Free Shock Factor by Jack Coughlin

After a year of college, he volunteered for the Marine Corps.
    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