map, a compass, and a grid destination, with instructors driving the roads trying to catch you. Good luck puzzling out where you are and selecting a route that will get you to the end point in time.
After that, we practiced estimating (without instruments) distances up to a mile. Out to half a mile, we had to be able to judge within one hundred meters the distance to a man standing erect. Our academics consisted of ballistic physics, target assessment, artillery and mortar calls for fire, intelligence assessment, weapon systems, and mission planning.
With over a hundred sniper teams in the Marine Corps, standard sets of weapons were required. You couldn’t have each sniper choosing his personal rifle and cartridge. I enjoyed reading shooting magazines, but most of that gear was for wealthy civilians, not us corporals. Small differences in machine precision counted for far less than individual discipline.
The M40-A3 was our 16.5-pound sniper rifle, equipped with an adjustable cheek rest, a heavy twenty-four- inch barrel, and a bipod stand. The 7.62-millimeter (.308) rifle, based on the Remington 700 short action, fired the M118LR 7.62x51 HPBT military-only cartridge that retained supersonic speed out to nine hundred meters. In addition, we used the standard infantry M4 5.56-millimeter rifle and the monster M107 Barrett .50-caliber.
Our instructors talked about targets they had hit only as a way of illustrating a technique or a lesson. Skinta told of one encounter that had an ironic twist. On one of his tours in Iraq, he was on a patrol hunting for an enemy sniper. At dusk on the third day, the patrol moved to an abandoned water purification building to get some rest. Skinta was on the second floor when the outside wall was peppered by an RPK (machine gun), followed by a few high-caliber rifle shots. Through the scope, his spotter saw a sniper nine hundred meters away. He was shooting with a Russian 7.62 Mosin-Nagant rifle that had a superb pedigree among snipers.
Skinta’s first shot was so low that it kicked up dirt in front of the enemy sniper. Yet the sniper didn’t bother to duck, probably thinking it was a stray round from the standard Marine 5.56-millimeter M4. Skinta’s next shot hit the man in the chest. He died because he didn’t realize an American sniper was shooting at him. (For your information: In three combat tours, Skinta tallied over thirty kills. I learned that only by talking with a corporal who worked in administration, five years after I first met Skinta.)
The hardest task for me was the close-in stalk against an alert prey: A truck is parked in the middle of a field, guarded by two instructors with binoculars. You make a ghillie suit from burlap and twigs and grasses at all angles. A man standing up looks like a mass of seaweed.
Lying down, that same man blends into the ground. The test required each of us to sneak a thousand meters across the field, take two shots at targets, and get close enough to copy down the letters stenciled on the side of the truck, all without being seen.
Trying to get that right took me a week of training on my stomach, moving with the ants among stalks of grass and brambles. I learned to observe the enemy by “burning through”—staring intently until you can see through the blades of grass without raising your head an inch. When exam day came, I inched undetected across the thousand meters and simulated my kill shots. That wasn’t bad for a guy built like a refrigerator.
We were told that as a sniper, you never let anyone else, regardless of rank, make off-the-cuff changes to your plan. You plan the mission, and you execute it. You’re in charge of your team. The goal is to know every aspect of your job so well that you have complete confidence.
Many of the missions we practiced were counter-IED. We spent hours learning how to stake out long stretches of road, waiting for someone to come along with a shovel and a sack of explosives. Skinta told us about a sniper team in over-watch in a half-constructed building in Ramadi in 2004. It was a warm, dull day and after several hours, they dozed off and never awakened. Insurgents sneaked up and shot all four Marines in the head. They left with the high-powered M48-A3 and its excellent Schmidt & Bender scope. Over the course of the next year, they allegedly killed two more Americans before a Marine sniper took them out and recovered the rifle. Skinta hammered home his message: know every aspect of your job, and never, never let down your guard. If you slack off or take things for granted, you die.
Shooting another human being was a math problem. You were either right or wrong, with no subjective in- between decided by someone else. I liked problems that were black or white, life or death. Before taking a shot at a target one thousand meters away, you had to calculate the effects of the light air at altitude, wind, humidity, angle of fire, cartridge velocity, and gravity. You had to align the target, the background, the terrain, the weather, the noise, and the weapon. You had to work in concert with others. At the same time, the target enemy was figuring out how to kill you. Combat was zero-sum decision-making played for the highest stakes, live or die.
My final test was conducted at one thousand yards with the M40-A3. You get two tries. If you hit the man- sized iron target half a mile away, you qualify. My first shot missed. The school’s best spotter then gave me the data for wind and elevation. I squeezed off my last bullet. We all heard the distant ping of a good hit.
Thirty-one of us began the eleven-week course; thirteen graduated. Skinta gave us a short talk about that.
“I took no pleasure in washing out most of the class,” Skinta said. “I can teach anybody to shoot. I can’t teach personal discipline. The test of a sniper is his ability to convince a commander that every step in a mission has been thought through. A sniper is all about maturity.”
When we began the course, the instructors called us PIGs, or professionally instructed gunmen. At graduation, each of us received a neck chain with a single 7.62 bullet in a clasp. It was called the HOG tooth, or hunter of gunmen. I was now officially designated as an 0317—a sniper.
On my chest I had inscribed a tattoo in Latin:
After nineteen months in the Corps, I was beginning to put it together. I knew that having a combat action ribbon wasn’t what made a good Marine. Instead, it was confidence based on good planning and execution, doing what was right time after time. I had learned from those who did it right, the Bradys, Kreitzers, and Skintas.
In July of 2007 our battalion assumed patrol duties in Kharma, sixty miles west of Baghdad. Nicknamed “Bad Karma,” the dingy town consisted of a few dozen narrow, dirty cobblestone streets lined with cramped concrete apartment buildings. A large mosque with a bombed-out minaret had been used by insurgents as a rest stop during the highly publicized battles for the nearby city of Fallujah. In the three years since then, the Marines had employed constant patrolling to grind down the local insurgent gangs. The town was so small that sooner or later, informants pointed out first one terrorist cell, then another.
When we arrived, we were hit occasionally by a few mortar shells from the diehards. Rumor had it they had only one tube. Four or five guys would drive to an open field, hop out, point the tube in the direction of our main compound, pop a few shells down the tube, and drive away.
We couldn’t detect a pattern or locate the source. We conducted little visits where a squad or a team of snipers would walk unannounced into a compound after dark, herd the startled family into one room, set up observation posts on the roof, sometimes staying for two days and sometimes leaving the next morning. We were hoping sooner or later to cross paths with the mortar team.
With each compound separated only by a wall from the next, sounds carried clearly down the streets at night. If you weren’t careful, soon the whole neighborhood knew that strangers were about. Once, at two in the morning, we sneaked over a back wall into a large courtyard. It was a hot night, and the family was sleeping outdoors. As we shook the owner awake and signaled him to be quiet, I saw a man next door staring at us in amazement. I gestured for him not to speak. That didn’t work. Inside a minute, his whole family was awake. So I shooed them into the courtyard next door.
“Meyer, what the hell are you doing?” my startled teammates asked.
The two families together made enough noise to wake up the family on the other side. Again, we herded a wary husband, an irate wife, and sleepy kids into the courtyard. Now we’d collected twenty-three Iraqi civilians, who were highly pissed at being awakened and prodded like sheep from one place to another. So, we apologized and walked back to base the next night, muttering at each other.
On night patrol, you couldn’t lie down anywhere in the fields without being bitten by sand fleas. One day I was stung sharply on my right hand. Over the next several days the swelling increased and my hand felt like it was burning off. It was a deep red, with other red streaks running up my forearm. My platoon sergeant brought me to
