Shock Factor (8 page)

As he and his fellow mortarmen finished gearing up, they laughed and joked about playing multiplayer Diablo II together when they returned from the mission.

A few minutes beyond the wire, a sniper's shot rang out. Nicholas Whyte fell dead. His stunned platoon scanned the streets, the scores of doorways and dark, glassless windows overlooking their position as they worked to evacuate their fallen brother. The moment underscored the reality of the Ramadi campaign: no matter the countermeasures taken, snipers in the city would always have the advantage. There were simply too many places to hide, too many windows, too many darkened corners of shattered buildings within which al-Qaida shooters could hide. Every time an American or Iraqi patrol moved through the streets, they were vulnerable from dozens of places at once. Even the best eyes and the most alert men in a squad or platoon could not possibly cover down on every potential threat.

Worse, when a sniper did take a shot, a platoon was often in the grimmest of situations: under fire from an unknown location with no hope of finding the source of the shooting. Al-Qaida's snipers were masters of concealment and adopted many of the tactics they'd seen American snipers use against them, including hiding deep inside a room with a window overlooking a key street. Concealed in the darkness, they were all but invisible. Others drilled holes behind car taillights so they could fire from the trunk of a nondescript sedan. Still others used mosques and hospitals for their hide sites, believing the Americans would not fire at such places.

The foot patrols tried a variety of countermeasures to foil enemy snipers. They popped smoke grenades everywhere they ran, making it harder for the shooters to see them. They began bringing shotguns out on patrols so they could shoot locks off of gates and doors quickly as they ran from point to point. They tried moving at night, or with armored vehicles in support. Even the presence of M1 tanks or M2 Bradleys failed to deter the al-Qaida gunmen, who took to targeting the crews of such vehicles.

Private Kelly Youngblood was a nineteen-year-old M1 Abrams driver from Mesa, Arizona. A year removed from basic training, he'd deployed to Ramadi in February 2007. In a letter home to his sister, he wrote, “I'm afraid to leave the building to go to the tank because there are snipers everywhere.”

On one of his first patrols, his tank came under RPG fire and a rocket exploded right beside his tank. Just before that mission, another rocket had detonated at his combat outpost, killing one of Kelly's friends and narrowly missing him.

Sixteen days after he arrived in Ramadi, he was shot in the head by an al-Qaida sniper as he climbed out of the driver's hatch of his tank after a long shift within the vehicle. His brothers got him to the medics, who tried for over an hour to save him.

The sniper who killed Private Kelly had waited for hours for a tiny window of opportunity. Those shots and others made the Americans utterly paranoid. Said one Marine to a reporter, “It just feels like someone's always watching you. It really messes with your head.”

Al-Qaida snipers overwatched every Coalition outpost in the city and its environs. It became so dangerous that a vehicle stopping at the gates of a combat outpost (COP) ran the risk of taking precision fire. Drivers learned to keep their vehicles moving, even when they had to stay in a specific area. Back and forth, back and forth, they'd switch gears repeatedly to throw off the aim of RPG teams.

At one Iraqi checkpoint, a sniper shot an Iraqi soldier. He went down in the open, and one of his comrades rushed to his aid. That act of supreme bravery cost the second soldier his life—another crack from a Dragunov rifle and another Coalition casualty.

Into this chaos and death stepped American snipers—Marines, Army, and Navy SEALs. They did their best to protect the Joes on the ground as they tried to secure the streets. From overwatch positions all around the city, they built hides and hunted al-Qaida.

One of the earliest, and best, sniper locations was the ruins of a hotel. Dubbed the “Ramadi Inn” by the snipers who established hides in it, the four-story building held a commanding view of the city and afforded the Americans excellent fields of fire along Route Michigan. Early on, they fortified the place with sandbags up to shoulder height. But the level of incoming small-arms fire showed that to be inadequate. Rounds would pass above the sandbags to ricochet around the concrete walls, and several Americans were wounded that way. Afterward, the men built the sandbag walls up to the ceilings in every room they used. There were so many in the building that the Inn was sometimes called “OP Sandbag.”

