Sniper by Gina Cavallaro

Author:Gina Cavallaro [CAVALLARO AND MATT LARSEN, GINA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762784318
Publisher: Lyons Press

GUTS, GUNS, AND GARBAGE

Cities get smaller and smaller when you’re a sniper in need of a loophole. The more hide sites you find and use, the fewer there are for new missions. And it’s especially hard when you stand out to begin with.

With the exception of a few who have certain physical traits, American infantrymen walk, talk, look, and smell like Americans. Not to mention the American uniform, an instant identifier the enemy has no obligation to wear.

When Sgt. Derek Balboa was faced with finding a hide site for an over-watch mission on the outskirts of Mosul, a city of nearly two million people in northern Iraq, he and his partner went to the most unpleasant, outside-the-box idea they knew of.

It was a disgusting way to carry out a mission, but the wet, rotting, offal-laden garbage dump—in which they spent three days lying on their bellies—ended up being the crown jewel of hide sites, the king daddy of concealment.

Okay. It should be mentioned that they did get compromised by a peripatetic goatherd, but Balboa said he still considered the mission a success because the reconnaissance, planning, and execution of the dump-as-hide-site concept was proven.

“All that together tells me that the idea would work,” said Balboa, an affable young patriot from Illinois who quit his job as a construction worker and joined the Army on the spot when he saw the television images of New York’s twin towers crumbling to the ground on 9/11.

When he decided to serve his country, he hadn’t envisioned the part with the stinking trash pit, but the day he and his partner came up with the idea—“we’d heard about some Marines or a British team doing it”—they enthusiastically started outlining their plan.

The mission itself, to over-watch a surveillance camera, had become an occasional standard with Balboa’s leaders, a method of baiting criminals into the sights of their snipers by placing a real, or sometimes bogus, camera on a utility pole or some other high spot and waiting for someone to come along and shoot at it. And they almost always did, even though it was announced to the public that there were snipers in the area who were authorized to kill those who tried to disable the cameras.

“Messages had already gone out in the media that if anyone was caught messing with the cameras, it would be necessary for us to use lethal force. Other sniper and recon teams were engaging guys who did this so they knew there were going to be consequences,” said Balboa, who noted that the knowledge that snipers were watching an area generally had a calming effect on the enemy.

“It demoralizes the insurgency because they know you’re out there, and nobody wants to move; your stomach’s going to be clenched just walking around. Even if there wasn’t much going on and we weren’t catching them, we were still denying them freedom of movement on the battlefield. I didn’t like the fact that they knew I was there, but just by my sheer presence we might have saved someone’s life.

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