The Distant Executioner

During World War II, snipers were seen as a spooky, merciless “Murder Inc.” by other soldiers—the brutal intimacy of their kills made them a breed apart. But in Afghanistan, where avoiding civilian deaths is a top priority, U.S. military sharpshooters may have found the war that needs them most. Going inside the world of Texas Army National Guardsman “Russ Crane,” who has dropped a Taliban fighter at 806 meters, the author discovers the sniper’s special talents and torments, and why it helps, in Crane’s view, to have God on your side.

Outside of Austin, Texas, where the farming begins in earnest, the land turns suddenly to the deepest sort of country, with no hint of the city that stands nearby. Russ Crane prefers it that way. Crane is not his real name. He wants to remain obscure. He is an experienced military sniper, a serious man in a serious profession that, however, excites a fringe of pretenders and psychopaths. He knows those people are out there. They inhabit gun shows, firing ranges, and war-porn recesses of the Internet; they have a poor idea of how real snipers do their work, or of its effect upon their lives. Crane does not want those people anywhere near. He lives in the country with his wife and home-schooled daughter in a rented stone house surrounded by fields. He does not like Austin. He has never been seduced by any city. He is a quiet, unassuming man with a gray mustache, at age 47 a master sergeant in the Texas Army National Guard, where he currently serves full-time as the master gunner of an infantry division, in charge of, among other things, combat marksmanship training. He is somewhat short. He is somewhat stocky. He wears glasses. When not in uniform, he wears shorts, T-shirts, and a baseball cap which, country-style, he removes only to sleep and to shower. Underneath it he has a military haircut, shaved up the sides and a little longer on top. But he does not look like a warrior, and warriors often do not. He made that point to me not about himself but about a fat and clownish soldier who had fought resolutely beside him in a number of battles. The first was a ferocious ambush in Afghanistan on a road that offered no cover. In the midst of it Crane saw this soldier put down his weapon and coolly help himself to a pinch of chewing tobacco before calmly resuming the fight. Crane said, “You never know it about someone. You can’t tell it in advance. The guys with the badges and the strut, a lot of times they’re gonna be hiding.” He seemed to have a certain Special Forces team in mind.

Crane dips, too, with a pinch of Copenhagen when he’s in the mood. He speaks with a light drawl. He got his first rifle when he was 13. It was a .22. Now his idea of a good time is to load the family into his double-cab, four-wheel-drive, diesel-powered Ford F-350 pickup truck and drive all the way to Arizona to stalk wild game. His idea of a good retirement is to disappear into paradise in Wyoming or Montana for the hunting. When, in 2008, he came to this part of Texas to take the job at the division’s headquarters—having returned from war in Afghanistan, having returned from war in Iraq—it did not escape his notice that the stone walls of the rental house are stout, or that the house is set 500 meters back from the road at the end of a single dirt track: one way in, the same way out. The setup allows clear views of anyone approaching and, incidentally, provides for clear fields of fire. A meter is about a yard. Five hundred meters is about the distance of five Texas high-school football fields laid end to end. It is beyond the range of accurate shooting with a standard-issue assault rifle such as the M16 or the shorter-barreled M4 carbine, but it is well within the range of accurate shooting with high-quality bolt-action or semi-automatic rifles equipped with telescopic sights. Such rifles are civilian hunting rifles or military sniper rifles—they’re nearly the same thing. Inside his house Crane has several of them propped casually against the walls by the doors. Not that he expects to be attacked. The rifles are there as an ordinary part of life. For instance, when he sees coyotes lurking in the back pasture, he shoots them. Coyotes are smart. They have learned that the local farmers, when gunning for them, will miss their shots at ranges beyond about 200 meters, and so in daylight they maintain a greater distance from the farmhouses and barns. It doesn’t help them here. After Crane kills them he bags them and throws them in the trash.

He does not enjoy killing coyotes. He shoots them reflexively, in service to mankind. His neighbors appreciate the gesture. They know little of Crane’s history, but find him a useful man to have around. Crane tends to agree. He told me he believes that the overwhelming majority of people in the world are good, but that they are as vulnerable as sheep to the wolves who prey upon them. His role, he said, is that of a sheepdog with the training and temperament to intervene. We were sitting at his kitchen table. There was a plaque on the wall reading, the future is as bright as the promises of god. Crane said, “There is good and evil in the world. It gets so you yearn for a righteous fight. Personally I believe there are bad people, and God put people here to shoot those people, to let other people live peaceful lives. David was a shepherd boy who became king. The Philistines had their giant, Goliath. The Lord said to David, ‘I’m on your side. Go out and fight.’ David did. And you know, David killed Goliath as dead as Elvis Presley. He was a shepherd, a king, a follower of the Lord. But first and foremost he was a warrior. God understands that we have to have soldiers. Soldiers are part of God’s plan.”

I said, “Do you mean that literally?”

He said, “I know that God has been with me actively in battle.”

“You’ve been fighting Muslims who believe the same thing.”

He said, “It’s a conundrum. But Jesus was resurrected after three days, and you can visit Muhammad’s grave.”

Muslims are mortals, it’s true. The last one Crane killed in Afghanistan died in the spring of 2006, toward the end of Crane’s tour. Crane was serving as the lead sniper with Alpha Company, a unit of the Texas Army National Guard that had been integrated into the regular army structure. The company consisted of 55 soldiers, most of them country boys from North Texas. In Afghanistan they were stationed at a remote base like a little concrete Alamo with watchtowers built into the perimeter walls. The base stood 85 miles north of Kandahar, outside a town called Tarin Kowt, in a mountainous and largely barren province where the Taliban, having been expelled in 2001, were returning in strength. Alpha Company was commanded by a former enlisted man, a beloved captain named Ross Walker. The company had two security missions there. The first was to provide protection for a U.S. Army Provincial Reconstruction Team, which had been given the hopeless task of clanking around in armored Humvees and trying to make friends and gather intelligence. The second security mission was to augment a Special Forces team that had a compound on the base and was supposed to find and kill the Taliban. An earlier Special Forces team had gotten along well with the soldiers of Alpha Company, but it had recently rotated out, and a replacement team who disdained the National Guard had arrived. Alpha Company had been 10 months in the fight by then, and the replacements were new to the terrain, but they refused all offers of advice. Collectively, Alpha Company shrugged. Crane remembers the reaction as “O.K., you guys got it now. You’re Special Forces. Cool.”

