but instead you're
(07:18):
helping to defend a position rather than maybe take it. Right. Right, Yeah,
you're helping out your buddies that are in the hiding
in the farmhouse below, right, because this is World War two. Right,
that's exactly right. Do you want to go ahead and
reveal the big secret about snipers, the supposed lone gunman?
(07:39):
It's not true. It isn't true. Have you've seen the
movie Shooter? Did you see that with Marky Mark? No,
I hate him. I don't hate him. No, I don't,
I I don't. I liked him in um three Kings. Yeah. Yeah,
I haven't seen The Boxer yet, but I'm sure i'll
like it. The Fighter the same thing, uh, and I have. Uh. Well, yeah, well,
(08:01):
Shooter is actually I had very low expectations and ended
up being a pretty decent movie. And um it is
buoyed by the great leave on Helm of the band
my favorite group ever. He's an actor in that. I
thought Tom Berenger was it, No, No, No, no different movie.
I think that might have been called Sniper. Tom Berenger
(08:22):
wasn't in that movie. So Leave Leave On Helm was
the He's the old timer who who apparently had something
to do with the Kennedy assassination too. Huh oh yeah, man,
he's been in lots of movies. Boogie Knights loved him
in Boogie Knights. He was awesome in that movie. Okay, okay, alright. Yes,
(08:42):
snipers working teams always, They never ever ever go alone.
It's not the way that military sniper units act. Yea.
They are, um so much so that their sniper rifles
are considered crew served weapons, like a you know, one
of those heavy machine and it's like belt fed bullets. Yeah,
it takes a defeat it bullets and one guy to
(09:04):
shoot it. That's a crew served um A weapon. Yeah, obviously,
UM so is a sniper rifle, not because it takes
two people to shoot it, but because it takes two
people to shoot it accurately, which is the whole point
it is. And uh a spotter is uh from what
we gather sort of a sniper in training. Um, you
(09:24):
will act as a spotter and the hopes that one
day you will actually be the sniper and lead your
own team and the sniper. I mean we're calling it
a team. It's two dudes, the sniper team. I'm sorry.
The sniper on the team is really the one in charge.
They're the one that he's to leave on helms of
the band helm. They get the orders, uh from from
(09:45):
the higher ups. They determine like the best route to
get there, the drop off points, all that stuff, right,
And I guess we should go ahead and walk through
the process because those are the first two steps. Let's
do you determine your drop off point for your objective,
which isn't gonna be you know, fifty yards away from
your objective. It's gonna be miles and miles away. Probably,
(10:05):
Like a day's walk is a good bed, Yeah, you're
gonna spend a day walk in there. You want to
get a good setup position and and verify that you
can camouflage that spot. Like, yeah, you're always thinking ahead.
When you're on your belly and you're you want to
move to your second position. You don't just say all right,
that looks decent over there, You've got to look at
everything around it, what's in your way to get there,
because you're gonna be belly crawling. And then when you
(10:27):
get there, what you can use to camouflage yourself. Uh,
they're gonna establish an escape route very important, and a
fallback position in case you get separated from your buddy.
And then you gotta locate your target, grab the gun
and get in position, right and um, getting in position
after you locate the target is probably not what snipers do.
(10:50):
They probably get in position and then locate the target.
Would say, you know, if they're shooting somebody's specific, like
maybe they arrive at the location of where they're you know,
going to be shooting the person or whatever. But you're
going to sit there, possibly for days on end. And
by sid I mean late flat on your stomach. What
is that prone or supine? I think prone? Prone, I
(11:13):
think curses. So the spotter is going to be on
the ground right next to and slightly behind you, basically
trying to line up their spotter scope, which is way
more powerful even than the rifle scope, as close to
the barrel of the gun as possible. Yeah, in the
same line as it and basically say okay, I've got
(11:35):
this guy and he is, um a thousand meters away. Yeah,
the wind is blowing at like six knots from the northeast,
it's sixty five degrees, it's got a barometric pressure and
a temperature of this humidity level is this? So you'd
make a great spotter. See all that. So all that
(11:56):
comes into consideration when you're trying to you know, you're
shooting oftentimes from a thousand yards away. Yeah, a thousand yards. Well, remember, um,
I think to become a sniper for Delta Force, remember
like it was yards minimum you had to you had
to have like eight or nine or nine accuracy from yards.
