Last night, I was hanging out with some friends and met a sniper for the United States Marine Corp. I became interested right away with what it takes to become a sniper, since I absolutely love playing the role in video games. So, I bombarded him with questions and here are some things I learned that I thought I’d share:
- The Marine Corp is at the service of the President of the United States. Also known as the “President’s Pride,” the Marines have at least one unit of troops in every body of water in the world!
- A Unit of Troops consists of around 250 troops. Just to let know what kind of damage 250+ Marines can do - that’s about how many overtook Bagdhad.
- To complete Sniper School Training, a student is given a 3 hour head start into a forrest where he will use new skills of deception and camoflauge to hide from a group of men trained to hunt him down. If he can travel the 8 miles to his target without getting caught, he’s in!
- The Marines now have rifles with a range of about 1.2 miles, using ammo that’s about 3 inches long! To aim, you adjust the rear of your scope to move left and right for wind and the front of the scope to aim up and down to account for trajectory.
- The minimum distance a Sniper should be from his target is 300 yards to give him a good buffer to escape if detected.
- To make sure you fully understand your target, a sniper needs to study his target for long time, sometimes a few days, to understand how the target moves, walks, limps and their daily routine.
- Once the movements are learned, all a sniper wants is a body shot. To help with his escape and avoid detection, the sniper will want to either shoot the target “midstep” to cause the target to spin or if the target is standing still, to shoot him in a part of the body that will induce the spin. The spin is very important to avoiding detection so that instead of people looking the opposite way of where the target has fallen, they now have to scan at least a 90 degree range from the target. With the 300 yard buffer, the sniper has a high chance of escaping without being deteced.
The last thing I learned which was the most important was that this is not even close to being a video game. Covering yourself in camel dung, crawling 4 miles in tall grass and staying still for 4 days is not something that you can truly experience unless you have done it. Also, no matter how much I disagree with the premise of the war, I fully support the troops that work their ass off to protect this country. The sniper I met will going back to Iraq in July for his third tour of duty and I just want to wish him Godspeed and the best of luck!
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Snipers are just about as awesome as it gets.
[…] Gary Lee speaks to a Marine Corps. sniper about what the job entails and how he got there. I don’t know about you but snipers are […]