Special Forces had the resources. Special Forces had the clout. Special Forces could fill the sky with air support when ordinary soldiers could not. There is a sizable village called Chora that sits in a luxuriant river valley about 25 miles northeast of Tarin Kowt. A dirt road leads to it across a high, barren plateau and then down through a pass between rocky slopes. Chora was becoming a Taliban town, and the new Special Forces group decided to take it on. To provide a patina of hearts-and-minds, the Provincial Reconstruction Team would go along. It was commanded by a lieutenant colonel, a formidable woman, not technically a combatant, named Robin Fontes, who was something of an expert on regional affairs. The Special Forces were commanded by a captain. The troops of Alpha Company were commanded by Walker. Altogether this was to be the largest operation in Alpha Company’s experience: a convoy of more than 20 vehicles carrying nearly 100 American soldiers and allied Afghans, backed up by orbiting A-10 ground-attack fighters, B-52 bombers, Predator drones—you name it. When the convoy got to the narrows above Chora, Crane and another sniper—his equally skilled partner—dropped out and took up an overwatch position on a mountainside to provide long-range rifle fire if necessary, and to keep an eye on the road behind.

The convoy rolled to the outskirts of Chora and parked there provocatively. Village elders came out and engaged the Americans in talk. The air support was obvious, with Predators buzzing around and the shadows of airplanes passing over the scene. There was no sign of the Taliban. Hours went by. Crane realized that, faced with such a force, no Taliban fighters would show themselves, just to be wiped out. That’s the thing about Afghanistan: there are some bad men there with the wrong ideas about life, but unless they attack you first, you can’t distinguish them from ordinary peasants who just haven’t yet seen the light. Up on the mountainside, Crane said to his sniping partner, “This is crazy. We know there’s not gonna be a fight.”

Eventually they came down and joined the assembly outside of town. In the afternoon, some of the Afghan interpreters had overheard the Taliban talking on their little citizens-band radios about getting rockets into position to attack the Americans. This was pretty standard stuff, and because of all the airpower overhead, it was pretty obviously a bluff. The Taliban knew they were being listened to, since exchanges were common and Alpha Company troops often radioed taunts to goad them to fight. But the Special Forces captain was not used to it yet. He went to Colonel Fontes and announced it was time to leave. She refused, as Crane remembers it, because she did not want the residents of Chora to see that Americans could be so easily pushed around. The soldiers of Alpha Company agreed, saying, “They can’t hit anything anyway.” The Special Forces captain, however, remained so adamant about leaving that Fontes told him to take his men and go. As the Special Forces were pulling out, some said, “We’ll clear your route.” To me, years later, Crane answered, “Yeah, right.”

After a dignified delay Fontes ordered the convoy home. This was not supposed to look like a retreat. It was supposed to look like the end of a workday. The next morning at the base, the Special Forces captain came into the Operations Center. Walker was there with Crane. The atmosphere was tense. The Special Forces man said, “They were talking about rockets. That Chora is a dangerous place.”

Walker said, “Sure is, and we’re going back tomorrow. Wanna go?”

“Negative. We’ve got some other things to handle.”

But if you wanted to find the enemy, this was the way to do it. They returned to Chora the next day in a vulnerable convoy, without Special Forces or air cover. Colonel Fontes and her reconstruction team intended to show goodwill. Captain Walker and some of his Alpha Company were there to provide protection. Sergeant Crane and his sniping partner both went along, but, rather than assuming the standard overwatch position, they stayed with the trucks. Fontes spent seven hours palavering with the village elders. During that time some of the Afghan interpreters picked up Taliban radio traffic. The talk was about the movement of weapons across a river. There was no mention of an attack. That should have been a sign.

At the end of the day the small convoy set out for home. Walker was in a Humvee toward the front of the column, Fontes in the middle, Crane and his partner toward the rear. They were ambushed where the road climbed through the narrows above the town. The attack started with twin explosions to the left and right, caused apparently by the misfiring of rockets exploding in place. Small-arms fire followed immediately from both sides. As usual, it came from fairly long range, at least 500 meters away, and was plentiful but inaccurate. The convoy pulled into a defensive herringbone formation and stopped. The top machine-gunners opened up in response—though at fighters who were largely invisible. The soldiers inside the Humvees bailed out. In his rush, Crane got hung up on the door and went sprawling into the dirt. He rose and, with enemy rounds slapping the ground, ran to join his partner in the partial shelter of his Humvee.

Then he saw the shepherd—an older man standing calmly in the road with a flock of sheep, despite the uproar of the battle, and the bullets snapping above him. In one hand he held a wooden staff. Crane watched as he stretched his arms out wide. The sheep responded by coming to him, clustering around, and lowering their heads. A soldier named Sanchez was firing hard. Colonel Fontes came running and shouted, “What are we firing at?” Sanchez shouted, “Don’t worry, ma’am, it’s all about morale. They’re too far away anyway.” But some were not. Crane’s partner was armed with a semi-automatic sniper rifle. He spotted a man running away, and started shooting at him. He missed, he missed, he missed seven times, but with the eighth shot he brought the man down. Crane later teased his partner about it: “One shot, one kill?” That’s how sniping is supposed to work.

