“Time’s up!” our drill instructor, Sgt. Brady, yelled a few minutes later.
About half the forty bunks in our squad bay were made in time.
“Rip ‘em off! Start again!”
Thirty bunks made. Brady would walk through and inspect a neatly made bunk. He’d nod, move to another bunk. Not good enough.
“Rip ‘em off!”
Eventually, we figured out that the exercise was about helping each other: one fails, everyone fails.
Not all the weakest links would survive, however, and the idea of returning to Kentucky in disgrace terrified me.
I’d crawl under my blanket at night, turn on my flashlight, and write letters to Dad. I missed my life back in Kentucky.
The second month is the turnaround, when they build you back up. Sgt. Brady made me a squad leader, meaning he yelled at me for the mistakes of ten other recruits. That was all right; he had his job, and I had mine.
The third month of boot camp was actually fun. We spent time on the rifle range, which I enjoyed, and Sgt. Brady took to harassing me for the sheer glee of it.
On family day, the day before graduation, Dad introduced himself to Sgt. Brady.
“Looks like you’ve taken a few pounds off, Dakota,” Dad said. Then, turning to Brady, he said, “He seems in fighting shape. You don’t have an easy job. Sergeant, I’d be pleased to buy you dinner.”
Graduation Day was impressive: a band with the deep drums and sharp bugles, the pennants waving proudly, four hundred new Marines marching in step, colonels saluting generals, and friends and family applauding and waving.
I spent the next two months in the SOI (School of Infantry). Only 15 percent of the Marine Corps (and the Army) are in the infantry. In today’s military, there are more combat pilots than infantry squad leaders.
At SOI, a hundred fundamental tactics were hammered into me, such as laying down a base of fire before maneuvering, understanding enfilade and grazing fires (an enfilade position lets you fire down a long line of the enemy, like you’re at the end of their trench; grazing fire is just sweeping the ground with heavy fire a foot or two up over the wide terrain of the enemy’s position), and learning how to read terrain and translate squiggly lines on a map into your position on the ground.
A Marine squad is comprised of three four-man fire teams. Everything you do as a rifleman revolves around that four-man team. One man carries a weapon more powerful than those of the others, but that’s a minor point. In the field, you don’t do anything without those three other guys. You don’t shit, sleep, eat, or move without the other three knowing about it.
A Marine squad with those three fire teams is like a boxer with three arms. One arm jabs with bursts of fire to keep the opponent off-balance while another arm loops around with a left hook, with the third arm ready to follow up wherever there’s an opening. If one arm is wounded, the other two can keep fighting. Fire to pin down the enemy; maneuver to finish him off: fire, maneuver, fire, maneuver.
Five months after joining up, I finally joined a real Marine rifle battalion: the 3rd Marine Regiment in Hawaii. On the day before Thanksgiving, 2006, I lugged my seabag up the steps of a dilapidated barracks in paradise. By way of greeting, some old salts on the second deck pelted me with beer bottles and shouts of “boot!”
I was assigned to a four-man fire team led by Lance Cpl. Daniel Kreitzer, age thirty, who had enlisted in response to the Twin Towers attack. He would lead us to Iraq, where he had already served.
We three team members lived in one dingy room, while Kreitzer lived down the hall with other team leaders. He let us know we were nothing until we proved ourselves in Iraq.
Kreitzer loathed the improvised explosive device, or IED—a primitive land mine that ripped your legs off. You hear about the big ones, designed to take out a Humvee, but they also made smaller IEDs to kill a soldier just walking down a street. The insurgents would bury a plastic jug filled with homemade explosives, insert a long wire, hide nearby, and touch the wire to a flashlight battery as you walked by. On his prior tour, Kreitzer had picked up the blown-up body of one of his buddies.
We spent a lot of time moving fast in seventy pounds of armor and gear, losing a gallon of sweat in the high humidity. No matter how tired we were, we never moved without one team member watching over the other three, checking for anything out of the ordinary. We learned how to skirt around trash piles, avoid freshly turned dirt, and take each step knowing that if you relax, you’re dead—or, even worse, your friends are.
In February of 2007, four months into Hawaii, I saw a bulletin announcing openings in the sniper platoon. In the barracks, I had heard that the firefights in Iraq’s Anbar Province—the Marine area—had slackened. The war was rapidly winding down.
I was going to miss the show.
If I could qualify as a sniper, however, it would improve my odds of getting into the fight. Sniper school isn’t about perching up in a palm tree and taking out some guy down the way, it’s about tactics and weapons. I wanted to learn more, but leaving the fire team wasn’t easy.
Kreitzer wasn’t happy that I wanted to try out.
“Meyer,” he said, “I spend four months shaping you up, and you repay me by leaving the team? That sucks.”
My instructor was Staff Sgt. Mike Skinta for the next eighty exhausting days, starting with learning heightened powers of observation. We had to map terrain and pick out hidden objects in the distance with our spotting scopes. The goal was to make us see needles in haystacks, move quietly and invisibly, and estimate long distances down to a few feet.
We spent weeks shooting; hitting difficult targets became second nature. You have to squeeze the trigger so evenly that you don’t anticipate the recoil and throw the shot off.
Sniper school provided the finest training of my career. The Marine Corps emphasizes marksmanship. Every Marine is a rifleman. It makes no difference what rank you are or how sophisticated your job is. Marine Gen. Jim Jones was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and served as President Obama’s first national security advisor. Even in those prestigious top jobs, he still signed his emails as “Rifleman.”
The Marines were generally acknowledged as having the finest sniper training program. In the Corps, if you qualified as a sniper, you received a special “military occupational specialty”—0317. I didn’t know if I could achieve that distinction, though. The attrition rate in sniper school was close to 50 percent.
Outside military circles, the word
On one level, that sounds reasonable. It’s like asking a baseball player how many home runs he has hit. The Finnish sniper Simo Hayha held the world record. During the winter war of 1939-40, he killed more than five hundred Russian soldiers. He was called “The White Death” because his white camouflage uniform blended into the snow. Other snipers, too, had astonishing numbers of kills. In World War I, a platoon of South Africans, recruited from big game hunters, averaged 125 kills per man. In Vietnam, Marine Sgt. Carlos Hathcock killed ninety-three of the enemy. In Iraq, Chris Kyle, a SEAL, recorded 160 kills.
I quickly learned, though, that asking in sniper school about kills was the surest way to anger an instructor. Nine times out of ten, the poor bastard seen in a sniper’s scope never knew he was about to die. Taking the shot that killed a man was only one small aspect of being a sniper.
“We don’t judge each other based on the number of kills,” Staff Sgt. Skinta, my instructor, told me. “How many enemy you shoot depends on luck—on whether you’re assigned to a hot or a cold battlefield. The most respected snipers are those who plan the most thorough mission.”
We beginners learned over the next eighty days what the word
Next came complex field navigation, where you are dumped out at night in the middle of nowhere with a
