Beach Balls and Long Shots

I was watching from the roof one afternoon when a group of roughly sixteen fully armed insurgents emerged from cover. They were wearing full body armor and were heavily geared. (We found out later that they were Tunisians, apparently recruited by one of the militant groups to fight against Americans in Iraq.)

Not unusual at all, except for the fact that they were also carrying four very large and colorful beach balls.

I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing—they split up into groups and got into the water, four men per beach ball. Then, using the beach balls to keep them afloat, they began paddling across.

It was my job not to let that happen, but that didn’t necessarily mean I had to shoot each one of them. Hell, I had to conserve ammo for future engagements.

I shot the first beach ball. The four men began flailing for the other three balls.

Snap.

I shot beach ball number two.

It was kind of fun.

Hell—it was a lot of fun. The insurgents were fighting among themselves, their ingenious plan to kill Americans now turned against them.

“Y’all gotta see this,” I told the Marines as I shot beach ball number three.

They came over to the side of the roof and watched as the insurgents fought among themselves for the last beach ball. The ones who couldn’t grab on promptly sank and drowned.

I watched them fight for a while longer, then shot the last ball. The Marines put the rest of the insurgents out of their misery.

Those were my strangest shots. My longest came around the same time.

One day, a group of three insurgents appeared on the shore upriver, out of range at around 1,600 yards. (That’s just under a mile.) A few had tried that before, standing there, knowing that we wouldn’t shoot them, because they were so far away. Our ROEs allowed us to take them, but the distance was so great that it really didn’t make sense to take a shot. Apparently realizing they were safe, they began mocking us like a bunch of juvenile delinquents.

The FAC came over and started laughing at me as I eyed them through the scope.

“Chris, you ain’t never gonna reach them.”

Well, I didn’t say I was going to try, but his words made it seem like almost a challenge. Some of the other Marines came over and told me more or less the same thing.

Anytime someone tells me I can’t do something, it gets me thinking I can do it. But 1,600 yards was so far away that my scope wouldn’t even dial up the shooting solution. So I did a little mental calculation and adjusted my aim with the help of a tree behind one of the grinning insurgent idiots making fun of us.

I took the shot.

The moon, Earth, and stars aligned. God blew on the bullet, and I gut-shot the jackass.

His two buddies hauled ass out of there.

“Get ’em, get ’em!” yelled the Marines. “Shoot ’em.”

I guess at that point they thought I could hit anything under the sun. But the truth is, I’d been lucky as hell to hit the one I was aiming at; there was no way I was taking a shot at people who were running.

That would turn out to be one of my longest confirmed kills in Iraq.

Misperceptions

People think that snipers take such incredibly long shots all the time. While we do take longer shots than most guys on the battlefield, they’re probably a lot closer than most people think.

I never got all caught up in measuring how far I was shooting. The distance really depended on the situation. In the cities, where most of my kills came, you’re only going to be shooting anywhere from two hundred to four hundred yards anyway. That’s where your targets are, so that’s where your shots are.

Out in the countryside, it’s a different story. Typically, the shots out there would run from eight hundred to twelve hundred yards. That’s where the longer-range guns like the .338 would come in handy.

Someone once asked me if I had a favorite distance. My answer was easy: the closer the better.

As I mentioned earlier, another misperception people have about snipers is that we always aim for the head. Personally, I almost never target the head, unless I’m absolutely sure I’m going to make the shot. And that’s rare on the battlefield.

I’d much rather aim center mass—shoot for the middle of the body. I’ve got plenty of room to play with. No matter where I hit him, he’s going down.

Back to Baghdad

After a week on the river, I was pulled out, swapping places with another SEAL sniper, who’d been injured briefly earlier in the operation and was ready to get back into action. I’d had more than my fair share of kills as a sniper; it was time to let someone else have a go.

Command sent me back to Camp Fallujah for a few days. It was one of the few breaks in the war that I actually welcomed. After the pace of the battle in the city, I was definitely ready for a brief vacation. The hot meals and showers felt pretty damn good.

After chilling out for a few days, I was ordered back to Baghdad to work with GROM again.

We were on the way to Baghdad when our Hummer was hit by a buried IED. The improvised explosive blew up just behind us; everybody in the vehicles freaked—except me and another guy who’d been at Fallujah since the start of the assault. We looked at each other, winked, then closed our eyes and went back to sleep. Compared to the month’s worth of explosions and shit we’d just lived through, this was nothing.

While I’d been in Iraq, my platoon was sent to the Philippines on a mission to train up the local military to fight radical terrorists. It wasn’t exactly the most exciting assignment. Finally, with that mission complete, they were sent to Baghdad.

I went out with some other SEALs to the airport to greet them.

I was expecting a big welcome—here my family was finally coming in.

They came off the plane cussin’ me.

“Hey asshole.”

And much worse than that. Like everything else they do, SEALs excel at foul language.

Jealousy, thy name is SEAL.

I’d wondered why I hadn’t heard anything from them over the past few months. In fact, I was wondering why they were jealous—as far as I knew, they hadn’t heard about anything I’d been doing.

Come to find out, my chief had been regaling them with the after-action reports of my sniping in Fallujah. They’d been sitting around hand-holding the Filipinos and hating life, while I’d been having all the fun.

They got over it. Eventually, they even asked me to do a little presentation on what I’d done, complete with pointers and stuff. One more chance to use PowerPoint.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 633