Crane had spotted another fighter in the distance. He was holding a radio, as if directing the attack, but before Crane could kill him, he ducked behind a large rock. Crane used a laser range finder—a device that he had brought from home—and measured the distance as 806 meters. That is the distance from Crane’s stone house to the road in Texas, and then half again as much, plus some. Crane had been issued the army’s standard sniper rifle—a 7.62-mm. bolt-action Remington M24, shooting a medium-weight, 175-grain match bullet and equipped with a fixed 10-power scope. He dialed an elevation into the scope to correct the aim for the ballistic arc at 800 meters, then braced the rifle on the hood of the Humvee, sighted it at the rock, and waited. Soon enough the gunfire ebbed and became sporadic. At that point, stupidly, the man behind the rock stood up to look around. Crane saw him clearly through the scope: he was a Pashtun, and in Crane’s view a typical Hajji with a scraggly beard and a man-dress on. Centering the crosshairs near the man’s groin to compensate for the tendency of rounds to go high when fired upslope, Crane squeezed off a single shot. The bullet flew for about a second and hit the man squarely in the chest, raising a little cloud of dust as it punched through the fabric of his clothes. He must have been surprised at being killed from so far away. He felt the blow and likely died before hearing the shot, the sound of which arrived three seconds later. He fell straight back like a firing-range silhouette, and did not rise again. At 806 meters it was Crane’s longest kill in combat. He pocketed the spent cartridge, the “kill brass” that had done the job. No Americans had been hit. A few Afghans in the convoy had been wounded, but none had been killed.

On the road the Afghan shepherd had been standing all the while with his arms outstretched above his sheep. Now he touched several of them with his staff. The sheep responded by raising their heads and quietly accompanying him as he walked out of sight around a bend.

Back at the base that evening the soldiers were full of talk about it. “Dude, did you see that dude?” they said. Recently I asked their commander, Walker, if the vision had been real. He answered that he himself had not seen the shepherd, because of his own position in the convoy, but he knew that Afghans have remarkable control over their flocks. Crane believed something else. He took the shepherd as a messenger from God. No doubt this steadied his aim when he shot.

II
You shoot one man, you terrify a thousand. That was the theory outside of Afghanistan. Through generations of warfare, it’s what sniping was largely about. By hiding in open sight and shooting precisely, snipers killed enemy officers, sowed fear in enemy ranks, and covered their own army’s retreats. Sometimes they went out to kill opposing snipers, because artillery was an ineffectual response, but rarely did they go off on assassination missions or do Hollywood things, as is generally thought. Sniping was defensive in nature. The British historian Martin Pegler—who is the pre-eminent authority on the subject—recently made that point to me in northern France near the inn called Orchard Farm that he runs with his wife on the World War I battlefields of the Somme. Walking among the remnants of the trenches there, where in 1916 half a million soldiers uselessly died, Pegler said, “What decides wars is what starts them—politics. For the purpose of winning, snipers are irrelevant. But they are also probably the most powerful soldiers face-to-face in battle. Their power is psychological. It greatly magnifies their effect.” This was true even on the Somme, where soldiers were willing to advance suicidally against machine-gun fire, but harbored a special dread of snipers’ single shots. To dread in war is to despise. In a conflict where hatred had faded between the combatants, and most killing was impersonal and mechanized, snipers who were captured were invariably bayoneted, shot, or hanged. Summary execution was the norm during World War II as well. In his encyclopedic history of sniping, Out of Nowhere, Pegler draws from the unpublished diary of a U.S. Army captain, who wrote in 1944 that General Omar Bradley said he had no objection to enemy snipers’ being treated “a little more roughly” than the rules of war allowed.

The fact that U.S. forces had snipers of their own apparently did not change his view. Truth is, the Allied snipers themselves—though sometimes sought after—were widely shunned by their fellow soldiers on the front lines. The snipers were indeed spooky, the way they stalked their victims, studied them through scopes, and then mercilessly took their lives. They were not wanton killers, as was often believed. But their single shots were handcrafted kills in an era of mass-produced slaughter. Furthermore, they carried out their work in a social context—during the invasions of North Africa and Europe, and the assaults on the Pacific islands—where ordinary soldiers, upon encountering the enemy, were often hesitant to shoot and kill. This was the finding of a U.S. Army general and historian named S. L. A. Marshall, who in 1947 claimed on the basis of extensive surveys that up to 85 percent of frontline American riflemen had not fired their weapons in combat—even when under attack and at the risk of being overrun. He attributed the low firing rates to an instinctive aversion to killing at close range, when the potential victim is clearly identifiable as another human being. At the vital moment, Marshall wrote, the rifleman becomes a conscientious objector. Marshall himself was not sympathetic: however admirable the aversion to killing might seem, for the military it posed an obvious problem. Based on Marshall’s findings, the army set out to solve it by changing its training—for instance, by substituting human silhouettes for bull’s-eye targets, and while teaching gunmen in boot camp to shoot, also persuading them to kill. The subject is controversial. After Marshall died, in 1977, he was found to have had so little documentation to support his findings that some critics now reject his work as a fraud. Others, more forgiving, point out that, however intuitively, Marshall may have stumbled across a truth. Numerous independent studies have since found similarly low firing rates among Japanese and German riflemen, as well as among the frontline soldiers of World War I, the American Civil War, and several other conflicts. For whatever reason, the Pentagon took Marshall on faith and initiated a decades-long human-improvement campaign. By the Korean War, in the 1950s, surveys showed that fully half of the frontline riflemen who saw the enemy fired their weapons in response. In Vietnam, the number rose to 90 percent despite the unpopularity of the war and the low morale among troops. Of course, to fire at someone is by no means to hit him. The 90 percent figure was undermined by a significant number of intentional misses (a common phenomenon that is difficult to assess and quantify), and it was inflated by a battle doctrine called “Quick Kill,” which taught American soldiers to spray masses of automatic fire rather than take careful aim. As a result of that doctrine, in Vietnam U.S. infantrymen fired 50,000 rounds of ammunition for each kill they made—a ratio that would have encouraged even conscientious objectors to go ahead and shoot. The firing rates for Vietnam are therefore somewhat skewed. But compared with Marshall’s claimed rates for World War II they do seem to show that the U.S. military had made strides in conditioning the infantry to kill.

