[rifle shot]
[woman squeals] [man screams]
[man screams]
Nicholas Irving: Not happening.
To the left?
Good to go?
My name's Nicholas Irving.
I'm a former 3rd Ranger Battalion
special operations sniper
and currently a New York Times best-selling author.
I spent six years in special operations,
and I'm known as The Reaper for 33 kills
in about a three-month time span
in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
Today we're gonna be looking at
a few sniper scenes in movies.
No one ever really does that.
[rifle shot]
[window shatters]
Ah. No.
His use of the equipment was really, really good.
He has his, you know, his pad to lay on,
he has his range finder,
he can measure the wind,
barometric pressure,
the altitude, density altitude,
his DOPE book.
The word DOPE is an acronym for snipers,
and it actually stands for data on previous engagements.
So he can go back and refer to all these things
that he's engaged before that
and have, like, some good reference point.
He applied all of his DOPE in his data to the scope itself.
I rarely see that in movies, where, you know,
he applies the elevation and the windage.
The impossible portion about this whole thing
was the actual shot itself.
The train is moving way too fast.
You have to, you know, defeat gravity in some ways.
So you're aiming up, and the bullet's dropping
almost down at that distance.
And shooting through glass,
panes of glass,
angled glass and different types of glass
may deflect and alter the bullet's flight.
You'd have to be
one really, really, really, really lucky guy,
or, after that, get up and go walk on water.
But now that I see it,
I almost wanna simulate it,
but it's kind of, you know,
it'd be almost impossible to simulate.
I can't find a target moving at a bullet-train speed.
Yeah, so this is a very basic
bolt-action rifle. Remington.
It shoots a 6.5 [millimeter] Creedmoor round.
Very, very fast rounds.
Small caliber, but I use it
essentially because of the speed of it.
I use it to defeat the wind.
If there's a lot of wind or
shifty winds or anything like that,
it's a good bullet because of the velocity of it,
how fast it's moving.
He had a suppressant on his.
I don't have one.
But for, you know, overseas work and stuff like that,
if I had to make a one shot, one kill,
I would probably take something
along the lines of a bolt-action rifle.
Then you have your bipod legs,
and that's just for, you know, stabilization.
Have a scope,
and of course you have your trigger and buttstock.
There's not much to a sniper rifle.
His eye position,
his cheek weld, where you put your cheek
on the rifle itself, where it rests,
his was pretty much perfect on his.
You'll see in movies sometimes
the guy will have his eye pressed
all the way up on the scope,
and, you know, unless you want a huge black eye
and a nice, you know, bloody eyebrow,
you wouldn't do that.
I keep both eyes open.
That way, I can use my peripheral vision
to, you know, keep my situational awareness.
Good body position behind the gun.
You want your body to be, you know,
almost perfectly aligned with the gun.
That way when the recoil comes back,
you know, you're not bouncing off target,
you can get a good follow-up shot.
Your skeletal structure
is gonna support all that recoil.
If you cant it off to the side,
that gun is gonna hop.
So being perfectly behind the gun
as much as you possibly can be.
That was a solid eight.
Maybe even a nine.
It was the shot itself that was a one.
[crickets chirping]
Sgt. Maj.: Stop. Touch that light-colored grass.
Sniper at your feet.
Nicholas: It's exactly like sniper school.
For one, that sniper scope is not,
that reticle inside the scope
is nothing like what you would use in real life.
Yeah, you usually have these little mil dots on there.
They're like little circles, and you have four of them
on each the horizontal plane and the vertical plane
inside the scope, and they're used for measurements.
So, let's say, for example,
if I had a target that was 40 inches tall,
and I wanted to find out how far away something is,
but what I would do is take the 40 inches
and multiply it by a constant,
which is 25.4,
and that comes out to 1,016.
And I would take the mil dots,
and, let's say, if the target measures 2 mils high,
I would divide 1,016 by 2,
and that comes out to 508.
So I add 508 yards on the target, on my distance,
and I would apply that to the scope of my gun.
