From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sunday Times Magazine 21.1.01 - not online, so OCR'd with my wonderful HP Capshare 920 portable scanner. Look Who's Stalking At a sniper school in Wales, elite members of the armed forces are turned into cold blooded assassins. Is their new recruit, AA Gill, about to blow their cover? You have no idea how difficult it is to give the army a gun. The guard at the gates of Derring Lines, the headquarters of the infantry school in Wales, approaches my car gingerly, armed with a cocked bathroom mirror on a stick, open the bonnet and boot please, sir." "There's a gun in the boot," I tell him helpfully. The reality of actually finding something in a visiting boot seems to confuse him. "You'd better take that to the guardroom, then:" The gun comes as an unwelcome novelty in the guardroom too. "A gun, eh, what are we going to do with that?" I swallow the desire to reply: "You're the army: if you don't know, then the independent nation state's in deep trouble." Nobody wants my gun. Finally they say I can put it in the armoury, where my poor 12-bore gets a terrible dose of barrel envy. Stacked in decks in racks are hundreds of rifles and machineguns. I hand over a bag of cartridges. The storeman recoils in horror, as if I were offering a regiment's worth of CND badges. "No, no, this is an armoury. You never keep ammunition with guns, didn't you know that?" I feel even more of a pillock than I did just standing here in plus fours and woolly socks. Decimating waves of partridge is as close as I've come to military life and, as I think with most men, there is a grain of regret that I never followed the flagonly a grain, mind - which is easily assuaged by an armchair blokeish fascination with killer kit and war films, but which draws the line at collecting hat badges or commando daggers. I have a nerdy love of military history, and I've never been able to walk past a window of toy soldiers without a second look, without indeed squinting Gulliverishly and wondering if I'd ever have fitted into the thin red line, behind the mealie-meal palisade at Rourke's Drift, waiting for the whistle on the firing step at Ypres, crouched in the bows of the wallowing landing craft, bucking the surf for Juno Beach. I'll never know. Like most British men, I am the first adult male in my family for 100 years never to have worn uniform, perhaps for 400 years. I go off in search of the officers' mess. Brecon is not a pretty place. It's a long time since we were bellicosely confident enough to build barracks with a Corinthian swagger; now the army has to make do with the worst kind of mean, expedient, prefabricated tat. Through the speed bumps and neatly hideous flowers (scenic decoration; for the use of) is the mess; it might be a provincial polytechnic dormitory. Captain Rupert Steptoe, the adjutant, is there to meet me, a man who is the blissful evocation of his name - soldiers generically call all officers Rupert. He's floppy-fringed, blond and pinkly handsome with slightly buck teeth; even in civvies you'd pick him out as an army officer at 500 yards in the rush hour. His regiment is the Devon and Dorset,which sounds not so much a fighting force as a flower show. An army report once marked him as tall, blond and affable, a distinction that would be attractive in any civilian capacity, but in this camouflaged other world is deeply risible. He's nervous of journalists: "What I really hate is the way you go on about the ridiculous, old-fashioned stereotypes. It's not like that any more." He introduces me to Capt Rob Connolly of the King's Own Scottish Borderers, another movie-stock type, 6ft 6in in his gartered socks, a straightbacked, red-haired, steady-the-ranks paragon. I am here to observe the army's sniping course, and Rupert and Rob are here to answer my questions. Between them they compete for the world-title affability contest. The army has only recently decided to reinstate snipers and now runs this course twice a year for 19 hand-picked mature NCO's (noncommissioned officers) who, in turn, will go back to their companies and pass on the skill. It also takes a number of foreign students for cash. At the moment they're training an Italian Navy Seal who takes a lot of reverse-gears stick, a Dutchman whose liberal government takes a dim view of sniping, two Singapore policemen and a Gibraltarian who has already flunked out because he's homesick (though how anyone could be homesick for Gibraltar is beyond me). There is something very un-British about sniping. Lurking in bushes taking pot shots is what They do to Us; we stand in lines volley-firing to the sound of brass bands, then go in with a bayonet. Since the cold war, the ethos of modern, rich, industrial bullying has been technological - get the computer and laser to do the dirty work, fire and forget. Soldiers are seated middle managers in