Weaponology (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - Sniper Rifles - full transcript

You're watching the Military Channel.

Go behind the lines.

The modern battlefield is no place for the faint-hearted.

Armies have never had so much firepower.

Millions of soldiers, billions of guns, all spitting lead.

Just missed a tank. I hate this.

Amongst the many, there's a lone band of warriors who only need one bullet.

And they never miss.

We do not shoot to wound.

Get locked and loaded as we go back through generations of technology

to find out how sniper rifles became the most accurate weapon on the
battlefield.



It's time to go ballistic.

Today's sniper rifles are at the cutting edge of technology.

The Barrett AS-50 is one of the best.

Weighing just 27 pounds, it can be broken down in three minutes.

But at distances out to a mile and a half,

this beast will slam through vehicles and body armor.

At the longer ranges, when you shoot that.50 cal, it's like a tornado hit you.

It's a tremendous blast.

Designed to provide Navy SEALs with accurate rapid fire at extended ranges,

the AS-50 is semi-automatic, mounts the latest scopes,

and has a detachable buttstock with a recoil-reducing butt pad.

The result? A weapon of ultimate lethality.

Now, weaponology will unlock its family tree,

going back through generations of technology to reveal how scopes,



bullets, tactics, camouflage, and mechanisms evolved into one of the most
accurate weapons on the planet,

the AS-50 sniper rifle.

400 years ago, sniping didn't exist.

Weapons accurate enough to target a man didn't exist.

And in America, accurate shooting meant grabbing a bow and arrow to take down a
buffalo.

But in the early 1700s, settlers arrived, and they brought their guns along for
the ride.

Most of them owned muskets, inaccurate, clumsy weapons.

But the German immigrants had something a whole lot better.

They brought with them a short weapon called a Jaeger,

or we know it today as the rifle.

Rifling was new in firearms.

A spiral groove was cut into the barrel, forcing the bullet to twist out of the
bore.

Spinning through the air, the bullet would maintain greater gyroscopic
stability.

It was a massive evolution in accuracy, and gave firearms a whole new name,
rifles.

These rifles are real accurate.

They would go out to 300 yards to kill a deer or an Indian if required.

Over the years, the Jaeger got Americanized, and became known as the
Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifle.

The accuracy of rifles made them different to muskets, the dominant battlefield
firearm for over 200 years.

Fire!

300-yard shots with rifles to hit a human figure were not uncommon at all.

Beyond 50, 60, 70 yards with a musket, you couldn't hit anything.

They believed in volley fire.

We all move at once, we level all the weapons, and when the sergeant says fire,
everybody squeezes the trigger.

Fire!

They really didn't aim much. The rifleman was the other way.

In the Revolutionary War, for the first time, skilled hunters armed with rifles

began proving that individual aimed fire might actually be more effective.

We had these frontiersmen riflemen, and they formed up and were brought in as
rifle units, companies,

the most famous of which was Morgan's Riflemen.

These sharpshooting units represented a seismic shift in battlefield strategy.

Unlike the regular units moving in rigid squares and firing in volleys,

Morgan's Riflemen fought in small teams, choosing individual targets, and fired
their weapons from distance.

The Kentucky rifle was the ideal guerrilla weapon of its day.

Shoot and shoot.

Was it effective? It sure was.

In the Revolutionary War, there was a general named Simon Fraser,

and he was stirring up the man, and he was pushing the American left back.

So Colonel Morgan got his best sniper. His name was Timothy Murphy.

And he told Murphy, get the general on the gray horse.

With muskets, taking out enemy commanders from distance had never been possible.

But rifles were about to change all that.

Murphy was now up a tree, taking aim on an English general from 300 yards.

On the first shot, it was more of a ranging shot.

The second shot, he thought the general flinched a little, as if a ball had
passed close to him.

The third shot, he hit him right in the belly.

General Simon Fraser had had a huge breakfast, and of course, in the guts, he
had no chance at all.

The British defeat at Saratoga was a turning point in the war.

Timothy Murphy had just proven the first and most important law of sniping.

It's not how many a sniper shoots, it's who he shoots.

In the 20th century, the idea that one bullet can change history came back with
a vengeance.

World War II. The one man everyone wants to see dead? Adolf Hitler.

What if a sniper could take him down? What then?

Incredibly, Hitler was targeted by snipers on two occasions, each attempt laying
down another law of sniping.

