I was re-reading a section of a book called "Inside Delta Force", written by Eric Haney, one of their founding members.
He writes of a situation they helped solve in Beirut in the 1980's. The Marine's stationed at the Beirut airport were having problems with snipers shooting at them. This normally wouldn't be a problem as the Marine snipers could easily hit their targets and kill them...but the shooters were surrounding themselves with a crowd of children.
In todays world of the internet and information on demand this might seem like a trivial thing. But this is the early 1980's when snipers were still using trigonometry tables to do range finding. There was no internet, and the personal computer as we know it really hadn't been invented yet.
Below is a bit of the story:
"The shooters don't seem to have any seem to have any set schedule. Sometimes they appear several days in succession and then we won't see them again for a day or two. The only consistent facts are that they always show up in the afternoon in the same general area, and always in a crowd of kids and teenagers.
That fact is what has made it so difficult for us to deal with them. When it was just lone shooters, our own snipers could handle the problem. But these guys seem to have discovered the limiting factors of our ROE (rules of engagement) and the've been taking advantage of it. They know we can't afford to cause unnecessary civilian casualties. So by firing on us from the protection of a surrounding body of children they have us stymied.
We can't shoot back. Our snipers have told me that even though they can probably pick each shooter out of the crowd, it's almost a certainty that the round will go completely through him and hit at least one other person. That other person is going to be a child, and that's a price we're not willing to pay.
We were told you have an answer to this problem. If you do, we'd be much obliged for the assistance.
Andres (his sniper partner) and i had gotten the heads-up just a couple of days earlier about the problem facing the Marines in Beirut.
The Marine snipers couldn't shoot because the solid, hard-jacketed 173 grain military-issued round used by the Marine snipers was made for stability, accuracy - and penetration.
It was one of the first problems we had confronted when determining how to shoot into a crowded counterterrorist environment: How do you kill one person out of a group at long range without harming anyone else? It was the principal dilemma of the "open air assault", an attack conducted in the open when the terrorist is surrounded by, and shielding himself with, his hostages. It was a technique that had been successfully used on at least one occasion by Carlos the Jackal, the great terrorist mastermind, to transit from a building, to a bus, and then eventually to an airplane for his getaway. But we had cracked that code years ago.
The answer came in the form of a bullet that was accurate and powerful, but would stay in the human body upon impact. We had done some experimentation during our first year and had come up with rifle loads that solved that problem.
By hand loading a round with a lightweight, lightly constructed bullet driven at very high velocity, we got an accurate round that would dump it's energy on impact so rapidly and violently, the bullet would stay in the body of the victim without exiting the other side. The tradeoff with the round was that its range was somewhat limited.
It performed admirably on shots out to about 400 meters or so. How did we know? After making our calculations and some preliminary studies, we conducted empirical tests at various ranges on live goats. Nobody enjoyed shooting the animals, but since the testing was done to avoid killing innocent fellow human beings, it seemed to carry a lesser weight in the great balance of things.
When Andres and I were tapped for the mission, we first spent a few hours in the reloading room making our ammunition, then a couple of more hours on the range to reconfirm the sight settings for our rifle scopes using this ammo. Then we climbed aboard the Air Force transport for the long flight to Beirut."
Ultimately they spent three days alone in a snipers hide situated in a vast wasteland of garbage piles that sat between the airport base and the rest of the city. On day three the local shooters showed up with their crowd of kids for cover.
"My man was now facing in my direction. he started to lift his rifle. I knew Andres had his man in his sights as well when just a split second later he intoned 'snipers...ready...fire'.
THWOOMP!
The two rifles spat their venom at the same instant. I was holding my sights on the upper lip of the young man when my rifle coughed, and as I rocked back with the recoil, he disappeared. A killing shot drops a man so fast it seems like the earth just gulps him down. When I came back to rest again, the only hint that just an instant before a man had been standing there was a faint pink halo of atomized blood and tissue momentarily suspended in the air. The chimera dissolved almost as soon as I saw it, and faded into nothing in the hot afternoon sun.
'Dead' I said as I chambered a fresh round.
'Dead' Adres replied as he did the same."
End of story.
My thoughts:
I thought that was an interesting process of problem solving. The Marines had a problem, heard that Delta had the solution, and called them in to help. Delta did their own research and testing, then loaded their own custom ammo tailored to the circumstance, and erased the problem.
For those of you who were into shooting, hunting, and reloading back in the late 1970's...what are your thoughts on load development from that era? How difficult or easy was it to get the knowledge that we take for granted today?
Nowadays if I want to learn about a bullet that expands rapidly and violently as soon as it hits my target I can simply look at the manufacturers website, or hit a shooting forum where people have been hearing about the topic for 20 years on the internet. But at some point in history this knowledge was difficult to attain.
It occurs to me now that we might actually be in the golden age of shooting. Ammo is easy to attain, knowledge is mostly free and incredibly easy to attain, and there are few restrictions on recreational shooting in our country.
