British Sniper Kills SIX Taliban Fighters With a SINGLE Bullet From Half a Mile Away

With a Taliban fighter looming in his sights half a mile away, the British sniper knew a clean shot would take down his enemy. What he could not have known was that the single bullet he fired would account for five more insurgents. But, incredibly, his rifle round triggered the explosive vest worn by his target, killing all those around him. The record-breaking shot was fired by a Coldstream Guards marksman on one of the last missions to be carried out by British troops in Afghanistan in December 2013. UK forces are preparing to leave their last frontline base in Helmand as part of their withdrawal from Afghanistan. The sniper, a lance corporal who cannot be named for security reasons, was on a mission to intercept a suspected suicide bomber.  Commanders feared the insurgent was planning to blow himself up at either a UK base, an Afghan security checkpoint or a civilian target such as a school or government building. The same sniper, with his first shot on the tour of duty, killed a Taliban machine-gunner from 1,465 yards (1,340m). Several hundred British and Afghan soldiers were carrying out an operation in December when they were engaged in a gun battle with 15 to 20 insurgents.“The guy was wearing a vest. He was identified by the sniper moving down a tree line and coming up over a ditch,” said Lt Col Slack. “He had a shawl on. It rose up and the sniper saw he had a machine gun.

“They were in contact and he was moving to a firing position. The sniper engaged him and the guy exploded. There was a pause on the radio and the sniper said, ‘I think I’ve just shot a suicide bomber’. The rest of them were killed in the blast.” It is understood the L/Cpl was using an L115A3 gun, the Army’s most powerful sniper weapon. Lt Col Slack said: ‘He has had a great tour of duty.’Surveillance for the operation was carried out by British troops based at Sterga 2, the observation post built on high ground overlooking the Helmand River. Located around 18miles from Camp Bastion, it allowed UK forces to watch over a huge swathe of central Helmand and two key roads, Highway One and Route 601. Fellow soldiers said the 20-year-old Lance Corporal prevented a major attack by the Taliban, as a second suicide vest was found near his target. The soldier hit the trigger from a distance of 850 metres, killing the suicide bomber and five others around him in the blast. Now a former marksman who has trained others to become snipers reveals what it takes to perform this select role in the armed forces. “You have to be mentally as well as physically robust,” says the 43-year-old, who asks not to be named. “I’ve trained a lot of guys, but there are some individuals who in the end can’t take a shot, and that’s not their fault. “They can practice as much as they like, but when they’re actually there and looking at a target – a fellow human being – and they know that simply by squeezing that trigger another person is going to cease to exist, they can’t do it.” The retired soldier himself, however, who qualified as a sniper in 1994 and served in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, says he never experienced such problems.

“Most of the time I’d think of it like a drill. I’d always be looking out for the [enemy] commanders and the ones further up the hierarchy – so what I saw was a threat, someone who was just about to endanger other people’s lives. I had to remember there was a reason they were a target.”  But the father of two, who has written a book about his experiences called A Sniper’s Conflict under the pseudonym “Monty B”, adds: “I can’t emphasise enough that sniping is not about shooting every day. It’s about hours and hours of observation.” The rigorous tests he had to take in order to qualify – and which he later trained others to pass – checked not only his marksmanship skills but also his observation, judgement of distance, stalking and concealment abilities.  A typical exercise for soldiers he was training would involve lying in a line and looking out for objects that he had hidden in foliage, then thinking about the reasons they might have spotted some and not others. He would train soldiers up to such a level that in exercises they could hit exactly the same target at exactly the same time from different points. His own career on the frontline came to an end after his first tour in Iraq, after an explosion near him damaged his hearing to such an extent that his seniors judged he might not be able to hear instructions over the radio. Since then he has worked with troops from across Europe, as well as British soldiers.

“One moment from my time as a sniper that particularly stands out is when I took out a Taliban observation point in Afghanistan,” he says. “There was a guy concealed watching our camp, directing the Taliban where to fire their mortars and rockets. We’d been getting a lot coming in. “I couldn’t tell where he could be, but after days of observation I realised he must have been hidden in a hay bale. Sometimes I’d look at the top of it and it would seem to have moved to the right or left, which isn’t natural. Then one day I was observing the area with the sun shining behind me. It must have just caught the lenses of his binoculars because I saw something shining in the bale, and I fired a round into it from about 700 metres away. “Within 24 hours the observation point had collapsed and disappeared. We weren’t bothered by mortars any more – at least not for a couple of weeks.”

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/british-sniper-kills-six-taliban-fighters-with-a-single-bullet-from-half-a-mile-away.html/2

now THAT is what I call economy