(12:19):
We talked about it. That was a while ago though.
So the sniper, how do they This was a cool
thing because I saw it on YouTube. This thing creates
a vapor trail the bullet does. Yeah, the spotters not
just you know watching. And also we should we should
say that if you're there for days on end, um,
the spotter and the sniper will probably trade off spot
(12:39):
or duty just so one can get rest or something
like that. And then exactly, um, but yes, when the
time finally comes and the shot is to be taken. Um,
the spotter watches to make sure that the sniper hit
the target. And like you're saying, a bullet, the bullets
that they're firing out of these fifty caliber guns are
(13:02):
seven point six too. Yeah, that's a big bullet. Those
are the ones that look like missiles. They move through
the air um in such a way that they create
a vapor trail. And the army ranger who was interviewed
for this article says, like it it looks you can
see through it, but it's distorted air, which I'd take
(13:24):
to mean like the matrix. That's exactly what it looks like. Oh,
you've seen it, well, it's on YouTube. Yeah you can see.
I mean you gotta look, but you can see it,
and it looks like the matrix thing and all the
other movies that copied it is like a hugely exaggerated obviously,
but it sort of looks like that. It looks like, uh,
the ABYSS, the little blob from the ABYSS traveling through
(13:45):
the air, cavitating the air? Is that the word I think? So?
Um so yeah, then the spotter says, you missed. That
doesn't happen very often. No, it doesn't um. But if
it does happen, these botter says, Okay, we need to
move it this way a little bit. Yeah, maybe down
a little probably uses more specific jargon than that, maybe
(14:09):
down a little, and then another SHOT's taken and then
another shot. Um. And the spotter is also going to
be the one who's carrying, like, um, something like an
M six teen or an M four some other assault rifle.
Because if somebody comes up on you, as anyone who
has ever played any video game when you're in hand
to hand combat or close combat, uh, this sniper rifle
(14:32):
is the worst weapon to have. Of all, you want
the automatic assault rifle. That's what you want. And that's
me in those games. I'm the one turning around fumbling
trying to reload while the guy's dispatching the face inter
shooting me exactly. And the relationship between these two guys
is obviously very key because they're spending hours and days
and days at a time with each other in very
(14:54):
close quiet quarters. Trust is huge, obviously because their lives
depend on each other and they usually don't have a
lot of support from their unit. They're out there alone
protecting their unit and their unit and platoon is depending
on them. If you screw up, a lot of times
your platoon is is not in good shape afterwards. So
very high pressure job, right, they're doing recon or they're
(15:16):
doing um, spearhead demoralization through selective assassination something like that. Right.
Um so yeah, they're they're like if the snipers out there,
probably shortly after a platoon is going to be on
their heels and the sniper has to relay whatever information
he's taking in. Um so yeah, if he screws up,
(15:36):
it can be problematic. Sure, Um you want to talk
about the rifles. Yeah, they don't just pull a rifle
off with shelf at Walmart and and go hide in
the woods, although some guys have. Remember Seemo Hia who
seem O Hia the White Death. Oh yeah, yeah, well
sure he had his plain old bolt action hunting hunting rifle.
(15:58):
Any from five cool with it? Uh These days, Josh,
it's a little more uh specialized than that. Um there
a lot of times it's called an M fourteen with
match grade upgrades. And match grade means that some professional
gunsmith is hone this thing to within a good centimeter.
(16:19):
You like that of accuracy? You were you were waiting
for a better reaction than that. I didn't know if
you thought that was a real word. So I think
match grade means like, um, like a shooting match like
competition grade. Yeah, probably because they use very similar rifles
for competition shooting. Yeah, where they're hollowed out. Yeah, that's Olympic.