American snipers may have seemed less strange as a result—but they still stood out. “Murder Inc.,” they were sometimes called, and with good reason. On average they expended only 1.39 rounds for each Vietnamese they killed. Round for round, this made them 35,000 times more lethal than average soldiers in the ranks. Furthermore, it wed them psychologically to their shots in ways that most soldiers were not. Their otherness seemed to stem now not just from the intimacy of their kills but also from their willingness to do this to themselves during a hopeless war, and with unknown personal consequences over the years to come. Martin Pegler quotes one of them, James Gibbore, who wrote, “Could I, would I, have taken a man’s life, just because he was the enemy? … Could you do that? Think about it.…I never missed one shot. Fourteen men lay dead.… I counted down each one as I pulled down on them. This is one of the pictures my mind carries around, and will carry around all the days of my life.”

III
Pictures, memories, certainties, doubts. Crane will carry his own for the rest of his life. He was born in 1962 to a Baptist preacher and his wife, a librarian and primary-school teacher. They were not Fundamentalists. They were conservative. They were apple pie. They moved around, mostly in the South, but then to a western suburb of Chicago, where Crane graduated from high school, in 1980. He was 17. He was smart. College was not for him. He joined the Marines. Jimmy Carter was in the last months of his presidency at the time. Saigon had fallen five years earlier. Funds were so limited for the Marines in training Crane had to run through the woods yelling bang bang bang. He thought it was bullshit. That changed as soon as Reagan took office. Suddenly there was ample ammunition. Crane learned to shoot well. He loved it, but was posted to Kansas City as a clerk dispensing pay. He did this for more than a year, then was reassigned to the military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he served as a guard, and every week had his hair cut by a hatchet murderer who had once gone berserk and killed six Marines, but was considerably calmer now.

Crane missed out on the invasion of Grenada, in 1983. That sucked. He left the Marines in 1984, spent five months upholstering sofas at a factory in North Carolina, then re-enlisted and was assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Arizona, to learn missile-radar repair. Yuma is a pit, but Crane sort of liked it. He began shooting in earnest there and got so good at it that he became a member of the Marine Corps competitive-shooting team and was made a marksmanship instructor at the air station. In his spare time he volunteered as a reserve police officer for the city. He missed out on the invasion of Panama a few months later. In 1990 he was sent to Alabama for one year of radar school. Because of school he missed out on the Gulf War, in 1991. That sucked. He got assigned as a radar technician to the Marine Corps logistics base in Barstow, California. Barstow is a pit, and Crane thought so, too. Informally, he kept shooting, improving his skills. In 1992, during a trip to Louisiana, he had an epiphany and embraced Jesus Christ as his savior. He was soon to turn 30. He had given 12 years to soldiering and had risen to the rank of sergeant. But he had been stuck at that level for six years because of cutbacks and bottlenecks that were blocking promotions, and so in the summer of 1992 he left the Marine Corps again.

He went to work as a cop for the Yuma Police Department. He met his wife—we’ll call her Danielle—who came from Texas, but moved to Yuma to be with him. They married. They lived in a trailer park in the desert. He was a regular patrol officer. He drove around in a squad car, responded to emergencies, and broke up a fair number of brawls. Yuma is a lively town for cops, what with its transients, narcotics, and gangs. Crane patrolled the roughest neighborhoods. The department had a Special Enforcement Team for high-intensity interventions—such as serving arrest warrants on violent gang members, or dealing with kidnappers and shooters. Crane joined the team as a sniper. He went through training, and was involved in various special operations, but in Yuma he never had to shoot anyone.

Danielle wanted to go home to Texas. In 1996 she was offered a position in a bank near Dallas, and she and Crane moved to a small town called Frisco, where they bought a house, and Crane went to work for the local police. The department had 25 officers when Crane arrived. They were good old boys and ordinary guys. Some among them had formed a Special Operations Unit, which Crane joined as the lead sniper. Again he shot no one. Despite all his training, he had never shot anyone in his life. Mostly what he did in Frisco was drive around in a patrol car, waiting for radio calls or speeders, and reading Guns & Ammo in the quiet times.

In December 1999, Danielle gave birth to their daughter. Four months later, in the pre-dawn of an April morning in 2000, the Special Operations Unit was called out to deal with a drunk and suicidal woman who had locked herself in her car with a handgun in a parking lot on the edge of town. Like his fellow officers, Crane knew her already, and by name, as one of the more difficult people in Frisco. She was in her 30s, about Crane’s age, and was habitually in trouble. She had lost her driver’s license because of drunk driving, had lost her job because she could not drive, had lost her house because she had lost her job, had lost her marriage for whatever reasons, and was about to lose custody of her two small children as well. She knew the number for the suicide hotline. Three times already she had threatened to shoot herself, and had held off the police for hours, until being persuaded to put down her gun and surrender for treatment. Each time she had been evaluated and released.