headphones. The Americans, who naturally lead this retreat into battle, have reached the point where they can't afford to risk a single life or piece of kit - apart from anything else, it all costs so much. Money is the grunts' best body armour. But it's a truism that generals invariably re-fight the last war, and the assumption that the next one would be a Dolby Imax version of the second big one - that we would tip up in Belgium again and have a mega November 5 has been proved unlikely over the past 20 years. They still talk about theatres and battlefields as if there's a United Nations consensus. But the paradigm has been made redundant by the Gulf, the Falklands, Somaha,Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone. They proved that the high-tech, big-bucks battle is a tank in a china shop. The stream of Serb military vehicles that left Kosovo proved just how ineffective our technology is, and Sarajevo showed how devastating the amateur sniper could be. Wars have been dragged back from the computer screen into the modern rubble, and while the Americans are still Nintendo-gamely searching for virtual battlefields, the Brits are putting on make-up and lying in puddles in Wales. Before Rob marches me up the hill to see them, I have to play a courtesy call on the CO, a man who manages the seemingly impossible feat of being both loquacious and taciturn, simultaneously producing gusts of incomprehensible chaff. He's not alone in this. I barely understand an entire sentence anyone in authority says. Military language is cancerous with TLAs: three-letter abbreviations, like PUP for pick-up point, DOP for drop-off point. They say this makes orders clear and concise; on paper they're an ugly Morse code that would make Wilfred Owen sound like the ingredients of field rations - and of course, out loud, DOP has the same number of syllables as drop-off point. What it really is is an exclusive gang slang, invented 3,000 years ago when the first Israeli army said shibboleth to differentiate them from the Philistines (David with his slingshot was the first recorded sniper). And these tart, unloaded letters distanced the user from the guttural, blood consequences of their meaning. The CO (commanding officer), who, by the way, is not the same as the OC (officer commanding), tells me there's a sergeant in the Irish Army on the course, and he manages to drop one phrase that resonates: snipers are force multipliers. "He told you about the Irishman?" says Rob. "I didn't think you were meant to know that." Rob and I hop into a Land Rover and head for the hills. Unfortunately for military panache, owing to defence cuts, all the army's butch kit is driven by Welsh civilian taxi drivers, so the effect of leaping into a revving combat vehicle and shouting"Go, go, go!" is rather spoilt when a retired long-distance lorry driver from Aberystwyth replies: "Where to, chief?" Few places on Earth can have been more roundly and heartfeltly cursed than the Beacons of Brecon. This is unquestionably the most loathed spot in Britain. To the civilian eye they may have a rugged beauty, high moorland creased with burns, and soggy like a massive organic sponge. The lungexploding hills rumple into the distance; it's as close as the Welsh get to wilderness, and that's close enough. But to the military perception the Beacons are a monotone vision of hell. While the boys with big-barrelled toys bang on about Salisbury Plain, the infantry slog over Brecon and hate it with a terse tommy's loathing. As Rob sweetly puts it, "Because we can't re-create the real fear and danger of a battle, we push them with cold, wet exhaustion and pain as far as they can go, and then a bit, so they can see what they're made of, see whose head drops. It's not about making them fail, it's about making them exceed:" Across the moor, fierce, drenching squalls and low-level Hawk trainers chase napkin-size patches of sunlight. Brecon has its very own military microclimate, as depressing as a February eisteddfod. "There they are:' Rob points to a stand of regulation Forestry Commission pine trees. There's nothing to see, no sign of life. Inside the dark, pillared wood, precious little light seeps, there's only the noise of the wood and the crunch of pine needles underfoot. Then in the gloaming I can just make out a series of variegated camouflage sheets, the size of lonely single beds, strung between the trunks about 2ft off the ground. It could be a Turner-prize installation. Underneath each, in shallow scrapes, lies a sleeping sniper. They've been here for a week. Beside each faux grave is a bergen, a rucksack the size of a chest of drawers; in it is a soldier's life, an entire outdoor activity caravan on your back, a knee-buckling, spine-crushing dead weight; in war as in civilian life, the ergonomics of miniaturisation and technology have actually increased the amount of stuff. Soldiers