ADOPT A SNIPER

Michelle Malkin points to a site where you can donate gear to snipers serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places abroad. As well as gear, cash donations are also accepted.



Snipers are a vital resource in the war on terror - against enemies that aren't as easily identifiable as targets from satellite photos. As the Adopt a Sniper site notes:

The war on terror is ideally suited for the tactics of the sniper. With the convoy escorts and house to house fighting, the US military is using snipers in numbers not seen in modern history. It seems like a no-brainer but a man with a rifle that knows how to use it, is in much demand in a war. Soldiers and Marines that have not been to a formal sniper school but who shot "Expert" on the range are being issued special rifles and basically doing the same job as the school trained snipers in some cases.

Personally, I would like to see a similar organization for Canadian snipers, who served with honor in Afghanistan and were denied recognition after the Canadian DoD refused to allow then to receive US honors. (scroll down for full item).

Canadian snipers were reportedly outstanding in the fighting around the mountainous al-Qaeda bastion east of Gardez, code-named Operation Anaconda.

The battle pitted the two Canadian sniper teams against an enemy that howered the assaulting coalition troops with mortars and machine-gun fire as soon as they jumped from their helicopters. One member of the team, a corporal from Newfoundland, said on his first night in combat he and his partner got an al-Qaeda machine gun in their sights as it was hailing bullets down on U.S. troops below.

Crawling up into a good position, they set up their .50-calibre rifle -- the MacMillan Tac-50, a weapon the corporal compares to having superhuman power in your hands. "Firing it feels like someone slashing you on the back of your hockey helmet with a hockey stick."

When he hit his first target, an enemy gunman at a distance of 1,700 metres, he said all that ran through his mind was locating his next target. "All I thought of was Sept. 11th and all those people who didn't have a chance and the American reporter who was taken hostage, murdered and his wife getting the videotape of the execution; that is my justification."

A master corporal from Ontario, the lead sniper of his three-man team, said when they first landed in the combat zone "our spider senses were tingling.... It was night and we didn't know what to expect."

By daylight, after coming under enemy machine-gun fire, he managed to ease his rifle barrel between two rocks and quickly located an enemy sniper hiding behind a small piece of corrugated steel between two trees. He guessed the distance at 1,700 metres and fired one shot through the metal, killing the man instantly. He said afterward he remembered thinking: "That's one less bullet that's gonna be coming at us, one less person we have to think about."

During the next four days of fighting, the Newfoundland corporal set what is believed to be a record for a long-distance shot under combat conditions, hitting an enemy gunman at a distance of 2,430 metres. The days of crawling, shooting and long hours waiting in cover left the Canadian snipers exhausted. "You don't realize what you've done to your body and how tired you are till it's all done. I think we slept 14 or 15 hours when we got back," the master corporal said.

Three of them, along with U.S. special forces soldiers, also rescued a company of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division that was pinned down by enemy fire on the first day of Operation Anaconda.

That item was from two years ago. I remember it mostly because of the distance record set by Corporal 'Bill" of Fogo Island, Newfoundland - and because of the way the Liberal government, as is generally expected, tried to downplay and hide the heroism of our forces.

There's more on that at the Canadian Military History site at Storm Pages.