Yet just as quickly as the Second Shia Uprising began that summer, it came to an end that fall. October was dead calm in Zones 22 and 50. November saw a major series of attacks launched by Sunni insurgents reinforced by a cadre of al-Qaida, but the Shia militias never again posed a serious threat to 2–162. A few scattered firefights with the Mahdi Militia remained to be fought in December and January, but the days of massed attacks ended with the warehouse raid.
Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson took his battalion home in March 2005. During the year the Volunteers had been in combat, they had suffered nine killed and over eighty wounded in action. Over ten percent of his citizen-soldiers had become casualties while struggling to bring stability in Iraq. It was the most difficult and battle-torn deployment the Oregon National Guard had experienced since fighting across the Pacific with General Douglas MacArthur in World War II.
The snipers came home with dozens of confirmed kills, but that is not what they remember. They take pride in the lives they saved at the Ministry of Interior in June 2004. They take pride in stopping the mortar attacks and the friendly casualties they incurred. Who knows how many lives they saved with their August 10 ambush.
Most importantly, Staff Sergeant Maries brought everyone home. Despite rocket attacks, firefights, roadside bombs, and urban ambushes, Nate Gushwa was the only one from the sniper section to be wounded in action, though there were several men from the scout platoon who were hit, including Andy Hellman, Randy Mitts, and Giordi.
Of his section’s performance in Baghdad, Kevin later said, “Nate and Buck—they were the best sniper team I had. I could always count on them to get the job done, and they need credit for that.”
Ten years later, Tyson Bumgardner looked back on the deployment and summed things up: “Most of us had families with a military hero in them. We all read the literature voraciously, we knew our unit’s unique history. We wanted the fight more than most. I think our scout/snipers were able to survive so many close fights with relatively few casualties because of our solid leadership … our aggression, discipline, and training. We thought of ourselves specially picked—and Oregon men are expected to never quit any fight. Ever.”
Six months after returning to Oregon, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. The governor of Louisiana appealed to Oregon for help. The 41st Brigade mobilized, and within a week deployed to New Orleans to put an end to the violence and looting there. Hendrickson took three hundred fifty men, veterans of the Baghdad firefights, into the Big Easy with him.
In a neighborhood that once had been home to eighty thousand Americans, the Volunteers found precisely seven holdouts. Here at home, they patrolled the trash-strewn streets and felt nothing but revulsion for the sights they witnessed. Block after block had been devastated by looters and vandals. Gang wars had broken out. The cops had gone rogue and the Volunteers caught them looting businesses and private homes. They encountered bullet-riddled corpses in mini-markets and gas stations, suicides closeted in waterlogged houses. One patrol encountered a corpse whose groin was being eaten by a stray dog. On another, the men escorted a distraught young man searching for his grandmother. Upon entering her home, they found her corpse draped across an upright piano. When the levees broke and the floodwaters hit her neighborhood, she’d been knocked off her feet by the first wave and slammed into a wall. She fell, dead, atop her beloved piano, her corpse rotting in the stifling humidity of late-summer Louisiana.
Running water did not exist in the city. Neither did power. The men slept on concrete walkways and on the steps of the chapel at the New Orleans Baptist Seminary. They took whores’ baths, ate MREs, and endured swarms of chiggers, mosquitoes, and other insects every night as they bunked down. None of the men grew used to the stench of the dead city. It permeated their filthy uniforms, lingered in their nostrils, and even the gentle breeze and occasional summer showers offered no respite from the charnel house smell.
Baghdad had not been as bad as this. Said Keith Engle later, “That an American city smelled worse than Baghdad was … unbelievable.”
Morale in the battalion was tested to the limits. The men had just picked up their civilian lives when they were thrust into this new nightmare. Some of the wives refused to believe they were even in the city, and at least two moved out while the Volunteers were gone. Many of the men, including Tyson Bumgardner, were scheduled to start college in the fall. The New Orleans deployment wrought havoc with those plans.
The cost of this deployment to his men was not lost on Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson. Within a week, he began to send the student-soldiers within his battalion home so they could make the start of the term at the University of Oregon and Oregon State. Others with family hardships soon joined them. The battalion’s footprint shrank until a kernel of one hundred fifty devoted men remained.
Through it all, the sniper section shined. During an early patrol, Specialist Jim Schmorde took one of the battalion’s few thermal sights with him. While moving along a raised railroad embankment at night, he spotted a heat signature in a neighborhood that had been particularly hard hit by the floodwaters. After studying it, he was convinced he’d found somebody. Was it a looter? One of the gangbangers known to be in the area who were shooting at passing rescue crews?
The next morning, the scout platoon went to find out. Using boats scrounged from the area, they motored across opaque black water filmed with rainbow slicks of oil. Schmorde led the search effort to the block where he’d seen the signature. The water there was still at least six feet deep. In places, the flood line reached the eaves of the one-story buildings.