used to have knapsacks; now they have Imelda Marcos's winter wardrobe. A sentry, rifle held low, slowly and silently pads guard. Rob tugs at the nearest bergen. "This is what they wear." He pulls out a damp ghillie suit, the camouflage all snipers tailor-make for themselves. It's a waistcoat garlanded with strips of hessian that have been frayed, daubed with paint and Greek restaurant nylon foliage. There's a hat that might belong to an aggressive morris dancer. I put them on over my fatigues; Rob hands me a compact with three shades of earthy face paint: "It's cream, not make-up." Sweetie, it's make-up. Being able to shoot straight is only part of what makes a sniper. He must be able to deconstruct a map and reconstruct it on a horizon, and read a landscape the way that you and I see a face, and then he must be able to become part of that landscape, not a figure moving over it but a wraith moving through it, never being skylined, seeing cover the way that we see pedestrian crossings, noting dead ground and lines of fire enfilade and defilade; and he must look for other men like him stalking the earth - half the training here is in hunting enemy snipers. Set a poacher to catch a poacher. The ghillie suit breaks up a silhouette, the recognisable configuration of line that is how we recognise a fellow human. We're expert at picking each other out in confusing terrain over great distances, it's important to us, we're sociable creatures. Unless we're snipers. Recognition gets a sniper killed. Anyone can curl up and cover themselves in leaves and hide, but a sniper must see without being seen, he must constantly watch and be just as constantly aware of his relationship to every tussock, branch and gully. He must revert 10,000 years and think like a lone predator, become pre-civilised in the service of civilisation. And then there's judging distance. Rob pulls at another bag that will be attached to the sniper by a long lanyard, the L96, soon to be replaced by the L115, the sniper's rifle which fires a small-bore, full-metal-jacket, high-velocity round-head shot at 600, 700, 800 yards. It wasn't what I was expecting. Childishly, I wished for something sleek and menacing, something matt and hightech. This is a disappointment, clunky and heavy with a bolt action, a thick stock and cut-out pistol grip, daubed in paint, like an amateur dramatic prop. I lie in the grass and peer through the sights and suddenly everything looks quite different. The delightfully named Schmitt and Bender sight simply insists you see things quite differently. The cross hairs impose a sly menace on the land, the small dots of calibration turn a life into an algebra problem; at 100 yards a 6ft man takes up two dots, adjust accordingly. Placed in a new theatre, a sniper begins by measuring things; the average door frame, 7ft in the UK; a brick, 4in; the width of a road, 9ft; a hedge, 4 1/2ft, so he can judge distance. A 5% error is x feet at 200 yards. The scope has a huge 50% peripheral vision and starts at three magnifications; turn the bezel and it goes up to 11 magnifications. A button on the side clicks millimetre correction to the fall of shot. Allowing for wind and light, you shoot differently in full light from in shadow. The sniper must consider all this in instant calculus. In the far distance, along the humping road, an army truck crawls up the horizon toward us. A terse order: "Take out the driver." The scope slides over the windscreen, the wipers are on. How far? 400, 350? The cross hairs skitter through the cab, searching. And there he is: a man in a cap, worn jauntily on the back of his head. late 50s, could be a grandfather, he hasn't shaved. He turns, sharing some joke with the man next to him, he laughs, he's missing a tooth, 300, hold a breath. The thread of life and death, vertical and horizontal, meet on his creased eye, hold a breath, squeeze... click. I stand up, skyline myself. The truck growls on. Without the telescope's frarne, it's oddly loud and solid and prosaic. The driver doesn't look round as he passes. In the back is a group of Welsh fusiliers, and here's me, a ragged scarecrow creature from the swamp, an image from a schlock nightmare. They stare without interest or surprise. Rob takes me to the nerve centre of sniper school. The concrete but in a dip in the hills is like a cattle byre. Inside are half a dozen camp beds strewn with sleeping bags, around the walls jerry cans and heaps of kit. The windows are holes in the wall hung with sacking, there's nothing as nancy as glass in them. The door is a slightly lower window; at one end there's a tent like a proscenium stage, the set for Journey's End, perhaps. It glows with a warm light, a generator hums. There's a bank of radios, a heater, a gas ring bubbles happily. Inside, arranged hugger-mugger on a selection of chairs and boxes, are the NCO instructors. This, then, is