The first, if you miss, men die.

Hitler would have been aware that in the First World War, he sustained an injury
himself,

and a close friend was killed by a sniper's bullet.

And he always said that if events had happened differently in October 1916,

and the sniper had fired six inches to the right, it would have been Hitler who
had been killed rather than his best friend.

It was probably the costliest miss in history. Millions dead.

But maybe where one sniper had missed, another could succeed.

Time for a second attempt on the fur, and the second law of sniping.

Patience is a virtue.

In 1944, the British Special Operations Executive developed Operation Foxley,

a plan to drop a two-man sniper team into Germany.

Infiltrating Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat, they would pose as German soldiers.

First thing you'd want to do is get a vantage point where with your binoculars
and everything,

you could observe the targeted person reaching an area where they were a good
target, where you could make a shot.

I would say he'd have to have got within about 300 yards and taken him out
through the skull or the heart.

The real game has to be played involving patience and the sitting and waiting
and boredom of keeping alert

until this target finally appear.

You've got to know your distances. You've got to know the wind and the sunlight.

You've only got one shot. You've only got one chance.

The German Army

Patience. Snipers have it. And so did the Allies.

The trigger was never pulled on Hitler.

Allied military planners decided that Hitler would bring about the downfall of
Germany faster than they could.

Less than 20 years later, Lee Harvey Oswald did pull the trigger on a world
leader, and his target, JFK, inherited the whirlwind.

The former Marine took down the leader of the free world with an incredible
headshot at distance.

The rifle he used was an Italian Carcano.

A cheap bolt action, described by many as the least accurate infantry rifle of
World War II, had just changed the world.

Rifles had come a long way from the Kentucky. To find out how far, you've got to
go back hundreds of years.

If you're firing black powder, there is a great big puff of black smoke that
says,

Here I am. I'm the sniper. Shoot me.

In the 21st century, soldiers go into battle with state-of-the-art equipment
costing billions of dollars.

Snipers are at the cutting edge of this technology.

The rifles they use rarely jam, fire at the touch of a trigger, and can kill a
man a mile and a half away.

200 years ago, generations of men struggled with flintlocks, and flintlocks were
slow and unreliable.

A sniper is afraid to go out with something that your life depends on when
you're not sure whether or not it's going to function properly.

The flintlock was flawed. Powder had to be tipped into the priming pan each time
it was loaded. This took time.

It takes 45 to 60 seconds to make each shot. Black powder for the main charge.

He would then pour that powder into the muzzle of the rifle.

A piece of patch over the end of the muzzle.

Now you can ram all of that down from the muzzle down to the breech.

Next, pour very fine priming powder into the pan.

With a very light touch, this rifle will go off toward the target.

Flintlocks had another weakness. Their priming was external, and there was
always a flash before the main charge was fired.

Something quicker and better was needed. Something that nixed flintlocks.

In the early 19th century, they were killed off. Not by a gunsmith, not by a
soldier, but by a Presbyterian minister.

The reverend Forsyth was a Scottish clergyman who in his spare time was a keen
hunter.

The major problem he discovered was that the flintlock that he used for his
hunting,

the flash from it gave away his position to the birds who were able to fly away
in time so that his bullet missed the target.

So what he did to rectify this was he paved the way for the development of the
percussion cap.

Forsyth engineered a small explosive cap.

Struck by the hammer, it would send a small hot jet into the barrel of the rifle
and fire the main charge.

This is more secure, more reliable, and above all, it's quicker.

Fifty years later, the next major advance.

The marriage of percussion caps with the very latest technology. Breach loading
mechanisms.

Traditionally, guns were loaded at the muzzle. This meant forcing the projectile
down a long tube.

Time consuming stuff, particularly if the gun had spiral ridges from rifling.

Breach loaders were different. No complicated loading at the muzzle.

A drop lock or bolt action mechanism allowed bullets to be fed directly into the
breach.

The closing of a bolt or the block would chamber the round.

The modern rifle was born.

You open the breach, you've got a round from your pouch, you put it in, close
the breach and fire.

Breach loading also meant that the bullet fit tighter in the bore.

Less gas could escape past the bullet on firing and velocity increased
massively.

During the Civil War, the Sharps rifle was the most deadly breach loader on the
battlefield.

Its mechanism meant that skilled marksmen could lie on their belly.

A landmark moment in sniping history.

Lying down makes sniping more accurate because the gun is stabilized.

