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From director Clint Eastwood comes 'American Sniper', starring Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history.
- news.com.au
- 03 Oct 2014
- Entertainment
‘The Reaper’ Nick Irving says he shouldn’t be alive today. Source: Supplied
NICK Irving first killed a man when he was just 18 years old.
“It was the only time I felt anything,” he says.
His .50 calibre machine gun was trained on a car outside Ramallah in Iraq, when he made eye contact with the driver.
The driver turned his car around. “Shoot! Shoot!” yelled Irving’s supervisor, a boot in the young man’s back.
Irving fired a seven-round burst straight at the man’s head, and watched him explode in a cloud of “mist and chunks.”
His first kill was followed by a nightmare in which the dead man hovered above him. Source: Supplied
Later that night, his first kill returned to haunt him, he writes in his new memoir, The Reaper.
“I was in a room with a ceiling fan spinning above me. The blades of the fan were the man’s four limbs plus his head and chest. He was staring at me with that same dead-eyed stare, but as the fan spun faster and faster, he started screaming at me open-mouthed.
“Eventually the fan got spinning so fast that his limbs were whipped off and he sprayed the room with blood and guts, covering me as well with gelatinous goo.”
Irving went on to become a master sniper for the US Army, racking up 33 kills in his final three-and-a-half month deployment.
His platoon sergeant warned him: “After you kill a man there’s no other feeling like it. Mark my words. You won’t want to do any hunting again. The excitement of that will be gone. You won’t find any joy in it. Once you kill a man, you can’t replace that feeling.”
Irving recounts his jaw-dropping experiences in his extraordinary memoirs. Source: Supplied
And Irving relished the dangerous job, progressing from ranger to machine gunner, marksman to sniper and then, finally, master sniper.
He named his beloved SR-25 “Dirty Diana”, spending hours cleaning and painting it in tiger stripes even after it was time to go home to his wife.
It began to feel almost as though the “real” him was the man in uniform, he says.
After missions, the team would watch themselves back on video, shouting “Yeah!” and “Get some!” as the “bad guys” were taken out.
“There’s lots of psychological evaluation before you go,” he tells news.com.au. “Being able to kill people and not feel anything ... I think that’s something you have to be born with.
“I figured I was a pretty strong-minded individual.
He says the death of two comrades left him with “survivor’s guilt”. Source: Supplied
“I didn’t think too much about the politics, it was just, ‘This guy’s shooting at me, I want to go home and I want the guy next to me to go home’.”
Irving became the first African American sniper assigned to the Army’s Third Ranger Battalion, which had fought in Somalia in the historic ‘Black Hawk Down’ mission.
His autobiography coincides with the release of the film American Sniper, about the most lethal sniper in US history, which set new box office records when it opened this weekend.
Irving’s fascinating story culminates with the bloody final tour in Afghanistan that made him a legend, earning him the nickname “Reaper” after he set a record for enemy kills on a single deployment.
American Sniper featurette 4:31
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Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood and Sienna Miller talk about the task of bringing the story of US sniper Chris Kyle to the big screen.
- news.com.au
- 14 Jan 2015
- Entertainment
The master sniper conducted more than 100 special operations missions over those few months in the Helmand Province, where his company was attacked by the Taliban every morning.
His most extraordinary achievement came when the team found themselves surrounded and pinned down by a Chechen sniper as they defended a Marine compound.
“We had a 360-degree ambush around us, maybe 60 guys,” he says. “The Taliban insurgents had an RPG [Rocket-Propelled Grenade] and were about to shoot our Humvee.
“I finally figured out where the sniper was. He was so good I couldn’t get a shot on him. I shot at him maybe 50 times, he shot 100 times, it was inches away.
Irving overcame a crippling fear of heights, as well as colourblindness. Source: Supplied
“It was really, really intense. It was run and die that way, or go out in a blaze of glory and blow ourselves up.”
Thankfully, the machine gunners saved them, and Irving achieved the virtually impossible, hitting the sniper in the leg with his SR-25 from more than a kilometre away.
With two of his comrades dead, Irving — who had seen his wife Jessica for about one month in 12 — knew it was time to retire.
“I’m not sure what PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] really involves, but I took a few years to get over that.
He dreamt of fighting for his country from childhood. Source: Supplied
“I had nightmares, bad dreams, I was an alcoholic there for a few years, I had anger issues ... I just didn’t want to be around people.
“I’d wish I did something different, it was like survivor’s guilt. Sometimes I think it should have been me.”
Sleeping with a pistol by his bed, he says: “There were a few close calls. I’d wake up from a bad dream and wouldn’t know who [my wife] was.
“It was a rough, rough ride.”
Irving always knew he wanted to fight for America. Both of his parents were in the army, and he grew up on military bases in Fort Meade, Maryland.
The master sniper’s mindset can help people in their everyday lives, he claims. Source: Supplied
He would practice shooting in the house with an air rifle, filling in pockmarks in the walls with his sister’s white Play-Doh.
But when a Navy SEAL entrance test showed he was colourblind, his dreams were almost shattered.
Luckily for the teenager, an Army nurse swept him up and enlisted him anyway. They need dedicated people like him, he says — he just needs occasional assistance reading maps.
His other great challenge was a crippling fear of heights.
He panicked on an early jump from a C-17 aircraft in 2005, tumbling out of the plane so awkwardly that his parachute didn’t deploy.
As he sped towards earth, the parachute was “a cigarette roll — just a long, slim strand of fabric. That’s what we call a partial malfunction.”
Irving now trains Olympic athletes and soldiers from around the world. Source: Supplied
Guys flying past screamed, “Pull your reserve!”, so Irving tore at his second parachute, which caught one of his legs, pulling him into the splits.
“I hit the ground hard and rolled over while being dragged along the ground by the chute. My equipment was being thrown off me, I could smell rubber from the soles of my boots dragging along.”
Had he left it just a few seconds longer, they would have been scraping him off the tarmac, he says.
Now Irving runs a training site in San Antonio, working with Olympic athletes and military personnel from around the world.
“I’m teaching people everything I’ve learned,” he says. “The mindset of the sniper can apply to any working environment.
“I had a no-quit attitude, never giving up.
“Things could always be worse. I shouldn’t be here.”
The Reaper by Nicholas Irving is published by Nero Books and on sale on January 24. Buy the book here.
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