infantry Top Gun. The best of the best. Hard, hard men, eagle-eyed, stag-footed, stallion-muscled, jack russell-haired. The creme de la creme who rose to the top of the paras, the marines, the highland brigade and the SAS to come here and pass on spartan skill; these are the gods of war. Their motto isn't some fancy Latin or Norman French bon mot about steadfastness and glory-it's plain, single-syllable English: "One shot one kill". "The trick is getting a proper amalgamation out of the garlic and ginger;" says a marine, using a plastic mug and a stick as a mortar and pestle. "Have you deseeded the chillies?" A fearsome highlander slices a chicken as easy as Jerry neck. They're making a man-sized Thai curry with steamed rice. Nobody gets up as the officer enters, there's no saluting here: in the field a salute can send an officer to an early body bag. They don't even call him "sir"; just "boss", and there's an easy, knockabout camaraderie. Snipers are different. The normal rules don't apply. Their uniforms are a motley collection of personal taste, they're like the privileged prefects at the top of school, but, as Rob says, everybody knows where the line is and they don't step over it. And neither do I. Officers are the snipers' target of choice, so nobody wears overt marks of rank. Can you tell who's an officer, I ask. "Oh, aye;" says the chicken dicer, Staff Sergeant Marr of the Small Arms School Corps. Can you always tell his rank? "Aye, pretty much by his age." Could you tell an officer from, say; a Welsh or Scottish regiment? "Of course, they'd both speak with English accents." Marr is as instantly winning as a shampooed, playful angus bull. He, along with another instructor, has just come second in the international sniping contest in Austria. beaten by one shot and twin German territorial policemen who nerdishly made their own ammunition. "They were more marksmen than snipers;' he says, by way of explanation. "We missed an egg at 300 yards." Staff Sgt Marr is the ultimate emergency exit; he's the man who'd get you out. He's also the best advertisement for never joining the army. "What I like is to make them really suffer. I love it when they cry for their mothers." As if this freezing bunker on this godforsaken heath, the 18-hour days, the crawling about in the mud and route marches weren't bad enough, he's brought his own weights with him. They lie about like the Flying Scotsman's bogeys. I very badly want to be Staff Sgt Marr's friend; the alternative is too horrid to contemplate. If officers pass down their own arid three-letter language, then the noncommissioned ranks pass up a trench slang. Theirs is gutful, livid and visceral, almost Shakespearian. A sleeping bag is a maggot, sleeping is gonking, smelling is mingeing, food is scoff; cake and arse is a mess, a cock-up; sentry duty is a stag, shimfing is moaning - there's a lot of shimfing. To show faith is to be there, a young recruit is a crow; and only the marines yomp, the infantry tabs (technical advance to battle). If you're asked how you want your brew, you say nato - that's standard issue: milk, two sugars. My favourite is gucci as an adjective, as in, they're gucci boots, or, he's got a real gucci knife. Gucci is good kit, and kit is an obsession. The men are perfunctorily complimentary about army issue but then buy their own boots, sleeping bags, down waistcoats, Gore-Tex socks and cookers. When you're out there in the wet and cold, a scintilla of extra comfort is a prize beyond medals. A radio operator from the Green jackets says he reckons he's spent over L2,000 on extra stuff, his own money, just to look after you. As a civilian it's impossible to be among these men without adding your own patina of envious Boy's Own romance, without seeing them as latter-day Pistols, Bardolphs and Poins, without imagining these earthbound, bantering tough men waiting round campfires at Agincourt or Plassey, on the Heights of Abraham, at Ladysmith or Nijmegen, spelling out the dusty battle-honour names that exist not in topography or time but high up in church naves. It's impossible not to see marble memorials and bronze statues or hear snippets of Rattigan dialogue and catch the shadow of varnished imperial canvases and grainy film. But the soldiers reject any fantasising of their jobs; however I try to wheedle them into considering bravery or fear, heritage, pride, morality or doubt, so they just as remorselessly avoid it, replying only in the most understated terms about their vocation. And this makes them more heroic. They've pared their lives down to a thin obstacle course of problem-solution-action, problem-solution-action. In the small, professional peacetime army, training in courses like this is endless - they apply, they endure, they pass and move on. A single failure can finish a career. The NCOs will go to extreme lengths to attain the boy-scout sharpshooter