This time seemed worse from the start. When Crane arrived on the scene, the woman had vowed to a police negotiator that she would emerge from her car only in a body bag. Deploying snipers was a standard precaution because the woman was armed. Crane and his partner crawled into a field—his partner with binoculars, Crane with a bolt-action rifle. They set up about 70 yards out, which is close, and about average for police sniper shootings in the United States. They were on the far side of the car from the woman with the gun. The field was dark. The car was lit by parking-lot lights. Its windows were up. Through his telescopic sight Crane saw that the woman’s gun was a revolver, and that it was cocked. When she was not smoking, or shouting at the police, she kept putting the gun to her throat or into her mouth. Negotiations continued, to no avail. The situation was deteriorating. The woman threw down a cigarette and screamed, “I’m going to do it right now!” Through his scope, Crane saw her face in excruciating detail. She put the gun into her mouth. Crane figured this was it. But then her expression softened, and he clearly saw her change her mind. There was no time to communicate this to the commander. An entry team had reached position behind the car, and they fired a pepper-spray round. It bounced off the roof and sailed into the night. They fired a second round. It hit the chrome strip on top of the rear window and shattered but did not penetrate the glass. The woman turned backward in her seat to face toward the police. Crane saw her switch the gun from her right hand to her left. She lowered both hands below his sight, but then raised the gun back into view. Crane’s partner was watching through the binoculars. He said, “Uh oh.” Crane wanted confirmation. He said, “See the gun?” Aiming through the closed passenger-side window, he centered the scope on the woman’s head, just behind her left ear. If he had to shoot her it would be essential to demolish her nervous system to cause instantaneous muscular relaxation and give her no chance to fire on the entry team. Crane’s partner said, “Yep.”

The view through the scope was strangely illuminated, as if all of Crane’s senses had poured their energies into his vision. Without effort he held the crosshairs absolutely steady on the target. The woman brought the gun in line with the police outside and stretched her arm as if to fire. Crane shot her. He felt no kick from the rifle. He barely heard the shot. In his scope he saw a little white hole where the bullet went through the window, and he watched the woman’s head explode. She was dead in an instant, and without spasms. Her gun hand came down, her torso twisted slightly in the seat, and she slumped toward the driver’s door. The picture grew murky as her blood and brains dripped from the car’s headliner and slid down the inside of the windows. The other police thought she had shot herself, and they stormed the car. One used his rifle butt to smash through the driver’s window, and another reached in to unlock the door. As Crane remembers it, they both recoiled in shock.

You don’t think of this when you set out to be a police sniper. You think about concealment, marksmanship, and punching tight little holes in distant targets. You think about some deranged killer holding a weapon on a child, and you taking that bad man out. Those shots are easy to make. They’re only about ballistics and technique. But what about the need to shoot a suicidal woman perhaps? Or to shoot a student rampaging through a school? Afterward you may know that you have killed only to save lives, but what about all that follows? Fifty percent of police who kill in the line of duty end up leaving the profession as a result. Crane got a full lesson in it now. Even before he packed up his rifle, he felt a confusion of emotions: professional pride, but also disgust, regret, uncertainty, urgency, exposure, anger at the woman, sorrow for her children, and deep revulsion at the act. At no point in his training had anyone brought any of this up. It was as if he had been taught to kill in the abstract. Now suddenly he had crossed a line.

When he returned to the police station, Crane’s mind was careening out of control. He was unable to concentrate, or even to remember much, when he sat at a computer to write out a statement. He kept visualizing the little white hole in the window, and the woman’s head coming apart. A lawyer from the Police Association showed up to advise him. Technically the killing was a homicide, and it would be treated as such: detectives would investigate it, and a prosecutor would present their findings to a grand jury to determine if Crane should be indicted and tried for murder. This was deeply disturbing to Crane. The police chief assured him that he had nothing to fear from the process, but Crane was unconvinced. It did not help that his colleagues were looking at him strangely, or that conversations stopped when he walked into the break room. He saw his case sheet with “Murder” written on top.

Driving home that night he placed his fate in the hands of God. He parked in his driveway and prayed. Danielle came out, carrying their infant daughter. When the baby saw Crane she smiled. It was a relief for him. He took her smile as an answer from God and an affirmation of his humanity. But later in the evening, when he went to shave and shower, he found that he could not bring himself to look in the mirror. He was afraid of what he would see in his eyes. For days he was afraid that others—even strangers—were seeing him differently, too. A police psychologist told him that it was a common reaction among first-time killers, and he called it “the Mark of Cain.” He said it is hard, but it fades.

The grand jury took months to absolve Crane of blame. Afterward he was bitter. His relationship with the Frisco police—and particularly with the chief—never recovered from his sense that he had been abandoned for doing his job. Eventually he wrote a short book—in frank and skillful prose—meant as a guide to the aftermath of killing for other snipers in the field. He addressed the practical realities. He described the grand-jury experience in detail. He also recommended that police snipers condition their minds for the more difficult kills in ways that their departments could not—by cutting out magazine pictures of women and children, as well as of men in unusual profiles, and using them in private for target practice. He knew this seemed extreme, but he believed it was better to quit the trade entirely than to pretend that such shots will never come up. He did not quit the trade. The book was published in 2003 by a press that specialized in police matters. Two thousand copies were printed. The book was perhaps useful to a few people. It should have been a little thing.

But in the meantime, he had decided to join the Texas Army National Guard, essentially for the benefits and the fun. The National Guard would keep him close to home. He would serve in a scout platoon, but for only one weekend a month and two weeks a year—unless the unit was mobilized. Before taking the oath, Crane joked about the possibility. He said, “The way my luck goes, I’ll join up and the world will go to shit.” He joined up on September 5, 2001. Six days later came the 9/11 attacks. To me recently he said, “I’m a shit magnet—you’ll find that out.” The C.I.A. knows, but covers it up: 9/11 was Crane’s fault.

