Johnathan Taylor served as a scout sniper in the United States Marine Corps for eight years. He is now the president of the USMC Scout Sniper Association, an organization helping veteran snipers access financial, medical, and psychological support.
He tells Business Insider how elite marksmen in the unit are trained for combat and describes the longest shot he took as a sniper in Afghanistan. He discusses his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, the dangers he faced in the field, and the tactics he used to evade detection.
He tells Business Insider how elite marksmen in the unit are trained for combat and describes the longest shot he took as a sniper in Afghanistan. He discusses his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, the dangers he faced in the field, and the tactics he used to evade detection.
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00:00My name is Jonathan Taylor. In 2011, I took one of the longest sniper shots in Marine Corps history.
00:06This is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:10You find yourself always living in an elevated sense of alertness.
00:15I personally did suffer from PTSD.
00:17You come home within a week, now you're back at your kitchen table with your family, back home,
00:22and you're going right back into daily life. It's a difficult transition.
00:31People ask me, you know, how does it feel to shoot someone or can't feel good to shoot someone?
00:35My answer to that is no, it's not hard to shoot someone at all.
00:38It's actually, for me, it's just like shooting a target.
00:42The only thing that's different to me is there's a big psychological effect if you miss,
00:48and there's a big psychological effect if you wound and they get away.
00:52If you take a sniper shot and you miss, and they know they were shot at by a Marine sniper and you missed them,
00:58they can now use that for propaganda.
01:01They can feel their chest puffed up.
01:03Marine snipers can't shoot. I got shot at by a sniper, he didn't hit me.
01:07If you engage an enemy combatant and you wound them and they get away,
01:11now you've definitely created an enemy who can now walk around saying,
01:15I got shot by a Marine sniper, but I'm fine,
01:18but now I'm going to do everything I can to hunt down and kill Marine snipers.
01:22I can confidently say that I've always used my good moral compass to make sure that I'm doing the right thing,
01:27and that is having positive ID of a weapon or hostile act, hostile intent.
01:33Those three things are a must-have if you're going to try to engage anyone.
01:38When we would do these missions and we'd have enemy kills and things, it was never talked about.
01:42We would come back, and if the mission was over, and, hey, did you kill it?
01:45Yeah, I think we killed a couple guys, and then that was it.
01:48Unless you actually could physically touch the body, which you never can as a sniper,
01:53and also, you know, the Afghan and Iraqi, the people that we were in combat against,
02:00they take their bodies immediately and get them out of there.
02:04So it's very rare that you even find a body left over,
02:07and the way you know you've got a confirmed kill is the funeral the next couple days.
02:14Our interpreter would have friends in the market.
02:17They would say, hey, you remember that engagement over there when you were in Building 91,
02:20and you shot the five guys?
02:22They just have five funerals this week.
02:25That's all those guys.
02:32Most of the time you try to insert under the cover of darkness, so we insert at night.
02:36We insert about usually 1, 2 a.m., 3 a.m.
02:39That way you can make your movement to your position, get set in before the sun comes up,
02:44get everything staged, get your security set up,
02:48make sure you can see what you're trying to observe, get your radio up,
02:51make sure you've got comm going and those types of things.
02:54And then as soon as the sun comes up, you're on alert.
02:57You're observing the pattern of life in the area.
02:59When you're on a mission, especially a three-day mission,
03:02a lot of times you're usually not in a good, comfortable position for those three days
03:06because there's not a lot of terrain to work with.
03:09A lot of times what we're doing is IED interdiction, so explosive device interdiction.
03:13So the bad guys would dig holes on the side of the road, put these bombs in, explosives,
03:18and wait for trucks to come and blow them up.
03:20So insert yourself into an area to where you can get good eyes on
03:25and observe that intersection where multiple IEDs have been in place.
03:30There's not a lot of ways to disguise yourself,
03:32so what we'd have to do is we would have to dig holes just a few inches down,
03:37and then we would take rocks and other stuff around us, bushes,
03:41and kind of place them around it so that it didn't look like a giant hole.
03:46And we would make a little lane in there so that we could have our gun, our scope,
03:51and observe, a little observation post.
03:54Sometimes we would take occupied houses where people lived in them, families lived in them,
03:58because they had a certain window on the second floor
04:01that had good eyes on this certain intersection in the town we wanted to see.
04:04It was always a weird feeling going into somebody's house that's occupied at 2 in the morning,
04:10knocking on the door, knocking on the window,
04:12and you just hold your pistol up and be like, you know, we're coming in.
04:17And they just, they got no choice.