badge that proclaims the elite snipers. They struggle on with weeping sores, raw blisters, temperatures and twisted ankles, Lying in the earth out there is a paratrooper whose wife is about to undergo surgery for cancer. He's been offered honourable compassionate leave, but he's here, he'll swallow the personal anguish and finish the course. All failure, however undeserved, however excused or dogged by ill fortune, is treated the same. It's not business, it's personal. You break a leg, it's because you weren't walking properly. This may seem cruel, but I suspect that these soldiers can only face death or crippling because they see it not as random luck or fate, but as a lack of concentration or skill. These blokes are part of the best-trained army there has ever been and they don't take their eyes off the job for a second. By and large they've sloughed off civilian friends, and wives and girlfriends must know they come second to the three-letter abbreviation, come childbirth or cancer. Marriages are often casualties, and contrarily they do think that's bad luck. It's late afternoon and the light is already packing up to go somewhere more appreciative. Tonight there is an exercise. The snipers will collect in teams of five two guns, two spotters and a co-ordinating commander. Three teams will crawl and wriggle and slither to stalk and triangulate on a small guarded bridge. All night they'll watch and at first light they'll shoot every damn man within sight. That's the plan. Rob Connolly goes off to brief the designated commanders, who include the two Singapore policemen. Their grasp of English would just about get them a job in a Soho dim-sum restaurant. Rob starts with that calm, reined-in eagerness that is such a feature of war movies. The TLAs flow thick and fast; the Singaporeans hunch over their notepads. It's all very tense and exciting. The atmosphere's building nicely, then he falters. "Tonight's code name will be, will be," the military mind reaches out into enemy territory, the land of imagination, "green haddock." Green haddock? There's a shifting in the ranks. "Glin Radrrock?" repeats an Asian copper, "whossit mean?" Unforgivably I lose it and chortle at the back of the class. It's contagious. The room is a shoulder-heaving, cheek-biting act of superhuman restraint. Rob rescues what's left of the aura by synchronising watches. The men go back to the darkness and we wait. Where did you get green haddock from? "You're not to write that, it has nothing to do with sniping." Of course. A few hours later we go into the dark wearing night-vision glasses. It's a clear, starfilled place of deep, colliding shadows. Through these goggles the Beacons glow green and the air seems filled with fairy fireflies. This monotone world is another country-, a dangerous place where you feel alone and exposed. The rational certainties of an adult sophisticated life are wafted away on the keening wind, and I become a wide-eyed child in a bedtime horror story. I understand in my bones why snipers are force multipliers. It's the fear. Out there, where every shadow; every stand of trees, every curl of the land could hide the cross hairs of extinction, your skin crawls. A pair of well-trained sniper teams can hold up a platoon, a regiment, a brigade, send men scrabbling face down in the earth, huddling for cover, mewling and sobbing. The panic makes them useless liabilities. You take out the officer, they're blind; the radio operator, they're deaf, the driver, they're crippled. All snipers carry not only the L96 but also a 5.56mm regulation rifle. Rob says it's for emergencies if they're in a close spot. That's half the truth. It's also so they can ditch the sniper kit and return to being just PBI: poor bloody infantry. Snipers don't get taken prisoner. They're so hated and feared that they're inevitably killed or worse out of hand. The terror cuts both ways. On the bridge the enemy are slapping their shoulders and stamping their feet. Welsh fusiliers wearing motley uniforms and Rambo headscarves, clutching decommissioned Kalashnikovs, a multipurpose Arabjeast European/Balkan enemy. It's tam. Back in the bunker, I crawl into my arctic maggot, wearing four layers of everything, and gonk out for a couple of hours. It's two degrees below with a biting wind. What it must be like up there on the hill, cold, wet, exhausted and watching, is beyond comprehension. I go to make a brew. The room's quiet, only the hiss and click of the radio, and I'm startled to see a man standing behind me, one of the instructors who has kept to the shadows. He looks like an eagle that has been turned into a man by a trainee wizard. He has piercing, unblinking blue eyes and he knows all about me; the shotgun, he car I'm driving, he's very spooky. We tiscuss deer-stalking in the Highlands and the kit, he doesn't like the infantry's new rifle, he loves the Heckler and