Shock Factor: American Snipers in the War on Terror

CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Artist

While precision marksmanship has been an enduring part of our military’s heritage, snipers have long been treated as the bastard stepchildren of the infantry. It has cost both the Army and the Marine Corps dearly over the years. But in Vietnam, the value of sniping finally sank in with the brass. In the Army, it started when the 9th Infantry Division established an eighteen-day sniper school in Vietnam during the fighting in 1968. By the end of the year, about seventy-five snipers had been trained. They were soon in action, and over the next seven months, the Army credited these men with over one thousand two hundred kills.

In the Reagan era, the Army opened a permanent sniper school in 1987 that has become the foundation of its precision-shooting program ever since.

The Corps developed its own, very stringent sniper program after the Vietnam War as well. The schoolhouse at Pendleton became the nexus of America’s most proficient shooters. Over the years, the school has evolved in ways to meet the challenges on the battlefield. Most recently, the Scout Sniper Basic Course was shortened slightly, “Basic” was dropped from its title, and stalking was deemphasized. The current syllabus devotes nine of twelve weeks to precision shooting. This reflects the lessons learned on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, where stalking targets has proven the exception, not the norm. Instead, combat experience has showed us that a wide variety of different and demanding shooting was taking place in every imaginable environment and terrain. Those dynamics became the core of the new Scout Sniper School in 2010.

The vast majority of the Army and Marine snipers emerging from these schools go straight to line battalions to fill the ranks of the scout platoons. In the Corps, each scout platoon includes roughly twenty snipers and observers, or ten teams. They function as an integral part of each Army and Marine infantry battalion, serving as their commander’s eyes and ears. They are true scouts, the best light infantry in the United States military who are capable of sneaking forward to find the enemy and protect the battalion’s infantry companies as they advance. They operate in the front lines, and often ahead of the front lines during conventional battles, such as the drive into Iraq in 2003. During the chaos caused by an insurgency, where there are no front lines, the scout platoons have been used to overwatch key areas, interdict enemy rat lines, and ambush IED teams.

Jason Delgado experienced that evolution from conventional warfare to insurgency while serving as a Marine sniper. Dark eyes, a wiry five foot nine, with an easy smile and a wicked sense of humor, Delgado made friends everywhere he went. From behind his scope, he saw it all, from force-on-force in his first combat encounters, to the wild west of the Iraqi-Syrian border where the insurgency mingled with smugglers, drug traffickers and organized crime syndicates. He scored dozens of kills, including one of the most remarkable snap-shots I’ve ever encountered.

Not bad for a city boy who’d never fired a rifle until he joined the Corps.

When Jason was five years old, he watched a junkie shoot his uncle in the head. Gang wars, drug violence, and pure thuggery defined his world and became his norm long before he’d grown old enough to realize how dysfunctional his Bronx neighborhood was compared to the rest of the country. When he was seven, a turf war broke out on his block, and his house was riddled with bullets.

A sense of hopelessness pervaded the neighborhood, but Jason’s dad struggled every day to provide an honest living for his family as a handyman. Part mechanic, part plumber, part carpenter, Jason’s dad grabbed hold of any job that came along, but was never able to earn enough to achieve escape velocity from the violence consuming their Bronx neighborhood.

As Jason reached his teen years, few options presented themselves. His school was a zoo, the trips between it and his house were almost like running the gauntlet through a war zone. Instead of working at the local fast-food joints between school semesters, the local kids sold crack or served as mules for the drug gangs. These were called “summer jobs” in the ’hood.

Jason took another path. He joined a cadet corps created and run by U.S. Army and Marine Corps veterans. The cadets learned basic infantry skills, absorbed military discipline, and were taught some of the finer points of leadership and scouting. The veterans showed their protégées how to create standard five-paragraph operations orders, and how best to report on enemy forces.

With the city of New York as their backdrop, they went out and executed simulated combat missions.

Jason recalled later, “We were pretty much an urban militia.”

The veterans would assign teams, give them missions, and work with other such organizations. They clashed with paintball guns and crept through heavily wooded areas like Van Cortland Park or Orchard Beach to report on “enemy activity” there. Often, the intel given to them by their veteran mentors would be false, which would force the cadets to improvise and adapt on the fly.

Many of those sneak and peak missions took place at night. Jason and his comrades would sleep out in the parks, establishing bivouacs before launching raids on known “enemy” positions. They’d find their tent areas, surround them, and initiate with a barrage of M-80 firecrackers and magnesium blocks thrown into their campfires. The explosions created mass confusion, and as their simulated enemies ran around trying to get organized, Jason’s team would storm into the chaos to snatch booty or key pieces of intel.

For Jason, the cadet corps was his escape from a life on the streets that so many of his peers chose. As he said later, “It was either that or sell crack.”

Though it may have been an escape at first, the military aspects of the corps, the discipline, and the pure fun of it all gave Jason purpose — and a childhood that he could look back on without regrets. He honed his skills through high school, and dreamed of becoming a Marine infantryman. At home, he began watching war movies. They had a visceral effect on him as he saw Hollywood’s version of selflessness in uniform. At times, they reduced him to tears. “It was through those films that I realized I am a Patriot,” he later said. He wanted to be a part of that brotherhood.

More truant than student, he graduated largely due to his devotion to Roosevelt High School’s swim team. He was an exceptional athlete and spent every moment he could in the water — when not out terrorizing other cadets in city parks.

For all the rough and tumble and competitive aspects of his life, Jason had another dimension to him that he shared with only a few who knew him. Starting in grade school, he discovered a passion for art. He would sketch for hours, drawing cartoons or battle scenes or whatever struck his fancy. It was another outlet for him, a means to express himself in a way not shared by many of those around him.

When he became a sniper, this talent became a key component to his abilities in the field. On surveillance missions, he could draw detailed three-dimensional drawings of target buildings in a matter of minutes, providing accurate and very useful intel to his battalion commander.

After high school, Jason studied art in college before dropping out to join the Marine Corps. He went Marine infantry, puzzled that anyone would enlist in the Corps for any other reason. To him, there was only one purpose for the Corps: to push rifles forward in the face of whatever opposition the enemy could muster. Carrying one of those rifles was every Marine’s job.

He served with 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines for eight months before getting a chance to try out for the battalion’s scout sniper platoon. The process, known as “Indoc,” or Indoctrination, is a brutal weeding-out marathon designed to test the toughness and suitability of prospective Marines. Jason went for it despite his relative newness to the Corps. “Everyone knows Marine snipers are the best trained and most disciplined and well known in the world,” he remembered. “I wanted to be a part of the best.”

During Indoc, the 3/4 Scout NCOs pushed every button they could think of to draw a reaction from their candidates. It was all part of stress testing them to see if they possessed enough discipline to keep focused in the midst of a rain of crap.

At one point, the candidates were ordered to do pull-ups. Jason hit the bars along with about twenty other Marines, and he knocked out ten in quick succession. An instructor nearby had been counting off, and suddenly he went from ten to three.

Jason let go of the bar and lost it. He started yelling at the instructor in frustration.

“I lost my shit,” he admitted. He washed out and was sent back to his line company. It was the first time he had ever failed at something he’d set out to achieve. The failure left him stunned. “It was a rude awakening.”

Lesson learned. In the future, Jason swore he’d take the fuck-fuck games and keep focused. After he’d been in combat, he discovered the value of those games. “You cannot control everything; and there are times you cannot help what is going on around you. In those moments, you cannot react emotionally. Those games test your emotional endurance.”

He tried out for the 3/4 Scout Platoon again at the next Indoc. The NCOs saw him coming and had already formed a bias. He ignored their extra treatment and worked furiously to prove he belonged. He did well through the entire crucible right up to the very end, when the NCOs interviewed each prospective Marine. After each interview, the NCOs would vote on whether to offer the man a slot in the platoon.

One by one, the NCOs voted “No Go” on Jason. The vote was unanimous, and Jason’s heart sank. He’d failed a second time.

I was the platoon sergeant at the time, and I remember watching Jason bust ass to try and make the grade. I remembered his Puerto Rican and Bronx accent, and his dark, intense eyes from his first time through. I also remembered the chip on his shoulder. This time, he’d come back humbled and determined to succeed. Instead of a chip, I saw resolve.

So I stepped in. I said to my guys, “Look, this is the second time this Marine has tried out for the platoon. Okay, he had an attitude the first time, but just coming out and facing all this all over again shows heart enough to work with. I vouch for him.”

Jason flourished in our platoon. We worked harder than anyone else in the brigade, and Jason worked harder than almost any of our new guys. Though he’d grown up amid gun violence, he’d never handled a real firearm until the year before in Basic. This actually proved an advantage to him, as he had no bad habits to break. We started teaching him the math behind long-range precision shooting, and all of the NCOs discovered he had a knack for numbers.