04:19We would tell the family basically, hey, you know, you can move around your house,
04:23do your day-to-day business, you just can't leave the confinements of your compound while we're there.
04:29After the first couple times doing that, I realized it was very difficult with the language barrier.
04:33And we never had an interpreter really assigned to us in Iraq.
04:37Afghan, we did a lot.
04:38Basically, I wrote out on a notepad like an entry statement for these houses.
04:45And it said, hey, you know, we are U.S. Marines.
04:48We're going to use your house for a mission.
04:51We'll be here no longer than the mission requires.
04:53We will treat you with respect. Please treat us with respect.
04:56Please bring us any weapons or ammunition or cell phones that you may have.
05:00If you have sick or wounded, please let us know.
05:03And that was about it.
05:05I put that on a piece of paper and had it written in Arabic.
05:08I had compassion for the local civilians.
05:11It wasn't their fault.
05:12You know, they weren't the enemy.
05:14So we tried to treat them with as much respect as we could.
05:17Being a sniper in a combat situation, you can definitely find yourself in some crazy situations,
05:23very dirty situations.
05:26One time in particular, we needed to get eyes on this one section of a road,
05:30and it was right on the outskirts of this village.
05:33And the only covered position that we could get was this.
05:36Beside this little house, there was a small little sheep shed, really small, though.
05:42But I had a four-man team, and we were like, we got nowhere to go.
05:47It's 3 in the morning. We've been walking around trying to find a spot.
05:49The last thing we could find before the sun came up was that shed.
05:52We made a little pile of hay through a hay bale,
05:55and when we removed all the hay out of the ground to make us a flat spot,
05:58we could lay down and sleep.
06:00There was just maggots, just layer after layer, years of sheep s***, active maggots.
06:08We try to get rid of what you can, but there's nothing you can do.
06:10That's very common for a sniper mission, to be in those kind of spots.
06:14Or even if it's cold, a lot of times, especially if you're near a river,
06:19you're trying to observe, you're going to have to be in a really crappy spot
06:23that's probably going to get you wet.
06:25You don't want to be on the side of the beach.
06:27You have to be hidden, so you get in the reeds, you get into a little wash,
06:31and disguise yourself in that.
06:33And if you're sitting in that for two or three days,
06:35and it's 30, 40 degrees, 20 degrees outside,
06:39that can be a toll on you too, take a toll.
06:42So it goes from both extremes, to extreme cold, to extreme hot,
06:46to living in s***, or living in a swamp.
06:49I mean, it's bad.
06:51But anywhere, usually the worst places on earth is where you're going to find the snipers.
06:58So the average loadout for a four-man sniper team during Operation Iraqi Freedom,
07:03and this was my team, we'd have your team leader, your assistant team leader,
07:07your radio operator, and your security guy slash machine gunner.
07:11Everybody would have at least six liters plus of water.
07:14We would have food to sustain ourselves for three to four days.
07:18And we would have extra of everything.
07:20I would have my sniper rifle, and that would be T-boned across my ruck.
07:24I would have an M4, and I would also have a pistol.
07:28And that's what I would carry.
07:30I would carry extra batteries to help the radio guy out,
07:33and I would carry extra ammo just in case.
07:36I would have at least six magazines of ammo on my chest,
07:39including one or two frag grenades, a Pyro pop-up for signals,
07:45and that's about it for my loadout.
07:48For the assistant team leader, very similar loadout.
07:51He would carry usually just an M4 and anything that we need as far as, like, to observe,
07:56so binoculars, spotting scope, night vision, those types of things.
07:59And then our RTO, our radio guy, he would carry one or two radios, sometimes two,
08:04always at least one with extra batteries, and then his own personal loadout as well.
08:09Our machine gunner, our last guy, security guy,
08:12he would carry usually a Claymore, which is an explosive device.
08:16He would also carry his machine gun and extra ammo
08:19and also help carry extra batteries for the radio guy.
08:22The average weight of a scout sniper's pack on a mission, a combat mission,
08:27is 65 pounds, I would say, average.
08:30And then on top of that, you've got your full combat loadout,
08:33so you've got your flak jacket with your armor, your magazines, plus all your guns,
08:38so it gets really heavy.
08:39It's probably 80 to 100 pounds per person that you're carrying.
08:46So one of the most, I guess, well-known items in a scout sniper's arsenal is his ghillie suit.
08:52You take a pair of utilities, you know, your regular clothes, camo,
08:56and you attach netting, you attach burlap,
09:00you attach things to conceal yourself and camouflage yourself.
09:03When we build a ghillie suit for camouflage,
09:05we usually always build it out of your desert uniform,
09:08which is your light colors, your light brown tans,
09:10because once you get that dirty, it starts getting brown,
09:13and you can kind of make that blend in any environment.