(16:39):
I never understood that. I love it though. The guys
who ski and shoot, yeah, what's the point of that,
I don't know. I like it. They should add like
they should snowboard and shoot and just do all sorts
of things. You go up to half fife, then you
stop and you take a couple of shots. Yeah, kite
sailing and shooting. Yeah, And I'm sure there's some great
history to that, but I don't know it. So match
(17:00):
grade guns and also match grade handmade ammunition. So I
mean it's all just like very detailed that like that's
hollowed out. It's light. It's usually fiberglass because you don't
want the wood to warp, and UM ends up being
extremely accurate. The barrel doesn't touch the rest of the gun.
This is cool. The free floating barrel. It touches as
(17:20):
little as possible so that the initial explosion from the
bullet being fired causing the recoil in the barrel that
it doesn't kick as much, and just the rifles accuracy yeah,
disadjusted plus move maladjust to any kind of movements. Ben Yeah,
which is why they use more often than not bolt
(17:42):
action rifles, which had disadvantages in that you have to
load a single round, shoot it, and then unload that shell,
reload another round. But um, their motto was one shot,
one kill, so one shot is usually all you need.
But they do sometimes use the semi automatic rifles, but
which you have there are shells flying out of the gun,
(18:03):
which is not very smart. Right. Either way, you're gonna
be detected with movement possibly like when you do the
bolt action that's moving, that flying shell that's moving. But
the automatic or semi automatic rifles have more moving parts
than a BOWLT action. Checkers tend to prefer bowlt action. Yeah,
although they said they can their shoot it's their choice.
(18:25):
Shooters preference, Yeah, sniper's sniper's choice between eight and fifteen grand.
These things costs. Yeah, it's kind of pricey, but they
look really cool. Yeah, they do. Uh do we talk
about the scope, No, we haven't yet. I mean, we
talked about how the the spotter has a superior scope.
(18:46):
But yeah, the scope on the sniper rifle usually has
about a ten time magnification power. It's just you know, telescope,
a high powered telescope, mini telescope sorry, with um crosshairs
on it. Called redicules, right, is that what it has pronounced?
A targeting ridicule, ridiculation ridicule. I didn't know how it
(19:08):
was pronounced. I kept saying articular, and then I thought
it was ridicule. Uh, what you're looking at when you're
aiming though, Like we said, there's all sorts of variances
in the wind and everything will change the path of
your bullet. But um, you're looking at the point of
aim and the point of impact, and if you're firing
from six yards away, it's not gonna be what you're
(19:29):
aiming at. And this is accurate even in that Call
of Duty game, like you aim at the dude's head
and then you end up shooting like three ft to
the right of them, and every one goes, what was that?
And then it's over? What's over? Well, that little round
is over. If you don't get the guy, you're done.
You can't get off at a second shot. What happens.
I think you gotta start over so they don't come
(19:50):
at you or anything. No, no, they come at you
and then you start over eventually. But so you have
to aim over aim a lot of times because of
things like gravity. And that was the fact of the
show to me. The gravity one. If you drop a bullet,
If you aim a gun a sniper rifle and then
shoot it level to the ground and you drop a
(20:11):
bullet at the same height as the barrel, they're both
gonna hit the ground at the same time because of gravity.
That's that's the fact of the show for sure. Um, Chuck.
What you're talking about can be adjusted for in the
scope through the ballistic drop compensator, which is a little
dial so you don't have to go redo your whole
scope settings and all that. You can just adjust it
(20:33):
up or down or left or right just a little
bit to compensate for gravity. And um. The other like
wind and that's what you see him doing. Yeah, they're like,
you know, wind it two nots you seed Markey, Mark,
go click, that's all you need to do. That's it.
One little click, gun shoots itself, not true. Um. And
then there's also these things called Gillie suits, which, um,
(20:57):
anytime you see a sniper or you don't see a sniper,
and then all of a sudden he stands up from
the leaves and brush and all that in front of
you and he's wearing what looks like leaves and brush.
