Free Shock Factor by Jack Coughlin Page A

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