09:15At that point, it's just based off of what environment you're going to be in.
09:19You can use the same ghillie suit, because you've got your netting on the back,
09:22and your burlap, you're able to use that burlap to tie in vegetation.
09:27In Afghanistan, if you're out, you know, in the farmlands,
09:30near the wadis and the rivers,
09:33then you can use all the tall grasses and things like that
09:36and stick them all over you and tie them to you, and you can be very concealed.
09:39Very rarely do we wear a ghillie suit in Iraq.
09:42We mostly try to use the terrain to disguise us as much as we could.
09:46One thing that gets difficult is if you're on a three-day mission
09:50and you're laying there in a hole in the desert,
09:53and you've got nothing protecting you from the sun,
09:55all your water leaves you very quickly.
09:57You get dehydrated very quickly.
09:59We'd order tan bedsheets online, have family ship them to us.
10:01We'd spray paint them different colors,
10:04and then we'd take them and make a mud hole out by our patrol base,
10:07and we'd just dump them in the mud, cover them in mud,
10:10put them in the creek, get them as dirty as we can, dry them out.
10:13And now we've got what looks like the natural terrain shade cover.
10:17So then from there, we could take, like, just your average tent pole that snaps together.
10:21We could take those, and we could figure out ways to rig them
10:24to maybe give us a little canopy, stick it in the hole,
10:27and we can all lay down under it.
10:29So now we've got cover from the sun, but we're also covered from people seeing us.
10:33You get creative, especially when you get hot.
10:36It's not fun laying there 110 degrees.
10:39The most coveted item that we have as a scout sniper is called a hog's tooth,
10:46especially when you're active duty.
10:48I think I never took mine off when I was active,
10:50and now I only wear it for special occasions basically, but I have mine on today.
10:53Basically what it is is it's the projectile from a .308 round or bullet.
10:58Your hog's tooth is a necklace that every scout sniper gets presented to them
11:03when they graduate sniper school, and it's your prized possession.
11:06A lot of snipers never take it off,
11:08and this is the actual round that we shoot at sniper school and that we train with.
11:14You hold it close to your heart.
11:15There's a lore behind it. There's a couple different stories,
11:17but the one that I go with and most people go with is this is the enemy's last round.
11:23So this is the round that was meant for you that didn't strike you.
11:28As long as you have this round around your neck, you're invincible.
11:37So in 2011, I was a sniper team leader.
11:41Call sign was Shogun of our platoon.
11:43I was a senior sniper in the platoon.
11:45We had a very stacked platoon with a lot of experience.
11:47Everybody had multiple deployments. That platoon was full of studs.
11:50This was in Marjah. Afghanistan is in the Helmand province.
11:53We had all the air operation to the east of the town.
11:56There was a lot of enemy activity, and they would kind of come in and out of Marjah through this area.
12:00It was like no man's land.
12:01Anytime you reached a certain grid line on the east of the city,
12:05you would start getting engaged every time.
12:07The reason that area was so protected by the enemy is because
12:10that's where they had a lot of their poppy, opium, and marijuana facilities going.
12:15So the whole mission was the Afghani army and Afghani police were going to do
12:19a north to south clearing operation, methodically locating and burning down
12:24marijuana fields, poppy fields, all the way down.
12:28What we were assigned to do was to insert two or three days ahead of the main operation
12:34to a building on the most eastern part of the village to observe the pattern of life
12:38and report on any activity we seen in that area.
12:41The morning of, as the vehicles were staging to start coming and pushing through,
12:44we could see multiple motorcycles full of guys coming in,
12:48two or three guys on each motorcycle.
12:50The way they operate in that area, anytime they're going for an attack, they wear all black.
12:56And as the Afghani army and Afghani police start pushing south and burning out these fields,
13:01these enemy guys start coming up and staging in this one little area of this village
13:06to start harassing them.
13:08My team is reporting on this from a building.
13:11They can't see us. They don't know we're there. We're over 2,000 yards away.
13:14And we can see what looks like to be weapons, but we can't really tell.
13:17At this time, I'm on the spot and scope observing.
13:20My teammate, he is actually on the .50 cal.
13:24I'm trying to get him walked on to the distance just in case we need to take a shot.
13:28We realize that it's over 2,000 yards, which is past the max effective range of the M107 .50 cal.
13:36It's a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle.
13:39Over 2,000, 2,200 is the max effective range,
13:42so we knew that this was going to be a difficult shot if we had to take it.
13:46We do all the math. We get everything figured out.
