Shock Factor (26 page)

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.

 

PART III

OBSERVATIONS AND UPRISINGS

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Origins

Daniel Morgan never once backed down from a fight. Six feet tall with broad shoulders and bulging muscles gained from a lifetime of physical labor, Morgan had a knack for finding trouble. Bar brawls, gang fights, and back-alley beat-downs characterized his hard-drinking youth. Ambitious, loyal to his friends, and possessing a sharp mind, he was equally feared and admired by his fellow Virginians.

In 1755 he joined British general Edward Braddock's march against the French at Fort Duquesne, seeing profit and adventure in this first major campaign of the French and Indian War. Serving as a civilian contract teamster, he drove the rule-bound British nuts with his independent spirit and flippant mouth. He also suffered no fools, no matter who they were. When a British officer angered him, he beat him raw and was sentenced to five hundred lashes with a whip for his crime. For most men, this would have been a death sentence. Not Morgan. The British tied him to a post and whipped him until “his back was bathed in blood and his flesh hung down in ribbons.” Morgan never lost consciousness, and he even counted each strike of the whip. After that incident, he hated the British Army with singular passion.

Daniel Morgan is the father of the American sniper corps.

After the American Revolution broke out, the Continental Congress voted on June 14, 1775, to raise ten companies of “expert riflemen,” including two from Virginia. At the time, Morgan was serving in the Virginia Militia. A patriot committee elected him to be the captain in command of one of these new rifle companies. Morgan leapt at the opportunity. For days, he rode through the county, using his skills as an orator and leveraging his legendary reputation to recruit the area's best marksmen into his new unit. At each stop, he would challenge all those interested into joining his unit to a series of marksmanship tests. Morgan's assistants would set up a board with the outline of a man's nose painted on it. From a hundred fifty yards away, each candidate received one chance to hit the target. Only those who did so, or came close, were allowed entry into Morgan's elite new company. When he finished recruiting after only a couple of weeks, his company included some of the best sharpshooters in the colonies.

They were a nonstandard lot. Some things just don't change.

Morgan's men soon made waves with both the enemy and within the nascent American Army. They never considered themselves average, nor did they react well to Army chickenshit. They were hard-drinking, hard-fighting frontiersmen, born and raised in the woods. They thought for themselves, took pride in their fierce independence, and could live off the land with a self-sufficiency few could match. They had also learned to shoot from the moment they were old enough to hold a rifle.

The other militia and Continental units hated Morgan's men. Officers reviled them and wrote scathing assessments of their unmilitary behavior. Truth was, they did not fit the army mold. They dressed different, walked with a swagger, and chafed against routine. They brawled with each other and others at the drop of a hat, and never once doubted they were better than everyone else. They developed their own style and rituals. They became a breed apart, as we still are today.

When they went into battle, they put all doubters to shame. They may have been a pain in the ass in camp, but in the field they showed their lethality time after time. Light on their feet, masters of concealment and stealthy movement, Morgan's men inspired terror in the British with their sudden and deadly accurate attacks.

After serving in the siege of Boston, Morgan's company took part in the invasion of Canada later that year. In the middle of blinding snow, he and his men helped storm Quebec, only to be surrounded and forced to surrender. In early 1777, Morgan was exchanged and returned to the American Army, where George Washington gave him command of an elite, five-hundred-man battalion of riflemen. Every man had been handpicked from their Continental regiments based on their precision accuracy with their weapons. Morgan's Riflemen went on to play a key role in the Saratoga Campaign and helped turn the tide against the British. He and his men later helped defeat Lord Cornwallis at Cowpens, and were present at the end of the war.

Daniel Morgan and his original citizen-snipers set the standard for our community in the years to come. In every subsequent war except Vietnam, militia and National Guard shooters have played valuable roles at the front. Today, that citizen-sniper heritage is embodied in the National Guard infantry units and their scout platoons. These part-time snipers are rarely noticed by the media, and most Americans don't even realize they may have a National Guard shooter working with them in their office or their community's Wal-Mart. Yet since 9/11, these men have served with distinction in both Iraq and Afghanistan, scoring some of America's most notable successes against our enemies.

In the summer of 2003, Oregon's 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry was mobilized for service in Iraq. Composed of a mix of college students, mill workers, Hewlett-Packard engineers, cops, and paramedics, 2–162 possessed a backbone of talented noncommissioned officers who had served in their platoons and companies for decades. Some of them had seen combat in Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf. Others had yet to hear the crack of bullets passing overhead, but had trained together for so long that they had become a bonded and well-oiled team. Their bond of friendship and brotherhood ran deep; their families celebrated holidays together, their sons had grown up playing war together, and when they turned eighteen, they joined the battalion. The Volunteers, as they called themselves, were a family—sometimes fractious, sometimes feisty, but loyal to each other to the core.

This small band of seven hundred Oregonians, keepers of the citizen-soldier heritage, would find themselves in the bloodiest and most violent battles of the Iraq War. To that point, no National Guard unit since the end of World War II had seen the level of combat 2–162 would experience in Baghdad, Najaf, and Fallujah. Right there with them, protecting their fellow Oregonians and innocent civilians caught in the violence, were the long riflemen of Staff Sergeant Kevin Maries's sniper section.

