Stuff You Should Know - How Military Snipers Work

Episode Date: June 14, 2011

Military snipers always work in pairs, and they're called force multipliers because of the profound effect a two-man team can have on a rival military. But how do they work? Join Josh and Chuck to learn more about snipers. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You could call us something of a podcast sniping team, taking out all NPR suckers ahead of us. That would make me the spotter, which I like. Do you think so? You're the spotter?

Yeah. I think I'd be a good sniper, actually. I think we could reasonably trade off with that. You know, I mean, wouldn't you eventually become envious? Like, you know, I'm tired of spotting. I want to pull a trigger. What's it like? Like, Michael Douglas' teenage daughter in traffic, thinking about shooting heroin, you know, starts out snorting it, ends up shooting it, just because she's around it so much. I imagine the same thing happens to spotters. They eventually want to kill. I would just be good on the team, you know. I could lay somewhere for hours at a time, without moving. I'm sneaking quiet around animals. You're not allowed to be asleep, though. Okay, that's a problem then. Yeah, it would be a problem. So,

Chuck, we're talking about military snipers. I have a slight intro for this one. All right, let's hear it. It's not really an intro. It's just an interesting fact. Okay. And I don't even know if it's true. So, fact's probably the wrong word. But have you ever heard the old adage, the old superstition that you're not supposed to light three cigarettes off of one match? I've never heard that, actually. Well, it's a superstition. Okay. And it is established, the real thing. And apparently it has fairly recent origins. World War I, actually, is that recent, 20th century. And it was based on the idea that if you're in a trench and you lit a match, you caught the attention of a sniper. You lit your first cigarette,

the sniper takes aim with the second cigarette, and then when you're lighting the third cigarette, sniper fires, and that guy's dead. I like that. Yeah, I buy that. So, it's bad luck to light three smokes off of one match. You know, a lot of those phrase origins are military in nature when you go back and look at them. And I buy that 100%. Like a wall? Yeah. Yeah, that's military. It sure is. Army. Yeah. Silent scope. You ever play that game? No, is it a sniper game? Yeah. Is it good? It's great. I mean, it's a standup arcade game. I prefer the sniper rifle on GoldenEye. Yep. And I play the Call of Duty game. And it's they have a sniper level where you have to take out this one guy and account for the wind and all that. And it's thrilling to me as a

gun-hating, peace-loving, liberal hippie, aging hippie. Yeah. I still love it, man. There's something about it. That's why little boys like playing with guns. Well, that's why you picked this article. How military snipers work this week. Yeah, it's interesting. This is a Chuck Bryant special, meaning that you picked it, not that you wrote it. Right. And this was a Robert Valdez special, huh? Oh, yeah. This guy got to the bottom of it, interviewed an actual former Army Ranger sniper. Yeah, that really, that enhanced it a lot, I think. Definitely. The guy was anonymous and everything, which is pretty awesome. Yeah. So let's talk about snipers, Chuckers. All right. There's a, I guess we can, we can reveal at the end the button of the article, right? That where

the sniper wants everyone to know, we're not just like these assassins that happens once in a while. Right. But very rarely. And we have many, many other jobs. And probably the biggest job that a sniper has is just reconnaissance. Yeah. Like going and gathering information by being behind enemy lines and spying on the enemy for days on end and then reporting back what they see. Yep. And they're highly, highly trained for that. They're not just highly trained for shooting. They're highly trained observers too. Yeah, big time. And but if duty calls, they can, if they don't have a specific assignment like to take out whatever this general is, because they can have what they call targets of opportunity. Is that what you call them? Yeah.

And that's when they can really take the wind out of the sails of a battalion if all of a sudden the officer is standing there, then he's not standing there. Or like the communications guy goes down or later on. Just even some dude doing like, you know, guard duty. Yeah. Or equipment. We found out later in this article, actually, and we might as well spoil that. Yeah. That's not even human. That's a material target. Yeah, like blow up their generator or their ammunition bay or just anything that would wreak havoc. Agreed. And make their job harder. And then I guess also, because of this effect, the effect that a sniper has is it not just physical, e.g., you know, blowing someone away. Yeah, sure. But it's also mental.