13:48I'm reporting. I'm telling the CO. I'm like, hey, we've got these guys.
13:51They look shady. They're doing something.
13:54I haven't got positive ID yet.
13:56He's like, if you get positive ID of any weapons or hostiles, fire at will.
14:00We're getting ready. All of a sudden, here it goes.
14:03The guy jumps up on the berm right behind this wall.
14:05All of a sudden, we've seen an RPG clear as day.
14:08He shot an RPG north towards the Afghan Army guys, Afghan police.
14:14And I screamed, RPG, he's got an RPG.
14:17And then the CO was like, fire.
14:19So I told Nixon, you know, he was like, where should I hold?
14:24I've got the elevation maxed out because it's past the max effective.
14:27I'm like, just hold as low as you can.
14:30I'm going to hold the last mil dot and fire.
14:32He took a shot and it hit in the desert.
14:35It was like 300 yards short, roughly 300 yards short.
14:39Cody was like, I don't know how to hold to hit him properly
14:43because he wasn't a school train sniper.
14:45He was a very good Marine, very good sniper,
14:47sniper-toomer Marine or teammate, but he wasn't a school train sniper.
14:50So I said, okay, let me get on the gun.
14:52I did my own calculation in my head and did a mil hold,
14:57which is a technique that you use to do a hold
15:01instead of actually cranking the actual data on your scope for elevation.
15:05You can just hold.
15:06I did my mil hold, and when I determined I was about at the spot I needed to be
15:12to take the shot, I was actually looking at a cloud.
15:15So my crosshairs were basically holding on a cloud.
15:17I couldn't see the guys at all.
15:19That's how high I was.
15:21I said, okay, Nixon, I'm about to fire a shot for reference.
15:24Tell me where I hit.
15:26So I shot and boom, hit the wall right beside these guys.
15:30It just hits it.
15:31You see the flash just bang.
15:33You've got it.
15:34Wherever you're holding, stay there.
15:36So they all start kind of walking kind of fast.
15:39As soon as they peaked from the cover of that wall,
15:43I had my spot where I was holding right in the middle of the wall,
15:46and I dropped in the tire nine rounds.
15:48Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
15:50Dust, flash.
15:52You couldn't see anything after that.
15:54And the reason there's such a big flash is because the round that we shoot is a
15:58this is a replica of a .50 caliber sniper round.
16:02The round that we shoot is actually called a ROFIS round.
16:05It is kind of like an explosive tip round.
16:07It's got a tungsten penetrator inside of it,
16:10and then it's also filled with zirconium particles.
16:14Zirconium particles is like incendiary.
16:16It lights up, burns.
16:18These projectiles have that in them.
16:20So it's designed to engage light armored vehicles, really,
16:25to shoot into the engine block of a truck and then light on fire.
16:29But we use these.
16:31That's basically all the rounds we had was ROFIS rounds.
16:33So the good thing about ROFIS rounds, they do some damage.
16:36Secondly, it's easy to see and spot your shots because it explodes,
16:41leaves a flash.
16:42So we could see that flash hitting right in their bodies,
16:46and there was nowhere they could go.
16:48Called in.
16:49I'm reporting all this right to the CO as it's happening.
16:51A few minutes later, there was no more activity from those guys.
16:55What we do is a battle damage assessment.
16:57So a squad of infantry will go out after you make a sniper kill,
17:00do an assessment.
17:01So they'll look and see if there's any dead bodies or what there was,
17:04what shooting positions they were set up in.
17:06So they called me on the radio like, hey, yeah, JT, man,
17:08we see blood everywhere.
17:10There's bloody clothes, bloody blankets, bloody everything,
17:13chunks of flesh.
17:15These guys definitely didn't survive.
17:17The distance was 24, 26 meters, over 2,600 yards.
17:22I knew it was a far, I knew it was a long engagement.
17:25I haven't heard of anybody at that point ever engaging anybody that far.
17:28But at the time, you don't think about it as far as a scout sniper
17:31is really concerned.
17:33There's things that are taboo that people don't like to talk about,
17:35longest kills and things like that.
17:37That's why I never came out with it for a long time.
17:41And I encourage anybody else out there that if they have stories like that,
17:44sniper stories, share your stories.
17:46People don't know what they don't know.
17:48And we're trying to honor the legacy,
17:50honor the impact that we've left on the battlefield.
17:52Every Marine sniper that will come out and tell their stories
17:55helps us preserve that history.
18:03To be a Marine scout sniper in the Infantry Battalion, it's voluntary.
18:05What they do is just about every year or after every deployment,
18:09they'll hold NDOCs, indoctorations.