The sniper is a smaller target for return fire.

Just a few well positioned riflemen could tie down a far larger force.

At the Battle of Gettysburg, General Buford shows up with two brigades of
cavalry.

And those two Yankee brigades hold off Harry Heft's division until the first
corps can come up to relieve them.

If they didn't have the Sharps carving, they would have been run out of that
position.

For 30 years, rifles like the Sharps dominated the battlefield.

But the arrival of smokeless propellants took sniping to the next level.

For hundreds of years, black powder had been the explosive charge behind all
projectiles.

But it was far from perfect.

It left a black residue in the barrel that caused them to jam.

The powder was also highly unstable.

If the black powder gets a little bit damp or if it's been in storage for a
while,

instead of getting a bang, you get a fizzle where you get nothing at all.

For snipers, there was an even bigger problem.

If you're firing black powder from a clever hiding place,

there is a great big puff of black smoke that says, here I am, I'm the sniper,
shoot me.

This fog of war was lifted in 1887 when Alfred Nobel created a new generation of
propellant,

a smokeless gunpowder called balistite.

Three times more powerful than black powder, it massively increased the
effective range of snipers.

300 yards became 1,000 yards.

Just as important, this gunpowder evolution also reduced the amount of white
smoke.

For snipers, it was payday.

You've got cordite, a smokeless powder in your weapon, and you fire it,

the enemy will hear the crack, they'll hear the thump.

They might watch the general drop down as a pile of useless jelly.

But where did the shot come from? Don't know.

By World War I, the marriage of smokeless powder and breech loading created a
golden generation

of high velocity bolt action rifles.

Long range, targeted sniping became a key feature of trench warfare.

The Americans had the Springfield 03, the Germans had the Mauser 98,

and the British had the Lee-Enfield.

In the hands of a trained marksman, each rifle was an executioner's tool.

No one was safe, and nowhere was safe.

And the trenches, not deep behind the lines, not even in the bath.

There's a famous story about a British officer who was such a gentleman

and such a good chap that he refused to shoot a German officer who was caught
taking a bath.

The British officer was poet Robert Graves, who recalled the moment in his
famous memoirs.

A romantic by nature, he couldn't bring himself to shoot the German.

He thought as a gentleman it was beneath him to do so,

so he asked his sergeant if he would take the shot, and his sergeant said,

Charlie Goode, of course I will.

The shot, made from a forward trench, reveals how technologically advanced
rifles had become.

In an age of total war, snipers now had the tools to deliver death to the enemy

where he was least expecting it.

I think it shows you that the sniper is the unseen reaper on the battlefield.

But the reaper needs a scythe, and for snipers, that scythe is the bullet.

It's the bullet that does the dirty work.

From the simple lead ball to today's high-caliber rounds,

every step of bullet evolution has delivered more and more devastation.

In the event of a head shot, people don't realize this

and probably expect just to see a small hole in a person's head,

when a high-velocity bullet will really just almost tear someone's head
completely off.

For hundreds of years, bullets this powerful didn't exist.

The lead ball, grandfather of all ammo, got dropped into rifles everywhere.

All of these rifles were handmade by rifle smiths,

so that meant that every single one of them had a different caliber.

When they purchased the rifle from the gunsmith,

each one would have to come with its own bullet mold,

so each rifleman would have to make his own bullets by the campfire.

It's a time-consuming process that has to be done one at a time,

and so what happens is each one of these is going to be a different size bullet.

This variation was a major obstacle to aimed fire.

Accuracy depends on a close fit between the bullet and the barrel.

After 400 years of lead balls, something new was needed,

something more aerodynamic, something like the mini-ball.

The mini-ball is made out of solid lead, just like the old rifle ball or musket
ball.

The difference is it's shaped somewhat like an American football.

It's pointed on one end, but the base of it, the bottom,

has a cone or cavity in the bottom of it.

When shot, the mini's cavity would expand with the explosive gases,

creating a tight fit with the rifling,

and sending it spinning through the air at high velocity.

What this does is it gives you a bullet which is not accurate to 300 yards,

but closer to 700 to 50 yards.

The mini caused carnage on Civil War battlefields,

but for all its sophistication, the mini wasn't the solution.

It still relied on the separate loading of three different elements.

The powder, then bullet, finally the primer.

The bullet was good, the process laborious.

By World War I, a new generation of bullet,

the very lethal and very familiar smokeless cartridge.

