A Marine Called Jason
(Revised)
by: Peter

(© 2007-2015 by the Author)
 

The author retains all rights. No reproductions are allowed without the author's consent. Comments are appreciated at...

Chapter 60
Sniper School for Real 

Sniper school was a ten-week school, more than three times longer than jump school. The Army had sent somebody from Pendleton to start its own sniper school in Vietnam, lasting just eighteen days, which made me wonder again what all there was to learn that could possibly take ten weeks if the Army could do it in eighteen days.  But then I learned that there’s a reason why the Marine Scout Sniper School is rated the best in the world.

I read, I studied, I listened to a couple of the older guys who were willing to share their experiences. The sniper’s main purpose was to impede and harass the enemy in his daily or nighttime movements. It was a little unnerving when I first heard snipers referred to as thirteen-cent killers; that’s what it cost to manufacture the bullets we used, and no one gave Uncle Sam a bigger bang for his buck.

I would soon learn that becoming a sniper was a lot more than having a good eye, a steady hand and pulling the trigger. I already knew about wind and gravity, the two biggest variables that affect a bullet’s flight. I was not aware of the effects of cold, heat and humidity. Cold air is denser than hot air and creates more drag on a bullet. Humidity with hot air has the same effect.

Ultimately, the farther a sniper can be from his target and still remain accurate, the more effective he is and the less likely he is to be discovered.  Using a 7.62mm round, snipers can shoot almost silently as long as they're shooting from over 650 yards.  A bullet leaves the rifle barrel faster than the speed of sound. The cracking sound a bullet makes is a tiny sonic boom.  Even if a target doesn't hear the rifle shot, he will hear the bullet fly by… if it’s a miss, that is.  But the drag created by wind resistance on a 7.62mm round as it travels through the air slows the bullet down to sub-sonic speeds at around 650 yards.  So at ranges over 650 yards, the bullet no longer makes that distinct cracking sound.  If you're shooting at a target 875 or 1100 yards out--that’s eleven football fields--you could be shooting at that person all day long and he don't even know he’s being shot at, unless you hit him, of course. 

We would spend plenty of time in school cracking the books and in the classroom learning the principles of ballistics, windage, air density, and many other variables that affect the flight of a bullet.  But at the end of the day, it comes down to what snipers call "rounds down range" or rounds fired on the firing range. That’s what I liked the best; hands on.

The skill that snipers are most known for is their marksmanship. The ability to hit targets as far as a ten or eleven football fields away isn’t something that comes naturally. Snipers train to become expert marksman with a deeply ingrained understanding of the principles of ballistics. MOA--minute of angle--is the unit of measurement that snipers use in school to measure accuracy. The greater distance the sniper is shooting from, the lower the accuracy, as natural forces like wind resistance work on the bullet as it travels through the air. MOA measures the accuracy of the shot, taking the distance it was fired from into consideration.  The basic formula is one inch at a hundred yards; for every one hundred yards the bullet travels, you add one inch of inaccuracy. 

I came to know the intensity of observation training. Since a sniper spends most of his time looking, and only a few seconds shooting, his observational skills have to be flawless.

They developed some unique “games” to hone our ability to look at things critically. They put different objects on the table--a bullet, a paper clip, a bottle top, a pen, a piece of paper with something written on it--ten to twenty items total. We would gather around and they would give us, say, a minute to look at everything. Then we’d have to go back to our table and describe what we saw. We weren’t allowed to say “paper clip” or “bullet,” we had to say “silver, metal wire, bent in two oval shapes.” They want the Intel guys making the decision on what we actually saw. We would play that game repeatedly throughout the three-month course. As time went by, we were given more objects to look at and less time to look at them. To add to the challenge, the time between seeing the objects and reporting what we saw got longer. By the end, we might see twenty-five or more objects in the morning, train all day, and then at night be asked to write down descriptions of all the things we had seen earlier.

There was another observation game that we played in the field with a sniper scope.  They hid things in a field, and we would be given a certain amount of time to find them through the scope.  There might be the tip of a pen sticking up out of the grass.  You'd just have to look at every area in that field, put your scope on it and just stare at that spot for a couple minutes, and move it over, stare at the next spot for a couple minutes, move it over, and so on. After a while, we got really good at it, just looking for things in the field that didn't add up.  And simple things, like leaves or smoke blowing in the wind.

I knew about camouflage but I’d never heard of a ghillie suit, which is basically just netting or old military uniforms that snipers modify for their own special purpose. The belly of the uniform is reinforced with heavy canvas to help pad a sniper's torso during hours or days of lying on his stomach.  Camouflage netting is attached to the uniform. This netting is used to attach shredded burlap and other frayed materials and the suits are painted to match the environment of the battlefield. Then things like twigs, vines, leaves and branches are incorporated into the netting to further camouflage the ghillie suit. They don’t come that way; they are custom designed by each individual sniper.  It’s an art.  Well, they do come that way but no self respecting sniper would dream of purchasing his ghillie suit.

Because the human form is unnatural to jungle environments, snipers wear their ghillie suits to break up the outline of themselves and their gear. Wearing the proper ghillie suit, a stealthy sniper is able to stalk right past a sentry or lie quietly waiting to ambush his approaching target.  Nothing in nature has perfectly straight lines, so equipment like rifles and antennas often betray concealed positions. To counter this, snipers also make little ghillie suits for their rifles. Using the same principles of camouflage, snipers wrap their rifles in canvas and create little sleeves that make them blend into the environment.  It’s what you could call snipers’ arts and crafts.

To be continued...  

Posted: 03/06/15 rp