They maneuvered from house to house, unsure of what they would encounter, but ready for anything. At last, as they knocked on one waterlogged front door, they heard a muffled and weak cry for help. Using crowbars, they broke into the house and found a dying eighty-nine-year-old woman. She’d been trapped inside her house for almost two weeks. When the floodwaters receded, they left her doors so swollen that she did not have the strength to open them. Same with her windows. Her rescuers eased her and her wheelchair into one of their boats and returned to the high ground where Patrol Base Volunteer, New Orleans, had been established. There, an ambulance sped her away to Belle Chase Hospital, leaving her wheelchair abandoned in the middle of Chef Menteur Boulevard.
She survived only because Jim Schmorde had brought a thermal sight on patrol with him. As in Baghdad, here at home the Oregon snipers saved lives.
At the end of September 2005, the last of the Volunteers returned home. Staff Sergeant Maries left the battalion soon after and joined an aviation unit. Buchholz left the Guard, but his desire to make a difference burned inside him. Six months after leaving the Guard, he found himself in a meaningless, dead-end job drawing a paycheck. It was a hollow existence for the man who always wanted to do more for his country and community. After a client yelled at him for an inconsequential error, he walked out and never looked back. He became a police officer in Independence, a small town just outside of his native Dallas. He was accepted onto the county SWAT team and served with distinction before moving on to the Salem Police Department. He continues to patrol the state capital today.
Nate Gushwa was medically retired from the Guard as a result of his wounds. He settled back in his hometown on the coast and rejoined the construction company he’d worked for prior to 9/11. He went to school and is a draftsman today.
He lives with the lingering effects of his wounds every day. The wire that clotheslined him on Route Hamms did permanent nerve damage to his neck. Sneezing for him is an agony. The sudden spasms it causes sends shock waves of nerve pain through his neck, arms, and hands. At times, his fingers tremble uncontrollably.
His refusal to leave the sniper section after he was wounded made things worse for him. Wearing his Kevlar helmet and body armor ensured that his tendons never healed properly. Scar tissue built up over the nerve bundles in the back of his neck. Over the years, the scar tissue has continued to build up and can be seen on X
-rays. There’s no surgical option for Nate, so he lives with these constant reminders of his time in Baghdad.
Keith Engle returned home and went to sniper school. He took the section back to Iraq when 2–162 deployed for a second time in 2009. It was a very different place by then. The streets weren’t filled with Mahdi Militia, the civil war between the Sunni and Shia that had begun at the end of their 2004–2005 deployment had mostly subsided. The battalion ran convoy operations, guarded bases, and chafed at the inactivity, boredom, and separation from their families. Engle lives with his family on the southern Oregon coast and remains in the National Guard today.
The 2–162 snipers still get together whenever they can. They hunt with their sons. On those trips, Nate and Darren use customized Remington 700 rifles built by Daryl Holland specially for them. At night, over drinks, they’ll sometimes speak of their firefights and gut-check moments in Baghdad. In their most serious moments, they grow bitter and angry over what happened at the MOI. For all they accomplished that year in Iraq, the pall cast by June 29, 2004, and the discovery of the torture compound has left them with unanswered questions. Who gave the order for the scouts to withdraw? Who was responsible for the unit inflicting the torture?
But most of all: what happened to the men who were not released? Those thirty-three men the scouts could not save. No matter where the snipers will go in their lives, those tortured, battered men are never far from their thoughts.
If only they could have done more.
It is the lament of soldiers and snipers whose sense of duty, honor, and service are embedded in their DNA.
EPILOGUE
America has always had a schizophrenic relationship with her snipers. On one hand, precision shooting is coded into our national DNA. To survive in the New World once required a combination of rugged individuality and the ability to use a rifle effectively. Shooting was not a recreational activity, it was a matter of life and death. It was a crucial life skill men took pride in and shared with their sons. Rifles became precious heirlooms, passed down from one generation to the next as a sacred American rite of passage. In battle, our sharpshooters played a key role in securing our nation’s independence at such places as Saratoga and Cowpens. They also saved the young republic more than once, most notably at New Orleans in 1815.
As warfare evolved through the nineteenth century, sharpshooters remained an important component of the American experience in the Civil War and the Indian Wars, but there developed a sense that there was something odious about such tactics. Sniping violated another deep-seated American value, one of sportsmanship and fair play. That revulsion contributed to the Army’s refusal to establish a permanent sniper corps in peacetime. That lead to a lot of hard lessons in World War I and II, when poorly trained American snipers went up against crack German and Japanese shooters who were better equipped.
The Army’s riflemen came to consider snipers a necessary evil. When pinned down by enemy shooters, they called for our own snipers to help clear the way. At the same time, they looked with disdain upon those who carried scopes atop their M1903s, considering them little more than killers.
Legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle perhaps summed it up best in Brave Men: “Sniping, as far as I know, is recognized as a legitimate means of warfare. And yet there is something sneaking about it that outrages American sense of fairness.”
The importance of sniping was recognized most clearly in the Marine Corps, which established three stateside schools dedicated to the craft. Yet even within the Corps, it was a necessary wartime evil. Soon after VJ day, the schools were closed down and the minting of new shooters came to an end.
The same thing happened after every war. In the heat of battle, the call for snipers was heard from every fighting front. In peacetime, their bastard stepchildren status ensured they were the first element of the military cut as budgets withered.