“The math and physics made sense to me,” he recalled.

He was all heart after he joined us. To hone his skills, Jason spent thousands of dollars out of pocket on ammunition and extra gear — as did most of the platoon. Day after day, we hit the range and I saw him develop into a phenomenal shot.

By the time he went to the Scout Sniper Basic Course, Jason had been so thoroughly trained within the platoon that school seemed easy. He received his class’s High Shooter award. To Jason, that didn’t seem unusual at the time, as 3/4 Marines had made a habit of sweeping up those sorts of things. He was just glad to be part of the team.

During the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, 3/4 Marines led the charge to Baghdad, and our scout sniper platoon went into combat for the first time. Most of our shooters had never seen action, and they entered the fight amped up, aggressive, and eager to go. I’d seen enough in Somalia to realize that this would be a marathon, not a sprint, but I also knew that I couldn’t tell my guys that. They would need to experience it for themselves and settle down as the innate foreignness of battle and death became their daily routines.

This is a process that most noncombat veterans cannot understand. An average American has little association with death, or the threat of it. When somebody dies in a car wreck, or in a street fight, or in some accident, their body is removed almost always within minutes. With death that remote in our daily lives, being confronted with unexpected or violent death is even more deeply shocking and transformative for us. One only needs to remember the sight of our fellow Americans leaping from the Twin Towers on September 11 to know the indelible effect such sights have on us here at home.

In combat, these moments are commonplace. They happen all around us, they claim our friends, civilians, and the enemy. In most of us, there is a switch that such scenes eventually throw within our psyches. It allows us to cope and function. Our first encounters are shocking, no doubt, but then we go numb. Black humor helps, and we make jokes to help normalize the insanity around us. While fighting for the Diyala River bridge, for example, one of the Iraqi soldiers we killed remained in our front for hours. We nicknamed him “Ach-Dead,” something that buttoned-down Americans would have probably found offensive. By then, as a platoon, we’d thrown our switches.

It happens in every war, to every soldier, Marine, and sniper who can psychologically withstand warfare. One look at the gruesome Battle of Verdun is all it takes to see the extremes that the human spirit can endure. During that 1916 campaign, German shellfire was so intense that entire companies of French infantry vanished into these barrages. Trenches were ground up, pitted by artillery strikes, then ground up again by subsequent barrages. When French reinforcements were fed into the battle and told to dig in, their spades unearthed shredded pieces of their comrades. They dug anyway, and soon new trenches took shape with corpses embedded in their walls. The fresh troops grew so immune to these horrors that they would sit and eat their rations surrounded by the rotting remains of their brother warriors, knowing that in time, they would probably be entombed in the trench walls, too.

Violent death is shock enough, at least initially. Taking a life is another thing altogether. It never unfolds the way Hollywood portrays. Novelists who have never taken a life, or seen one taken, have created all sorts of heroic final moments, or desperate last stands as their protagonists face the whirlwind with unfettered resolve, killing away without thought or conscience.

Jason Delgado had been no stranger to violence. His world back home in the Bronx had been steeped in it. Yet the scale and nature of what we experienced during the drive up was so much more vast and surreal, it left him hyperalert, edgy, and unsettled. As we fought forward toward the Diyala River bridge, the gateway to southeastern Baghdad, Jason came to grips with the nature of our job as shooters.

It was at the end of March 2003 when 3/4 Marines pushed into a small town we called Buyinah. The Iraqi Army and Fedayeen (Iraqi guerrilla fighters) resisted fiercely, and the fighting devolved into a close-range small-arms and RPG slugfest. Jason, one of our lieutenants, and one other sniper scaled a nearby tower to try and get a better view of the enemy ahead of us. As they did, the enemy fired a rocket-propelled grenade. This one streaked straight at one of our armored vehicles, slammed into its track, but failed to detonate. Jason spotted the smoke plume created by the launch, but couldn’t see the enemy soldier who had fired it.

He was carrying an M16A2 at the time, zeroed to six hundred yards. He scanned the area around the smoke plume until movement caught his eye. In an alleyway, a Fedayeen fighter, dressed in black, edged out of a building and moved to a nearby corner. He was armed with an AK; there was no doubt about taking the shot.

Jason leveled his M16, brought his sights onto his target, and pulled the trigger. The shot missed. He took aim again. The Fedayeen had not moved. Jason fired again, and missed again.

He took a breath, let part of it out, and tried to relax amid the din of the battle playing out around him. He focused and pulled the trigger a third time. The Fedayeen dropped his rifle and clutched his stomach. He began to walk with awkward, almost drunken steps. He hadn’t gone far when Jason saw him bend over and hunch his shoulders. Then he fell to the ground. As he lay there, Jason looked on as the dying man crossed his legs, then crossed his arms over his chest. He bled out in that position a few seconds later.

Jason stared at the corpse, the shock of his first kill and the peculiar way the man died sinking in. A stay thought ran through his mind. Hollywood never gets this right.

The fighting continued. Jason shouldered his rifle and scanned for targets. The hyperness, the overeagerness born from inexperience, drained away. He settled down and felt cold resolve. He was a veteran now.

Not long after his first kill moment, Jason was spotting for a sniper named Jesse Davenport. The battalion had been advancing on the Diyala River bridge, but the going had been tough and bloody. The enemy resisted with surprising intensity, hitting 3/4 Marines with everything they had. No wonder. If the Iraqis lost the bridge, the Marines would have crossed the last obstacle before Baghdad. It was the Remagen Bridge of the Iraq War. If we took it, we’d have a dagger pointed right at the heart of Saddam’s capital.

Jason spotted an Iraqi soldier on a rooftop and lased him for Jesse. Eight hundred yards away. Davenport brought his scope on the target, but could only see part of the man’s weapon and a portion of his head.

They’d set up a position on a rooftop, so there was little elevation difference to calculate. But a slight breeze was blowing. Jason raised one finger in the air to gauge the wind and said, “One and half right.”

“Roger.”

Davenport dialed it into his scope. A moment later, he took the shot. The Iraqi suddenly clutched his face and spun out of sight.

“Oh my God! Dude! You hit him!” Jason exclaimed. The veteran in him now marveled at the incredible complexity of the shot. To hit a sliver of a man at eight hundred yards was something only a handful of shooters could ever pull off.

“Jesse, greatest shot ever!”

Davenport pulled his eyeball out of the scope and grinned back.

My boys had grown up.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Ain’t Dyin’ Tonight

As 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines inched closer to the Diyala River bridge, armor battles raged around the Iraqi’s last foothold on the southern bank. Massive, sixty-seven-ton M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks used their 120mm guns to blast a path of pure destruction through every Iraqi strongpoint. Nothing the Soviets produced during the Cold War could stand toe-to-toe with the American tanks, and those Iraqi crews who tried ended up paying an unimaginable price. Here and there, Delgado and his fellow snipers encountered the burned-out remains of T-62 tanks, whose armor proved no defense to American-depleted uranium rounds. In some cases, the 120mm rounds had struck the T-62s in the bow and blown clear through the vehicle to exit the other side. The incredible kinetic energy the round produced created a vacuum in its wake so powerful that it sucked the Iraqi crews through the exit holes that were the size of quarters. Beside the wrecked Soviet tanks there would be a fine spray of human remains drying on the ground in a fan spreading from those exit holes.

Despite being in service since the 1980s, not a single M1A1 had been lost to enemy fire, including during Desert Storm when hundreds of them wiped out the bulk of Iraq’s armored forces. It was the closest thing to an invulnerable weapon’s system the United States possessed. To the Marines, the Abrams was king of the battlefield. Where those tracks went, the Marine infantry knew they were in the best possible hands.

Until the day after April Fools turned everything upside down.

A civilian truck appeared on the battlefield. Unbeknownst to the Marines, it had been turned into an improvised weapon, packed with explosives including an antitank missile. The driver careened into an M1A1 and triggered his car bomb. The blast destroyed the Abrams and left it a skeletalized hulk that burned for hours.

Jason Delgado and the other snipers of 3/4’s scout platoon had never seen such an attack. Mixed in with the Iraqi Army units they were fighting were Fedayeen guerrillas, but this was the first suicide bombing they’d faced. It was a harbinger of things to come as Saddam’s die-hards grew increasingly desperate to stop the Marine advance.

On April 3, 2003, the battalion assaulted Al Kut, a small Iraqi town only a few kiloyards from the critical bridge across the river. An artillery barrage paved the way, and Abrams tanks rolled forward with the Marine infantry, but the Iraqis resisted fiercely.

