Shock Factor (25 page)

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.”