That prejudice against snipers cost a lot of American lives in the twentieth century as our enemies remained far more advanced in this realm than we were. Only after Vietnam did we finally learn the lesson. Both the Corps and the Army established dedicated, and permanent, sniper schools. The craft was taught, but often money for our specialized equipment languished. American snipers often bought their own gear and ammunition to compensate for their government’s penny-pinching.
The War on Terror changed the American sniper’s status within the military, and our society. Time after time on these new battlefields, shooters proved their worth as agents of death and protectors of life. Countless American soldiers and Marines returned home to their loved ones because of the expert work of America’s snipers. As combat shaped and revised our tactics, our shooters grew to be the most skilled and experienced on the planet. Not since the earliest days of our nation have our snipers played such a transformational role on our battlefields. Their prowess and achievements have led to a renewed golden age for our small, elite corps of warriors, unseen since the days of the Messenger of Death standing high atop the ramparts defending the Big Easy.
And yet, with peace almost upon us as our forces draw down in Afghanistan, America’s snipers fear for the future. While new weapons and technologies that will make them even more effective on the battlefield are just now coming into service, the Army and Marine Corps face massive budget cuts in the years to come. If history is any guide, that does not bode well for our battlefield sentinels. The short-sided mistakes that followed World War I and World War II are being repeated, and unless Marine and Army snipers gain powerful advocates in Washington, their specialty may again disappear, or at least be imperiled. Should that happen, the next time America’s warriors are called to battle, they will be thrown into the fray without these angels on their shoulders.
Every shooter who has ever looked through a scope at America’s enemies knows the tragedies that will follow should we fall into the trap of our historical mistakes. The Shock Factor isn’t just about dominating a battlefield, killing the enemy or destroying him psychologically. It is about protecting our own. Without the men behind the scopes, the soldiers in the street will be forever vulnerable. That is the great lesson of the War on Terror, and every sniper prays our nation takes that lesson to heart.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
JACK COUGHLIN:
This book was written as a testament for all snipers who have served our nation. John and I are grateful to every shooter interviewed for this book. Your time, energy, and memories made this book possible, and we hope as you read our words you feel like we’ve done justice to your achievements on the battlefield.
JOHN BRUNING:
In May 2008, I was fortunate to function as an OPFOR “sniper” for Alpha Company, 2–162 Infantry during a National Guard field exercise at Goshen, Oregon. I remember very clearly being hunkered down under a pine tree on a slope overlooking a makeshift village by the Lane County dump, observing 2nd Platoon as they worked. Trying to simulate a react-to-sniper drill was tricky at best, and there was clearly no way to create the Shock Factor that makes snipers so valuable in battle. Yet the drill left a deep impression on me. I looked through the scope at men I knew well, most were good friends, and one by one, I pulled the trigger and called their names to the Observer Controller functioning as the referee for the exercise. As each man went down, and the platoon took cover and countered my presence, I gained a glimpse of how vulnerable our warriors are to a concealed, trained shooter. The importance of having such men protecting my friends as they went about their missions was driven home to me, and I left with a great appreciation for those who carry scopes into combat.
So when I had the chance to work with Jack Coughlin on a book about such men, I jumped at the chance. I had just come home from Afghanistan, where I’d been an embedded writer with elements of the Oregon National Guard and the 3rd Combat Aviation Brigate, 3rd ID, and wanted a new project that had value and meaning to me. When our agent, Jim Hornfischer, suggested we team up on Shock Factor, I was all in.
Working with Jack
was a tremendous professional experience, and he has become a valued friend. Thank you, Jack, for everything.
To Charlie Spicer—it has been a great pleasure to work with you and the team at St. Martin’s. Your patience as our snipers came and went on overseas deployments was much appreciated, and the final result is very much a product of the great team we all became. Thank you for taking a chance on me, I am grateful for the opportunity. April, your tireless work and patience have been much appreciated. The book is much better for your efforts on our behalf. Thank you, and thanks to the rest of the team at St. Martin’s who made Shock Factor a labor of love.
Much of Shock Factor was written in my library in Independence. My daughter, Renee, made sure I was taken care of through many long nights. I would find notes on my laptop, treats on my desk. At odd hours of the night, she would get up and check on me to see how I was doing. Later, after Renee went through brain surgery, she spent six weeks with me day and night as she recovered from her operation. I’ve never had so much fun working, Cricket, than when you were hanging out with me. Thank you for all the motivation and the care. You’re an amazing young woman.
Both Renee and Ed joined a rifle team soon after I started writing Shock Factor with Jack. As a result, Ed was fascinated with the stories we were developing, and sharing chapters with him became one of the rituals that defined much of the book’s progress. Thank you, Ed; your love and support have been pivotal.
To Jenn, it didn’t turn out the way we thought it would, but your friendship and love have always been a vital part of my life. Thank you for all the countless things you’ve done for me as I’ve worked to develop this crazy career of mine. Our children will go far in life, no doubt because of the passion, care, and devotion you’ve given to them. Just know, I will always appreciate all that you have given me.
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