The 3/4’s battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, had gone in with the initial assault force. One of the battalion’s scouts, Corporal Mark Evnin, was with him, along with the unit’s sergeant major. Just after securing a foothold in the town, the Iraqis counterattacked. Some fifteen fighters and soldiers charged out of buildings and rubble in a human wave, bent on trying to overrun and destroy a nearby Abrams.

The 3/4’s sergeant major dashed across a street to help stop the attack. Evnin, a gung-ho kid from Burlington, Vermont, followed. As he ran, an Iraqi bullet struck him in the hip. Three years removed from his graduation ceremony at South Burlington High, Evnin tumbled to the street, critically wounded.

He’d been a new addition to the scout platoon and had not had a chance to go to sniper school before the battalion deployed to the Middle East. Eager to learn, eager to excel, he was a skinny, narrow-faced twenty-one-year-old whom everyone liked because his enthusiasm came from his heart, not from a sense of ambition.

The company medics rushed to his aid even as the Iraqi human wave attack was mowed down. All fifteen soon lay dead near the M1A1.

Mark was loaded into a Humvee and rushed to an aid station about a kilometer behind the lines. Doctors and medics descended on him. Mark was talking, and when asked by one of the docs, he wiggled his toes.

A chaplain rushed over. Mark was Jewish, so he leaned over the wounded Marine and read him the Shema, the first prayer the young Vermont native learned as a child.

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.… And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

The Chaplain finished and began to read the 23rd Psalm. Mark looked up at him and said, “Chaplain, I’m not going to die.”

A MEDEVAC CH-47 Chinook helicopter landed nearby, and the medical staff carried Mark’s stretcher to the bird. The helo lifted off and rushed south for a combat support hospital.

But it was too late. During the flight, Mark Evnin went into shock and died. He was 3/4’s first combat loss, which was difficult enough on his fellow Marines. But his death hit the scout platoon like a sledgehammer.

For Jason Delgado, learning the news marked the beginning of the most painful and intense period of the invasion. The fighting grew increasingly intense as the battalion clawed the final kiloyards to the bridge. On April 6, 2003, the snipers and infantry of 3/4, supported by armored personnel carriers, or Amtracs, Humvees, and M1 Abrams tanks, finally advanced to the south end of the Diyala River bridge.

They’d reached the last obstacle before Baghdad.

The Iraqis were under no illusions. Should the Marines get across the river, they would be unable to stop the Americans from assaulting into Baghdad. Their capital and the Saddam regime’s survival were at stake. Republican Guard units were thrown into the north bank’s defense. Fedayeen fighters and artillery were also brought up.

The bridge had suffered heavy damage, which made getting vehicles across it impossible — at least until combat engineers were able to repair it. But the decision was made to assault across in daylight on the morning of April 7. Along with a reinforced platoon from Kilo Company, three sniper teams from the 3/4 Scouts would go across in the initial attack and secure a foothold on the far side. Their precision marksmanship would be relied on to repulse any enemy counterattacks while the battalion fed reinforcements into the bridgehead.

In the morning, both sides launched heavy artillery barrages at each other. Marine 105mm shells pounded the north bank, blowing apart buildings and Republican Guard dug-in defensive positions in preparation to the assault.

The rain of high explosives killed or wounded dozens of the elite Iraqi troops, but their artillery exacted chilling revenge. Just before our attack began, their spotters on the far bank must have seen the Marines gathering to storm the bridge. They called in a fire mission, and three heavy shells landed in quick succession right among the American spearhead. One scored a freakish, one-in-a-million direct hit on an Amtrac parked near the south end of the bridge. The blast wounded several Marines and killed two of the vehicle’s crew, Lance Corporal Andrew Aviles and Corporal Jesus Medellin, instantly.

While the Iraqis continued to lob shells at 3rd Battalion, the American barrage lifted. It was time for the assault element to go forward. Jason Delgado and the other scouts charged across the bridge with the Marine infantry. They weaved around shell holes the size of Volkswagens torn in the roadway as two or three Iraqi mortar rounds exploded nearby. Fortunately, none of the assaulting Marines were hit by shrapnel. They pressed on, climbing around debris and ducking whenever bullets pinged off the bridge’s steel structure or whined overhead.

When Jason reached the north side of the bridge, he saw the bodies of uniformed Iraqi Republican Guard troops splayed in the dirt, victims of the preassault artillery bombardment. He ran past their ragdoll corpses and into a nearby one-story cinderblock building. He and his spotter climbed onto the roof to cover down on the main road stretching from the bridge northward into Baghdad.

The rest of the snipers found good positions to do the same thing. I came across a short time later with Colonel McCoy. We would need every gun in this fight, for surely the Iraqis would counterattack this position since we were the biggest threat to Baghdad they faced.

Snipers usually operate in pairs, each team covering a particular compass point. This time, the platoon knew where the enemy would be coming from, and we worked together to concentrate our fire on any approaching targets to ensure they would not get close enough to harm the Marine infantry steaming across the bridge to expand our toehold on the north bank.

While behind his M40 bolt-action rifle, Jason heard a warning transmitted over the battalion radio net. The Iraqis were using ambulances loaded with explosives as suicide vehicle bombs. The snipers were told to be on the lookout for anything resembling an ambulance.

“That’s pretty fucking low,” Jason muttered under his breath.

The snipers had a clear view of the road to Baghdad out to at least nine hundred yards. At the edge of their field of vision was a small rise, then a gentle curve. On either side, pockets of surviving Fedayeen and Republican Guards took potshots at the Marines streaming across the bridge.

A white pickup truck appeared in the road. It rounded the bend, disappeared behind the slight rise, then came into view again, head-on to the snipers. By this time, I had set up shop across the street from Jason. As the rig sped toward the bridge, Jason and I could see the driver wore a green Iraqi Army uniform. He also had on what looked like a long brown leather hat like Russian tank crews wear. A passenger stood in the pickup’s bed, wearing a red headdress and hefting an AK-47.

We coordinated our ambush over the radio. At four hundred yards, I gave a short count, and we opened fire simultaneously. Jason’s range to target was 395 yards. Mine was 411.

The driver died instantly, struck twice from our 7.62mm M40s. As the truck drifted to a stop, the passenger bailed out. We hit him, too. We later discovered he had a pistol concealed in the small of his back at his waistline. Those shots were Jason’s first with his M40 bolt-action rifle.

What were these two guys doing? Certainly they were not the vanguard of a Republican Guard counterattack, but perhaps they were scouting forward to find out the situation at the bridge. Our artillery bombardment probably destroyed communications between their headquarters echelons and the front-line units, leaving the Iraqi leadership in the dark.

The snipers hunkered down and waited to see what would follow. An ambulance loaded with explosives? Another truck bomb? The thought of one of those coming at the bridgehead left the entire scout platoon tense and edgy. Marines have a raw spot for suicide truck bombs. The one Hezbollah drove into the barracks at the Beirut airport in the 1980s killed 241 of our brothers. Though many of the men in 3rd Battalion hadn’t been born when that happened, Marines never forget their heritage, history — or old wounds that had yet to be avenged.

That truck bomb in Beirut turned out to be the largest nonnuclear explosion detonated since World War II. Say what you will about the Middle East; the people there know how to build things that go boom.

Whatever happened, Jason and the other snipers were determined to keep the Marines around us safe from such a fate. It was crucial that we stop any vehicle from reaching the bridgehead. But with enemy soldiers and Fedayeen militia still moving around the position, there was no way to establish a traffic control point.

The bolt-action M40s would have to do the job. The snipers resolved to fire into engine blocks at five hundred yards. If the vehicles didn’t stop, the drivers would die at three hundred.

What followed was the worst twenty-four hours Jason endured in combat. It was also mine. We remained in our positions without food and without water resupply all day, through the night, and into the next morning as wave after wave of civilian vehicles streamed down the road at us. Some were driven by uniformed Iraqi soldiers. Some were driven by panicked civilians. They were intermingled, and the Americans at the bridge could not distinguish who was a suicide bomber and who had simply driven into the battle crazed with fear and unable to think.

At five hundred yards, we shot into the engine blocks, but too many times the vehicles kept going. Innocents died, but a lot of enemy fighters did as well. For Jason, the hours became a blur of rage and angst as he was faced again and again with a devil’s choice: hold fire as a van or truck crossed the three-hundred-yard threshold even after the warning shots and risk the lives of every Marine on the north bank, or take the shot. Not a man in the scout platoon wanted the deaths of American Marines on his conscience, so we all took the shots. And each time Jason pulled the trigger, his conscience grew burdened with the result. So did mine. We were in an impossible position.

