Nick ‘Irv’ Irving was the first Black sniper in the Army’s Third Ranger Battalion.  He was dubbed ‘The Reaper’ by his fellow soldiers and ‘The Devil of Ramadi’ by insurgents for his skill as a sniper.

Irving now runs his own training site in San Antonio, Texas.

He was given the nickname ‘The Reaper’ by his comrades in the military – after killing 33 men in less than four months.
Former Army Ranger Nick ‘Irv’ Irving using his trusty SR-25 rifle he nicknamed ‘Dirty Diana’ to blast insurgents to death during the Iraq War.
He was so possessive over ‘his girl’ as he called the gun, that he hated it when other men touched her and would spend four hours a night painting her.

Before every battle he would get pumped up to the sounds of men zipping their gear up with Velcro, which he likened to music being played to a high school football team.

Irving was trained to become a sniper by his superiors who told him that it was the biggest thrill of your life and that ‘once you kill a man, you can’t replace that feeling.’

In Irving’s memoir, extracts of which were published in the New York Post, he tells how he became the first black sniper in the Army’s Third Ranger Battalion, which had previously fought in the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident in Somalia.

He was the son of two enlisted soldiers in Fort Meade, Maryland, but didn’t want to be in the Army until he got curious about weapons as a teenager.
He built himself a blowgun and eventually signed up, serving tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

During his training his platoon sergeant told him: ‘After you kill a man, there’s no other feeling like it. Mark my words.

When Irving was deployed to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province as Sniper Squad Team Leader in 2009, the first African-American sniper with the Third Ranger Battalion, he didn’t expect to see much action. Though the area was a safe haven for enemy fighters and the hub of the heroin pipeline that funded the Taliban’s war, the Second Battalion reported their tour of duty there to be so quiet they advised incoming guys to bring their Xbox. Yet barely hours after arrival, Irving was in gear covering Charlie Company First Platoon as they hunted down a High Value Target (HVT), a supplier of bulletproof vests to the Taliban. At an insertion point near Kandahar, Irving cradled “Dirty Diana,” his SR-25, a gun he loved so much he repainted its pattern every two weeks.
In less than 30 seconds of engagement, he shot two Taliban. Back at base, he had only eight hours to recuperate before he was sent into an enemy compound where he brought down a suicide bomber just as he was reaching to detonate his vest. Irving had hot hands.

July 10, 2009, would live in Irving’s memory as the longest day of his life. It wasn’t his last mission, but he decided it was his last deployment. He’d racked up 33 kills (probably more undocumented) and a legend. It was time for the 23-year-old to go home.