That's called the Gillie suit, which has a pretty cool
little history to it. I like it. Go ahead. So
gillies um were the Irish game wardens Scottish game wardens
(21:19):
from days of your uh, and basically their job was
to keep an eye on the landowners um game right
while game that he liked to hunt um and the
gilly once in a while would have to basically catch
a deer or something like that, say bring it back
to the castle for the landowner to hunt in a
(21:43):
mock hunt and kill the deer. But he couldn't just
kill the deer and bring it. He had to bring
it alive. So this meant days of stalking a deer,
staying completely silent, camouflaging himself with stuff found in the
in the local environment, and then waiting for a deer
to walk by in jumping on it, grabbing it. Can
you imagine these dudes and then dragging it back to
(22:04):
the castle for this mock hunt. Yeah, so think about
how despised the nobleman must have been for his little
mock hunt in between glasses of sherry of a deer
that the Gillie caught with his bare hands after waiting
two days for it to walk past him, you know,
and then they just killed the deer like when they
(22:25):
bring it in because like his gout and his flaring
up so you can't even get out of his chair.
So yeah, it's like early internet hunting. Oh yeah, God.
They outlawed that pretty quickly, thank goodness, because it was awful.
I almost had to write an article on that. Did
you get out of it? Yeah? I refused. I said,
you know what, I'm not even gonna put this out
(22:45):
there as something that exists. And they went, you know what,
you may be right on this one. And then like
two weeks later they outlawed it controlling the flow of information.
Huh no, you know nice. I didn't want I didn't
want it happening. Yes, I stopped internet hunting single. So
the gilly suit is what they call what the sniper
wears now because of that cool history, and it's usually
(23:07):
like really reinforced on your torso because you're gonna be
crawling a lot, probably padded to help you out with comfort,
and you know it's not like you're really comfortable. It's
padded for comfort. Padded for comfort, and you've got a
netting all over you so you can work in twigs
like what you don't want our straight lines like the
antenna from your radio or the muzzle of your gun,
because nature didn't have straight lines like that, right, So
(23:29):
they make gilly suits for their guns. Yeah, um, can't
you see them having like it's the Special Ops barracks,
like gilly suit contests, like who's got the best one? Oh,
that's elaborate, you know. Yeah, yeah, I can't believe you
work that rock into it well. And when I envisioned
that SIT's that skit they like are putting the medal
around the winter and then a guy just rises up
(23:51):
behind him that they're never He comes off with the
back of his Gillie suit and steals his metal. Uh
we'll speak King of Special Ops. These are Special Ops
teams and uh Sniper teams are all a part of
Special Operations and they train all the time. If they're
(24:12):
not training specifically for a mission. They're studying the mission,
and their goal is to know every single thing about
everybody on that mission and memorize it, because if you're caught,
you don't want to have paper saying these are signals,
these are call signs or whatever, because I could just think,
you know, like being caught with the paper like this
(24:33):
is Corporal Todd Thompson's call sign ACE, you know, and
then the enemies like this, who's this Todd Thompson? Why
do you get ACE? That's the coolest one, right, because
he's the best one. Uh. The U S m C
is known even though all military branches have sniper teams
(24:54):
and schools, the Marines are obviously because they're the Marines.
They have what's known as the best school, the U
s m C. Scout Sniper School in the Marines actually
may have been the origin of the snipers in the U.
S military. Yeah, the leather necks, the original guys who
used to ride around in the eighteenth century on ships
(25:14):
were um often tasked with basically sniping from crow's nests
um other people on other ships during battles. I don't
think I knew what the leather necks were. Yeah, their Marines, Well,
I knew that, but I didn't know that it went
back that far. Yeah, nine eighteenth century. Well back then
they actually had next made of leather, right, that's pretty
(25:35):
cool human leather. Um, it is the best school, like
I said, and if you get in, even fewer graduate
because it's not just about being a good shooter. You
have to have the right temperament. You have to be
calm and not like some hot head. You have to
have confidence in your decisions, confidence in your in your
(25:56):
spot or yeah as this as this um this niper
who was interviewed for the article said he basically like,
you can't just be calling back like can I shoot
this guy? Or you have to make the decision and
make the right decision and confidence in your decision so
that you can say I am going to shoot this guy.
It works well alone and their little report card growing
up was probably a key for a future sniper. So
(26:19):
it's a two month course, Josh. Here at the Marine Corps, Uh,
they train in three main um disciplines marksmanship obviously, observation,
and stalking. Yeah, and let's talk about can we talk
about the games? I think we should like the Kim's game. Yeah,
I didn't see what that stood for I don't know
why they made it all caps because it's Um. It's
(26:41):
named after a Rudyard Tippling book Kim, So it's not
a boy's name, UM. And he was an Irish orphan
who grew up in India, was trained in intelligence and
in the book they would give him um trades of
like stones and gems and give him a minute to
look at it and then take it away and say
what did you just So that's what the Kim's game is.
