When asked to sum up his personality, Dave Wentworth describes himself as calm, composed, patient and able to obliterate from his mind any form of distraction. All essential qualifications for someone who routinely killed people with a clean head shot at a range of up to 1,200 metres.

Wentworth was one of the British army’s elite snipers, men selected from the ranks to undergo special intensive training in order to take on one of the most demanding and psychologically menacing jobs in the military.

Traditionally, snipers have been a powerful military weapon. Their ability to shoot with deadly accuracy, unseen, and from great distances make them among the most feared of soldiers, for both friend and foe. The accuracy and premeditation of their shots is in sharp contrast to groups of regular soldiers who, in the heat of battle and armed with machine guns firing round after round comparatively indiscriminately, often do not know who among them is individually responsible for a death. There is no such psychological band aid for the sniper. He knows all too well that the fate of the man in his crosshairs rests in his hands alone.

Often viewed with suspicion by their own side and dread by the enemy, the life of a sniper is a lonely one. No wonder then perhaps that as late as the Second World War, snipers who were captured were summarily executed.

Sniping comes with such heavy psychological baggage that you might not expect it to sit well with a blissful retirement in a small Cypriot village. Certainly, few, if any, of the locals who greet Wentworth at the coffee shop know his past experiences, nor of his need to rid himself of their weight in order to live a normal life.

“I don’t sleep very well,” Wentworth admits, before insisting “but that’s not to do with my past life as a sniper”.

“I was a soldier and I did my job well, I always adhered to ‘one shot-one kill’. There were no random killings. My job was all about precision, about key targets.”

For Wentworth, for all the fear a sniper inspires, his very precision means the damage is limited. “I never sprayed a village square with gunfire or took out civilians.”

Dave knew he was a talented marksman early on when, as a child, he would go poaching in the woods with a bow and arrow.

“I was good. Then a friend taught me how to use a shotgun, and soon I was able to always get my target,” he says. “It was as if I was born to hunt, to take time stalking and creeping after my prey undetected.”

Hunting was just a hobby until he went into the army. “There, I was considered the best marksman they had after beating over 700 fellow soldiers in various national competitions.”

His sergeant then sent him off for special training, and after that his talents were put to use during some of Britain’s military conflicts.

To keep in practice, the army snipers would also be dispatched every year to the Highlands of Scotland to practise stalking and killing deer during the official culling season. “My experience as a poacher then came in handy,” he says.

On display in his small village house is an impressive cache of medals awarded to Smith during the ten years he served as a sniper, all won when competing in some of the world’s top class shooting competitions, prompting me to ask if he still has the talent and the eye even at the age of sixty plus?

“I practise regularly far away from the village, and, yes, I can still hit a two cent piece at 40m with my Beeman air gun. My eyesight is still perfect with no need to ever wear glasses.”

Sitting on a sofa in Wentworth’s home I sip tea, nibble on a Danish pastry, and along one wall, I try to read the titles on numerous shelves laden with DVDs – each a Hollywood Rambo-style version of many different wars. We chat surreally about human targets - about how snipers try and aim for what they call the apricot part of the brain that controls involuntary movement. I learn that he used to be able to forgo sleep for up to three to four days and nights, keeping awake only with the aid of pure caffeine tablets while lying in a cold wet field, fully camouflaged, gun at the ready, awaiting his prey. He explained how he learned to control his breathing, how some snipers are taught to shoot between heartbeats to minimise barrel motion and how snipers cannot ever be susceptible to emotions such as anxiety or remorse.

“You see the sniper has to be an unseen but always precise foe, and that’s why they are so feared by the enemy,” he says.

“You don’t ever register the close up face caught in the centre of the crosshairs. It’s all about getting in the zone, focusing on the act until it becomes automatic, repetitive. You concentrate only on the shot.”

Did he ever get an order to carry out a kill which for some reason or another he didn’t want to do?

“No it never happened, they were the enemy.”

Then comes the caveat.

“One time I did query when my commanding officer suggested after I had taken out a man that I bring the corpse back to base camp so they could show off that he was dead,” he says. And then adds deadpan: “I told the officer that I would bring back his hands or his head but I certainly couldn’t lug this big man on my back all the way to camp.

“That’s the only time I have ever given an alternative suggestion to an order.”

Throughout our time together I was deeply conscious of the one big question that hung over our conversation: what was his total kill tally?

Sitting there on the sofa with the sun streaming through a lace curtained window, he quickly turned away and stared out the window.

“I can’t tell you that really,” he replies.

I feel the gruesome urge to push. Was the figure was over 1000?

“No.”

Was it perhaps between 200 and 300?

He slowly turned to face me and after a slight nod of the head, he quietly got up and went into the kitchen to make another cup of tea.

Within modern warfare and its array of laser-guided missiles and smart bombs it’s increasingly only men like Wentworth who see their victims at the point of death, albeit it at a distance. More importantly, it’s one thing to kill in the heat of battle, but quite another when you have a lot of time to plan a death. Now, the army has psychological profiling so they can spot any mental problems before and during sniper training.

Wentworth had no counselling. “In my time I never had any back up. I was told what to do and I did it, came back and waited for the next time.

“There was stress, there had to have been, because my wife and family never ever knew what I did. It wouldn’t have been safe for them to know, so I just never communicated much to them. Also I was away a lot and missed out on seeing my kids grow up. It wasn’t an easy life for a person like me. My marriage ended, and I admit now to being very lonely as my kids don’t really have much to do with me.”

Wentworth, like many ex-soldiers, looks back on the army as the best years of his life. Yet for all his talk of not ever registering the close up face in his gun’s crosshairs, he admits that counselling would probably have helped him.

“I suppose looking back, if I had been given someone to talk to, it would have helped make me feel less separate from family, friends, neighbours and the like.

“But that’s past times. Now I just enjoy a quiet simple life here in Cyprus where no one really knows me, and I just get on with living every day as it comes.”

 

Wentworth cannot disclose his real surname name for fear of reprisals.

 

• The term ‘sniper’ originated in the 1770s among British soldiers in India, where a hunter who proved he had the skill to kill the fast-flying game bird called a Snipe, was christened a ‘Sniper’.

• The British sniper unit originated within the Lovat Scouts, a Highland regiment formed during the Boer war in 1900. They were the first unit to wear a ghillie suit - camouflage clothing designed to resemble heavy foliage.

• The Pentagon is developing a guided smart bullet for use in sniper rifles. In the future, snipers will crouch four miles away from their target before sending a super smart-slug to kill a distant faceless enemy.

• There are currently an estimated 350 trained snipers on active service within the UK military.

 

• The most expensive sniper weapon is the long range 415A3 - it fires 8.59mm rounds at a range of 1,100 m to hit targets of just 10cm. It has a day scope which magnifies up to 25 times and a suppressor to reduce noise and flash.

 

• Snipers now play an increasingly important role in Afghanistan. Scores of Taliban have been shot, with one British sniper alone admitting his kill tally routinely accounted for ‘handfuls of the enemy’.

 

• During the Vietnam War the average number of rounds expended per kill with M-16 rifles was 50,000. By contrast snipers averaged 1.3 bullets per kill.