The snipers there built elaborate hides set back from the windows with narrow vision slits built into the sandbag walls. From the street, they were virtually undetectable. Yet the enemy knew the Americans held the building, and they kept up a steady rain of rockets, mortars, and small-arms fire on the place that took its toll. The snipers reverently wrote the names of all their fallen brothers on the walls under the words “Never Forgotten.”

Others scrawled motivational graffiti in their hide sites. One group of snipers wrote “Kill them all” and “Kill like you mean it” on their walls. Somebody else later added a quote attributed to Senator John McCain, “America is great not because of what she has done for herself but because of what she has done for others.”

OP Sandbag became one of the great sniping sites of the War on Terror. Hundreds of al-Qaida fighters fell to the men behind the M24s, M82 Barrett and Marine M40s concealed there. In 2005–2006, the scout-sniper platoon from the 3rd Infantry Division's 2/69 Armored set the gold bar standard in Ramadi. The sniper element of the platoon was only ten men. Calling themselves “Shadow Team,” the section was led by Staff Sergeant Jim Gilliland. They soon earned a fearsome reputation as one of the best precision-shooting units in Iraq. Over the course of their deployment, the ten men of Shadow Team killed well over two hundred enemy fighters. They did it through careful observation, an understanding of enemy tactics, and a few surprising moments where luck and skill came together.

On one early mission, Shadow Team had set up in two hides overlooking an auto repair shop suspected of being an insurgent ammo resupply point. For eighteen hours, they watched an unusual amount of traffic come and go in the place, but could not positively identify any hostiles. They saw no weapons or IEDs, and so they remained silently in place, observing the facility hour after hour.

To combat the boredom, Gilliland quietly game-boarded potential scenarios with the men around him. How would they handle multiple targets at once? Who would have what area of responsibility? They envisioned every type of engagement they could dream up, then walked through how they would handle them until each member of the team knew his role intimately. Gilliland's men functioned as a true team. The media's image of the lone sniper shooting targets with one shot, one kill was nowhere in evidence within Gilliland's section. They worked together, and in the process multiplied their effect on the battlefield.

But no matter how you plan and prepare, the enemy can still throw curveballs your way.

Eighteen hours into their overwatch mission, a four-door sedan suddenly roared into the street below Gilliland's hide site. The car screeched to a halt less than sixty yards from their rifles.

Gilliland and the three men with him gaped in astonishment as an insurgent popped out of one of the rear doors and walked around the fender to the trunk where he retrieved a 155mm artillery shell prepped with plastic explosives in the fuse well—a classic, ready-made IED. A couple of his pals jumped out and helped emplace it. The Americans watching them could see them joking and laughing amongst themselves until one went back and sat in the front side passenger seat. They were casual and blasé, despite the nature of their mission.

Shadow Team had already seen this once before. On one of their first missions, they saw a couple of insurgents get out of a car on a busy street and carry a 155mm artillery shell across traffic to emplace it. The civilian cars stopped and waited for them to cross. Even as the fighting destroyed the city around them, its citizens tried to carve a life out of the ruins. And part of that required traveling farther and farther through the war zone just to get basic survival supplies such as water, food, and fuel. Watching two al-Qaida terrorists seed their streets with bombs was nothing new. It was business as usual in Ramadi.

At least it was until Gilliland's men drilled both insurgents with well-placed shots from their M24s. Both terrorists fell dead before the shocked Iraqi commuters waiting to continue on their way.

This time the terrorists had blundered. Gilliland and his men were so close to where the sedan stopped that they didn't have a good shot from their hide. Rather than use their bolt-action M24s, the men quickly grabbed their M4 carbines and rushed onto the roof of their building. Four M4s, four targets. The men took aim and unleashed a fusillade of 5.56mm bullets into the street at point-blank range from an elevated position. The first rounds tore through the driver's side windshield, killing him before he could even move. The terrorist riding shotgun tried to bail out, but one of Gilliland's sharpshooters stitched him as well. He slumped over, dead, half-in and half-out of the vehicle, its passenger-side door hanging open.