18:11Basically, it's a tryout.
18:13So out of most NDOCs, say 25 guys show up.
18:17And these are probably more than likely some of your best,
18:20the top-tier guys in the Infantry Battalion that come out for these.
18:24It all starts with the gear list, the first day at check-in for the NDOC.
18:28It's 05 in the morning, everybody lay their stuff out,
18:31and if you're missing one item on that list,
18:33you pack your stuff and you go home.
18:35That's it.
18:36You have to have attention to detail.
18:38If you can't make attention to detail to try out,
18:41you're not going to make it.
18:43After that gear list, the guys then pack their rucks up
18:46and we do a physical fitness test.
18:50So a 3-mile run, max set of pull-ups, and max set of crunches.
18:55We do that.
18:56As long as they score a high first class, then they're good.
18:59And we had 2 logs between us and water jugs and MREs
19:03and everything that we needed to sustain ours.
19:05When I say MREs, I mean that's your food, your box of food.
19:09It's meals ready to eat, that's what they're called.
19:11They're not very delicious, but they have all the nutrients you need.
19:15And they would hike those logs with all their gear out to the training area,
19:19which is about 5 miles.
19:21And the snipers in the platoon, the senior snipers,
19:24are running around yelling at you, pulling you out of formation,
19:27making you do stuff, getting back in formation, the whole 5 miles.
19:31And when you get to the training area,
19:33the first thing you do is you set up all the tents and set the camp up.
19:36And then from there, it's basically nonstop for about 10 days of just hell on earth.
19:42They're going to treat you like s**t for 10 days straight.
19:46Very little sleep, little food, and test all of your infantry knowledge.
19:52Out of the 25 in my NDOC, 7 finished it without quitting,
19:57and they kept 6 of us for the platoon.
20:00So it's a pretty high attrition rate for the NDOC alone.
20:04Those 6 guys, you're all really tight now
20:07because you all just went through something very hellacious together.
20:10To this point in my life, that could have been the hardest 10 days ever I did.
20:14My feet were destroyed. I was bleeding through my boots.
20:17It was pretty rough.
20:19The next step in your journey, you join a platoon, you get assigned a team,
20:23you start feeling your way out in a team, finding your niche.
20:26And then once you're ready and your platoon thinks you're ready,
20:29they try to get you a spot in sniper school.
20:31Those spots are very coveted.
20:33Sniper school is about 65% historically.
20:36The school altogether is 11 weeks, so it's a long time.
20:39You're buddied up with somebody. You've got a buddy partner, a shooter-spotter.
20:42That's how we operate.
20:44You're with that guy 24-7. He's attached to your hip.
20:48So everywhere you go, you're together.
20:50If you fail, he fails. If you're in trouble, he's in trouble.
20:55So you better hope you've got a good partner.
20:58You go right into the first phase, which is land navigation.
21:02Land navigation is the first gradable event that can drop you.
21:06It's very difficult, and basically what you're doing is you're using a map and a compass,
21:09and you're trying to locate a tent stake that's in the ground,
21:13and on that stake has a dog tag.
21:17And you're trying to find that in a dense, wooded swamp area.
21:23It's very difficult to find.
21:25You have to find so many in a certain number of hours to be able to say you passed.
21:30So that gets a couple people usually from sniper school off the bat.
21:34And then after that, you go into the second phase, where you start learning your marksmanship.
21:39Whenever it comes a time that you have to make a shot, it is the most important because you can't miss.
21:46Then you go into your field skills.
21:48That's when you're learning how to do what we call observation exercises.
21:52So basically you lay down, and you have your spot and scope, your binos.
21:56Instructors place 10 to 12 military items out in the area somewhere, in a field or wherever.
22:05You have to lay there in the prone and try to identify those items.
22:09It can be as small as a bullet, an AP brush that you use to brush your, clean your gun with.
22:15It can be a magazine clip.
22:17It's a skill that you're learning, a skill set to get you used to observing what we call the baseline.
22:23The baseline is everything as it is in its natural state.
22:26So as a sniper, you have to be trained to notice changes in the baseline.
22:31The next thing that we learn is called stalking, camouflage and concealment.
22:36Stalking is the number one phase of sniper school that people get dropped for.
22:41It's the hardest part.
22:42You put your ghillie suit on, you camouflage up, and they take you out to an area.
22:47They determine a left lateral limit and a right lateral limit.
22:50At one end, they'll park a truck with two instructors on the top in chairs with binoculars,
22:56and they're observing that whole area.
22:59We call it a stalk lane.
23:01And all the snipers are in what we call the veg line.