Only later in the insurgency did the Marines learn that the insurgents forced civilians to drive into our checkpoints around Iraq ahead of a suicide bomber. That kept our soldiers and Marines guessing, always wondering if the next vehicle would blow them apart or not. The Jihadists used any means necessary to coerce these innocents into their vehicles. They threatened to kill them, or kill their families. Often, they took families hostage to ensure the civilian would carry out his orders.

And the most insidious part of this tactic was the propaganda value the insurgents made when American troops killed those civilians. They counted on it, and trumpeted America’s barbarity on their Jihadi websites. Their willing accomplices in the media followed that lead, and all too many times young soldiers and Marines who were faced with this choice, incomprehensible to their fellow Americans back home, were eviscerated by our own news outlets.

Snipers are not soulless warriors. Snipers are not men without conscience. They are guardians of the infantry first and foremost. And on that bridgehead, the snipers of 3/4 performed that task with all the judgment, skill, and professional resolve they possessed.

But it came at a terrible cost. The Diyala River bridge scarred us all.

In the aftermath, when the platoon was finally relieved, Jason and I drifted back to get hot chow and some sleep. Filthy, stinking, and hollow-eyed, we staggered out of the fight, rage and anguish poisoning our souls.

All of this was made worse by the press, of course. Johnny-come-latelies showed up at the bridge in the wake of the fight to see its aftermath. They didn’t report on the armed men in civilian clothes we’d killed. They didn’t report on the Fedayeen or the uniformed Iraqis mingled with the civilians who died as they barreled down the highway toward the bridge. They just reported the civilians, and never understood the agony Jason, Jesse, and the rest of us endured as we struggled to make the decisions that kept our Marines safe.

By the time we advanced into Baghdad a few days later, and Saddam’s statue fell, Jason Delgado had nothing left to prove to himself, or anyone else. Warriors emerge from the crucible of the fight. Men go into it with expectations of how they will react when touched with fire. The flames sear in different ways. Some break and have not the psychological tools to cope. Others rise to the occasion. And some give up all hope and cast their lot with fate. Men who believe they have nothing left to live for are among the most dangerous — and brave. They don’t give a fuck.

When Baghdad fell that April, the snipers of 3/4 no longer gave a fuck. Constant combat and exhaustion had etched away everything but their sense of professionalism and duty. Below both was the rage, nebulous and unfocused.

From atop a skyscraper, Jason and Jesse Davenport watched Baghdad devolve into chaos as its citizens embarked on looting sprees. Random acts of violence broke out in the street below. The two snipers grew jaded to it, and only intervened when somebody below posed a significant threat to innocents still trying to get by with their lives. They were still guardians, but this time, they were protecting Iraqis from other Iraqis.

Atop a fifteen-story building in the government district one day in mid-April, Jesse caught sight of a young Iraqi male as he opened fire randomly with an AK-47. This wasn’t celebratory fire — we’d all seen a lot of that since the fall of Saddam’s regime. This was a kook with an assault rifle who ran into a street spraying gunfire at the people milling about there.

Jesse took aim with his M40. Jason read off the range: a hundred and eighty yards. The gunman sprinted down the street below, shooting wildly. Fifteen stories in Bagdad usually put us at about a hundred and fifty feet over street level. Jesse had to compensate for the steep angle of elevation. He calculated the shot and placed his scope’s reticle low on the target. Snipers call that the “angle of the dangle.” When up high shooting down, you aim low. It takes an accomplished marksman to get comfortable with such shots. The Marines and Navy now have a shooting school dedicated to the art of high-angle shooting.

Jesse Davenport was a natural at it. Once again, Jason Delgado witnessed him make an incredible shot only a few could possibly make. The gunman was running erratically, which meant Jesse had to track him. Simultaneously, he factored in the lead necessary to hit him as he moved, the angle of the dangle, wind, and distance.

Jesse pulled the trigger and blew the madman off his feet in a dead sprint. He flopped to the ground, a 7.62mm bullet hole in his forehead. It was one of the most technically challenging shots any of the 3/4 snipers took during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Not long after, on May 3, 2003, Jesse and Jason were up on a thirty-story building, covering a contingent of Marines ordered to secure millions of dollars from a partially looted bank. Looters still roamed in packs, and the scene below was one of chaos and sudden ignitions of violence. Jesse was spotting for Jason that day, and as they glassed the frenzied scene below, they discovered a group of armed males rushing toward the melee. Several of them carried AKs, and they hefted them about and fired at random.

Not only were they a threat to other Iraqi civilians, they posed a threat to the Marines at the bank. Jesse lased them. Two hundred yards out and thirty stories below. Jason took aim and settled his reticle on one of the males who wore a green and white tracksuit. He carried both an AK and a long, sheathed knife on his belt. He and his pals ran along the street, their backs to the American snipers as they shot up the neighborhood with full auto bursts from their AKs.

These guys needed to be stopped. Jason took the shot. His round missed. The men kept running toward the bank. The New Yorker, perplexed, racked his M40s bolt and drew another bead.

He missed again.

He got up and ran with Jesse to the far side of the roof to see if his zero was off. He aimed at a water tank atop another skyscraper and pulled the trigger. The shot went exactly where he’d wanted it to go.

Why had he missed Green Tracksuit then? As he rushed back to his original position, it dawned on him — he’d been shooting high. Quickly, he calculated the angle of the dangle, set the reticle below Green Tracksuit’s waist, and fired.

The bullet hit the man in the kidneys. He spun and dropped as his astonished friends stared at him. They froze, totally captivated by the Shock Factor. Jason chambered another round and waited to see what they would do.

It took several seconds for the spell to be broken, but when it was, the gunmen panicked. Some dropped their weapons, others bolted into a nearby alley, running as if the Devil himself was on their heels. To a man, they left their fallen comrade to die in the street.

That single shot was all it took to break their morale and render them no threat at all to the Marines at the bank. The Shock Factor’s power on the human psyche was something Jason would never forget.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN The 440

For all its intensity and the toll it took on Jason, the drive to Baghdad was cake compared to his second deployment, this time with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines.

After a very brief stay at home following the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom I, Jesse Davenport, Jason, and a few others from the 3/4 Scouts were sent to join 3/7 as it worked up for operations in Anbar Province. The battalion arrived on the Iraqi-Syrian border in February 2004, just as the war entered a new and deadly phase.

For the first and only time during the Iraq War, the diverse and fractious insurgent groups attempted to spark a national uprising. Cooperation between the Shia militias and the Al Anbar Sunni rebels took place at a high level, including a secret planning conference later discovered to have been held in London mosques.

The killing of four American Blackwater contractors at a bridge on the outskirts of Fallujah on March 31, 2004, sparked the uprising. Within days, almost every province in Iraq seethed with violence and rebellion. The Coalition was caught completely by surprise, especially in the south where the Shia were considered to be pro-occupation.

All across southern Iraq, Shia militias and insurgent groups struck at the Americans and nascent Iraqi security forces. Entire towns and cities fell into their hands. The militias, including the notorious Mahdi Militia, used their success to terrorize the local populations as they enforced their radical brand of Islam. Shop owners selling Western DVDs were told to shutter their doors. Those who didn’t were dragged into the streets of Basra and Najaf to be beaten or murdered. Women who did not cover themselves completely when they went outdoors were shot or beaten — or worse. Couples who dared display affection to each other in public were set upon by the militias, pummeled and left bleeding in the streets as examples.

The British and American forces in the south were spread very thin. Nobody had expected this sudden onslaught, and the majority of the Coalition’s fighting power had been deployed in Baghdad or Al Anbar Province. This sudden development threatened the supply lines to Kuwait, and in many places the highways the logistical convoys used were overrun and fortified by the Shia insurgents.

The U.S. had to switch gears. The offensive began just as the first wave of troops were rotating home in what was one of the military’s largest relief in place operations ever. Tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines who had been trying to establish order for the past year suddenly found themselves forced to call their families and tell them they would not be home after all. The 1st Armored Division was among the first units to have their deployment extended. Instead of going back to Kuwait, then home, the tankers and mech infantry were thrown into a counteroffensive in the south, supported by the freshly arrived 1st Infantry Division.

As the battle raged from Baghdad to the Kuwait border, the Marines in Al Anbar Province bore the brunt of the Sunni half of the national uprising. The press focused on Fallujah, where the Marines launched an assault into the city to clear the rebels out. Breathless reporters recounted street fights raging throughout Fallujah, but they ignored the broader scope and context of what soon became a transformative moment in the history of the Iraq War.

