Scott McEwen on ‘The Sniper and the Wolf’

In real life and in pop culture, the sniper is a figure of fascination and fear. Now, thanks to “American Sniper” — the wildly popular Clint Eastwood film that starred Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, a real-life Navy SEAL sniper — a new generation of moviegoers was offered a chance to view the sniper as a more complicated, even tragic character.

“American Sniper” was based on the autobiography of the same title by Kyle, co-written by his friend Scott McEwen, a San Diego trial attorney and author of the popular “Sniper Elite” series.

McEwen’s third book in the series, “The Sniper and the Wolf,” finds his hero, Gil Shannon, also a Navy SEAL sniper, the target of an equally talented sniper known as the Wolf, a Russian military sniper who has now joined the cause of independence for Chechnya. But the Wolf, it turns out, is only part of a larger conspiracy to destabilize the West — a plan that Shannon and his friends do their best to thwart.

McEwen consulted on the “American Sniper” film and is gearing up for the film versions of the first two “Sniper Elite” novels at Sony Pictures, which hopes the movies can become a major new franchise like the James Bond series. Printers Row Journal recently caught up with McEwen, 53, for a phone interview from his hometown of San Diego. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.

Q: You’ve written about snipers in fiction and nonfiction. What are the differences, and how does one inform the other?

A: It’s interesting. As I was working with Chris and got to know other SEALs through Chris, on deployments and other operations, you hear what you can put in the book, and then you hear what you can’t put in the book: names, dates, places, operations, all that. One of the main things that started the whole series was the Jessica Lynch story. I don’t know if you remember Jessica Lynch —

Q: Oh, sure.

A: Jessica was rescued by a group of Navy SEALs, and those SEALs included Chris Kyle and some of his teammates. But you never saw them and the hospital where they pulled her out, and you never saw the stuff that led up to finding Jessica Lynch. A lot of the things that inspire my novels are situations like that, where the president says, “Treat this as if I had been taken hostage,” and the team was told to use every available resource to find her. They found her quick, and they got her out quick. And that was the genesis of the first book, “Sniper Elite: One-Way Trip.” We had a female helicopter pilot who had been taken prisoner. She’s sexually abused, just like Jessica Lynch was. But the key is that I have an unbelievable network of guys that work out there and know that I can’t give out sources, but I can tell fictional stories based on the real-life stuff I’ve heard.

Q: You can’t say a lot of things in nonfiction because of security concerns, but you can put all that stuff into the novels.

A: Well, I make sure there’s never anything that can identify the sources that I get my stories from, or that could lead to defamation or libel charges. God knows, that happens. For example, in “The Sniper and the Wolf,” there’s a story in there about a team guy and a Russian guy being held at a safe house in Turkey that has 15-, 16-year-old prostitutes in it. It’s run by the Russian mafia. The SEAL team guy gets into an argument with Russian mafia guys. He looks across the table at his Russian counterpart and says, “There’s about to be a gunfight. Get yourself ready.” He’s so mad at these Russian guys who are holding these young girls as prostitutes that he’s about to start a gunfight with them. And they all proceed to tear the house down. That is actually a true story of some guys I knew that were ex-team guys that were working in a country in the Middle East where the Russians run, for lack of a better term, houses of ill repute. So I like to take those types of stories and put them into a book with my series character Gil Shannon, who’s an amalgamation of a whole bunch of guys I’ve known on the SEAL teams.

Q: Is he true to life, would you say?

A: I’d say he’s about as true to life as you get. Somebody said, “No one could take that many injuries and keep on fighting.” I can send you a link to a guy that in my first book I described meeting in a bar. He’d been shot more than a dozen times and killed four terrorists that he’d broken into a room to kill and was later medevaced out of the place. What he was proud of was that he stayed in the fight until they medevaced him out. That’s the epitome of what I write about in my “Sniper Elite” novels.

Q: You worked on “American Sniper,” the film. What was your role?