23:05The whole purpose of the stalk is to make your way concealed within 200 meters, 200 yards of the observers on the truck,
23:14set up a shooting position, and take a well-aimed shot at the truck.
23:20We use blanks.
23:22And then be able to report and observe on what they're doing.
23:25There's walkers out there that are walking around to help the observers try to locate you.
23:31Once you make it through stalking, you are kind of at the finish line.
23:33It's really yours to lose at this point.
23:35Now you're in the mission planning and execution phase.
23:38This phase is where they're actually assembling you into sniper teams and teaching you how to run missions.
23:45They'll set up a command post in the office there with radios.
23:49You'll get mission checkpoints, and you'll patrol out to your checkpoints.
23:54You'll get observation spots where you're supposed to observe a target.
23:58You'll stay out there for a couple days doing that, reporting information back, just like you would in combat.
24:04You'll get compromised sometimes and have to evade or break contact and run two miles and set up in another spot.
24:12They play with you a lot, play games with you.
24:14The whole final phase is just teaching you how to develop and write a five-paragraph order, we call it,
24:20which is basically like your mission plan, how to brief that properly,
24:23how to build a terrain model that shows and illustrates what you're doing,
24:28and to be able to articulate and brief that to a command.
24:33Once you pass that, you're basically good.
24:36By then, it's your 11th week.
24:39Now you're a basically trained scout sniper.
24:43You still don't know everything for sure,
24:45but now you know how to at least carry yourself and operate and run a team in a combat zone.
24:57A lot of different things go into becoming a good long-range marksman.
25:01There's things that you have to take into account that you wouldn't have to take into account for, say, your average hunter or average sports shooter.
25:07You have to take into account the atmospherics, like what's going on in the air, the barometric pressure, humidity, your temperature.
25:15All of these little things affect the bullet's flight, especially if you're doing high-angle type shoots,
25:21like shooting from an angle high to low, like shooting off a mountain or building, or shooting low to high.
25:28Then you have to start getting into some serious math, like the Pythagorean theorem, algebra, different things like that.
25:34Also, when you're shooting angles, you're dealing with cosine, cosine indicator.
25:39It can be a lot to take in to a new sniper.
25:43When I went through school, we were doing everything manually.
25:46So all of our calculations and our formulas, you have to memorize a lot of formulas.
25:50To calculate your wind, there's a certain formula.
25:52To calculate your distance to the target, there's a different formula.
25:57What we had is we had these, we called them a sketchbook.
26:00In the sketchbook, we had a calculator, we had protractors, we had anything that we needed for marksmanship.
26:07We had it all lined out in there.
26:09All your dopes was like your elevation for your gun.
26:12Every gun shoots a little different, so at certain distances.
26:16If you want to hit a target at 600 yards, it may be 3.2 that you have to turn on your elevation.
26:20His gun, it may be 3.4.
26:23To get those, you have to shoot a lot to get your data and collect your data.
26:27You have to collect data at different temperatures because your dopes aren't going to be the same
26:32at first thing in the morning at 50 degrees as they are in mid-afternoon at 80 degrees.
26:38The trajectory of the round is going to be different. It's going to fly different.
26:41All those atmospherics start having effect.
26:45The modern snipers, everything is computerized and there's a trick for everything and a gadget for everything.
26:53So a lot of those skills are fleeting.
26:55Those are skills that are very perishable, and if you don't practice them, you will definitely forget them.
27:02So I'm glad that I learned that way, the proper way, and actually sitting there writing out formulas.
27:08I come from a very rural area in Mississippi. There's not a lot of opportunities.
27:18You either become a cop, you work construction, or you go to the military.
27:23I tried college first. It didn't work.
27:26And after 9-11, I was actually in my barracks room watching the TV when the planes hit the tower.
27:35And from that moment on, I knew that I wanted to serve in some capacity.
27:40So when I went to boot camp, I was 20. So I was a little older than the average recruit.
27:45It wasn't difficult. It was just frustrating.
27:47You're gone from home for the first time, no phones.
27:50So you just communicate and be a letter back and forth with your family.
27:53And they just play with you mind games all day.
27:55Once you get out of boot camp, that's when your training really starts.
27:59If you sign up to be infantry in the Marine Corps, after boot camp, you go to what they call SOI, School of Infantry.
28:06Infantry school is where you really start learning how the Marine Corps works,
28:09how to be tactically proficient, how to do your job, how to get ready for combat.
28:13It's more difficult than boot camp because it's a lot more physical and you're out in the field a lot.
28:18But you also have more freedoms. You can have your cell phone. You can go off on the weekends.
28:23Everybody does the first couple weeks together, basic training.