(27:02):
It's very similar to that. It's based on that. Well,
go ahead, explain it. Well. It teaches observational skills, right
and basically um with this game, Uh, the guys in
sniper School are presented a tray and it has you know,
fifteen twenty things on it, and they're told to look
at it for you know, thirty seconds or a minute
or something. Then the trays removed and they say what
(27:24):
did you see? And say there was a paper clip? Right,
You can't say well, there's a paper clip because they
want to leave it to the guys who are analyzing
the intelligence you're sending back to determine what it was
you saw. So you say, well, I saw a piece
of wire bent around into um an oval three times
(27:44):
or something like that. Ever slip and you can just
say paper clip. But and then as as school goes along,
the training, this observational training through the Kim's game apparently
gets more and more difficult, where they show you something
in the morning, then you go out and practice all day,
and then at night they say, write down what you
(28:05):
saw this morning. Yeah, and they'll add more things and
give you less time to look at it to begin with,
Because when I first read it, I was like, that's
not too hard. It's like a wine cork and a
paper clip and uh and a CB radio done. But
then as it gets harder, I was like, oh, there's
a method here, right, and not being able to call
something what you know it is like, how would you
(28:25):
describe a wine cork? I would say I have thousands
of these around my home. Lungs are coated with the
dust of them. I could say it's a cork in
a spherical cork with a red stain on one end.
It would be tubular, wouldn't it tubular? It wouldn't be spherical,
(28:47):
it wouldn't be conical. And then right now there's someone
standing behind it's the gun. Yeah, exactly, we'd be the
worst sniper team ever. Actually. Um. And then another another
good game I guess you could call it is how
they trained to stalk, right, Yeah, that is really cool.
So stalking is moving from say your drop zone or wherever,
(29:08):
to the place where you're going to set up without
being identified, without being seen or noticed. But you have
to make your way there and there may or may
not be people watching you, are able to see you,
but you need to get to the point you need
to get to. So you have to practice that. That's
called stalking, and they practice it by basically saying, Okay,
here's a nice grassy field. Um, you guys stay here,
(29:31):
and we're gonna put two people a thousand meters away
and we're going to look for you, and you need
to make it within a hundred and fifty meters of
us without us seeing you. And they're looking for you.
Not only that, they have two people out there in
the field looking for you walking around. So apparently that's
like real life on hyper drive that never ever would happen.
(29:53):
But I guess the idea is if you can pass that,
then you know you'll be fine out in the field.
It's like we're an ankle, which makes sense. And then
they have to take a shot from the hundred and
fifty meters with blanks, obviously, and then they have to
move from that position. They have to take the shot
without being detected, and then move from that position to
another position and take another shot without being detected, which
(30:18):
apparently you very rarely, if ever moved to another position
and take a second shot, and you definitely are never
within a hundred and fifty of your target. So they overtrain,
which is a good thing. Another little game they play
is is just strictly observational from a distance. They will
hide things in a field, very small things like a
ballpoint pin hanging from a little shrubbery brush, and you
(30:41):
get out there with your spot or with your scope
and binoculars and you gotta pick this stuff out. And
basically just canvas, you know, he said that. The guy
in here said. You just block off one little, small,
tiny block at a time, stare at it through your
binoculars for five minutes, then move on to the next
little block until you find something and chuck you were
talking about when they were um with gravity is one
(31:04):
of the biggest problems for accuracy, right well, there's there's
a a unit of measurement that snipers use to adjust
for these variables. It's called minute of angle m o
A and UM. Apparently one point zero four seven inches
UM for every hundred yards is the the the inaccuracy
(31:30):
that's going to develop as the bullet travels. Right. Yeah,
So if you're a thousand yards away like they say
you can be, or more, you could potentially be off
by ten inches, which means you could potentially miss your
target altogether unless you account for wind and humidity and
barometric pressure and temperature, the temperatures. I thought this was
very interesting. Cold air is denser, which means it creates
(31:51):
more drag, right, which is pretty cool. You have to
account for that UM and then the other one UM.