And it has a real dampening effect on morale. I imagine the psychological effect is probably pretty huge. Yeah, because, you know, one of the things about snipers is that you don't know they're coming and you don't see, just all of a sudden the guy next to you is dead. Yeah. And that's going to shake you. Especially, like you said, when there's targets of opportunity, it happens randomly. Or when it's like a very well-chosen person, like you said, like an officer. Right. Somebody who's like, you know, kind of the moral, spiritual leader of the team is suddenly dead. Yeah. That has a big effect, which makes snipers what are called force multipliers, meaning just a one or two people can have the effect of, you know, a big platoon. Yeah. You

know, charging in and shooting people. Yeah. And I know we say band name a lot, but if you're in a heavy metal band and your name isn't force multiplier, you might want to think about changing it. Yeah. Unless it's mastodon. Yeah, they have a good name, don't they? That's a great name. Yeah. So yes, they're actually trained to spy on the enemy and learn who the officers are, which is, you know, you've always heard you're not supposed to salute in the field of battle because it's pretty much a dead giveaway. Right. But these guys are trained to look and stare and just, you can tell, they can tell at least who the higher ranks are by the way they carry themselves, by what they're doing, by the way they're acting. And they're trained to pick these people out

and then pick these people off. Chuck, there's a couple of other assignments, I guess a sniper can land or positions that they play roles. That's the word I'm looking for. There's the famous Overwatch position where they're like up in a bell tower, clock tower, something like that. Yeah. With just a 360 degree view of the battlefield. That's just picking people off like Pride of the Nation. Yeah. In Glorious Basterds. Or Save and Private Ryan. Yeah. Because remember, he took them out through the scope. Yeah, I remember. Only in the movies, but that was pretty cool. Yeah. Only in the movies or World War II. Yeah, I guess so. And then that's called the Overwatch position. I don't remember if I said they're not. Then there's a blocking action,

which is basically you are again up on a roof, but instead you're helping to defend a position rather than maybe take it. Right. Yeah. You're helping out your buddies that are hiding in the farmhouse below. Right. Because this is World War II, right? That's exactly right. Do you want to go ahead and reveal the big secret about snipers? The supposed lone gunman? It's not true. It isn't true. If you've seen the movie Shooter, did you see that with Marky Mark? No. I hate him. I don't hate him. No, I don't. I don't. I liked him in Three Kings. Yeah. I haven't seen the boxer yet, but I'm sure I'll like it. The fighter. Yeah. The same thing. And I have, well, yeah. Well, Shooter is actually, I had very low expectations and it ended up being a pretty

decent movie. And it is buoyed by the great Levon Helm of the band, my favorite group ever. He's an actor in that. I thought Tom Bairinger was it? No. No, no, no. Different movie. Oh, I think that might have been called Sniper. Tom Bairinger wasn't in that movie. No. So Levon Helm was the... He was the old timer who apparently had something to do with the Kennedy assassination, too. Huh. Yeah. That's a slide joke. He could act. Oh, yeah, man. He's been in lots of movies. Boogie Nights. Loved him in Boogie Nights. He was awesome in that movie. Levon Helm? No. Okay. Okay. All right. Where are we? Yes, snipers work in teams always. Yes. They never, ever, ever go alone. That's not the way that military sniper units act. Yeah. They are

so much so that their sniper rifles are considered crew-served weapons. Yeah. Like a, you know, one of those heavy machine guns that's like belt-fed bullets. Yeah. And it takes a guy to feed it bullets and one guy to shoot it. That's a crew-served weapon, obviously. So as a sniper rifle, not because it takes two people to shoot it, but because it takes two people to shoot it accurately. Yeah. Which is the whole point. It is. And a spotter is, from what we gather, sort of a sniper in training. You will act as a spotter in the hopes that one day you will actually be the sniper and lead your own team. And the sniper, I mean, we're calling it a team. It's two dudes. The sniper team, or I'm sorry, the sniper on the team is really the one in charge.