You have a first copper, now brass cartridge case,

which encloses the powder inside.

You have the primer here on the end,

and here on this end you have the bullet or projectile.

So you have all the components that you need all together.

Loading time was slashed.

The Civil War shooter could fire three rounds a minute.

The World War I rifleman could fire up to 20.

And compared to earlier bullets,

the effect of the new cartridge on human flesh was shocking.

Its massive velocity creating horrific battlefield wounds.

We've got three blocks of modeling clay here down range.

We're going to shoot a replica of a Pennsylvania rifle,

54 caliber muzzleloader.

We're going to shoot a Civil War era mini ball,

and we're also going to shoot a 20th century smokeless cartridge rifle.

First we'll try the Pennsylvania rifle.

Next, an original 69 caliber rifle loaded with a

And finally, an original German 8mm mount.

So we're going to shoot a replica of a Pennsylvania rifle,

54 caliber muzzleloader.

We're going to shoot a Civil War era mini ball,

and we're also going to shoot a 20th century smokeless cartridge rifle.

First we'll try the Pennsylvania rifle.

Next, an original 69 caliber rifle musket from the American Civil War.

And finally, an original German 8mm mount from World War II.

Let's go down and check our handiwork.

We see here the three blocks of modeling clay with three completely different
effects.

The first one here, you see the shove of the rifle ball.

And has actually gone into the modeling clay block and is stopped.

On the second one over here from that 69 caliber rifle musket,

what has happened is you have a fairly small entry hole here in the front.

It has entered what would be a body cavity,

and has then tumbled and actually smashed flat as it goes through the body,

making a much larger exit cavity as it goes out.

This third block of modeling clay was fired at with an 8mm German Mauser.

What has happened is this represents the entry hole from this end,

and the exit hole further on down.

While the bullet is only quite small, 30 caliber as it enters,

what happens is called cavitation.

This is the amount of damage that you would see on the inside of a human being.

Three completely different effects,

three completely different effects through the ears.

This evolution in bullets meant that by the 20th century,

snipers knew if they hit their man, he was going down,

and wouldn't be getting back up.

To ensure accuracy, one more line of development was needed,

the arrival of accurate scopes.

When you look through a scope and you're looking,

you can see the individual's eyes shifting around.

It becomes very personal.

Snipers are the hawks of the battlefield.

Using scopes capable of 10 times magnification,

they can put a bullet through a human head at up to a mile away.

Scope technology has increased.

We'll be actually probably looking at a television screen inside the scope

in the next 10 to 20 years on.

250 years ago, iron sights were as good as it got.

The most basic form of aiming a gun,

they helped the shooter line up his target down the barrel.

Useful, but no solution in a world where gun technology was rapidly evolving.

If you're firing over iron sights with a 19th century rifle,

you've got a piece of equipment that is technologically capable

of putting a round into the same spot over and over again at a thousand yards.

But the human eye has a hard time focusing at a thousand yards.

Adding a scope to a rifle allowed snipers to artificially focus at extreme
distances

and maximize the true potential of their firearm.

In the Civil War, low-powered scopes made a big difference.

Small exposed areas, heads and legs, could now be seen clearly.

Long-distance kills became more frequent.

It also meant that snipers could properly identify high-value targets like
officers.

Badges of rank start to disappear from coats in the American Civil War.

Even U.S. Grant is sometimes seen wearing a private soldier's coat

with General's rank on it.

Is this because he's a modest man? Possibly.

I think he's more afraid of being taken down by a sniper.

By World War I, scopes had made snipers the scourge of trench warfare.

Demand was so high, the British faced a chronic shortage.

In desperation, they panicked and went to the only supplier they knew,

their German enemy.

In an attempt to get hold of binoculars and telescopic sights,

a secret deal was instigated with the Germans via Switzerland

that they would supply the British with optical sights

and we would supply them with rubber.

In the end, the Germans nixed the deal.

The prospect of their troops being slaughtered in return for rubber wouldn't
bounce.

Even so, the importance of scopes had been established.

They had transformed snipers into fierce snipers.

They had transformed snipers into fearsome daytime predators.

But at night, they were as blind as the enemy.

A decade later, one of the pioneering inventors of television saw the light.

Vladimir Zvorykin was one of the key players in developing image intensifiers.

Used in the Starlight Night Scope, it took light from the moon and stars

and amplified it by 60,000 times, turning night into day.