The battle for Fallujah soon got mired in politics made worse by intervention and micromanaging from Washington. Elsewhere, the Sunni insurgents managed to cut the main supply route from Baghdad through Anbar Province in at least two places. Those bold moves forced the Marines to react; they pulled troops out of other areas and cleared the highway. In Ramadi, the insurgents launched a series of coordinated attacks that rocked the Marines and Army units there. Everywhere, the Americans were reacting to the enemy. The Sunnis held the strategic initiative.

On the western edge of Al Anbar Province stood the city of Husaybah. Long an outlaw stronghold during the Saddam regime, it was sort of Iraq’s version of the Mos Eisley Space Port from the first Star Wars movie. When Obi Wan told Luke, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy…” he could have been referring to this last outpost on the Syrian border. Remote, far from centers of authority, Husaybah was Iraq’s lawless Wild West.

The place functioned on greed, corruption, and smuggling. The border crossing was the city’s main source of revenue. Everything from oil to booze to weapons came across the frontier there, and the Iraqi security forces manning the checkpoints simply took their cut and looked the other way.

When the insurgency gained traction through the fall of 2003, Husaybah became one of the key resupply routes for the Sunni rebels. Syria was to Al Anbar as Pakistan was to the Taliban in Afghanistan — a safe zone from which to shuttle men, materiel, and weapons into the fight.

Choking off this supply network became the task of 3/7 Marines, starting in February 2004. But the Americans quickly discovered they had been given an impossible task. Every day, thousands of vehicles crossed the border at Husaybah, and checking them all was simply beyond the capabilities of the battalion. They didn’t have the men or the resources to do it, and the Iraqi frontier guards could not be trusted. Plus, the smugglers and criminals who had been making these runs for years, and knew how to hide stuff, were now working for the insurgents. Each day, hundreds of semitrucks filled with fruit or other perishables lined up to cross the frontier. Hidden deep within their beds would be weapons, ammunition, and even young foreign volunteers eager to join the Jihad. Short of emptying each truck and searching it from the frame up, there was no way to fully halt the flow.

And it was perilous duty. Husaybah was full of armed criminals, Sunni rebels, and a growing kernel of al-Qaida operatives just securing a foothold in this part of the country. On April 14, 2004, an Iraqi pickup truck was stopped by a fire team of 3/7 Marines. Corporal Jason Dunham approached the driver, who lunged at him when his car door was opened. Dunham punched and kicked the man, trying to subdue him. As he did, the driver activated a grenade. Dunham saw it fall to the ground next to his feet and knew that it would kill or wound two of his fellow Marines standing nearby. He let go of the driver, pulled his helmet off and used it to cover the grenade. Then he fell atop it to further shield his brothers from its blast.

It exploded and mortally wounded Jason Dunham, who died several days later at a Stateside hospital. His comrades were unharmed by the blast, and as they recovered from the shock of it, they spotted the driver trying to run away. They killed him with rifle fire, then discovered his pickup truck had been full of weapons and ammunition. He’d been one of the mules smuggling for the insurgency.

Jason Dunham later received a posthumous Medal of Honor, the first Marine to be awarded one since the Vietnam War.

But not the last.

The smuggler Dunham’s friends had killed turned out to be part of the logistical support for a new offensive the insurgents planned to unleash in Husaybah. For days, Sunni cells had been infiltrating Husaybah from Ramadi and Fallujah. More poured over the border by the truckload. Soon, they had at least three hundred well-armed and well-led fighters deployed around the city. What followed was one of the most intense, and unheralded, battles of the Iraq War.

Jason Delgado awoke with that slow burn of anger in his stomach. From day one on this second deployment, what he was seeing through his scope flew in the face of the assumptions being made by his chain of command. While the leadership thought there was only a scattering of criminals and Saddam loyalists hiding in the rabbit warren of streets and alleys in Husaybah, Jason sensed something else entirely was going down.

On their first mission in February, Jason and the other 3/7 snipers went out to overwatch an Iraqi police station from the local Ba’ath Party headquarters building. It was the tallest structure in the area, so it afforded a good view. Within minutes of arriving there, though, they took sustained small-arms fire and had to be extracted.

In the weeks that followed, Jason was the only sniper in the battalion taking shots. Whether his experience and training with 3/4 made him quicker to identify threats, or if the others were too concerned about a bad shoot, he didn’t know. But they were clean kills against armed men actively threatening Coalition forces. Yet every time he pulled the trigger, his chain of command stuck him in a room and grilled him like he was a criminal. Combat was stressful enough; being hammered like this by his own people for doing his job was almost unbearable.

It didn’t help that the sniper section of the scout platoon was undermanned. Instead of ten teams, they were lucky to field three with five men. Casualties over the past year and the demands on the Corps had left every battalion short-handed, so 3/7 was not unique in this regard. Still, the numbers game just added to the burden. They’d only been in country for about six weeks, and already the daily (and nightly) grind was taking its toll.

Jason and the scouts stayed at Al Qaim with the rest of 3/7’s headquarters element for only a short time as the battalion settled into its new AO. The town sat about a mile from the Syrian border and the base was only a few minutes’ driving time to Husaybah, where a hundred and fifty man company from the battalion had been forward deployed. A week after arriving, Jason and the rest of the snipers packed up and joined them.

That morning, outnumbering the local Marines two to one, the insurgents launched a full-scale assault in Husaybah.

In began with a baited ambush. They detonated an IED on the main road through town, not far from the Ba’ath Party headquarters building. The blast triggered an immediate reaction from Captain Richard Gannon’s company. He and a platoon sortied from their outpost — and drove straight into an ambush. Machine guns, mortar fire, and AK-47s raked the platoon. The fighting spread from the street into the nearby buildings.

As it happened, a Marine Recon team had been on the top floor of the Ba’ath building. Now, they discovered the insurgents had taken over the bottom floor and used it as an ambush position against Captain Gannon’s reaction force. The Recon guys crept downstairs, burst into the first floor and killed all the insurgents there.

In a nearby building, a squad of Marines ran into a die-hard group of insurgents. Fighting room to room, several Marines were killed. Others were wounded. The casualties piled up. Captain Gannon called for MEDEVAC and reinforcements. More men from his company flowed into the fight, but they were outnumbered and the enemy was well emplaced.

In the chaos of this point-blank urban firefight, Captain Gannon disappeared. For an hour nobody could raise him on the radio or locate him on the battlefield.

Gannon and several of his men had assaulted into a nearby building. It turned out to be full of well-equipped and determined insurgents. They wounded Captain Gannon and killed the other Marines as they fought room to room. As Captain Gannon lay helpless on the floor, the insurgents disarmed him. He was a student of military history, the son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, and a devoted patriot. But now, in this terrible moment, he alone faced a barbaric and merciless enemy, the likes of which Americans had not seen since the Pacific War.

The terrorists executed him with his own 9mm pistol. The same fate would later befall an Army company commander from Task Force 2/2 during the Second Battle of Fallujah later in the year.

At Al Qaim, the remaining scouts and all other available Marines piled into Humvees and raced toward Husaybah to offer their beleaguered brothers assistance. The scouts would sweep into the city from the south while the rest of the battalion struck the enemy from the west. Hopefully, the insurgents would be caught by surprise and trapped between the two elements.

Jason and the rest of the scouts approached a cluster of homes and businesses known as the “440” (there were four hundred forty structures in it). The place was basically a suburb of Husaybah, separated from the main portion of the city by a stretch of open terrain. The Marines dismounted in the desert between the two built-up areas and began to move toward the fighting on foot.

They hadn’t gone far when something white fluttered on a rooftop. Jason brought his scope to his eye for a better look. A ten-year-old kid was up there, waving a stick with a white plastic sack attached to it. In previous patrols, Jason had seen other boys doing this as pigeons flew overhead and assumed the kids were just training their birds.

But not this time. There were no birds in the air around him.

Jason watched him for a long moment, considering his next move. His gut told him the kid was signaling the enemy. But what could he do? He couldn’t put a bullet in a ten-year-old boy.

The Marines reached a set of railroad tracks. On the other side, a drainage ditch ran parallel with them. It looked like a natural defensive position, except for the heaps of trash strewn throughout its length. The stench boiling up from the ditch was vile, and clouds of flies boiled and buzzed over the mess.

Somebody said, “If the enemy is nearby, I bet they’ll be in there.”

Jason looked around. The 440 was just to their left, the main part of the city ahead and to the right. From both flanks, an ambush could be executed, and the Marines would have a hard time just trying to figure out from where the shooting originated. They’d walked into a terrible tactical situation, and a feeling of dread welled in Jason.

An officer appeared next to him and said, “Scope that building and see what’s going on.”

“On it, Sir.”

He checked the rooftop. The boy remained in full view, waving his makeshift flag.