28:27They can break you down into infantry specialties, MOS specialties.
28:30So you can either be a machine gunner, an assaultman, or mortarman.
28:33So I did a machine gun course at SOI, and it was difficult.
28:37You're humping those big guns, the tripods, all the ammo.
28:40With the disassembly and assembly of the guns and having to learn the processes really quick was a challenge.
28:47After infantry school, of course, then you get your orders to your unit.
28:50We call it the fleet.
28:52Once you get to the fleet, that's when all the fun begins.
28:57When I went to the fleet, I went to 1-2, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines.
29:01And it was pretty crazy and surreal checking into the fleet for the first time.
29:06The first day when they dropped us off after we graduated SOI and they dropped us off at our battalion,
29:12it was like the walking dead.
29:14I mean, guys had just got back from deployment in Iraq.
29:17So you seen guys walking around the barracks with burns, amputees, people in crutches, a lot of disgruntled Marines.
29:27It wasn't a good scene to walk into as a young PFC or private.
29:31It was a shocker then.
29:33I can imagine how it's changed now with there not being an active war going on, but it was an awakening.
29:39My first ever deployment, I was a machine gunner.
29:42I deployed with the 22nd MEU, Marine Expeditionary Unit.
29:45And we traveled across the Mediterranean on ship, and we went into Iraq for about 90 days, a little more.
29:54As soon as we got into Iraq, a lot of action.
29:56By the time of my second deployment, I went to sniper school, and I was a sniper team leader.
30:00My third deployment, I was also a sniper team leader.
30:03We went to Iraq, and it was in 2009.
30:06And then my Afghanistan deployment, 2011, that was my final deployment and one of my most active deployments.
30:20Operating as a scout sniper in a combat zone for as many deployments as I did,
30:25and as much as high-tempo as our deployment cycles were,
30:29you find yourself always living in an elevated sense of alertness.
30:35It really gets difficult at times to turn that off.
30:40I didn't really notice it as much until my latter deployments, when I got a little older, too, I think.
30:46You've been on high alert, running back-to-back missions in an austere environment with the enemy for six months straight.
30:57You come home within a week.
31:00Now you're back at your kitchen table with your family, back home, and you're going right back into daily life.
31:08When I noticed it was at night when I'd go to sleep, when things would get quiet, I wanted my security there with me.
31:16Because when I'm asleep in Afghanistan or Iraq,
31:19I can go to sleep comfortably knowing that these guys on my team got my back, and they got guns.
31:26If anything happens, they're going to wake me up.
31:28When it's just you, you feel alone, even if you have a family.
31:31You've still got your family there with you, but now it's all on you.
31:34You're the team leader, and you're the only security at home.
31:37When I would first get back from some of my deployments, I would go through a phase to where I couldn't sleep hardly at all.
31:43The only way I could sleep was if I had a weapon-in-arms reach.
31:48I would even practice going to bed, laying down, reaching and grabbing my gun.
31:53All right, yeah, it's right there. Wait, I'm left-handed. I need it turned this way.
31:57Wait, I don't like—I'm going to make sure the trigger's here so I can just pull it up and shoot.
32:02And then if I didn't have a gun, it was a knife or something.
32:06But I'd always want to have it at arm's reach.
32:09In any little sound, you know, in the middle of the night, I would wake up like I was on a mission
32:14and immediately grab my weapon, clear the house, walk outside of the house, go all the way around the house,
32:20come back in and go right back to sleep.
32:22To turn it off is like, oh, this is what adults do. This is what grown men do.
32:24They protect their family. You hear a sound, you go and look at it, and you go check the house.
32:28But the average father at home is not—doesn't need a gun at arm's reach at all times.
32:35So that's one thing, and I think that leads into, you know, especially if you've done a career
32:42or spent a long amount of time in this type of environment, in this type of job field,
32:46it's very hard to transition and turn it off completely.
32:50Out of my teams that I deployed with, we never had a sniper KIA out of my group.
32:58I have multiple friends, snipers from other units that went and deployed with other units that were KIA.
33:05You know, the most loss of life that I've experienced throughout my military career is Marines taking their own lives.
33:15And I can confidently say that there's at least probably 20 that I've been connected with in some way,
33:21whether they were in my battalion, my unit, served with them, knew them.
33:25When you're already dealing with transition issues and you're already dealing with PTSD and depression
33:30and feeling that lack of belonging again, and you're surrounded by death.
33:37I personally did suffer from PTSD, and the only way that I was able to address that
33:43was finally being able to talk to someone and admit it and reach out for help.
33:57I came back from Afghanistan with some injuries.
