Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [16]
Casey lay there for a while and considered what had happened. His people were adding nothing to this make-believe war, since several more of them had been tagged and had come to a beeping stop. With nothing else to do, he made a note to look into the situation when it came time to debrief. He learned fast and would later become my guardian angel when we started running sniper strike teams for real in Iraq. I never apologized for shooting him in ProMet.
We kicked so much butt that day that after a few hours of beeping and chirping MILES belts, the game was stopped and my sniper platoon was divided, with half of us being given to each force. That only made things worse, because now we were doing it to everybody instead of just one side.
The commanders grew agitated. If they couldn’t get rid of the pesky snipers (the ones who couldn’t survive in an urban environment), this war game would never get played, so the bigwigs finally called each other on the radio and swapped the grid coordinates of my various teams. Finally they knew exactly where we were, and they sent units out specifically to squelch us.
It’s bad enough when the enemy doesn’t want you around. It’s worse when your own guys don’t want you either, and we started feeling unloved again. As soon as I figured out that we had been given up, I radioed word for all of my boys, on both sides, to free-play—just go out and kill as many people as possible before they get you—and we took off like a bunch of cockroaches.
By the time they weeded us all out of the game, my small team had “killed” more than sixty men, including many of the important players, and had staggered both the attacking and defending forces. After I got beeped, I went over and sat on the porch of a small house to get out of the rain, figuring I could be just as dead dry as I could be wet. Casey and a whole bunch of other Marines were resurrected and sent back into the fight, and ProMet resumed.
I was filthy and exhausted but happy with the job turned in by my boys. I could not have asked for a much better demonstration of my arguments for unlocking snipers from fixed positions and setting them free to roam. Our run-and-gun tactics had altered the geometry of the battlefield by turning us into a totally unexpected force, and I could easily imagine that the trouble we caused would have been greatly magnified if we had been able to increase our range by using fast, high-performance vehicles.
Before I could delve too deeply into my recollections of the day, a high-ranking officer sloshed through the mud to find me. He was one of the foreign observers and wore the badges of a special operations unit that I knew well. He planted a big black boot on the porch, looked me in the eye, and said with a thick accent, “You’re good. Oh, you’re good.” Then he walked away, chuckling.
My boys had proven some things that day, and the overall tactics that Marines would use in taking a city had to be reconsidered. Snipers still had a place in war, and the ways to use them had increased. The experiences of ProMet in the neighborhoods of George AFB were important.
It didn’t make me too popular with most of the planners, but it did make me right, and I liked that better. We had proven that snipers had a valuable role in modern warfare, with possibilities that could not be ignored. We had brought an attack to its knees, and even when the enemy knew where we were, it was hard to snuff us out. Give us wheels and we would be only more deadly.
ProMet was in January 2001, and the world had