That’s it.

Calmly, Jason turned to the officer and said, “Maybe we should get into that ditch, Sir.”

The officer agreed and gave the order. The Marines began jumping down into the trench. The smell of rot and corruption was nearly overwhelming, and the men were both bitching and laughing about it at the same time.

That’s when four machine guns opened fire on the Americans from multiple elevated positions. The fusillade of bullets chewed across the top lip of the drainage ditch as the Marines pressed themselves down as far as they could into the muck. A host of AK-47s unleashed a hail of rounds and added to the cacophony.

In seconds, the insurgent ambush pinned the scouts down. Totally defensive, they couldn’t even raise their heads without drawing a crossfire that filled the air around them with cracking 7.62mm bullets.

Jason lay at the bottom of the ditch, listening to the four machine guns rip off burst after burst. The ditch was their salvation, but it also was their death trap. The absurdity of the situation suddenly overwhelmed him. He began to laugh.

Yeah. And the higher ups kept wondering who the hell I’ve been shooting at for the month. Maybe those geniuses will get the message now.

The guns raked back and forth over the platoon. Several men went down wounded. The situation was getting out of hand. It is in such dire moments that snipers can be the most effective. Usually, the only way to overcome an ambush like this one was to bring in more firepower. Tanks, aircraft, helicopters could dig the scouts out of the jam they were in. Nobody does firepower like the U.S. Marines.

But it would take time to get air support and artillery. The pounding the platoon endured that morning could not be allowed to go on for long. The ditch wasn’t that deep, which meant the enemy fighters positioned in the taller dwellings around them would be able to get direct fire on at least some of the Marines as they looked down on them. The insurgents began to find the angles. Another Marine went down wounded as bullets began impacting among the men. As the corpsmen went to work, some of the others burrowed into the trash to conceal themselves from the gunmen out there in buildings overlooking the trench.

Something had to be done, or they’d get picked off one by one. Jason and his spotters, sharp-eyed Joshua Mavica and Brandon Delfiorintino, eased up the ditch wall to try and get eyes on the enemy machine guns. When they reached the top, they used binos and the scope on Jason’s M40 to glass the nearest buildings. At a hundred and seventy yards, the trio observed muzzle flashes coming from an apartment complex. Lots of them. Black clad figures moved around inside the rooms as others darted about on the roof.

Find the crew-served weapons.

The air around the sniper team suddenly buzzed with bullets. To Jason, they sounded like pissed-off bees. The enemy had seen their heads exposed above the lip of the trench. Now at least one of the machine gunners had the range on them.

They ducked low and waited out the fusillade. A moment later they crawled back up to the top and continued their sweep. This time they focused on a building about two hundred thirty yards away. On the rooftop, they found one of the machine-gun positions. The gunner wore black man jammies and Adidas running pants. Another man was with him, similarly dressed but carrying an AK-47.

More angry bees. The enemy had seen them expose their heads again, and the two Marines had to go to ground once again.

Half buried in the garbage, the urge to laugh overcame Jason again. Half aloud he said, “Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?” The words were swallowed by the din of cracking bullets.

There was no way the scouts would gain fire superiority in this fight. With wounded men, and the top of the trench covered by so many heavy weapons, if they tried to shoot back they would certainly just incur more casualties. Something needed to be done to level the playing field, or they were going to be in for a long and bloody day in the trash.

Carefully, Jason inched back up to the top of the trench, swung his M40A3 over the rim, and stuck his eye in the scope. Technically, a two-hundred-thirty-yard shot at an elevated target was not particularly difficult. Wind was light. Sun was not an issue. Enough of the gunner was exposed above the parapet to make an inviting target. Back on a range in the States, it’d be an easy kill.

But back in the States, nobody was shooting at you. Without any covering fire, Jason was exposed to the full fury of all the guns the enemy had in the fight. He focused on the task, blocking out fear and ignoring the rounds smacking into the dirt on either side of him. The enemy was getting close. He couldn’t let himself think of that or the physical reaction to the danger would ruin his aim.

A half breath, and his reticle settled on the machine gunner, just a bit above center mass in order to compensate for the angle. He had the shot lined up. He could see the gunner laying on the trigger, his weapon’s barrel spewing flame.

Jason’s finger slipped into the trigger guard. More 7.62 rounds streaked over his head. He blocked them out. Nothing mattered but the picture in the scope. He left half his breath out, then pulled his own trigger.

The gunner spun away from his weapon and fell out of view. Jason racked another round into his M40 and drilled the rifleman with his second shot.

The volume of incoming diminished. What next? There were too many bad guys in the apartment complex for his M40 to make much of a difference there. He hadn’t been able to find the other heavy weapons yet either. An idea struck him.

Jason took a smoke grenade off his chest rig, pulled the pin, and flipped it over the lip of the trench. The smoke offered a little extra concealment. As it settled over them, Jason called for Joshua Mavica, one of the platoon’s radio operators. Mavica came on the run at once, staying as low as possible as he picked his way over the piles of trash at the bottom of the ditch. When he reached Jason, the sniper grabbed his handset and called battalion to request a fire mission using 3/7’s 81mm mortar platoon.

The mortarmen brought their A game that day. The first round landed about two hundred yards north of the apartment complex. Jason saw the round explode, lased the distance with his binos, and called back, “Drop two hundred and fire for effect!”

The mortars landed right atop the apartment building and detonated on its roof. They touched off some propane tanks stored up there, sparking a conflagration that roasted the insurgents using the roof for their fighting positions. One of the machine guns and three men were later found to have been up there.

The flames swirled and spread to the top floor. As they did, one of the Marines in the trench stood up and fired an AT-4 rocket into the building. The fire spread until the entire structure was consumed.

Meanwhile, the scout platoon’s leadership had been trying to get a MEDEVAC ride for their wounded men. Helos were out of the question — landing anywhere nearby would be a death sentence to the crew given the amount of firepower arrayed against the Marines. A vehicle evacuation was the only possibility, but there weren’t any Humvees available. At length, the situation grew so critical that 3/7 HQ sent them an unarmored seven-ton along with a fuel truck. The two vehicles were the last ones at Al Qaim.

They showed up in the middle of the firefight and instantly drew fire. An RPG sizzled over the trench and speared the fuel truck just as it came to a halt a few yards away from the Marines. The rocket punctured the truck’s huge tank but failed to explode. That seemed like a moment of inspired divine intervention — if it had blown up, there would have been few survivors in the trench. As it was, the hole it created caused hundreds of gallons of gasoline to spray out into the dirt and flow into the ditch. Soon, most of the Marines taking cover in the trash were soaked with fuel.

The wounded men were carried to the vehicles and extracted as the surviving insurgents fired back with everything they had left. Fortunately, nobody was hit. The apartment building burned on as Marines from one of 3/7’s line companies cleared the two remaining machine-gun nests.

Then they moved into the city proper. Jason and the scouts ran into immediate trouble as the streets were laced with roadside bombs. Other Marine elements took sniper fire from well-trained foreign fighters, most of whom were later discovered to be Chechens. They were a cagey and disciplined bunch, and the Americans took more casualties fighting house to house again. At times, the Marine snipers ranged on enemy fighters who were using small children as human shields. The battalion’s executive officer, Major George Schreffler, got on the radio and warned the other companies of this new development, telling the Marines not to take any shots that could harm the kids.

As the fighting continued, the IEDs stopped the scouts for almost four hours as EOD teams came out to neutralize them. They advanced a block forward, ran into another makeshift IED minefield, and had to wait again as the specialists rendered them useless. Block by block, they advanced at a crawl, taking sporadic fire as they worked. But the main resistance they’d faced had been broken after the 81mm mortar barrage.

It took fourteen hours of continuous combat to finally break the enemy’s back. Late that night, the Marines finally received air support. Cobra gunships made strafing runs on pockets of resistance near the downtown soccer stadium. Those gun runs signaled the end of the offensive.

One hundred fifty insurgents had been killed during the day. The Marines captured twenty more. Captain Gannon and five other Marines were lost. The insurgents wounded twenty-five more. In one day, the battalion lost over five percent of its combat strength.

