“Kill brass”: That’s the term for the spent cartridge of a sniper’s bullet. Russ Crane, seen here at a hotel in Egypt, where his unit was training, is a military sniper who has served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Photograph by Shawn Baldwin.
I
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.
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