The sniper lay on his stomach, legs splayed, one eye staring through a telescopic sight down a gulley between woods and fields under a distant ridge. He studied the movement of the grass. “The wind was strong, breaking left off the high ground behind,” he said later.
“It curled down the range – about 600 yards ahead it dropped off.” He calculated a drift of 15 degrees. He breathed out slowly and as he did so pulled the trigger. There was a crack. Below the ridge, 840m (920 yards) away, three soldiers were raising and lowering plywood targets in the shape of enemy combatants. The bullet travelled in a long parabola, rising 1.6m and falling again to smash through the head of the right-hand target and drill into the sand behind.
Lying beside fellow snipers on a range at the Land Warfare Centre in Wiltshire, the soldier is one of the first to operate a new rifle that promises lethal accuracy at a greater distance. The L115A3, produced by the British company Accuracy International, has been procured for the Army at a total cost of £4 million in a sign of the reviving importance of snipers in the battle to secure Helmand province. Next week all four soldiers will deploy to Afghanistan as part of the Air Assault Force.
There they will depend upon their full range of skills, not just marksmanship, but stalking, field craft and camouflage. In dusty Helmand, snipers wear sand-coloured ghillies and will select any tiny ridge from behind which to conduct their long, silent shift, flat out on the desert. The new rifle has an effective range of 1,100 metres, an improvement of 200 metres on its predecessor. “The Taleban were able to reach us before,” the sniper said.
None of the men wanted to be named, but he is 36, a member of the Royal Irish Regiment, and a veteran of Kosovo and Iraq.. “I can certainly achieve a first-round kill at 900m,” he said. “You stay neutral. You don’t think of him as a person but as a combatant. A target.”
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“JC”, 33, from Manchester, who “sort of fell into the Army” after a short stint as a roofer, said he “got into sniping six or seven year ago”.
“At that time the training was harder to come by – it was a forgotten art, but with the last few conflicts the colonels are recognising its importance again.”
Sniper courses are oversubscribed. “You don’t need anything special,” he said. “Just your basic soldier skills, honed to a very high level. And as long as you don’t mind being cold and wet in one place for a long time.”
At least Helmand will be warm, he said. “You do feel a bit nervous: you get used to it” – he has completed tours of Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Northern Ireland – “but Helmand is quite hardcore.” But what of the pressure, less common in modern warfare, of seeing the man you are about to kill? “Once you have identified someone you are expected to hit him,” he said. “If you miss him you can expect a right ribbing.”
Beside him is a sniper from 3 Para, who was part of the force that defended the Kajaki Dam, which supplies power to southern Afghanistan. “Thirty-eight confirmed kills from 11 snipers,” he said. “It’s what we call an ‘alley job’ – a job everyone wants to do. Everyone has seen the films.”
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Patience is the key virtue, he said, “when you’re spending two weeks with four blokes in an observation post far ahead of your lines. It was 45C, you’re in body armour, two of you are doing ten-hour shifts.”
Hidden in position, watching for the combatants attempting to attack the dam with mortar bombs, he thought of going home. He said: “My wife was married to a soldier who never got deployed. Then she married me: 39 months I have been with her, I’ve been away 27. Speak to my missus long enough and you will have the patience to lie for ten hours behind a rifle.”
The target weapon
— The Long Range Rifle L115A3 replaces the L96 Sniper Rifle
— It fires a higher calibre bullet, 8.59mm rather than 7.62mm, which is heavier and less likely to be deflected over longer ranges
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— It has an effective range of 1,100m plus, compared with 900m for the earlier rifle
— The muzzle velocity is 936m/s, up from 838m/s
— A suppressor on the muzzle reduces the flash and noise of the report, reducing the chances of detection
— The telescopic lens magnifies targets up to 25 times, an improvement from 12 times magnification
— It weighs 6.8kg and can rapidly fire five rounds
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— Each rifle costs £23,000
Source: MoD