The end of the First Battle of Husaybah did not end the violence in the city. In the days that followed, the insurgents continued to resist and bring in reinforcements. They learned from their mistakes, switched tactics, and evolved. But they never tried a full-scale offensive again. They didn’t need to; what they came up with next was far worse.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Thousand-Yard Shot

In the weeks that followed the First Battle of Husaybah, 3/7’s snipers grew into experts at urban warfare. They learned not to insert into a hide in vehicles. They’d only be spotted by one of the countless kids the insurgents used as their eyes and ears. Early on, they would move into the city in seven-ton trucks, then bail out at their objective. Too obvious. So Jason and the other Marines in the scout sniper platoon switched tactics. They stopped going out with the infantry, stopped using vehicles — convoys of any size were bound to get hit anyway. They also discovered platoon-sized patrols did not work. The insurgents always detected them and countered whatever mission they had laid on for that night. So the Marine snipers took a page from the enemy’s book and started infiltrating at night in groups of no more than four. They entered the city on foot, unscrewed streetlights so they could remain in the shadows. Instead of smashing in doors and violently taking over homes so they could establish an overwatch position on the roof, they found a kinder, gentler approach worked much better. To mask as much noise as possible, Jason would tap lightly on a window to get the home owner’s attention. Later, he discovered an even more effective trick. Most of the houses had window-mounted air-conditioner units. He could knock on those loud enough to wake the folks inside, but the A/C’s motor drowned the sound outside. It made for a very stealthy way to get into a good hide site.

When gaining the high ground didn’t work, the 3/7 sniper teams got creative. Like most Iraqi cities at the time, garbage littered the streets. This wasn’t just stray packages and wrappers, but heaps of household trash families just dumped in front of their homes because transporting it anywhere was a life-threatening proposition with all the IEDs emplaced in and around the city. The trash heaps made perfect concealment. The snipers made effective use of them and it always surprised the insurgents when they did.

The tactics worked, and the snipers racked up kills. They took out bomb-laying teams, surprised insurgent patrols, and interdicted their supply lines. But at times, it seemed like whatever they did, the enemy always had more willing bodies to throw into the fray.

As the snipers adapted to their environment, the Sunni insurgency they faced underwent a transformation. Many of the local Iraqi leaders had died in the fighting that spring. The Marine and Army’s efforts to interdict their supply networks and roll up cells had been extremely effective. The Americans underestimated their successes. Yet those victories came with unintended consequences. As their capabilities diminished, the Sunni turned to the only source of outside help: al-Qaida. They opened the door and let the devil in. Through 2004, al-Qaida’s role in Anbar Province grew considerably. In time they would take complete control of the Sunni insurgency and turned it not just against the Coalition but against the Shia as well, hoping to spark a sectarian civil war.

That spring of 2004 was the first iteration in that development. On the battlefield, it meant that 3/7 suddenly faced a host of new threats and sophisticated weapons systems. Al-Qaida brought considerable experience and skill to the IED-making industry around Husaybah. The bombs became far more lethal than ever before. Bigger, utilizing larger explosives and triggered in different ways, they wrought havoc on the Marines and their unarmored trucks and lightly armored Humvees.

On one mission, Jason and the scout sniper platoon rushed to the scene of an IED attack. They found a 998 high-backed Humvee sitting in the kill zone. At first, it looked unharmed. But as Jason drew closer, he saw a fist-sized hole punched in its side. When the scouts dropped the back gate, blood poured out in a wave. Most of the Humvee’s crew had been badly torn up.

The Marines had never seen the kind of IED used in that attack. The insurgents had encased it in concrete and left it in the street. It looked just like any other pile of debris in Husaybah. But inside the concrete was a tube with a flechette rocket. When it was detonated remotely, the rocket shot from its tube, broke through the concrete, penetrated the Humvee’s sidewall, and maimed the crew.

As the IEDs grew more sophisticated, the enemy brought in a new threat: traveling snipers. These guys never stayed in one town long. They moved from city to city, taking only a few shots and never lingering to see their handiwork. One began showing up every few weeks after the April 17, 2004, fight. Jason studied his attacks and learned his signature — every sniper has one. This shooter was an opportunist. He would stick around for perhaps two to three days at a time, then vanish for a while. He was not a particularly good shot, and he usually missed. He sometimes triggered off more than one round, too, before breaking contact and going to ground.

Then another sniper showed up. This guy was a pro, though Intel was never able to get a handle on who he was or where he had been trained. He was an expert shot, fearless, and disciplined — the kind of sniper who instills paralyzing fear in his targets.

From seven hundred yards, the Pro hit a Marine standing watch in one of the towers at what was later renamed Camp Gannon, the base just outside of Husaybah. The Marine had been scanning the city with binos, minimally exposed, when he was struck in the head with the single shot.

A few days later, the Pro struck again. This time he hit a Marine center mass. His chest plate saved his life. Not long after, he wounded another American in the forearm.

The attacks got into 3/7’s head. They made the Marines cautious and reactive, and psychologically it became more difficult to saddle up and head into the city. The 3/7 snipers decided they needed to do something about the Pro. They put together a plan to try and pinpoint him using dismounted infantry to draw him out while the snipers watched from elevated positions. However, by the time they implemented the plan, the Pro had vanished altogether. He never returned to Husaybah.

The 3/7 snipers had an even greater psychological impact on the enemy. During overwatch missions, they protected Marine patrols in the city and killed many insurgents trying to attack the men. The insurgents grew cautious, then skittish. Their fear of the battalion’s few sniper teams forced them to cede the initiative to the Americans.

Jason got a glimpse of just how much the enemy feared him and his brothers when a group of elders showed up at their base one day. Most of these Iraqis were either playing both sides or had outright sided with the enemy at that point of the war. They came to the Marines, told them that there would be an anti-Coalition demonstration in Husaybah in a few days. The Marines were happy to see the Iraqis exercising their newfound right of free speech and freedom to protest, so the Americans asked the elders how they could help.

“Would you please keep your snipers away?” was the response.

Of all the things they could have asked for, the snipers had taken center stage.

Between protests and IED attacks, the cat-and-mouse game continued in the city’s streets. The insurgents became elusive, hitting and running, increasingly relying on bombs to inflict casualties. The Marines finally decided to search the entire city. The full battalion, along with Iraqi security troops, swept into Husaybah and searched it house by house, building by building. They found a veritable arsenal of AK-47s, machine guns, rifles, rockets, bomb-making equipment, RPGs, and mortar tubes. They detained dozens of suspected insurgents and destroyed all the ordnance and weaponry they uncovered.

The sweep worked — at least for a few weeks. The level of violence diminished, and patrols moved more freely on the streets. Inevitably, the cells got resupplied from Syria, and the attacks escalated again. Without the ability to control the border crossings, this would be the cycle the Marines would endure for months to come out there in Iraq’s Wild West.

One morning in May 2004, two sniper teams sortied beyond the wire on a hunting patrol to the outskirts of the 440 area. Jason led Sierra Three. Sierra Four was the other two-man element. They stayed on foot, moving through the desert carefully, keeping eyes out for any sign they’d been detected. The first two kiloyards of the patrol saw them creep through a series of mines and rock quarries, which served as about the only economic activity in the area besides smuggling.

As they worked their way past the last mine, a burst of automatic gunfire echoed across the desert scape. It hadn’t been directed at the snipers, but was close enough to cause the Americans to go investigate. After a few minutes, they saw a shack on the horizon with a single Iraqi border policeman hunkered down behind it holding an AK-47. Beyond the shack, Jason saw five armed men shooting at the Iraqi. Four had assault rifles, but the fifth was armed with an RPK light machine gun.

Sierra Three called to the 3/7 Combat Operations Center and reported the situation. A moment later, COC cleared Jason to engage and assist the besieged Iraqi. The Americans were a long way from the lone cop. So far, most of the shots the snipers had taken in country had been fairly close — usually under five hundred yards. This time, the situation forced a much farther one.

Jason’s spotter, Silicon Valley native Brandon Delfiorintino, lased the distance and called out, “One thousand fifteen yards.”

Jason settled down behind his M40A3 and searched out the RPK gunner. Snipers are trained to reduce the greatest threat first, and that machine gun was peppering the shack with scores of rounds.

The M40A3 is considered effective out to nine hundred yards, so this would not be an easy shot. Jason had mounted an AN/PVS 10, 8.5power Day/Night scope atop his rifle. He really needed a ten-power scope for this sort of distance, and he wasn’t sure he could hit the target with what he had. Perhaps if he missed, he could spook the enemy into retiring.

Brandon was a superb spotter, and Jason loved working with him. The two always seemed to be in sync, always knew what the other needed. Without prompting, he whispered the wind direction and speed — less than ten miles an hour.

Jason set his reticle on the gunner, then raised it above center mass to compensate for the distance. A half breath, release, and he pulled the trigger.

The RPK gunner didn’t react.

“Anyone see the splash?” Jason asked.

Sierra Four was spotting for him along with Brandon, but nobody had seen where the round had gone.

Jason racked another round into the chamber and slapped the bolt down. He took aim again. He pulled the trigger and waited.

Nothing. Another miss, and nobody saw where the round impacted.