[crickets chirping]
[rifle shot] [bullet ricochets]
Sgt. Maj.: Damn.
Nicholas: Going to that trigger squeeze,
that was not really good.
You wanna use the pad of your finger.
He kind of curled the entire trigger finger.
It's a precision weapon.
You're looking at harmonics and stuff like that,
so imagine, like, a tuning fork,
you want everything to be as smooth
and less friction on the sides
of that railing inside the gun as possible.
So having the trigger come straight back
is what you really wanna look for,
not so much of that curled trigger finger.
And it's exactly how they used it in sniper school,
where the, you know, the instructor,
he's telling the guys on the outside,
"Hey, come in, sniper at your feet, X, Y, and Z."
It's pretty much exactly how it works.
Sgt. Maj.: All right, you won this one.
Come on out.
[grass rustling]
Soldier, how did you get that close to me?
Nicholas: Sneaking up on someone is extremely tough
because of the stalking portion.
It's not really an easy tactic,
and not too many guys are good at being that sneaky.
For the training portion,
I would give this one
James: He's moving, he's moving, he's moving,
to the building.
Follow him. You got him?
Sanborn: Got him.
Nicholas: Really nice.
[rifle shot]
James: He's down.
Nicholas: That was really good.
I think, well,
there's a few things that I saw wrong with it.
Going to, well, the sniper dialogue, it was OK.
It wasn't the best sniper dialogue that I've ever heard.
It was the second shot,
where he moved 20 meters to the left of the building.
Really good sniper dialogue,
the spotter talking on the sniper to where the target's at.
After that first shot with that .50 cal went,
as a spotter,
he should have called out immediately,
"Hey, you're, like, 2 mils low."
Inside that reticle there's, like, mil dots,
mil radian circles in there,
and they're used for measurements.
At that time when he missed that shot,
the spotter, the guy on the scope,
should have told the sniper,
"Hey, aim up 2 mils and, you know, send it again."
He should have never let that guy get up to run.
James: Window, at the window, at the window.
[shot]
Nicholas: This shot, where he's
engaging the targets in the building,
the two guys in the building,
little fly on the eye,
that was pretty neat to add in there.
It shows that dedication to the,
you know, to the spotter and to the sniper team.
You're in this little bubble.
Only you exist,
nothing else does.
And the single shot with the .50 cal is,
I've never seen it,
never heard of it,
but I guess it makes for a good movie.
Not too, too bad.
On the scale from one to 10, I'd give it,
as a sniper team, a four.
[rifle shot]
[people shouting] [gunshots]
That was really, really good.
"Lone Survivor" is one of the most realistic movies
I've seen when it comes to combat.
I've used that same rifle overseas in Afghanistan.
My deployed rifle was an SR-25,
but I used that one when I was a designated marksman.
That shot right here, it's,
I mean, it's real. It's real.
It shoots at a 5.56,
so it's not a very powerful round or anything like that.
And being in this environment,
I was just getting into special operations,
first day in the barracks when
the guys were coming back in
stateside after rescuing Marcus Luttrell.
You deploy every six months overseas,
and we were averaging about 120 missions per 90 days.
Your average troop won't even touch that in a year.
The unit I was with holds the record
for killing and capturing
the most high-value enemy targets
in the global war on terrorism
in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Whether you're a Navy SEAL with special operations,
you're a green beret, special forces,
Marine Force Reconnaissance,
you know, Delta Force, whatever you wanna,
you know, all special operations,
then very small group of guys,
they go through a very, very grueling experience
and they get the best of the best of the best training.
They could be sleeping in your attic,
and you wouldn't even know it.
That's what special operations is like.
That's what I think about.
You know, being a ninja. It's like being a ninja.
This should be, like, the modern-day
standard for wartime movies.
[gunshots]
[rifle shot]
[gunshots]
That was epic.
That was a really...
I was almost playing along in my head with them
as, you know, who would I take out first?
And it was in that order.
I would take out the guy in the shower first.
Well, going back, that was a,
I think that's a Mosin-Nagant rifle, maybe?
It's pretty accurate for open sites.