They're the one that. He's the leave on helms of the band. Helm. They get the orders from the higher-ups. They determine like the best route to get there, the drop-off points, all that stuff. Right. And I guess we should go ahead and walk through the process because those are the first two steps. Okay. Let's do it. You determine your drop-off point for your objective, which isn't going to be, you know, 50 yards away from your objective. It's going to be miles and miles away. Probably like a day's walk is a good bet. Yeah. You're going to spend a day walk in there. You want to get a good setup position and verify that you can camouflage that spot. Like yet, you're always thinking ahead when you're on your belly and you want to move to

your second position. You don't just say, all right, that looks decent over there. You've got to look at everything around it. What's in your way to get there because you're going to be belly crawling. And then when you get there, what you can use to camouflage yourself. They're going to establish an escape route. Very important. Yeah. And a fallback position in case you get separated from your buddy. And then you got to locate your target, grab the gun and get in position. Right. And getting in position after you locate the target is probably not what snipers do. They probably get in position and then locate the target. Yeah, I would say so. You know, if they're shooting somebody specific, like maybe they arrive at the location of where they're,

you know, going to be shooting the person or whatever, but you're going to sit there possibly for days on end. And by sit, I mean lay flat on your stomach. What is that, prone or supine? I think prone. I think curses. So the spotter is going to be on the ground right next to and slightly behind you, basically trying to line up their spotter scope, which is way more powerful even than the rifle scope as close to the barrel of the gun as possible. Yeah, in the same line as it. Yeah. And basically say, okay, I've got this guy and he is a thousand meters away. Clicks. Yeah. The wind is blowing at like six knots from the northeast. It's 65 degrees. It's got a barometric pressure and a temperature of this humidity level as this. You'd make a

great spotter. See all that? Yeah. So all that comes into consideration when you're trying to, you know, you're shooting oftentimes from a thousand yards away. Yeah. A thousand yards. Well, remember, I think to become a sniper for Delta Force, remember, like it was 1500 yards minimum, you had to, you had to have like eight or 90 or 90% accuracy. Really? From 1500 yards. We talked about it. That was a while ago, though. The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table.

Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss y'all. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Marcel Swiley, that dude and host of more to it, a new I heart original podcast that takes a deep dive into the biggest topics in sports, entertainment

and culture. The journey begins with headline news, which leads to deeper discussions about life lessons that are presented in every story. Each week, we tackle subjects and issues beyond the public's perception and narrative to learn more about the stories and about ourselves, hosted by someone who defied the odds to go from Compton to the Ivy League and then played 10 years as an all pro defense event. This is not your typical sports show with topics ranging from the social ills that surround us all to the character growth that occurs from overcoming adversity. You'll get inspired hearing stories that highlight the growing pains that fuels anyone on a successful journey. You'll leave every episode with a greater understanding that no

matter the story, the person or outcome, there is always more to it found on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. So the sniper, how do they that this is a cool thing because I saw it on YouTube. This thing creates a vapor trail. The bullet does. Yeah, the spotter is not just, you know, watching. And also we should we should say that if you're there for days on end, the spotter and the sniper will probably trade off spotter duty, just so one can get rest or something like that. Exactly. But yes, when the time finally comes and the shot is to be taken, the spotter watches to make sure that the sniper hit the target. And like you're saying, a bullet, the bullets that they're firing out of these 50 caliber guns

are 7.62 millimeters. Yeah, that's a big bullet. Those are the ones that look like missiles. Yeah. They move through the air in such a way that they create a vapor trail. And the army ranger who was interviewed for this article says like it it look you can see through it, but it's distorted air. Yeah, which I take to mean like the matrix. That's exactly what it looks like. Oh, you've seen it? Well, it's on YouTube. Yeah, sweet. You can see, I mean, you got to look, but you can see it and it looks like the matrix thing and all the other movies that copied it is like hugely exaggerated, right? Obviously, but it sort of looks like that. It looks like the abyss, the little blob from the abyss, traveling through the air, cavitating the air. Is that the word?

I think so. All right. So yeah, then the spotter says you missed. That doesn't happen very often. No, it doesn't. But if it does happen, the spotter says, okay, we need to move it this way a little bit. Yeah, maybe down a little. Sure. Probably uses more specific jargon than that. Maybe down a little. Right. And then another shot's taken and then another shot. And the spotter is also going to be the one who's carrying like something like an M16 or an M4, some other assault rifle, because if somebody comes up on you, as anyone who has ever played any video game, when you're in hand to hand combat or close combat, the sniper rifle is the worst weapon to have of all. Yeah. You want the automatic assault rifle. That's what you want.