In July of 2002 his battalion was mobilized and sent to New Mexico to guard a sensitive installation. For a whole year al-Qaeda did not attack. When Crane returned to Frisco in the summer of 2003, his book had just been published, and the chief of police was furious about it. On Crane’s first day back on the job he was suspended with pay and was served with a letter charging him with contempt of court—for having divulged the secret workings of a grand jury. It was absurd. He hired a lawyer, who eventually settled the matter. Crane and Danielle sold the house in Frisco and moved with their daughter farther into the Dallas countryside, to a small town called Mabank, near another one called Gun Barrel City. It was late 2003. The United States was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He signed on as a full-time active-duty sergeant in the Texas Army National Guard. He was attached to a new battalion. The commander soon heard of Crane and his special history; he called him in, asked him to set up a program to train a lower level of long-range shooters known as “squad- designated marksmen,” and sent him off to an army sniper school near Little Rock, Arkansas, for the full formal deal himself. The course was tough. Crane excelled. After he graduated, his official military occupation for the first time became “sniper.” He was unusually well prepared for the job. Soon afterward, in May 2005, his unit was mobilized. In July of that year he shipped off with Alpha Company and Ross Walker to Afghanistan and to war.

IV
In Vietnam, American forces killed at least 3.5 million people. In the process they fired untold billion of rounds of small-arms ammunition and dropped nearly seven million tons of ordnance—a weight three times heavier than that dropped on Germany during World War II. Afterward, the military had to recognize that its expenditure of ammunition had only helped the enemy cause. Various conflicts then came and went with little consequence except that, as a British sniper recently said to me, they helped weapons development along. Some of these weapons were newly precise missiles and bombs. The army’s rifle squads did not keep pace. When they went to war following 9/11, they carried essentially the same weapons that their predecessors had carried in Vietnam.

Iraq became an urban war, fought at close range in the streets of the cities and towns. Snipers there were used primarily from fixed positions on sandbagged rooftops, to keep insurgents at bay. Two hundred meters was about the maximum distance—from here to the corner, or maybe two blocks down. At those ranges you could hardly miss. Snipers came home with heavy head counts.

Afghanistan by contrast was a rural war, fought in the open countryside, with snipers on both sides pushing the engagements out beyond effective assault-rifle range. Firefights began at 500 meters and widened from there. Killing was correspondingly harder. I write this in the past tense, but it goes on today, and more so than before. A British sniper recently returned to England dissatisfied that he had shot more donkeys than men. I thought it was an unusual complaint. I asked one of his colleagues why he had been shooting donkeys.

“Because they were Taliban donkeys.”

“How could he tell?”

“Through his scope.”

That was sniper humor. But snipers don’t kill for fun, and this one must have seen donkeys doing suspicious things. The problem is: in Afghanistan the peasants do suspicious things, too. Some then die because they are indeed Taliban, while others become Taliban for being dead. No one would wish for the latter, but in a foreign land where everyone looks the same, it can be hard to sort people out. In tacit recognition of the difficulty, the U.S. forces do not officially divulge their kills. The deaths of noncombatants drive the expansion of the war. The specific incidents tend to be acknowledged only when the victims include women and children, or the locals make a public fuss that gets picked up by the press. This war is going to be lost and declared to have been won. It worked that way in Vietnam; it is working that way in Iraq; it will work that way in Afghanistan as well. Meanwhile, “collateral casualties” undermine the moral ground of the fight and make the losing worse. There have been too many, they must be avoided, and something must be done.

So snipers believe that their time has come. Here at last is a war they can fight in precisely the manner required. Here is a war where they will not be marginalized. The army seems to agree and is shifting its emphasis toward more accurate shooting. Rumor has it that ordinary assault rifles will soon be equipped with improved optical devices like those already in use by the Marines, which allow for effective fire at 400 or 500 meters. New scopes are in development that will automate calculations and adjustments, and, in conjunction with guided bullets, may ultimately revolutionize long-distance shooting. Meanwhile, you work with what you’ve got. Currently there are 980 fully trained snipers in the army, 748 in the Marines, and even the air force and navy have some teams. Such specialists are considered to be valuable assets—expensive to train, and still too scarce to be used on many routine missions. As a result, there is a push to deploy larger numbers of squad-designated marksmen, who in effect are semi-snipers, equipped with sniper rifles and trained to use them at ranges up to 500 meters, but not taught about other aspects of the sniper profession, such as concealment and psychological fortitude. Between such marksmen and full-on snipers, some people now envision an infantry consisting entirely of sharpshooters. The consequence of this, if feasible, is difficult to know. On the one hand, it would greatly expand the number of soldiers having to bear the burden of intimate killing for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, it would place into the battle more soldiers who, even when they get it wrong, kill only one man at a time.

V
Crane seems to have gotten it right with every shot. This means there were shots he could have taken but did not. Once, he and his sniping partner were lying in a hidden overwatch position on the side of a mountain when two peasants, one of them carrying a hoe, emerged from a field below and began to dig beside a road, as if preparing a hole for an explosive device. Crane was on the gun, his partner on the spotting scope. The rules of engagement allowed for killings if hostile intent was obvious—and the two men beside the road fit the profile. Crane might have shot them, but his partner called for him to wait, because there was something about them that seemed more right than wrong. After half an hour it turned out that the men were digging up dried bushes to use as firewood. They never knew how close they had come to being killed for wanting to heat their houses. By contrast, Crane spotted another man on a mountainside who had an AK-47 and was counting off the vehicles in an American convoy by pointing at them one by one. Crane shot him dead. At his stone house in Texas, he said to me, “I was driven by the certainty that someday I will have to stand in front of the Lord, and he’s going to know that either I shot some people who didn’t need to be shot or I only shot people who needed to be shot.”