The men kept up the barrage. The car caught fire. A third insurgent went down as he stood in front of it after emplacing the IED. The last one was hit as well. He fell to the street, wounded, and began to crawl away from the burning car. At that point, Gilliland's men had been spotted on the roof. Without any cover atop it, they elected to withdraw back downstairs to their hide site. By the time they got back, the fourth insurgent had dragged himself out of their field of view.

Such attacks and others knocked the casualness out of al-Qaida. They grew cautious and cunning. They hired kids to find American sniper hides, and when they did they would set up subtle signals for their al-Qaida masters. Usually the kids would pile pebbles in front of a building being used as a hide site. Other times they would signal by hanging towels in certain ways nearby.

It was hard to move around the city undetected as a result. But that did not diminish the effectiveness of the American sniper teams. The days of casually planting IEDs ended. As the snipers took a steady toll of the terrorists, they began using subtle methods to get the bombs in place. Usually, this started with a quick recon of a previous IED crater. A kid or a hired local adult would walk down the street and peer into the hole to make sure it was clear and could be used again.

The kids sometimes made passes on bicycles. They'd ride around the crater then speed off back down the street, weaving through the debris and trash to report what they'd seen. Next, a car would make several passes down the street as a second reconnaissance of the area. On each pass, the car would slow down as it went by the potential bomb site. If al-Qaida was satisfied with the spot, they'd send in the emplacement team. There were many variations on this, but usually the team consisted of two cars, one with the bomb in the trunk and the other to pull security. A van or larger sedan would follow and linger behind the other two. That one served as their casualty evacuation vehicle should anyone get hit and wounded.

They'd roll up to the site and the section assigned to planting the IED would dismount, carry the bomb to the selected location, prep it, and pull out. They did this as quickly as possible to minimize the chance of a sniper kill while they were exposed in the street.

Before American snipers began to have an effect on al-Qaida's operations in the city, the enemy would frequently use acid to melt the asphalt in the street, then scoop it away to plant an IED. With the bomb in the roadbed, they'd bury it with the melted asphalt, then scatter trash atop the site before bugging out. Such bombs were almost impossible to detect and took a heavy toll of American vehicles. They also became impossible in much of the city where our snipers had eyes on the scene.

If al-Qaida's sharpshooters affected our men and messed with their heads, American snipers had a profound effect on the enemy's psychology as well. Intercepted radio and cell phone communications between cells and their commanders revealed a growing rift between what al-Qaida's leadership wanted and what its front-line fighters were willing to attempt. More than once, a cell received orders to emplace IEDs in a particular location. The cell commander flat-out refused, telling his superiors that if he and his men did that, they would be killed by American snipers.

For both sides, killing the enemy's snipers became a critical aspect of operations in Ramadi. Al-Qaida had the edge at first, as the locals actively assisted them and the Americans rarely moved around undetected in the city. The terrorists used such knowledge to deadly effect more than once. One of their earliest coups came in June 2004 when they caught a four-man Marine sniper team by surprise on a rooftop and killed them all. They videotaped the scene and celebrated in front of the camera around the dead Marines—images that were later posted on Jihadi websites—before making off with two M40 rifles, a thermal scope, night vision, and other gear.

One of the al-Qaida snipers around Ramadi used one of those M40s for two years. On June 20, 2006, the scout snipers from 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines (3/5) spotted a car parked suspiciously on a road near Habbaniyah, about forty kiloyards outside of Ramadi. As they watched it, they saw the driver pick up a video camera to film a passing Marine convoy of amphibious tracks. Zooming in on the vehicle, one of the Marine snipers spotted the butt of a rifle inside the car. They watched it carefully until the driver pulled it into his lap, making as if to use it against the column of vehicles passing by his position. That was enough. The Americans opened fire and killed the driver. A few minutes later, another man showed up and slid into the passenger seat, unaware that his buddy had been killed. He looked over and saw the driver and froze—the Shock Factor at work. Suddenly, he broke free from his paralysis, jumped out of the car, and ran around to the driver's side. He threw open the door and was trying to pull the driver out so he could use the vehicle to get away. He wasn't thinking clearly. If he had been, he'd have realized that by doing this, he'd exposed himself to the snipers who had just shot his friend. This is another aspect of the Shock Factor—irrational behavior. They don't think; they just act. And sometimes they do things that seal their fate.