Koch. He's vearing square-toed ski boots, breaking them in for Norway. What are you doing here? "Can't tell." Look, I venture, I too :crow who you are, the reference to Hereford was a bit of a clue. An SAS sergeant whose father and grandfather were snipers before him, I've heard about him. He bet Rob a bottle of port (nice officer-teasing touch) that he could hit a man-sized target from a standing shot at 1,000 yards, close on a mile, and he did it. That's mythic shooting. Then he did it again. What do you think about training foreign soldiers? And the Irishman? "I don't like it. It's just money isn't it? Oh, I'm sure he's fine but I don't know who his fiends are. Who he'll pass the training on :o. I've lost friends in the border country. They're not snipers now; they're just amateurs with a good rifle, but it would make a difference if they were:" He takes his cup and goes back to the shadows. A man on a mission that exists only in his own head. A quietly, softly terrifying killer. Before dawn we jump into the Land Rover. The taxi driver goes up to the bridge head, where the enemy are smoking and chatting disconsolately. Rob checks with the snipers on the radio, the landscape is shrouded in early morning mist, the hills emerge like someone twitching consecutive net curtains. "Teams, have you got a primary and secondary target?" Yes, yes, yes, stop - no. One of the enemy has chosen this moment to take a dump behind a bush, and it has added a precious two minutes to his life. Finally, inevitably, yes, yes, yes. The radio crackles. "Fire at will:" The enemy tumble over histrionically one starts running up the road. Bang. the photographer is so excited by the sight of bodies, he leaps out of the truck. The radio squawks: "There's a man in black on the bridge, a man in black." Bang. It's a moment any journalist would savour. The longest night is all but over. In the distance, ragged groups of men emerge from the earth like the undead, walking scarecrows. They could be medieval or figures from The Seventh Seal. Hot breakfast. A nice surprise, brought up from camp, eggs, bacon, beans, fried bread, tea poured from a jerry can. The snipers gather outside a deserted farm. They don't look so bad. Stripping off the wet gear to put on damp gear, checking their guns acid feet. It's the end of along week and they've made it, just the debriefing and the ritual bollocking, then a bed, a real bed, with a warm girlfriend and beer. "Right;" bellows Staff Sgt Mart. "get your kit on, we're tabbing over that hill, the far one, then live firing. You've got 40 minutes to get there:" Another surprise, not so nice. Let's see whose head goes down. They trot off with that short, bentkneed sherpa's gait. A man falls over in a chest-high river, his bergen holds him under; another man goes back to pull him out. They tab on, gasping and sodden. The Italian nearly severs his trigger finger. Rob picks up his rifle and examines the breach. "Look at that: rust. That would be a courtmartial offence in our army" Staff Sgt Marr jogs past like a happy spaniel. "I love it, love it;" he says. "Suffer, you bastards." I know what it is about these men that makes them so enviable: it's their confidence, a confidence we never have in the world, where we can choose our own clothes. Far from being unreconstructed testosterone junkie cavemen, they're amazingly well balanced; they cook and sew, wipe surfaces, take out the rubbish, and kill. They're aggressive, but not violent. There's none of that half-cocked, latenight thuggishness about these soldiers. Their aggression is focused and appropriate. They prove themselves as professionals every day, they don't need to do it as amateurs, and they have an utter belief in their own ability to complete what they start. They've arrived here not just by single minded diligence and grit, but by discarding everything that might be confusing or contradictory. They have no life outside their service, and they look inward to each other, to the banter and shimfing and the gucci-kit chat, to be a constant reassurance that their discipline is right. The civilian world is a place of uncertainty and shifting focus, where their skills count for little; only the officers peak over the barricade towards banking or land management. Seeing them through civilian sights you judge the distance and realise that for a generation that has never served, this small-knit band of men are further from us than ever before. It's easy and convenient to patronise them, but we should never forget that the force these men multiply is actually us -- Er, I think there's a few more yards than a 1,000 in a mile! Steve. Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ____________________________________________________________ T O P I C A -- Learn More. Surf Less. Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Topics You Choose. http://www.topica.com/partner/tag01