A: I was a consultant. For all intents and purposes, I was just on set and spoke to Clint and Bradley on a regular basis. But as far as telling Clint Eastwood how he wants to shoot his movie, I didn’t do much. I did consult with Jason Hall, who wrote the script. I sat down with him and gave him some ideas about where I wanted things to go. I don’t take any credit — that’s Jason’s script.

Q: So what’s an example of your contribution?

A: Well, the ending (battle) scene of the movie shows Chris in a huge gunfight and I felt that, really, Chris saw God. He was shot and basically he was done. And that’s when Chris realized that he wasn’t immortal, that he could be killed. His decision to leave the SEAL teams came out of that moment. He was having some problems, and it was time to get out. We described that pretty accurately in the book, but to show that in a movie scene was kind of difficult. So Jason and I talked a lot about how to do that. Chris had been through so much before that, I felt like this was our big chance to tell people that his time was up. His enemies had his number. They had money on his head. He was going to be killed.

Q: The movie was extremely popular, but there were also critics of the film who said it glorified violence and so forth. What did you make of that?

A: Well, any film about a war is going to have its critics. And actually I thought some of the criticism was interesting. One piece by a female critic said she had gone to the movie with a preordained thought process as to what the film was really about. And when she walked out, she said there’s no way you can say that this glorifies sending people to war. I just don’t see how you can come up with that when you see the hell and you see the casualties and you see all the damage that’s done — not only in war, but also at home. It’s more of a portrayal not only of a soldier’s patriotism, but also the fact that war is hell. I don’t think Clint attempted to glorify it, and I don’t think anybody who’s seen it can come away from that movie and say it’s about rah-rah. In the movie, the people take real damage — physically, mentally — and that includes the people back home.

Q: Why are we so fascinated by snipers?

A: Snipers represent a skill set that is extremely specific. They operate relatively independently. They have to make independent decisions about bad guys vs. good guys and what shots to take. The sniper is an enigmatic figure who stands in the shadows — who isn’t as visible, if you will, as somebody riding in an F-16 or a tank. And it’s just an extremely difficult job. It requires a lot of attention to detail. It requires a huge amount of training, including how to survive once you’ve taken a shot. It’s not just taking a gun and shooting a long distance. It’s a lot more than that.

Q: There’s also an impression people have of a godlike figure who’s off in the distance — you’re never going to see him — making a decision about whether you’re going to live or die.

A: Yes, and even at the troop level, they realize he’s the guy who’s going to make decisions about their own existence. That’s why it has such a psychological effect on the other side. If you randomly think you can be shot at any time, it really bugs you.

Q: I think we also think of snipers in jungles or other wilderness settings, but of course in the Iraq war, Chris Kyle was operating in cities.

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A: That’s right. You’re watching over the top of your troops, which is kind of a different job for a sniper. Your job is to take out the bad guys before they attack your troops.

Q: There are a lot of novelists writing books about snipers these days. How is your series character, Gil Shannon, different from those others?

A: A lot of people don’t realize that a SEAL sniper has not only become a SEAL — which means he can jump out of airplanes, dive into the ocean in extremely cold water, plant bombs on ships, all that — but then he also goes to sniper school, becomes a sniper, refines his skills and becomes one of the best shots on earth. Understands all of the different guns you can shoot, from a .50-caliber to a .223, and then factor in all those things into what he must do for his mission. You become a specialist, but then you become a real specialist. You can make the analogy that snipers are the surgeons of the military. They have the skill set that your average doctor would have, but so much more, and that’s embodied in the character of Gil Shannon. And I think that’s why Sony has chosen it to be what they hope will be the replacement for the James Bond series.

Q: Big shoes to fill.

A: (Laughs.) James Bond has a lot of gadgets, but my guy has real gadgets. My guy deals with real things. And he’s badder than James Bond.

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer.

“The Sniper and the Wolf”

By Scott McEwen with Thomas Koloniar, Touchstone, 387 pages, $24.99