by Bing West
I was okay talking to guys. If we had disagreements, why, we could just start fighting. I was a typical heavyweight in that department. I’d paw with my left, then plow in with my right, using it like a pile driver, hammering away. Most times, the other guy and I would end up grappling for a headlock while banging away, usually ending up on the ground with torn shirts, scraped elbows, and bruised faces—hoping, by the way, that our friends would please pull us apart. I figured as long as my win/lose ratio was at 50 percent, I was doing okay.
When I was fourteen, my best friend, Mike Staton, tagged me with a roundhouse that knocked me off my feet. A dazzling white light exploded behind my eyes. At the hospital, the doctor confirmed I had suffered a serious concussion and should take up another hobby. For quite a few days, any sudden move sent an electric shock of pain around my skull.
In my senior year, a football injury ended my dream of playing college ball. I was the stereotypical cocky jock who had fizzled out. True to form, I tested how far I could push the buttons of some of my teachers. I got into the habit of leaving school in my Dodge truck at lunchtime and not returning. Dad didn’t know I was screwing up.
Somehow, I got involved helping a teacher, Mrs. Rattliff, who was working with autistic kids at the school. Maybe the way they stayed to themselves made me relate. I asked Mrs. Rattliff if the autistic kids could use any help.
Well, those kids were amazing. They picked up fast on everything. I liked seeing them improve. I enjoyed horsing around with them when lesson time ended. We’d walk down the corridors together, our own little group of happy misfits.
But, in terms of a football scholarship, I was pretty screwed. I was walking through the cafeteria in May of my senior year with no idea where I was headed next. My knee had been stitched up twice and I’d had three concussions. I had one vague scholarship offer from a vague college, but even if I faked my way through the entry physical, I knew my knee wouldn’t last another season. I was washed up as an athlete and I hadn’t developed strong study habits—I was bored by academics. I sure didn’t want to waste Dad’s hard-earned money drinking beer and cutting classes at some college.
I walked by a table with brightly colored brochures set up opposite the serving line. A rugged-looking sergeant with a crew cut stood behind the table. He was wearing dress blues. He looked like he owned the state of Kentucky.
“Have you been in combat?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, that’s what Marines mostly do,” he said. “Fallujah, Iraq. It was a shit hole when we got there and worse when we left.”
My granddad didn’t talk much about the Marines, but he was proud of his service. I knew they were tough.
“Yes, boot camp is rough and not everyone makes it through,” the sergeant told me. “The pay isn’t bad, seeing as we pay your room and board and ammunition.”
I asked him some questions. No, he didn’t like the M4 carbine—not enough stopping power. He preferred the 7.62.
“So do I,” I said. “The .308 can put down a big buck.”
My obvious reference to hunting fell on deaf ears. He wasn’t impressed with shooting something that couldn’t shoot back.
I felt I was taking an interview and failing. The sergeant was no more talkative than I was.
“So what are you planning to do?” he concluded, signaling he had given me enough of his time.
“I don’t know. Probably go to school. Play some college ball.”
He shifted around the brochures.
“Yes, you do that,” he said, “because you’d never make it as a Marine.”
I knew he was baiting me. He straightened his stack of brochures, letting the fishing line play out. Right, I couldn’t ride that big ATV. No sense in even trying. I actually left the cafeteria before turning around and walking back to his table, his silver hook in my cheek.
“You have the papers to sign up?”
“You’re seventeen. Your father has to sign. You’re not grown up yet.”
“If I’m going to be in the Marines, I want to be in the infantry. I want to fight, not sit behind a desk.”
In 2006, our country was in two wars. We had been attacked on 9/11. I was thirteen when I watched on television as the Twin Towers caved in. I was more than willing to fight the bastards who had murdered three thousand Americans.
“I’ll guarantee you a tryout at boot camp,” the sergeant said. “If you make it through, you can become a grunt.”
An hour later, he followed me out to our farm, where we sat around the kitchen table and he told me about the fighting in Fallujah.
“A lot of shots at five hundred meters,” he said, “straight down the streets.”
“I could hit at that range,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
I don’t know whether he believed me or not. We sat without saying much more until Dad walked in after work. He looked at the two of us.
“Ko,” he said, “what have you done now?”
The three of us talked for the next hour. There was no hard sell. The recruiting sergeant and my father left the decision up to me.
“I don’t want to go to college, Dad,” I said. “And I don’t want to stay here herding cows. I want something better.”
“Well, Ko,” he said, “I don’t disagree with your choice.”
Chapter 2
THE MARINE YEARS
The good-byes were somber when I left for boot camp. Dad was okay, but not really happy to see me go. Granddad told me I’d do fine if I didn’t piss off any of the sergeants. My guidance counselor, Ann, was somber. Her husband, Toby, a state trooper, had worked on our farm when I was about eight. Ten years my senior, he taught me how to spear tobacco and stalk turkeys. Ann and Toby had spoken up over the years whenever I needed it. None of my family came right out and said it, but my desire to be a Marine grunt in combat naturally did concern them. I’m sure there’s not one family in America that doesn’t have worries when a son or daughter goes off to war.
I sat among twenty other quiet recruits for the fourteen-hour bus trip from Louisville. At three in the morning, the bus started along the causeway that crosses the swamps around Parris Island, South Carolina. At the front gate, a sergeant boarded the bus.
“Put your heads between your legs!” he yelled. “Don’t move or blink.”
Then the bus door closed and we continued on for what seemed like the longest drive ever.
We came to a stop and the door opened. I heard the slow stomp of footsteps.
“Get your asses out of those seats!” a drill instructor boomed at us. “Outside! Keep your mouths shut and follow the yellow footsteps.”
So it began: close haircuts to strip away your old identity, exercises to prove you’re not half as strong as you figured, simple tasks that show you are mentally weak, drill instructors who mock your attempts to look tough. It’s right out of the movies, but it never stops.
We were handed a blanket and two sheets and told to make our bunks and then stand against the wall.
“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 sniper holds a mystique. People ask only one question of a sniper: “How many men have you killed?”
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 thorough meant. The instruction started with the basic power of observation, studying terrain and movement at near and far distances, then providing sketches of the land, its key features and its occupants. It was Kim’s Game on steroids—you stare at a complex set of objects for a minute and then from memory produce an accurate sketch. In sniper school, we had to pick out ten hidden objects with our M49 spotting scopes.
Next came complex field navigation, where you are dumped out at night in the middle of nowhere with a 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 t
hat 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.