Depending on your distance. UM. Someone may or may not
hear you. If you're six hundred yards away or more,
potentially you are not going to even hear that little
sonic boom crack because the bullet leaves the muzzle at
(32:13):
the speed of sound. You won't even hear that. So
you could be eight hundreds away and dudes could be
standing there. And that's when you see in the movie
that they see the little buff of dirt behind them
and they're just like what was that? Yeah? So six
is where the seven point six two millimeter round is
dragged into sub sonic speed, meaning it travels less than
(32:38):
the speed of sound, meaning it makes a sound where
anything over that is like you said, suddenly there's just
bullets appearing. And the guy who was interviewed from this
head a great quote. He said, Um, you can basically
just take shots at somebody. And the guy who has
interviewed for this article had this great quote. He said,
if you're shooting at a target eight a thousand meters out,
(33:00):
you could be shooting at that person all day long
and they don't even know they're being shot at. Why
are these oil cans exploding he hates them? Uh, Yeah,
that's pretty cool. And that's a very good place to
end because the goal of the snipers to not get caught,
so they want to get as far away as they
can from the target while still being within an accurate range. Done. Done,
(33:26):
Do you got anything else? I got nothing else? Military
snipers if you were expecting like the DC sniper or
um Charles what was his name, Whitman, Yes, Uh, they're
not military snipers. Although Charles Whitman was in the military.
He's in the Marines, remember in full metal jacket. Yeah
it wasn't Oswald too, or no, yeah, he's a marine too.
(33:47):
Do you have it? Yea, I think they were both
sharpshooters too. Do you have it? Well, okay, those are okay,
Well they made an appearance then all right, okay. If
you want to know more about snipers, Um, you should
type in snipers in the handy search bar how stuff
works dot Com and has some cool flash games inside
of it and very cool links and cool pictures and
(34:08):
if you're into that kind of thing, you're gonna love
this article that's Snipers in the search bar at how
stuff works dot Com. Since I said that, it's time
for listener mail, Josh, I'm gonna call this from a
fan with MS multiple score rosis. I have a very
very good friend of mine that has MS and it
(34:32):
was afflicted with it later in life and is late twenties.
I believe it's very sad, but so she writes, Um,
Josh and Chuck, perhaps I could tell you about the
fact that I've been living with MS for over twenty
two years and I found it a nonprofit called soft
Serve matters that will empower people with chronic analysis. But
maybe I should leave with I was listening to is
(34:54):
Bhuton onto something with their gross national and happiness because
I feel the need to tell you I believe that
some people are just born with the happy gene. I
am living proof of that, having started it in kindergarten um.
In spite of the fact that I have a decreasing
have had decreasing abilities since my twentieth birthday, and a
six figured debt that my husband and I accrued while
(35:17):
getting our advanced degrees, I am uber happy. Or maybe
it's just a denial to all of these challenges. My
default is happy, happy, joy joy. I made that reference
just to amuse you. Uh. It may have something to
do with the fact that I come from a family
of armchair comedians and married a man based on his
humor alone. Well not really, but doesn't that sound good?
(35:37):
We have a nine year old who is freaking hysterical.
Nature or nurture, I ask. I'll go with nature since
it supports my theory, though clearly nurture as a major player.
So while I figure out the approach to email you guys,
let me just say I love your work. And for
the administrative section of this email, I employ to check
out these links. And she has a blog that I
(35:59):
would like to pug and it is M S l
O L dot WordPress dot com and that is Amy
G and Amy. Like I said, my really good friend
Billy has MS. So it's very uh dear to my
heart cause and anything we can do to help you
spread the word, just email us back and we'll do
so cool. That was a good one, Chuck, Thank you,
Thank you Amy, thanks for being an armchair comedian yourself. Yeah. Yeah, okay, Um,
(36:26):
and I guess thanks to your whole family for that
really husband good. Yeah. If you find something funny that
other people may not, we love that stuff and we
want to hear about it, Um, send us an email
with it to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(36:47):
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought
to you by the rein into two thousand twelve. Camry,
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