33:59A lot of stuff that I had had already been just been compiling on me.
34:03I was slotted for recruiting school, what you call flagged.
34:06So at a certain point in your career, the Marine Corps will flag certain individuals to serve in other billets
34:12that are on behalf of the Marine Corps.
34:14It was almost like I was out of the military now.
34:16I transitioned from being an operating sniper to being a recruiter.
34:20And I was now living with my family full time, dealing with the day-to-day family issues and just life issues.
34:29I hadn't been used to that.
34:31And we weren't used to spending all of our time together either.
34:35So we were growing apart, and we were in serious financial trouble.
34:41One thing that made it difficult for me on recruiting duty is that at this point in my life,
34:46I was not very happy with the Marine Corps and wasn't really a believer.
34:51It was difficult for me to sell something I wasn't really fully believing in anymore.
34:56Of course, I was proud to be a Marine. I was proud to be a sniper.
34:58I was proud of everything I did, proud of our legacy, proud of everything.
35:01But it was a difficult transition.
35:03When I got to recruiting duty, there was already word of recruiters having a high rate of taking their own life.
35:14Before I arrived, there had been one a couple months before.
35:18And then when I was there, my first six months, we had two or three other recruiters take their life.
35:24So I was already having these issues.
35:25I already knew numerous people that had taken their own life.
35:27I already had one of my good friends do it on the phone with me.
35:30Everywhere I turned, I was seeing death.
35:32And then the final straw was our direct boss took his own life.
35:36And there was only three of us in this office, so we were tight.
35:40I literally kind of had a breakdown and went and told the sergeant major of the recruiting station what was going on.
35:46And she said, hey, let's go talk to the CO, and we're going to send you to Wounded Warrior Battalion.
35:52Take care of any things that you have you need to take care of,
35:54and you can make up your mind if you want to stay in or get out or whatever at this point.
36:00So that's what I did, and I relocated, got myself taken care of, dealt with all my demons,
36:08got a divorce, and started my whole life over in 2013.
36:14Upon my transition out of the Marine Corps, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.
36:20I'd always wanted to be in law enforcement, but I could see myself going back to my hometown in Mississippi and just dying there.
36:28I decided I was going to take a year off professionally before I made any decisions career-wise and just go travel.
36:35So I went out to Wyoming, lived out there, worked on a ranch for a little while as a ranch hand.
36:41I was herding cattle and sheep up through the Bighorn Mountains and a little bit of everything.
36:45Worked for the oil fields, got my CDL, started driving trucks, hauling sand for oil rigs.
36:50At one point, I realized, okay, mentally I'm fine.
36:55I'm ready to start getting a good career, and I want a family.
37:00My Wounded Warrior case manager had emailed me and said, hey, there's this amazing program in D.C.
37:08that you'd be a great fit for.
37:10It's called the Warriors to Workforce Acquisition Program.
37:13It's a three-year paid internship program with the V.A.
37:16It brings you in with a cohort of other wounded vets.
37:19You get professional development classes, all the training and certificates you need to be a contracting officer
37:23or a procurement specialist for the government, and you also get your bachelor's degree in business.
37:27I called, interviewed, got accepted, and moved out to Frederick, Maryland, where the course was,
37:34and then finished that course and met my wife while I was there.
37:39I randomly got a call from the president of the Scout Sniper Association at the time,
37:44and they had nominations coming up for board of directors, and he was looking for some guys.
37:50He asked me if I'd be interested.
37:52He's like, but I got at least five or six emails from people vouching for you, saying that you'd be good.
37:58Once he told me that, I'm like, well, I need to take this opportunity to utilize that.
38:04I've always had a strong natural ability to lead, so I decided I'd jump on the board for SSA,
38:11and within a couple months, I was offered to be the vice president, COO.
38:16The president at the time had to step down, and he offered me to take over as president.
38:21We are the only nonprofit association for Marine Scout Snipers in the world.
38:26We were established in 1998, and we provide support services for Marine snipers and their families.
38:33If you have mental health issues, we have a connection with the VA, who is a physician.
38:38Attorneys that we can link you up with that can help you with legal issues that you may be going through.
38:43Out of all the things I've been through, ups and downs, all my combat deployments,
38:48the loss of life I've seen and been around, I wouldn't take anything back for what I've been through
38:55because if anything would have changed in any way, I wouldn't have the current life that I have today
39:01with the current family I have today, and truly, I could not imagine myself being in a better position.
39:08I would have never imagined growing up when I was a little poor kid in Mississippi
39:15having the life and the family that I have now, so I'm very grateful.
39:25For more information, visit www.fema.gov