This use of night scopes helped us level the playing field

as far as being able to see them and see movement.

And now it's been developed, I think, in Iraq to the point where surgically,

it's a terrific technological advantage.

No matter what war, no matter what rifle, scopes put everything into clear
focus.

And snipers were seeing their victims up close and real personal.

A pilot of a bomber and an infantryman see the people they kill very different.

The bomber never sees them, the infantryman rarely.

The sniper sees them all the time.

When Rocky Chandler went to Korea in 1952, he thought he might see nothing at
all.

In Korea, we were not allowed to advance anymore.

By the time I got there, we had more or less stabilized the lines

and we were running little killer offenses.

You'd go out and shoot a bunch of people, capture a bunch,

and return to the lines you were on.

But Rocky soon got his chance.

I saw through my 2.5 power scope a figure in a different uniform

and I couldn't make him out.

My first sergeant said, my God, that's a Russian.

When you look through a scope and you're looking,

you can see the individual's eyes shifting around.

You can see him wipe his nose. It becomes very personal.

It has an effect on you at the time.

And so I shot him and down he went.

A sniper is a one-shot kill man.

Without a high-powered scope and hugely accurate rifle,

chances are Rocky couldn't have killed the Russian.

Then again, the rifle couldn't have done it without Rocky.

A weapon is nothing until it's in the hands of a sniper.

Rocky's first sergeant, the sergeant-in-chief,

says a weapon is nothing until it's in the hands of a sniper.

His skill, his training make him part of that weapon.

Together, they're a lethal combination.

If all of a sudden it's from out of nowhere,

your buddy drops dead and his head explodes,

there's definitely a psychological impact.

No.

By World War I, a revolution in bullets, scopes, mechanisms,

and balance made rifles deadly accurate from distance.

But this accuracy counts for nothing

if there isn't a skilled marksman pulling the trigger.

Rifles are just a tool.

Snipers are the real weapon.

Their training, their tactics have evolved down the years

to make him one of the most feared warriors on the battlefield.

When the sniper shoots, he makes everybody duck.

When you have active snipers, you have everybody walking around,

bent over, fearful of looking over the parapet to look at anybody.

You find everybody anxious and unhappy.

That's a nice thing to have.

If all of a sudden it's from out of nowhere,

your buddy drops dead and his head explodes,

there's definitely a psychological impact.

If we know where to look to fight back, shoot back when that happens,

that lessens our fear.

When you don't know where to shoot back at,

there's only so much you can do and it's human nature

to fear that a little bit.

It's that never knowing type thing.

Some people think it's a dirty trick to use,

but it's nonetheless, it's a very effective means of warfare and combat.

For early snipers, how to select a shot was learned on the battlefield.

But after World War I, sniping schools were established.

Books were out, bullets were in,

as teachers taught their students when to shoot and where to shoot.

The best shot a sniper can make is from the rear

into the medulla oblongata, which is the base of the skull back here.

A bullet there stops everything instantly.

A hit there, there is no trigger pulling.

It's a complete collapse.

The next best is considered by many to be a T in the front

because the bullet then goes right back into the medulla oblongata.

It's an instantaneous relaxation.

The target does not run anywhere.

But the medulla oblongata, or abracad, as it's known to snipers,

is also a small and unpredictable target.

If you miss, it could be the last bullet you fire.

The result? A fundamental shift in modern sniper tactics.

We're taught to shoot center mass.

Basically anything in the upper chest area, any of the vital organs,

even if we hit low or hit them in the leg,

that's still considered a good shot because they're now wounded

and hopefully it'll take them out of the fight.

To make these kinds of shots, you need an accurate rifle.

In World War I, snipers used the Springfield 03,

the Mauser 98, the Lee-Enfield,

and the Moyzen-Nagant.

Come World War II, no change.

Snipers were using the same rifles their fathers had fired 25 years ago.

Just as well then that all four weapons were awesome sniping pieces.

The German Mauser was a legend.

First issued to their infantry in 1898, it had a strong bolt action,

took a five-round clip, and delivered accurate fire at up to 1,000 yards.

Toward the end of World War II, the retreating German Army

began deploying lone snipers to delay enemy advances.

Armed with their Mauser, these men held up entire divisions,

proving that tactically sniping wasn't just a good offense

but one hell of a defense.

That rear guard action is fanatical as they try to stem the red tide.