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Yellow Shirt

BAGHDAD, IRAQ
JUNE 2004

At five foot five, with John Lennon spectacles and an easygoing smile, Staff Sergeant Kevin Maries does not look like a deadly sniper. If you were to encounter him on the street, his soft-spoken, friendly nature might deceive you into thinking he was an accountant, or perhaps a math teacher. But underneath the benign exterior beats a warrior's heart.

Born in Iowa, his folks moved the family to Oregon in 1976 when he was nine years old. They settled in Albany, a small Willamette Valley rough-and-tumble mill town. As a kid, he developed an interest in firearms—no surprise since his father was a sportsman—and he learned the mechanics of marksmanship long before he was able to drive a car. He has shot competitively most of his life, and has a room full of trophies from those events.

In 1985, after high school, he joined the Oregon National Guard, where he served initially as a TOW missile anti-tank gunner. Later, he became a medic and transferred to an engineer unit. In 1991, he found his true calling in the Guard when he joined 2
nd
Battalion, 162
nd
Infantry's scout/sniper platoon. He graduated from the National Guard's scout-sniper school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1993. At the time, most of the instructors were Marines, and Maries was part of the first class to graduate from it.

The Volunteers considered the scout/sniper platoon to be the battalion's elite element. Only the best soldiers were selected to join it, and only after they underwent an extensive series of tests and interviews. Each prospective candidate had to be a seasoned infantryman whose tactical acumen was challenged with a weekend of field exercises known as the Scout Indoc. One bad decision during those training battles and the candidate would be rejected.

The scout platoon had two components: a reconnaissance, or recce, section designed to serve as the eyes of the battalion, and a sniper section composed of three two-man teams. The thirty men who filled the platoon's ranks represented the best light infantrymen in the entire Oregon Guard.

The surest shots and the most patient, observant soldiers who were admitted into the scout platoon were selected to become snipers. Kevin Maries made it through the selection process thanks to his stone-cold demeanor while under stress and his ability to recall incredibly minute details. He spotted things through his scope that others never saw. He was persistent, cerebral, and impossible to fluster. He made a natural candidate for the sniper section.

When Maries joined the scout platoon, the Vietnam-era M21 rifle was long out of the Guard's inventory. This was the Vietnam-era variant of the M14 made famous by such men as Chuck Mawhinney. In 1988, the Army transitioned to a new sniper weapon system called the M24. Based on the Remington 700 civilian bolt action rifle, the M24 has an effective range of eight hundred and seventy five meters. It holds five 7.62mm rounds, though some units use .300 Winchester Magnums. The Volunteers received their M24s starting in 1992. By the end of the decade, the 2–162s snipers carried a mix of M24s and the deadly .50 caliber M107 Barrett semiautomatic. Maries' loved both weapons, but he had a special affinity for the M14. Later on during his service with 2–162, he acquired several match grade M14s from the Guard's marksmanship unit and pressed them back into service with his snipers.

2–162.

Sergeant Wes Howe, a fellow National Guard sniper, served with Maries for years and was awed by Maries's natural shooting ability. After Kevin won the state's sniper competition in 2001, which made him Oregon's top shot, Howe marveled at Maries's “incredible score with an M24.” Kevin had long earned a reputation among his peers as the state's preeminent sniper.

By 2003 Maries had become the sniper section NCO. In that role, he molded the 2–162 shooters into a close-knit, meticulous bunch who prided themselves on their attention to detail. He was also responsible for recruiting and mentoring new candidates for the sniper section. He handpicked each man for the unit and imparted his knowledge to them with the acumen and patience of a schoolteacher.

In the summer of 2003, the battalion received orders to deploy to Iraq. The Volunteers' commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson, ordered Maries to increase the sniper section to include five two-man teams. To do so, Kevin had to accelerate his normal recruiting process. He pulled in a number of talented privates, including a prior service veteran named Keith Engle. Through the course of that summer, the scouts tested those privates relentlessly. When the process ended, Maries had sent almost two dozen of the prospects back to their line companies. He kept only Engle and Private Nate Gushwa.

That fall, the Volunteers were allotted only one slot at the sniper school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Jim Schmorde was originally slated to go, but he suffered a knee injury in training that delayed his depature. So Maries gave the slot to Nate Gushwa, who left the battalion to attend the school in January 2004. He graduated on Valentine's Day and caught up with the Volunteers at Fort Polk, Louisiana, shortly before the unit headed out the door for Iraq.

Engle grew up in the mountains south of Bakersfield, California. Before age five, his dad had taught him to shoot with a .22 Marlin 18, which he used to hunt rabbits and squirrels. His Marlin had no rear sight, yet he developed a knack for nailing targets on the fly that confounded his older brother, who later joined the Army. When Engle was fifteen, he outshot his brother when he came home on leave from Korea. Keith teased him about that for years afterward.

His brother was the second man in the family to serve in Asia. Engle's dad had done a combat tour as a medic during the Korean War. Though he rarely talked about it, his military service helped to inspire his sons to join the Army. Out of high school, Keith enlisted as a TOW antitank missile gunner.