That position,
shooting through something like that,
is, one, it's extremely scary.
You have to understand, you know, how your rifle works,
how much you have to aim up so your rifle,
so what you're looking at,
you're not actually hitting the bottom portion
of that brick wall.
And in the beginning,
he even sets his range,
where he licks his finger.
He's taking off the mud on that slide.
So, there's, like, a little slide.
If you ever have a chance to look
at the top of an AK-47,
he slides that little lever up,
and that raises the rear sight,
and it adjusts the elevation.
It's essentially like a scope,
just without the scope.
[rifle shots]
Dude, the most I've taken out in a row is five.
A good sniper, a good sniper, not even a great one,
a good sniper could pull that off.
And how he wraps his hand around the sling
to make it nice and tight,
that is perfect.
You never really see that in movies.
They teach you that in sniper school.
Yeah, that was really fast and really good.
Look at that. Wrap, over the top.
Nice and tight.
Boom. That's perfect.
I would say 70% of my shots overseas were from the knee.
And at that distance, with that rifle,
that's not a hard shot,
that's definitely not a hard shot.
He's gotta be less than 100 yards away.
That's a 10. That's a 10.
I cannot argue with this whatsoever.
[bullet whooshes] [man grunts]
Before I was a sniper,
I was a machine gunner with a .50 cal.
That round is devastating.
Where she uses that little laser finder,
probably not gonna happen, ever.
That's a very, you know, fine object to point.
The sniper in the window should have known
where the elevator was at
or where she was gonna be shooting at anyways,
but....
[bullet whooshing]
[man grunts]
People don't look like that
when they get hit with a .50 cal.
It's usually just a puff
of moisture and mist.
The guys returning fire from the inside
essentially just killed
or injured a bunch of civilians on the street.
I do like the use of the sniper,
how she's using the bed frame and not, like, out the window,
like you see in most movies.
And, yeah, she's backed away.
So, yeah, I would have used that same tactic.
As long as that rifle is not hanging out the window,
she should be fine.
And she's not shooting through glass.
I'd give it...
ah.
A three.
[rifle shot]
[woman squeals] [man screams]
[man screams]
Not happening.
There was a shot like that back in the '90s.
It was a police SWAT sniper.
It was 98 yards away,
where he shot the pistol out of the guy's hand,
but at this distance?
That wind?
You gotta think, you're on top of mountains.
Well, a true sniper would never take that,
no matter how good you are.
If you look at her hair,
her hair is not moving that much,
so there's obviously not a lot of wind on target.
I'd give that a good 3, 4, or 5 mile an hour wind.
You wouldn't dare take that shot.
I would debate even taking a headshot at that distance.
At that distance, through a real scope,
you wouldn't be able to see.
You'd be able to see maybe a black toothpick.
By the time you put your crosshairs on
whatever you think was the shotgun,
the crosshair itself would probably cover up the shotgun.
If you go back and you can see where his scope is,
not covered in the front portion.
You see that black hole there.
Any good counter-sniper
would have picked out, all this white terrain,
and then boom, there's this black circle there.
Marky Mark would've been hit a long time ago
if I were on that other end.
Prior to this going off,
him shooting the gun out the guy's hand,
I'd give it a five, 5.5.
With that, I give it a two.
Sarah: Wait, what is it?
What? What?
Nicholas: The sniper who's on that team,
mercenary team, has a large .50 cal.
That gun weighs about 38 pounds,
and the guy soaking wet was maybe 150 pounds,
and he's moving miles and miles and miles
at a high rate of speed with this rifle.
I wouldn't do it.
What they would do is separate it into two pieces.
So one guy would have the upper portion,
the other guy would have the lower portion of the rifle.
It kind of distributes the weight.
It's about as tall as I am.
You know, I've had to jump out of a plane with it one time,
portion of it,
and it's an extremely uncomfortable gun to carry.
I would give that a two.
I'd give that a two.
They could be sleeping in your attic
and you wouldn't even know it.
That's what's special operations is like.
That's what I think about.
You know, being a ninja.
It's like being a ninja.