And that's me in those games. I'm the one turning around, fumbling, trying to reload while the guy's just bashing the face and or shooting me. Exactly. And the relationship between these two guys is obviously very key because they're spending hours and days and days at a time with each other in very close, quiet quarters. Trust is huge, obviously, because they're live-dependent on each other. And they usually don't have a lot of support from their unit. They're out there alone protecting their unit and their unit and platoon is depending on them. If you screw up a lot of times, your platoon is not in good shape afterwards. So very high pressure job. Right. They're doing recon or they're doing spearhead demoralization through

selective assassination, something like that. Right. So yeah, they're like if the sniper's out there probably shortly after a platoon is going to be on their heels and the sniper has to relay whatever information he's taking in. Yeah. So yeah, if he screws up, it can be problematic. Sure. You want to talk about the rifles? Yeah, they don't just pull a rifle off the shelf at Wal-Mart and go hide in the woods. Although some guys have. Remember C-Mohiah? Who? C-Mohiah, the white death. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, sure. He had his plain old bolt action hunting rifle and he killed 505 people with it. It's true. These days, Josh, it's a little more specialized than that. A lot of times it's called an M-14 with match grade

upgrades and match grade means that some professional gunsmith has honed this thing to within a good centimeter. You like that? Of accuracy. You were waiting for a better reaction than that, weren't you? I didn't know if you thought that was a real word. So I think match grade means like a shooting match, like competition grade. Yeah, probably so. Because they use very similar rifles for competition shooting. Yeah. Were they hollowed out? Yeah, that's one thing. I never understood that. I love it though, the guys who ski and shoot. Yeah. What's the point of that? I don't know. I like it. They should add, like they should snowboard and shoot and just do all sorts of things. You go up the half pipe

and you stop and you take a couple of shots. Yeah, kite sailing and shooting. Yeah. I'm sure there's some great history to that, but I don't know. So match grade guns and also match grade handmade ammunition. So I mean, it's all just like very detailed that's hollowed out. It's light. It's usually fiberglass because you don't want the wood to warp and ends up being extremely accurate. The barrel doesn't touch the rest of the gun. I think this is called a free floating barrel. Yeah. It touches it as little as possible so that the initial explosion from the bullet being fired causing the recoil in the barrel that it doesn't kick as much and adjust the rifle's accuracy. Yeah. Disadjust it. Plus movement. Maladjust it. Any kind of movement span.

Yeah. Which is why they use more often than not bolt action rifles, which have disadvantages in that you have to load a single round, shoot it, and then unload that shell, reload another round. But their motto is one shot, one kill. So one shot is usually all you need. But they do sometimes use the semi-automatic rifles, but what you have there are shells flying out of the gun, which is not very smart. Right. Either way, you're going to be detected with movement possibly. Like when you do the bolt action that's moving, that flying shell, that's moving. But the automatic or semi-automatic rifles have more moving parts than a bolt action. Which means the snipers tend to prefer bolt action. Yeah. Although they said they can shoot, it's their choice. Shooters preference.

Yeah. Sniper's choice. Between 8 and 15 grand, these things cost. Yeah. It's kind of pricey. Yeah. But they look really cool. Yeah, they do. Do we talk about the scope? No, we haven't yet. I mean, we talked about how the spotter has a superior scope. Right. But yeah, the scope on a sniper rifle usually has about a 10-time magnification power. It's just, you know, a telescope, a high-powered telescope, mini-telescope, sorry, with crosshairs on it. Yeah. Called the reticules, right? Is that what it was pronounced? A targeting reticule, reticulation, reticule. Okay. I didn't know how it was pronounced. I kept saying reticula. And then I thought it was reticule. No reticule. What you're looking at when you're aiming though,

like we said, there's all sorts of variances in the wind and everything will change the path of your bullet. But you're looking at the point of aim and the point of impact. And if you're firing from 600 yards away, it's not going to be what you're aiming at. And this is accurate even in that Call of Duty game. Like you aim at the dude's head and then you end up shooting like three feet to the right of him and everyone goes, what was that? Right. And then it's over. What's over? Well, that little round is over. If you don't get the guy, you're done. You can't get off at a second shot. What happens? I think you got to start over. Oh, so they don't come at you or anything like that? No, they come at you. Then you start over eventually. But so you have to aim

over aim a lot of times because of things like gravity. And that was the fact of this show to me. The gravity one, if you drop a bullet, if you aim a gun, a sniper rifle, and then shoot it level to the ground and you drop a bullet at the same height as the barrel, they're both going to hit the ground at the same time. Because of gravity. That's crazy. That's the fact of the show for sure. Check what you're talking about can be adjusted for in the scope through the ballistic drop compensator, which is a little dial. So you don't have to go redo your whole scope settings and all that. You can just adjust it up or down or left or right just a little bit to compensate for gravity and the other wind. Yeah. And that's what you see them doing. They're like,

