Shock Factor (20 page)

The number of lives taken by Coalition snipers during the Ramadi campaign will never be known. Nor will the number of Coalition and civilian lives they saved with their actions. In both cases, though, the snipers decisively affected the flow of the battle. Few battles in modern history were influenced so heavily by so few trigger pullers.

When those men came home, they did so without fanfare. Their share of the credit in the Ramadi victory was largely ignored by the American press, who had long since moved on to other stories. They remain largely anonymous—these Marines, Army, and special operations shooters, despite the fact that they helped turn the tide in Iraq.

Adam returned home with the rest of the team in April 2007. He was ready to call it a career, and dreamed of homesteading someplace. In Ramadi, he'd dreamt of a little farm, some cows and chickens, and mornings in a blind someplace, alone with his bow and his thoughts.

He struggled with the decision right up to the last minute. Ultimately, he reenlisted and served four more years. He spent time in an assault cell and loved every minute of it. While serving with Team Ten, he married and had a son. Right after his son was born, Team Ten deployed to Nigeria to help stand up their new counterterrorism force. While Adam admired the Nigerian troops he helped to train, the separation from his young family proved especially hard on them all. For ninety days, he worked diligently at his assigned task. The poverty in Nigeria was a true eye-opener for him, and by the time the deployment ended, Adam never wanted to leave American soil again.

In April 2011 he separated from the Navy and settled down on a farm. He's at his happiest now in a tree blind, waiting for the perfect buck to come along. His son sits beside him, and as his best friend's dad did when they were kids, now Adam imparts his outdoor skills to his boy.

Ramadi is never far from his heart and thoughts, though. The battle for that city grew in importance until it became a test of wills between the United States and al-Qaida. The resolve of men like Adam and the Americans and Iraqis he served with in the city sustained the fight even in the darkest hours. It was that resolve that finally broke al-Qaida's hold on the city, and eventually to all of Anbar Province.

In September 2007, after a summer free from attacks and violence, the citizen of Ramadi began to dig through the rubble and salvage what they could. The process of rebuilding the devastated city would take years. But one symbol offered them hope. The soccer stadium, once the sight of a grisly mass grave, had been transformed by the Coalition. Once the neighborhood surrounding it had been secured and the bodies removed, engineers descended on it. They rebuilt the stands, laid turf, and striped the field.

Every evening at five o'clock, the citizens would gather in the stands to watch local teams play on the grounds there, made hallowed by the blood of their neighbors. They cheered and reveled in this one aspect of normalcy among the ruins. Youth teams—the children of Ramadi—would play every week as well. Only a few months before, some of them had been the paid eyes and ears of al-Qaida. They had hunted for the Americans, for the SEALs and sniper teams all the while unwittingly working against the very people determined to secure a future for them. Now at last, they had the opportunity to be kids again.

In 2013, four years after President Barrack Obama ordered a complete pull out from Iraq, forces opposed to the Baghdad government, some assisted by a wing of al-Qaida once again growing in strength, retook Ramadi and Fallujah. For the American veterans of both campaigns, the news came as the worst possible blow. For the citizens of those battle-scarred city, they once again faced wanton murder, oppression and violence. Only this time, they had little hope of salvation. The American troops had all gone home.

 

PART II

FRONT LINES

 

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.”