Watch this soldier. A sniper gets him.

The fear about being sniped with the Germans was very real.

The word sniper was sent a tremble.

If you can get them as you did in Normandy,

well placed, well camouflaged, and accurate,

and they worked similarly, not like us in pairs,

and if you could start knocking off the tank commanders,

it had a devastating morale effect on our troops.

The Germans also evolved sniping techniques.

Taking their Mausers into unlikely places.

They were found in harness in trees, completely self-supported,

and would let us advance past them and then fire on you from behind.

In the ruined cities of the East,

Russian snipers became the top World War II aces,

taking down thousands of German soldiers.

The weapon they used was the Moyz and the Gantt.

Issued as the standard infantry rifle in 1891,

it was adopted as a designated sniper weapon in 1932.

It fired a hard-hitting 7.62 millimeter round,

and in short distance urban exchanges like Stalingrad,

it had the punch to take men down.

Vazily Zaitsev was the top Soviet sniper in the world.

Vazily Zaitsev was the top Soviet sniper ace of World War II.

Over 400 verified kills, including 11 enemy snipers.

But he wasn't the only one getting his hands dirty.

In a war of unbelievable carnage, women were engaged as snipers,

and also became aces.

Everybody in the whole Red Army is supposed to work hard

to kill as many of the enemy as the Vazily Zaitsev.

Through World War I and World War II,

American snipers were equipped with modified infantry rifles,

mostly the Springfield 03.

It wasn't until Vietnam that American snipers

stopped using standard infantry firearms

and got their hands on specialized sniper rifles.

Doctrinally, it was recognition that sniping was going to be

a major factor in jungle combat.

The Winchester M70 and the Remington M40 were issued to Marine units.

Both were highly accurate, expensive hunting rifles,

the kind of specialized commercial firearms that in previous wars

were denied to troops on the basis of cost.

Today, the M40 is still in service with the Marines.

Yeah, the M40 has a Douglas medium-heavy barrel

that shoots a.308 NATO round.

The rifle also had a Redfield scope with a 3x9 range finding reticle.

It was a very effective rifle.

The ability of the M40 was proven in Vietnam,

with numerous successful headshots taken at over 800 yards.

Snipers relied on its accuracy, but also on their own training.

They had to learn to control their fear,

and that meant controlling their breathing.

Snipers get into a rhythm, deliberate slow, steady breaths,

a controlled heart rate, minimal movement, 100% in the zone.

For that moment, time stops.

You're alive.

I mean, you're alive, but maybe you're not going to stay alive.

And for that moment, things slow down,

and sometimes that moment lasts a long time.

It seems like a long time.

You pull that trigger,

and then it's over.

Analysis conducted after the Vietnam War

shows that it took an average of 50,000 bullets

from an M16 rifle to kill a single Vietcong.

The average for a sniper firing the M40

was 1.3 bullets.

Somewhere along the line, all that sniper training,

all that experience, all that technology was paying off.

In the 21st century, the battlefield is changing.

American snipers still play a vital role

and still use the M40 rifle,

but tactically, things have changed.

The chaos of insurgent warfare, the presence of civilians,

has compromised the sniper's unique military independence.

Increasingly, they're told to call it in first, shoot later.

They ain't going mine.

Iraq, 2004.

Sam Little, a Marine sniper sergeant,

is caught up in a deadly game of cat and mouse with insurgents.

We have some checkpoint 343 on top.

My team was in an urban hide on top of a rooftop

in one section of the city,

and these three individuals were on foot,

basically hit and run, shooting at the vehicles

and then running away through the neighborhood.

The individual showed up on the rooftop,

matched the description, it was a heavy set of Iraqi male,

gray sweatpants, gray sweatpants,

wearing a black mask, carrying an AK-47.

He was sweating profusely from running away,

you know, running through the city streets,

evading capture, and under the rules of engagement,

you could shoot anybody with a weapon

as long as they posed a threat.

I'm looking through my scope, I see a burgundy sedan

on the north side of Peru.

But he didn't have a weapon visible at the time.

So just to be on the safe side, I called it in.

Six, catfish six, this is lightning four.

And they told me not to shoot.

And later on, whenever we wound up getting extracted

out of our position, those same three individuals

tried to ambush us whenever we were getting out of our position.

And it almost cost me my life.

You know, and he lived to fight another day,

and if he didn't, I don't know,

he lived to fight another day.

