SNIPER MISSION BASICS

At 0300 hours on a cool, quiet morning, Staff Sgt. Harry Martinez and three snipers slip out of the gate of Camp Corregidor on the eastern side of Ramadi, Iraq, and begin to carefully insinuate themselves into the dark and dangerous streets. The little team is officially designated Shadow Four, and they are on the first solo mission of their deployment.

Ramadi is, as one Marine sniper observed, a gunfighter's paradise for both insurgents and coalition war fighters, a place where killing and dying are part of the daily routine, where the sound of bullets and bombs surprise no one. When you are a sniper in Ramadi, there is no safe time or route to go to work, but three in the morning tends to be a little safer than broad daylight, when the streets are full.

Martinez and his little band of merry men are heading by an indirect route to a house on the northern side of the city, up near No Name Road and Entry Point Five. This particular little neighborhood hasn't been hunted by the snipers for a while and the word from the S2 (intel) shop is that the local bad guys are getting confident and bold enough to operate openly in daylight. That should mean good hunting for Martinez and his team if they can get into their hide site undetected.

The distance from the compound to the hide site is a half mile or so and would be only a ten-minute stroll in any American city. Here, though, the route Shadow Four takes is indirect, in the shadows, in order to keep their movements unpredictable to the enemy. They sneak through town like deer hunters in the woods, as quietly and unobtrusively as they can. They slip into dark alleys and change course often, always checking to see if they are hunters being hunted — followed on the street, perhaps, or observed from windows or doorways.

All four men are members of the National Guard; the active-duty soldiers call them "weekend warriors," and that is not a compliment. The part-timers are seldom admired or trusted by the regulars, who consider them ill-trained and equipped, old and out of shape. Martinez, however, is a cop and an FBI-trained SWAT sniper back home in New Jersey. He's forty — that's elderly in the active-duty Army — but he is not out of shape, ill trained, or ill equipped.

When Harry Martinez and his unit arrived in Iraq, his parent unit really didn't know what to do with their snipers — a very common problem for Guard units called up for deployment — and so he and his men were told to go find something useful to occupy themselves and to stay out of the way.

Sgt. Martinez wandered over to where 2nd Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division's recon platoon was based, on the other side of Camp Corregidor, and introduced himself to Sgt. Sam "Samuel," one of the snipers on Two-Six-nine's ten-man Shadow Team. Samuel quickly started bringing Martinez up to speed on local operations, on urban sniper ops, on local rules of engagement, on all the big and little topics of interest that a soldier with experience can pass along to a new arrival.

As every soldier and Marine knows, personnel and mission assignments are only done with stacks of paperwork, lots of signatures, all the right initials, proper SOPs, and all the other details carefully observed. That may be the way it is supposed to work during peacetime training, but sometimes during war, and often in places like Ramadi, things are a bit more casual. "Say, Harry," Sgt. Samuel asked, "we're going out on an operation tonight — would you and your guys like to go along?"

"Sure!" Martinez said immediately, not believing what he was hearing.

"Have your sniper rifles arrived yet?" Samuel asked.

"No, not yet," Martinez answered, expecting the M24s to be a requirement for the mission.

"Well, how about your M16s? Do you have your secondary weapons? If you do, that's good enough — you can provide us some security and learn something at the same time."

With Martinez's positive response, Samuel called up the section leader, Staff Sgt. James Gilliland. "Hey, Sgt. G, I have four new snipers from the Guard unit here and they'd like to go along with us tonight. They don't have their M24s but do have their M16s. What do you think, over?"

"Sweet!" Staff Sgt. Gilliland radioed back, "Tell them to get their gear together and where to show up!"

Very suddenly, less than two days after arriving in Iraq, Martinez and his little team were very busy cleaning their weapons, collecting their gear, and getting ready for a combat operation in deepest, darkest Ramadi and marveling at the casual, confident attitude of Samuel and Gilliland. Welcome to the war, sniper-style!

The Guardsmen showed up on time, took their positions in the order of march (travel sequence), followed directions, and soaked up the lessons of the real world like four sponges. Shortly after sunrise, as if to help with the lesson plan, the insurgents showed up with a car full of bad guys and a trunk full of improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

When the shooting stopped, Martinez had killed three with his M16 and another member of his team had killed two more; the entire enemy team had been killed. The weekend warriors demonstrated that however old or badly trained or ill equipped, they showed excellent discipline under fire and could put steel on target. Although they were officially assigned to another unit, the Guardsmen happily found themselves chopped, or temporarily assigned, to Gilliland's section, where they became Shadow Four. For the next few weeks, Martinez and company tagged along with the Two-Six-nine snipers, learning their trade and becoming journeymen combat soldiers. Then, at last, the training wheels were off and they had a mission to execute all by themselves.

As before, they prepared by studying maps, talking to the Intel section, and reading reports from previous patrols. They selected a hide site in advance, planned the route, and executed the infiltration in the early hours when Ramadi was under curfew and asleep.

Shadow Four approaches their objective about 0400, an hour after leaving the gate. The door to the building is chained shut; they cut the chain, slip inside, and lock it again with a lock of their own. Other snipers have used this place before, but not recently. After a careful check of the...