At Tarin Kowt the soldiers of Alpha Company called themselves the avengers. As in the avengers in the valley. As in the valley of the shadow of death. On his rifle Crane had written “Remember 9/11.” On the inside of the flip-up cap of his telescopic sight he had pasted a small picture of New York’s Twin Towers. He wore tightfitting army-issue wraparound glasses, secured to his head with parachute cord. The glasses are known as Go-Fasters because of their speedy look, or as B.C.G.’s, for Birth Control Glasses, because of the effect they have on romance. There was no romance in Tarin Kowt, or to it. There were no enemy snipers to duel with one-on-one. There were no long-range reconnaissance missions. At first there was not much of anything. To me, Crane said, “People have no concept of boredom until thay have served in a combat zone.” Once, there was a kid standing beside a road holding a sign that read, afghanistan might be dangerous, but at least this isn’t michael jackson’s house. Some soldier had put him up to that. In the briefings Crane heard: Be aware of piles of rocks, because that’s where they put explosive devices. But, dude, Afghanistan is a pile of rocks. Crane worked a standard schedule—four days on patrol, four days on standby with the Quick Reaction Force, four days on base defense. During time off, while the other soldiers played football or watched videos on television, he and his partner sat on the perimeter wall and shot at rocks that they had placed at known ranges in the wasteland beyond. In that sense they stood out, but otherwise they were integrated into the ranks to an extent not known by the snipers of previous eras.

Wars move slowly even when fast, and the war in Afghanistan is certainly not that. After a month the Special Forces were authorized to act. These were the first Special Forces in Alpha Company’s experience—the ones with whom the National Guard got along well. The idea was to provoke a fight by driving to the southwestern corner of the province and into a strategic pass called Daylanor, which was traversed by a rough dirt road and was known to be a stronghold of the Taliban. The mission would involve about 35 men drawn in equal measure from Alpha Company, the Special Forces, and a unit of the ragtag Afghan National Army. Crane was among them. The Americans were in armored Humvees with machine-gunners up top. The Afghans were in Ford pickup trucks with heavy-duty bumpers. There were 10 vehicles in all. Five minutes after they left the base at Tarin Kowt, the transmission on one of the Humvees failed. Humvees have automatic transmissions. On an earlier occasion a driver in one of Crane’s columns got out of a Humvee without putting it in park. The Humvee rolled away. The driver said to Crane, “I didn’t go to Humvee school.” Crane said, “Dude, a Humvee’s a car.” People have no concept of stupidity until they have served in the army. This time, when the Humvee’s transmission failed, the entire convoy had to creep back to the base and wait while a replacement vehicle was prepared for battle. This took a while. The force set out again, but behind schedule.

The way was rough and required river crossings. The top speed was eight miles an hour. By dark the convoy had not yet come to the Daylanor Pass. The Special Forces captain was in command. He called a halt for the night. The Americans put their Humvees into a defensive circle. The Afghans put their pickups into a larger circle around them as an outer perimeter.

The night air was cool. The Americans sat around eating field rations and junk food mailed from home. Those not standing guard slept on the hoods of their Humvees. In the wee hours, the Special Forces captain called a meeting of the leaders, including Crane, and told them he had gotten word from aerial reconnaissance that a large group of Taliban were moving into an ambush position in the pass. Crane thought: Well, O.K., in a way that’s kind of scary, but in a way that’s what we’re here to do; at least they’ll make it easy to find them. He had a burning hollow feeling in his gut. A Special Forces sergeant came up and said, “Hey, dude, I got some bad news. I gotta put a Stinky in your truck.” Afghans are Stinkies because they don’t wash. This one was an interpreter. In the prelude to battle, Crane hardly cared how the man smelled. The plan was to head out early and push into the dark, where they could use their night optics to advantage. But the Afghan soldiers were so slow to get going that by the time the convoy rolled daylight had come.

It was August 7, 2005, almost four years after the 9/11 attacks. The road into the pass was littered with stones. The column struggled forward at five miles an hour, raising clouds of powdery dust. An Afghan pickup truck led the way. The pass itself was a moonscape. The road was flanked by a vertical rock face rising immediately to the right and by a steep boulder-strewn slope rising more gradually to the left. The scene was stark and eerily quiet. One of the Special Forces men radioed, “This is looking pretty ugly.” Crane felt the hair rising on the back of his head. He was taking fast shallow breaths. Between his legs he gripped his bolt-action M24 sniper rifle. It was loaded to capacity with five sniper rounds. Beside him in the Humvee he had a little rucksack, a go bag packed with spare ammunition and devices. There was a knoll ahead on the left slope. Crane was watching it, waiting for trouble, when he saw the white puff of a rocket-propelled grenade firing off. He radioed, “Contact left, R.P.G., R.P.G.!” The R.P.G. streaked in and exploded in the road about 15 feet ahead of the lead truck. The column lurched to a halt as heavy machine guns opened up on it from ahead and behind, and the left slope erupted with muzzle flashes. The soldiers began to pile out of their vehicles and return fire. Some went into a shallow, flat ditch that bordered the road’s right side, at the base of the rock face against which the column was pinned.

Crane was one of the first into the fight. He ran from his Humvee and threw himself prone behind a scraggly bush to return fire. He was surprised by the magnitude of the ambush. Based on all the muzzle flashes on the slope above, there were too many of the enemy to count. Range was equally difficult to judge. Crane’s scope was equipped with a “mil-dot” reticle—a display of small dots known as hold-offs, each representing an increment of 3.5 degrees above, below, and to the sides of the crosshairs—which serves several purposes, one of which in theory is to measure the distance to a target if the size of that target is already known. For instance, the body of an average man. It’s simple in class: an angle at a known distance gives you a height; a height that fills an angle gives you a distance. The system works well during training, but it requires an enemy in combat to show himself and hold still to be measured. Against blinking muzzle flashes on an empty moon face it was useless. Crane fell back on years of knowledge. At the base he had “zeroed” his scope for 500 meters, meaning that at that distance he simply had to put the crosshairs on a target to hit it. He noticed that the smaller rounds coming in were not snapping by his ears but buzzing like bumblebees as they passed—air resistance over distance having slowed them to less than the speed of sound. This put the nearest Taliban at least 500 meters away, by Crane’s estimation. The distance helped to explain why the enemy fire seemed to be inaccurate—at least to the extent that so far no soldiers near Crane had been hit. Crane located the closest muzzle flash to his position and aimed just below it for an upslope shot, and slightly to the right on the presumption that the invisible gunman was right-handed and was lying to the left of his weapon. Crane squeezed off a shot and immediately afterward saw a pink haze floating above the spot. The pink haze was the spray of blood. Technically it meant that Crane had gotten the range just right. Tactically it meant that a weapon had stopped firing. Strategically it meant nothing at all. But one shot, one kill. Crane did it three times more, and each time seemed to score a hit. Perhaps five minutes had passed. At that point, with only a single round remaining in his rifle, he realized that in his haste he had left his little ammo rucksack in the Humvee. Oh cool, oh Christ, now he was going to have to go back through the bumblebee fire to fetch it. Above the roar of the battle he shouted at the soldier beside him, “Cover me! I gotta go back to the truck!”