Heck...I'm going to the range tomorrow.
He writes of a situation they helped solve in Beirut in the 1980's. The Marine's stationed at the Beirut airport were having problems with snipers shooting at them. This normally wouldn't be a problem as the Marine snipers could easily hit their targets and kill them...but the shooters were surrounding themselves with a crowd of children.
In todays world of the internet and information on demand this might seem like a trivial thing. But this is the early 1980's when snipers were still using trigonometry tables to do range finding. There was no internet, and the personal computer as we know it really hadn't been invented yet.
Below is a bit of the story:
"The shooters don't seem to have any seem to have any set schedule. Sometimes they appear several days in succession and then we won't see them again for a day or two. The only consistent facts are that they always show up in the afternoon in the same general area, and always in a crowd of kids and teenagers.
That fact is what has made it so difficult for us to deal with them. When it was just lone shooters, our own snipers could handle the problem. But these guys seem to have discovered the limiting factors of our ROE (rules of engagement) and the've been taking advantage of it. They know we can't afford to cause unnecessary civilian casualties. So by firing on us from the protection of a surrounding body of children they have us stymied.
We can't shoot back. Our snipers have told me that even though they can probably pick each shooter out of the crowd, it's almost a certainty that the round will go completely through him and hit at least one other person. That other person is going to be a child, and that's a price we're not willing to pay.
We were told you have an answer to this problem. If you do, we'd be much obliged for the assistance.
Andres (his sniper partner) and i had gotten the heads-up just a couple of days earlier about the problem facing the Marines in Beirut.
The Marine snipers couldn't shoot because the solid, hard-jacketed 173 grain military-issued round used by the Marine snipers was made for stability, accuracy - and penetration.
It was one of the first problems we had confronted when determining how to shoot into a crowded counterterrorist environment: How do you kill one person out of a group at long range without harming anyone else? It was the principal dilemma of the "open air assault", an attack conducted in the open when the terrorist is surrounded by, and shielding himself with, his hostages. It was a technique that had been successfully used on at least one occasion by Carlos the Jackal, the great terrorist mastermind, to transit from a building, to a bus, and then eventually to an airplane for his getaway. But we had cracked that code years ago.
The answer came in the form of a bullet that was accurate and powerful, but would stay in the human body upon impact. We had done some experimentation during our first year and had come up with rifle loads that solved that problem.
By hand loading a round with a lightweight, lightly constructed bullet driven at very high velocity, we got an accurate round that would dump it's energy on impact so rapidly and violently, the bullet would stay in the body of the victim without exiting the other side. The tradeoff with the round was that its range was somewhat limited.
It performed admirably on shots out to about 400 meters or so. How did we know? After making our calculations and some preliminary studies, we conducted empirical tests at various ranges on live goats. Nobody enjoyed shooting the animals, but since the testing was done to avoid killing innocent fellow human beings, it seemed to carry a lesser weight in the great balance of things.
When Andres and I were tapped for the mission, we first spent a few hours in the reloading room making our ammunition, then a couple of more hours on the range to reconfirm the sight settings for our rifle scopes using this ammo. Then we climbed aboard the Air Force transport for the long flight to Beirut."
Ultimately they spent three days alone in a snipers hide situated in a vast wasteland of garbage piles that sat between the airport base and the rest of the city. On day three the local shooters showed up with their crowd of kids for cover.
"My man was now facing in my direction. he started to lift his rifle. I knew Andres had his man in his sights as well when just a split second later he intoned 'snipers...ready...fire'.
THWOOMP!
The two rifles spat their venom at the same instant. I was holding my sights on the upper lip of the young man when my rifle coughed, and as I rocked back with the recoil, he disappeared. A killing shot drops a man so fast it seems like the earth just gulps him down. When I came back to rest again, the only hint that just an instant before a man had been standing there was a faint pink halo of atomized blood and tissue momentarily suspended in the air. The chimera dissolved almost as soon as I saw it, and faded into nothing in the hot afternoon sun.
'Dead' I said as I chambered a fresh round.
'Dead' Adres replied as he did the same."
End of story.
My thoughts:
I thought that was an interesting process of problem solving. The Marines had a problem, heard that Delta had the solution, and called them in to help. Delta did their own research and testing, then loaded their own custom ammo tailored to the circumstance, and erased the problem.
For those of you who were into shooting, hunting, and reloading back in the late 1970's...what are your thoughts on load development from that era? How difficult or easy was it to get the knowledge that we take for granted today?
Nowadays if I want to learn about a bullet that expands rapidly and violently as soon as it hits my target I can simply look at the manufacturers website, or hit a shooting forum where people have been hearing about the topic for 20 years on the internet. But at some point in history this knowledge was difficult to attain.
It occurs to me now that we might actually be in the golden age of shooting. Ammo is easy to attain, knowledge is mostly free and incredibly easy to attain, and there are few restrictions on recreational shooting in our country.
Heck...I'm going to the range tomorrow.
