Sunday and Monday were advanced sniper. Many of the basic students left, Mike Moore, my new partner showed up. We zeroed our rifles, and practiced fire on command drills, went to the house on the hill, and set up up positions to shoot out of the house and down into the range on steel. He is 6’10”, we had a hilarious set up. 2 cinder blockes stacked on end, then a bucket of drywall plaster, then his backpack, then me with my rifle on the backpack, then he with his rifle on my shoulder. We fired simultaneously.
Command fire sequence:
“This is Rabbit 1 Actual. I have control, I have control, I have control.”
“Standby for countdown”
“5”
“4”
“3”
“2”
“1”
Everyone fires on the “t” of two, 1 is for door breachers to set off entry explovies, zero is for the direct action team, or entry team to bust their move. We fire on 2 even if command does not count all the way down, or we lose radio communication.
“Standby for countdown: 5, (silence) (silence)” BOOM
and Mission abort drills
“This is Rabbit 1 Actual. I have control, I have control, I have control. Standby for countdown. 5, 4, 3, ABORTABORTABORT!”
Then we conducted our first mission, gathering in the classroom for a briefing and WarnOrd. We break into teams, assign callsigns, walk to insertion point, patrol along a ravine behind a ridge over looking the village, scattered along the ridge, we crest it slowly, crawling through fields of Cholla Cactus.We set up in position, in ghillie suits, and range our targets, each team assigned targets, need to do head shots, 200 and some yards. come up 1.5 minutes of angle on my scope. right to left slight breeze, hold Favor Right on the head of my target. Countdown on the radio. No time to put in ear plugs. Brand new cut barrel, don’t even know where it will impact. FIRE, can’t see my hit, reload like a maniac, FIRE again. Ears ringing. Exfil and regroup in the village to look over our targets and debrief. I hit my target twice, perfectly in the head. Got reprimanded for firing more than once.
Next day, starts 9am at the 100 yard range, fire a few groups, then come back to the porch, ghillie up, recieve briefing, camp paint my face, set off on mission. This time, we will be walking a long distance, several miles around and with sniper teams encircling the entire village 360 degrees, shooting down into it. See a target, too bad another team has dibs on it. We got impatient, did not crawl, too close, got spotted. Moore and I had to walk all the way around from Whiskey (west) hill position to Echo (East) ridge position. hiking along a the top of a ridge, with a cliff dropping away right below my feet, falling would be no joking matter whatsoever. Barely get into position, command fire countdown comes over the radio. I had ranged the target, and given Moore his wind call. He fires. The head of our hostage taker explodes in a red spray!
Back down in the village, one of the sniper teams had missed their target. “Who did get to fire their rifle today?” I didn’t. “Wang, load up, I want you to shoot the head, so we can all watch and get a good look at it.” The instructors had suddenly thought a great idea, to dremel out the foam heads they have for targets, put a red spray paint can inside, and put a had on it. The shot blew up the head in a spectacular shower of red and chunks and paint everywhere. Lance, our head instructor was whooping and hollering with glee. “You see that? In real life, it looks just like that! brain matter goes splattering everywhere, pink mist, chunks of gib, and teeth and hair and scarf thrown all around!”
Went to Tilted Kilt again that night, our server was amazingly hot. Arizona has amazing white girls. She’d ask us if there was anything else we needed, and all we could do was look at each other, swallow, lie to her face, saying “we’re good.” I was kind of sick, and 11:30 when everyone else went off to the strip club for a night out with the instructors, I went back to the range and slept.