you know, wind at two knots, you see Marky Mark go click. That's all you need to do. That's it. One little click. Gun shoots itself. Not true. And then there's also these things called ghillie suits, which anytime you see a sniper or you don't see a sniper and then all of a sudden he stands up from the leaves and brush and all that. Right in front of you. And he's wearing what looks like leaves and brush. That's called the ghillie suit, which has a pretty cool little history to it. I like it. Go ahead. So ghillies were the Irish game wardens, Scottish game wardens from days of yore. And basically their job was to keep an eye on the landowners game, right? Wild game that he liked to hunt. And the ghillie once in a while would have to basically catch a deer or something

like that. Say, bring it back to the castle for the landowner to hunt in a mock hunt and kill the deer. Yeah, but he couldn't just kill the deer and bring it. He had to bring it alive. So this meant days of stalking a deer, staying completely silent, camouflaging himself with stuff found in the local environment. Right. And then waiting for a deer to walk by and jumping on it, grabbing it. Can you imagine these dudes? And then dragging it back to the castle for this mock hunt. So think about how despised the nobleman must have been for his little mock hunt in between glasses of sherry of a deer that the ghillie caught with his bare hands after waiting two days for it to walk past him. And then they just kill the deer when they bring it in because his gout and is

flaring up so he can't even get out of his chair. So yeah, that's like early internet hunting. Oh, yeah, they outlawed that pretty quickly. Thank goodness because it was awful. I almost had to write an article on that. Did you get out of it? Yeah, I refused. Really? I said, you know what, I'm not even going to put this out there as something that exists. And they went, you know what, you may be right on this one. And then like two weeks later, they outlawed it. Controlling the flow of information, huh? No, you know, nice. I didn't want, I didn't want it happening. Yes, I stopped internet hunting. So the ghillie suit is what they call what the sniper wears now because of that cool history. And it's usually like really reinforced on your torso because you're going to

be crawling a lot, probably padded to help you out with comfort. And even though it's not like you're really comfortable, it's padded for comfort, padded for comfort. And you got a netting all over you so you can work in twigs. Like what you don't want are straight lines like the antenna from your radio or the muzzle of your gun because nature doesn't have straight lines like that. Right. So they make ghillie suits for their guns? Yeah. Can't you see them having like the special ops barracks, like ghillie suit contests, like who's got the best one? Ooh, that's elaborate, you know? Yeah, yeah. I can't believe you worked that rock into it. Well, and when I envision that skit, they are putting the medal around the winner,

and then a guy just rises up behind him that they've never even saw. Oh, he comes off of the back of his ghillie suit. Steals his medal. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss y'all. The property is guilty, exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Marcel Swiley, that dude, and host of More To It, a new iHeart original podcast that takes a deep dive

into the biggest topics in sports, entertainment, and culture. The journey begins with headline news, which leads to deeper discussions about life lessons that are presented in every story. Each week, we tackle subjects and issues beyond the public's perception and narrative to learn more about the stories and about ourselves, hosted by someone who defied the odds to go from Compton to the Ivy League and then played 10 years as an all pro defense event. This is not your typical sports show, with topics ranging from the social ills that surround us all to the character growth that occurs from overcoming adversity. You'll get inspired hearing stories that highlight the growing pains that fuels anyone on a successful journey. You'll leave every episode with a greater understanding

that no matter the story, the person, or outcome, there is always more to it. Found on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. While speaking of Special Ops, these are Special Ops teams, and sniper teams are all a part of Special Operations. They train all the time. If they're not training specifically for a mission, they're studying the mission, and their goal is to know every single thing about everybody on that mission and memorize it, because if you're caught, you don't want to have paper saying, these are our signals, these are our call signs, or whatever. Because I could just think being caught with a paper like, this is Corporal Todd Thompson's call sign. Ace. And then the enemy's like, who's this Todd Thompson?

Why did he get Ace? That's the coolest one. That's because he's the best one. Yeah. The USMC is known even though all military branches have sniper teams in schools. The Marines are obviously, because they're the Marines, they have what's known as the best school, the USMC Scout Sniper School. And the Marines actually may have been the origin of the snipers in the US military. Oh yeah? Yeah, the Leathernecks, the original guys who used to ride around in the 18th century on ships were often tasked with basically sniping from crow's nests. Other people on other ships during battles. I don't think I knew what the Leathernecks were. Yeah, they're Marines. Well, I knew that, but I didn't know that it went back that far. Yeah. 18th century, 1700s.