“What the hell?” Jason said.

He thought it over and decided he needed to do a battle zero on his weapon. He found a berm about the same distance away, told his spotters what he was doing, and took a shot. This time, the round kicked up a big spout of dirt, two and a half mils high and three mils to the right of where he had aimed.

He couldn’t dial in any more dope on the scope — his turrets were maxed out. He’d have to compensate manually, but at least he knew where the round was going now. Mentally, he marked the spot on his scope and swung the M40’s barrel back on the RPK gunner as quickly as he could.

He pulled the trigger. The RPK gunner flipped over backwards and sprawled on the ground between the other armed men. Stunned, they stared down at him for an instant — another example of the Shock Factor at work — then suddenly bolted wildly. Several ran into a bunker a few yards away, but then one suddenly changed directions. It was a classic case of how the Shock Factor puts a man in autopilot mode after the initial paralysis is broken. A second or two after his brain caught up with his legs, he willed himself to go back for his fallen man.

He rushed back to the RPK gunner. He gave him a quick look, but instead of trying to drag him to the bunker, the insurgent went for the RPK. Jason couldn’t believe it. The insurgent had run right back into the area that Jason had already locked down in his scope.

“Oh my God. This guy’s a super genius.”

Had the insurgent stopped to think things over, let his mind fully catch up to instincts, he would have realized he’d just signed his own death warrant. But the Shock Factor scrambles circuits, and this guy wasn’t thinking clearly.

He shuffled to one side slightly until he was standing almost exactly where the first man had been when Jason hit him. He started to bend down, but Jason was waiting for him. The New Yorker dropped the hammer and killed him.

After the second man went down, the snipers reported the situation to the COC. The remaining three fighters had gone to ground in the bunker, so no further targets presented themselves. A few minutes later, the COC ordered the snipers to return to base.

Those two shots Jason took were among the most difficult and longest ones taken by a Marine in Anbar Province. His quick thinking to fire on the berm and get a battle zero ensured his success, as did his knack for physics and math. Only a handful of snipers could have ever made that shot with the rifle and scope Jason carried that day.

Back at the COC, 3/7’s leadership was in an uproar. The battalion commander called Jason into a meeting room. As he walked in, Lieutenant Colonel Lopez was sitting there, crossed legged with a finger to his lips. He looked pissed off and intimidating, and Jason’s immediate thought was that the officer was affecting the pose deliberately.

“Do you know what you’ve just done?” he demanded.

Jason looked puzzled. “No, sir.”

The sniper gave a brief description of the engagement. When he finished, Lieutenant Colonel Lopez said, “Well, Sergeant, there’s only one problem with what just happened.”

“Sir?”

“You shot into Syria and killed two Syrian soldiers.”

The news left Jason stunned. A full investigation was conducted on the incident — and found that the Iraqi border policeman had been left on his own with a single thirty-round magazine for his AK-47. The Syrians had initiated the fight, and 3/7’s snipers had gone to the man’s defense. The shoot was deemed totally within the ROEs and justified given the situation. Still, it was another crazy moment in a war that made less and less sense to the Marines fighting it.

The fighting swelled again in the late spring. As 3/7 received replacements to compensate for their combat losses, the new guys found the learning curve in Husaybah to be a steep one. In a matter of days, three new team leaders went down, wounded in action.

The main highway running from Syria east to Baghdad became the focal point of many Marine operations. Keeping it open was a key priority. Denying it to the Marines became the focal point of the insurgent IED-laying effort. To counter that, the snipers spent more and more time overwatching the highway and taking out the bomb layers.

One night, Sierra Three and Four were set up in two different hides, keeping eyes on the road. An Iraqi police station had been built not far from the highway on Market Street, perhaps eight hundred yards from the Marines’ positions. The place was a frequent target for the insurgents, who laced it with small-arms fire during hit-and-run raids.

That night, Jason’s building trembled violently as an explosion rocked Husaybah. Somebody had detonated a bomb by the Iraqi police station. A minute later, a white Toyota sedan came tearing down the road from the direction of the blast. A curfew had been in effect for months, so civilians knew they were supposed to be off the street at this hour.

Jason watched the car and knew something wasn’t right. It passed his hide site, and he decided they needed to stop it. He called to the other sniper team, emplaced a few hundred yards further down the road in another building, and told them to set up a snap checkpoint and stop the vehicle.

The other team rushed down into the street and waited for the car. Meanwhile, Jason and his spotter pulled off the roof of their building and rushed downstairs. They would backup the other team as they searched the vehicle.

As they reached the street, Sierra Four called Jason and told him that the sedan had pulled a U-turn as soon as the driver saw the Marines in the road ahead of it. The car was coming straight back toward Jason’s team now.

The transmission had barely reached Jason’s ears when he heard the sound of an overreved four-cylinder engine. Up ahead, the Toyota came blasting down the street, doing at least sixty miles an hour.

Jason stood at the side of the road and leveled his M40. The driver saw him, but didn’t slow down. He pulled the trigger and put a round in the vehicle’s engine block. Toyota makes durable cars. The shot tore into the engine, but had no effect.

The driver didn’t stop. Only a few yards away now, Jason heard the driver punch the accelerator to the floor. The engine whined. In a second, he’d be past the Marines. Jason jacked the bolt and slammed home another round, but before he could raise the rifle to his shoulder and take aim, the sedan sped past him.

The New Yorker pivoted a hundred eighty degrees on one foot, eye in the scope and fired a single shot offhand at the fleeing car. His spotter let loose on the car as well with his M4.

The sedan suddenly veered and lost speed. The Marines ran after it. It drifted to a stop, and the driver climbed out about a hundred fifty yards away. Jason and his spotter kept their weapons on him as they ran forward.

The man turned and looked at the onrushing Marines. “Please,” he begged, “don’t kill me. I have two daughters. I am a good man.”

The Iraqi’s English was flawless. He had almost no accent. It rocked both Marines, and for a moment they doubted themselves. What had they done? Visions of the Diyala River bridge and the horror there flashed in Jason’s mind.

They reached the man. He’d taken a bullet in the back of the right armpit that had grazed his lungs before exiting from his chest. He stood there, repeating that he had children. Girls. He was a good man.

He sat down next to the car as the Marines looked him over. He was in bad shape and needed immediate MEDEVAC. Jason called the COC and requested one, but it was denied.

The man was going to die if he didn’t get medical help.

More Marines showed up. Jason took a minute to look the car over. A single 7.62mm bullet hole had punctured the trunk — that was Jason’s snap-shot from the hip. The round went through the backseat, through the front seat, and left a hole right at the armpit level. It had been a one-in-a-million fluke bull’s-eye. And now, a father would pay the price.

No way would he let the man die. He and his spotter carried him to his sedan. The engine was still running, and an Iraqi hospital was not far away. There in the middle of the night in one of Iraq’s most dangerous cities, Jason sped the man through the empty streets unescorted. He reached the hospital and he and his spotter carried him inside.

Not long after, his platoon commander and a bunch of Marines from the CAAT team (Combined Anti-Armor Team) showed up. Fearing another investigation was about to be initiated against him, Jason met with his commander.

“Don’t worry, Delgado,” his lieutenant told him, “it was a good shoot.”

The Marines had searched the sedan and found a collection of cell phones, spools of electrical wire, and all sorts of IED-related tools and gear. Jason started to feel better about that one-in-a-million shot.

It turned out that the man had been arrested by an Army unit a few months before after a weapon’s cache had been discovered at his house. Perhaps his “I am a father” schtick had worked on the Army and that was the reason for his release. It had certainly worked on Jason.

But not this time. After the Iraqi doctors stabilized him, a Coalition helicopter arrived and had whisked him away for parts unknown. Jason and the 3/7 Scouts never saw or heard of him again.

A few weeks after that incident, the battalion packed up and headed home. Jason went on to become a sniper instructor for the newly formed Marine Special Operations Command. He stayed in that slot until leaving the Corps in 2009. He returned to the Bronx to pursue his artistic passion by opening Gunmetal Ink, a tattoo shop. He works as a contract sniper and security agent for the State Department occasionally, and spent 2012 in Iraq again. He got to see firsthand how the war played out for the people over there. Gone were the days of bombs and sudden ambushes. Life had returned to normal, and the people of Iraq were busily moving on with their lives.

But in the summer of 2004, that normalcy was a long way off. As 3/7 rotated home, another uprising was brewing in Baghdad. Caught in the middle was a small, close-knit group of citizen-snipers who’d grown up together in the Oregon woods. The moral quandary they faced that summer of 2004 would engulf them in an international incident and trigger almost a decade of media investigations and conspiracy theories.