In the high desert north of Phoenix, 17 men lie prone on a concrete platform behind sniper rifles. Their heavy rounds kick up dust and pockmark the steel targets on a hillside six football fields away. Into this storm of whizzing lead ambles a 10-point buck. Far from the noise of the rifles, he calmly chews on some mesquite leaves.
A shooter yells, “Deer!” An instructor jumps behind a spotting scope. “Shit, that’s the first one I’ve ever seen out here.” The shooter’s spotter slaps his partner on the back and studies the majestic stag through his scope. “What a beautiful animal,” he says. “Can we kill it?”
Day One Lock and Load
0900 hours: In the state of Arizona it is legal to carry a handgun into a bar. This is gun country. And in the heart of the Sonoran Desert, at the dead end of a state highway snaking through a parched rolling landscape of Bursage and Saguaro cacti, is GPS Sniper School.
Perched atop a dusty hill, GPS has the look of a makeshift military outpost airlifted in by Chinook helicopters. There’s a portable classroom, a steel storage container housing rental rifles, and a tented concrete platform with four picnic tables. The school overlooks a valley with a mock Iraqi village at one end and a shooting range at the other. Across the valley are steel targets staked into the hillside.
Unlike notorious sharpshooter Lee Harvey Oswald, the students of this school are not the fringe. They are not survivalists, ultranationalists or domestic terrorists. They are firemen, cops, soldiers, and mechanics ranging in age from mid-20s to early-50s. Bob is a soft-spoken policeman from Washington, DC. Kevin and Cesar are Army buddies back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paul, a 54-year-old from Denver, builds his own AK-47s. There’s even a dentist from the Pacific Northwest, here for a week of shits, giggles, and simulated violence.
At 9am on the first day of school, the gravel parking lot buzzes with activity. Open trunks and truck beds expose jugs of drinking water, boxes of high-end match grade ammo, gun cases, and all manner of camo and olive drab tactical gear. Nearby, under the white canvas tent, scoped rifles sit side by side on butts and bipods: Sako, Barrett, Savage, Remington, Accuracy International – tens of thousands of dollars in weapons systems. At $5 per round, the Barrett’s .338 will cost Brent, a Texas fire chief, $350 in bullets every day, on top of the $1,100 course tuition. Precision shooting isn’t cheap.
We’ve all come to shoot, but everyone has his own reasons: fun, the challenge of it or – for many – the opportunity to cash in as a certified sniper on a private security contract overseas. As one GPS student put it, “I’m tired of working for $31,000 a year. That’s the most you’re ever going to make in my job. But I can go overseas and more than triple that. Military and law enforcement you do for country first, money second. Contracting you do for money first, country second.”
I grew up shooting .22s in the piney woods of North Louisiana, and I always had a gun in the house as a kid. I’ve had my shoulder bruised by the kick of a 12-gauge shotgun and my eardrums nearly ruptured firing my uncle’s .38 Special. But I never shot a high-powered rifle 60 times a day for five days straight. It’s no vacation.
“You know what trunk f—king is?” school owner William Graves asks the men hovering in the lot. “It’s standing around the back of your car, getting ammo and food and wasting time.” The 42-year-old former Dallas police officer and lifelong competition shooter has been teaching pistol and rifle courses since his teens. Graves has framed letters of commendation from George W. Bush and Tony Blair in his office, and he’s somehow the caretaker of conservative US political icon Barry Goldwater’s gun collection. “You will carry three boxes of ammo at all times and carry food in your bag. You won’t have time to go back for more ammo, and we don’t break for lunch. That means no trunk f—king.” As if on cue, 10 trunks slam closed at once.
The classroom is a single-room prefab with an A/C unit at each end, exposed insulation poking through the ceiling, a plywood floor, and two double rows of white plastic lawn chairs. There are about a half-dozen tactical schools in the US that offer high-level sniper training, but Graves describes GPS – which he founded in 1998 – as “the only school in the country dedicated to sniper training”. Graves now trains about 350 students a year, with a per-day tuition fee of $220 for civilians and $190 for military. “This is not a handholding, ‘Here, honey’ class. This is a big-boy class,” says Graves. “I figured in a shooting course, we should spend more time shooting than listening to someone talk about it.” The instructors start hitting us with equations, cosine angles, theories on wind and gravity. Physics. I quickly come to know that there are no dumb snipers, though there are some wild ones.
An hour into class we get a latecomer, whom I’ll call Jim. He speaks with a thick South American accent and is the only one here wearing civvies – T-shirt, jeans, and Asics running shoes. His wife kicked him out of the house, he explains, so he doesn’t have any other clothes. He has to borrow a pen. He takes the open seat next to mine. “You want to be my partner, bro?”
Turns out Jim is former US military, and at a very boyish 30 years old he is a door gunner on a Little Bird (a fast, light helicopter) for a US-based security company in Baghdad. He pulls down $600 a day protecting the diplomats who buzz around the Green Zone, hanging outside the chopper door cradling an M4 assault rifle. He’s doing this course to be better at his job. “These days we can’t spray bullets,” he says. “If you have to take a shot, you take one shot.”
As anyone who’s seen Full Metal Jacket knows, the complex piece of machinery you fire is not your gun (your “gun” is between your legs); it’s your rifle or your weapons system. My weapons system is a Remington 700 chambered in .308 calibre, the standardised NATO round. It’s a single bolt action with a capacity of five rounds plus one in the chamber, a matte black barrel hacked down to 18 inches [46cm] for reduced weight and increased concealment, a black synthetic stock with bipod, and a Leupold adjustable 10-power scope.
We start off with dry firing drills, learning to call our shots, proper breathing, and trigger control – always shoot on empty lungs and keep a steady pull on the trigger, even after the round leaves the barrel. The bullet starts at a dead stop and leaves the muzzle at just under 800m per second, so you can’t just pull the trigger and then relax or you’ll throw off the shot. You have to remain almost perfectly still – eyes on target – as you re-chamber the next round.
Soon the range goes “hot” and we get our day’s first taste of live fire. Your body has a strong inclination to anticipate the shot, but running 60 rounds a day through your rifle eventually kills the urge to flinch. Like many guys my age, I’ve sniped a few thousand virtual enemies in Call of Duty and Battlefield. But first-person shooter video games have no relevance to the experience of firing an actual sniper rifle.
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