Well, back then they actually had next made of leather. That's pretty cool. Human leather. It is the best school, like I said. And if you get in, even fewer graduate, because it's not just about being a good shooter, you have to have the right temperament. You have to be calm and not like some hothead. Yeah, you have to have confidence in your decisions. Confidence in your spotter. Yeah, as this sniper who was interviewed for the article said, he basically like, you can't just be calling back like, can I shoot this guy or you have to make the decision and make the right decision and have confidence in your decisions so that you can say, I am going to shoot this guy. Yeah, it works well alone and their little report card growing up was probably a key

for a future sniper. So it's a two month course, Josh, here at the Marine Corps. They train in three main disciplines, marksmanship obviously. Right. Observation and stalking. Yeah. And let's talk about, can we talk about the games? I think we should, like the Kim's game. Yeah, I didn't see what that stood for. I don't know why they made it all caps because it's named after a Rudyard Kipling book, Kim. So it's not a boy's name. And he was an Irish orphan who grew up in India was trained in intelligence. And in the book, they would give him trays of like stones and gems and give him a minute to look at it and then take it away and say, what did you just see? So that's what the Kim's

game is. It's very similar to that. It's based on that. We'll go ahead and explain it. Well, it teaches observational skills, right? Yeah. And basically, with this game, the guys in sniper school are presented a tray and it has, you know, 15, 20 things on it. Yeah. And they're told to look at it for, you know, 30 seconds or a minute or something. And then the trays removed and they say, what did you see? And say, there was a paper clip, right? You can't say, oh, well, there was a paper clip because they want to leave it to the guys who are analyzing the intelligence you're sending back to determine what it was you saw. So you say, well, I saw a piece of wire bent around into an oval three times or something like that.

Do you think they ever send back and say, that's a paper clip? You can just say paper. But then as school goes along, the training, this observational training through the Kim's game apparently gets more and more difficult where they show you something in the morning, then you go out and practice all day. And then at night, they say, write down what you saw this morning. Yeah. And they'll add more things and give you less time to look at it to begin with. Because when I first read it, I was like, that's not too hard. It's like a wine cork and a paper clip and a CB radio. Done. But then as it gets harder, I was like, oh, there's a method here. Right. And not being able to call something what you know it is.

Yeah, true. Like how would you describe a wine cork? I would say I have thousands of these around my home. No. Your lungs are coated with the dust of them. I could say it's a cork and a spherical cork with a red stain on one end. It would be tubular, wouldn't it? Tubular? Yeah, it wouldn't be spherical. It wouldn't be conical. And then right now there's someone standing behind the gun. We'd be the worst sniper team ever, actually. And then another good game, I guess you could call it, is how they train to stalk, right? Yeah, that is really cool.

So stalking is moving from, say, your drop zone or wherever to the place where you're going to set up without being identified, without being seen or noticed. But you have to make your way there and there may or may not be people watching you or able to see you, but you need to get to the point you need to get to. So you have to practice that. That's called stalking and they practice it by basically saying, okay, here's a nice grassy field. You guys stay here and we're going to put two people a thousand meters away and we're going to look for you and you need to make it within 150 meters of us without us seeing you. And they're looking for you. Not only that, they have two people out there in the field

looking for you walking around. So apparently that's real life on hyperdrive that never ever would happen. But I guess the idea is if you can pass that, then you'll be fine out in the field. Yeah, it's like we're in ankle weights. Which makes sense. And then they have to take a shot from the 150 meters with blanks, obviously. And then they have to move from that position. They have to take the shot without being detected and then move from that position to another position and take another shot without being detected. Yeah. Wow. Which apparently you very rarely, if ever moved to another position, take a second shot and you definitely are never within 150 meters of your target. Yeah. So they over train,

which is a good thing. Another little game they play is just strictly observational from a distance. They will hide things in a field, very small things like a ballpoint pen hanging from a little shrubbery brush. And you get out there with your spotter with your scope and binoculars, and you got to pick this stuff out. Yeah. And basically just canvas, you know, he said that the guy in here said you just block off one little small tiny block at a time, stare at it through your binoculars for five minutes, then move on to the next little block. Yeah. Until you find something. Yeah. And Chuck, you were talking about when they were with gravity is one of the biggest problems for accuracy, right? Yeah. Well, there's a unit of measurement that snipers use