And if he was able to plant mines or IEDs or ambush another,

you know, Marine and kill another Marine,

then I feel it was my responsibility.

It's just one of those things that haunts you afterwards.

These insurgents were the lucky ones.

Few men who pass through a Marine's crosshairs survive.

Snipers deal death.

They're feared and hated.

But what happens when the cards are turned?

I think if a Viet Cong capture you and you're an American sniper

or any American infantryman, you're a dead man.

In the 20th century, snipers set new benchmarks of excellence.

The number of kills went through the roof.

But for all that blood spilled, there'd have to be a reckoning.

A machine gunner smoked out the sniper's nest.

Snipers across history have often been killed out of hand, if captured,

simply because the soldiers on the other side don't regard them

as legitimate competence taking the same risk.

They're different.

The hunters had become the hunted.

Day by day, new tactics were being evolved to wipe them off the battlefield.

I think if a Viet Cong capture you and you're an American sniper

or any American infantryman, you're a dead man.

We saw a team up toward the DMZ that had been castrated

and their testicles had been thrust into their mouths.

So that's the most gruesome, horrible thing I've ever seen.

Exposed to these dangers, snipers learn to use their natural surroundings

to remain hidden.

It's time to unravel one of the most important branches

of the sniper family tree, camouflage.

Camouflage is as basic as shooting.

You're foolish not to use it.

Prehistoric cavemen, right through to 20th century hunters,

have used their natural environment to get closer to their prey.

It works. But why?

In 1892, Abbott Henderson Thayer, a well-known American painter,

published the first dissection of natural camouflage.

He discovered that animals are countershaded.

Darkest on their backs, lightest on their undersides.

An effectively camouflaged prey could appear flat and insubstantial.

Thayer's thesis evolved on the battlefield.

In World War I and World War II, snipers started wearing countershaded
camouflage.

Graduations of dark and light that would help them blend into the background.

Sniper tactics evolve around being hidden.

And there were various ways to do it.

British officers looked to their Scottish gamekeepers

and they came up with an idea called the ghillie suit,

which was a suit that had streams of burlap hanging all over it.

And this would break up the outline of the sniper.

Camouflage is the sniper's primary defensive mechanism.

But it's not foolproof.

Get spotted and you're dead.

A much safer strategy for the sniper is to put a lot of distance between himself
and the enemy.

For this to happen, you need a really big gun that can fire a high velocity
round.

Something like the.50 cal.

If you've got one shot, because you're a sniper,

and that one shot has got to kill whatever it is you're shooting at.

And it might be wearing body armor, it might be in a vehicle, whatever.

You want to use a very big efficient round.

And the.50 cal rifle round is big enough and heavy enough and pointy enough

to go through most things that might stand between a sniper and a target.

The origin of.50 cal sniping began in World War II

when the British came up with the Boys anti-tank rifle.

A.55 caliber beast, it could take out a Panzer.

It would not penetrate the armor so much as what they would do is they'd fire
against the track

and break the track and kill the tank with a mobility kill rather than killing
the crew.

You wouldn't want to fire one. The recoil was just awful.

All the same, snipers saw something in the.50 caliber bullet.

In the early 1980s, British and American companies built the first
specialized.50 cal sniper rifle.

It led to the development of extreme firearms like the Barrett AS50.

Firing a bullet five times heavier than a standard.308 at 2,800 feet per second,

it can take down men, vehicles, and helicopters.

.50 cal rifles also hold the world record for the longest sniper kill, 2,650
yards, over 1.5 miles.

It just heightens the level of terror that sniping does to begin with

by adding more velocity and horsepower to the equation.

This weapon keeps the sniper safe by putting him a long way from the enemy

and increases his combat lethality with its massive velocity.

The.50 cal really is the mother of all firearms.

If it hits any part of a human being, if it hits someone in the arm, it'll tear
your arm off.

Today, snipers carry a rifle that truly is the sum of its parts.

Drawn together, the branches on its family tree reflect its unique genesis.

Hunting rifles led to hunting men, powerful men.

Mechanisms gave birth to reliable weapons.

The marriage of bullets and scopes spawned accuracy.

Snipers and their camouflage created a silent, invisible killer.

And a new generation of heavy caliber guns has emerged.

A new generation of heavy caliber guns has evolved into the world's deadliest
firearm,

the AS-50 sniper rifle.

Weaponologically, it's the top of the tree.