Cover me? How? The soldier was a private. He shouted, “What for?”

“I forgot my go bag!”

The soldier shouted, “O.K.—you’re a dumb-ass!” Sir.

Crane went crawling back to the Humvee, vowing never again to make the mistake. Dumb-ass. He got the pouch, reloaded his rifle, and returned to his original firing position. The battle continued to rage, with explosions all around and multiple R.P.G.’s in flight, leaving trails hanging in the air, as many as 10 at a time. Crane started singling out muzzle flashes at ranges he estimated as 600 and 700 meters. He fired sparingly. He did not see the enemy. Several times he saw the pink mist again. At one point a Taliban fighter popped up from behind a nearby rock and fired an R.P.G. directly at his Humvee. The rocket approached him like certain death, but then suddenly veered upward and away. It exploded harmlessly against the rock face overhead. Crane believed that God’s hand was involved. A machine-gunner shot the shooter to hell. Crane believed he deserved what he got.

An Afghani soldier crouching behind him raised a Kalashnikov over his head and began firing blindly. Crane moved up the column to get away. He sheltered from the Taliban behind the lead Humvee and took time to survey the scene. The battle by now had lasted a half-hour, and it showed no sign of abating. Crane had fired 15 rounds—an average of one every two minutes. He did not know how many Taliban he had killed or wounded, and he did not care. He was not there to keep track. He had no name to make for himself, no dreams of glory and fame. He preferred to remain obscure.

To the right he spotted a low-lying indentation in the opposing slope that looked like a possible withdrawal route for the attackers. He lasered the range to the opening and came up with 712 meters—more than twice as far as the distance at which soldiers with assault weapons could expect to hit the enemy. This time he dialed the range into his scope and set up properly as a sniper, resting his rifle on his go-bag on the hood of the dusty Humvee. Soon enough a fighter appeared carrying a Kalashnikov. He wore a grayish-tan man-dress and a typical round cap, and had a heavy beard. Crane believed that you can tell a lot about a Pashtun from his cap. He thought that if he wears it on the right he’s a homosexual, if he wears it on the left he goes both ways, and if he wears it straight he’s straight. Crane thought the cap was stupid. He shot the man in the face just below the left eye. The man’s eyes closed. He made a bitter bullet face and dropped.

Minutes later the battle petered out and stopped. Soon afterward a line of Taliban fighters could be seen in the distance climbing to cross a saddle above the pass. The Special Forces called in a B-52. The airplane flew high and unseen. From its sterile altitude it dropped a single 500-pound bomb, which was very precise and exploded on the saddle. Soldiers took pictures of the blast.

That was it. One Afghan pickup truck had been destroyed, and all the vehicles had been scarred, but no one in the convoy had been wounded or killed. While the Americans waited on the road, the Afghan soldiers went up the slope to check for results. They went only about 400 meters because the going was tough, and they turned around having found little at all. There must have been quite a few Taliban dead, but they were out of reach among the rocks. The column turned around laboriously and later that day returned to the base. The Taliban returned to the pass.

And so went the war. Crane lay in the mountains on overwatch many times and was in another three firefights. He shot an unknown number of men. Those he saw die will stay with him for the rest of his life. One night he turned the tables by ambushing the Taliban. There were three of them in a column, the first two carrying Kalashnikovs, and the last one with an R.P.G. Crane was with a couple of Humvees parked on a rise in the dark about 700 meters away. He had a rifle with an eight-power nightscope, and a magazine loaded with tracers. He got the machine-gunners ready and said he would mark the target. There was a ditch ahead of the Taliban fighters. He figured they would hesitate when they came to it, just as deer would do. They did, and he shot the last man, blowing through his belly with a tracer that then hit a rock behind him and ricocheted straight into the air. The machine-gunners opened up on the spot for a mad minute. Crane watched the Taliban explode in his scope. Afterward, one of the gunners asked, “What’s the battle-damage assessment?” Crane answered, “Are you kidding? There’s nothing out there but DNA gooze.”

So Afghanistan was a pretty bloody place, but Crane sort of liked it anyway, with its beautiful valleys and its famous history, the British in the Khyber Pass and all that. In comparison, Iraq sucked. After a year back in Texas, Crane went there in 2007 and 2008. He was stationed at the huge Balad Airbase north of Baghdad. One night he shot a man who was then immediately set upon by hungry dogs. That memory, too, will stay with Crane. But in the end he will not regret his life—or so he believes. He will stand before his Lord and answer for everything he has done. But he will have a question too. He explained it to me in his stone house, near Austin. He said, “When I get to heaven and meet the Lord, I’m just going to have to ask him, ‘Dude, you created all these beautiful places. Wyoming, Montana, even Switzerland. Dude, look around! So tell me, why did you center the Bible on the Middle East?’”
Vanity Fair