to adjust for these variables. It's called minute of angle MOA. Yeah. And apparently 1.047 inches for every 100 yards is the inaccuracy that's going to develop as the bullet travels, right? Yeah. So if you're 1000 yards away, like they say you can be or more, you could potentially be off by 10 inches, which means you could potentially miss your target altogether. Yeah. Unless you account for wind and humidity and barometric pressure and temperature. Temperatures. I thought this was very interesting. Coal there is denser, which means it creates more drag, right? Yeah. Which is pretty cool. You have to account for that. Yeah. And then the other one, depending on your distance, someone may or may not hear you. That's pretty cool.

So if you're 600 yards away or more potentially, you are not going to even hear that little sonic boom crack because the bullet leaves the muzzle at the speed of sound. Yeah. You won't even hear that. So you could be 800 meters away and dudes could be standing there. And that's when you see in the movie that they see the little puff of dirt behind them. And it's like, what was that? Yeah. So 600 meters is where the 7.62 millimeter round is dragged into subsonic speed, meaning it travels less than the speed of sound. Right. Meaning it makes a sound where anything over that is, like you said, suddenly there's just bullets appearing. And the guy who was interviewed from this had a great quote. He said, you can basically just take shots at somebody. And the guy who

was interviewed for this article had this great quote. He said, if you're shooting at a target, 800 or 1000 meters out, you could be shooting at that person all day long and they don't even know they're being shot at. Why are these oil cans exploding? He hates these oil cans. He hates them. Yeah. That's pretty cool. And that's a very good place to end because the goal of the sniper is to not get caught. So they want to get as far away as they can from the target while still being within an accurate range. Yep. Done. Done. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Military snipers, if you were expecting like the DC sniper or Charles, what was his name, Whitman? Yes. They're not military snipers. Although Charles Whitman was in the military. He was in the

Marines. Remember in full metal jacket? Yeah. Wasn't Oswald too or no? Yeah. He was a Marine too. I think they were both sharpshooters too. They had it. Well, okay. Those are... Okay. Well, they made an appearance then. All right. Yeah. Okay. If you want to know more about snipers, you should type in snipers in the handysearchbarthousestuffworks.com. It has some cool flash games inside of it. Very cool links and cool pictures. And if you're into that kind of thing, you're going to love this article. That's snipers in the search bar at housestuffworks.com. Since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Josh, I'm going to call this from a fan with MS, multiple sclerosis. I have a very, very good friend of mine that has MS. Oh, yeah. And was afflicted with it later in

life in his late 20s, I believe. He's very sad. Okay. So she writes, Josh and Chuck, perhaps I could tell you about the fact that I've been living with MS for over 22 years. And I founded a nonprofit called SoftServe Matters that will empower people with chronic illnesses. But maybe I should leave with... I was listening to his bouton on to something with their gross national happiness. Because I feel the need to tell you, I believe that some people are just born with the happy gene. I am living proof of that, having started it in kindergarten. In spite of the fact that I have had decreasing abilities since my 20th birthday and a six-figured debt that my husband and I accrued while getting our advanced degrees, I am uber happy. Or maybe

it's just an denial. Through all of these challenges, my default is happy, happy, joy, joy. I made that reference just to amuse you. It may have something to do with the fact that I come from a family of armchair comedians and married a man based on his humor alone. Well, not really, but doesn't that sound good? We have a nine-year-old who is freaking hysterical, nature or nurture, I ask. I'll go with nature since it supports my theory, though clearly nurture is a major player. So while I figure out the approach to email you guys, let me just say I love your work. And for the administrative section of this email, I implore you to check out these links. And she has a blog that I would like to plug, and it is mslol.wordpress.com.

That's awesome. And that is Amy G. And Amy, like I said, my really good friend, Billy, has MS, so it's very dear to my heart cause. And anything we can do to help you spread the word, just email us back and we'll do so. Cool. That was a good one, Chuck. Thank you. Thank you, Amy. Thanks for being an armchair comedian yourself. Yeah? Yeah. Okay. And I guess thanks to your whole family for that, really. Husband? Yeah. If you find something funny that other people may not, we love that stuff and we want to hear about it. Send us an email with it to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join How Stuff Works staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities

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