Troops you’ll meet in the book

Army Master Sgt. Rick is a God-and-country Special Forces sniper who looked so much like an Iraqi that he dressed up like one to go on his recon missions, breaking his disguise only once when he saw two guys placing a bracket on a highway guardrail for a bomb to kill U.S. troops. After his driver screeched to a halt 10 feet away from them, Master Sgt. Rick jumped out and aimed his rifle at the men, who froze in place, terrified of this strange, English-speaking “Arab” before them. “If they had taken half a step I would have shot ‘em in the face.”

Army Staff Sgt. Stan Crowder is a young infantryman trained as a sniper who killed his first man only moments after alighting from a hovering helicopter on the peaks of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush, having survived a helicopter crash only weeks earlier in which he almost went blind. Going to war was a dream come true. When his unit got orders for Afghanistan in late 2001, he said, “I think I felt like I won the Heisman Trophy! I called everybody. I told them ‘I can’t tell you what’s going on, all I can say is keep watching the news. “

Marine Cpl. Neal Brace said the other snipers in his platoon thought he was gay or that he was a spy because he didn’t fit the mold of a Marine. But he proved himself on a hot morning in Helmand Province in Afghanistan and when one of the platoon’s beloved team leaders was killed in an ambush, became a trusted right-hand man to the fallen Marine’s best friend. Before that day, though, he hadn’t wanted to have much to do with either them. “They were really, really tough guys, like meat and potatoes, snake eater types. They were pretty much the opposite of anybody I’d ever want to talk to or hang out with.”

Army Sgt. Ryan Coffield was shot through the neck by an enemy sniper’s bullet a split second after catching sight of a glint in the sniper’s scope about 150 meters away. Through a raspy voice, but lucky to be alive, Coffield described the experience like this: “It felt like somebody had slapped the back of my neck. All my muscles relaxed and my entire body started going limp, I fell backwards and I started seeing blood gushing out everywhere.”

Army Sgt. 1st Class Kevin was born in Dundalk, Ireland in the 1960s at the start of the troubles with Northern Ireland. But rather than allow the Irish Republican Army to recruit him, as they had recruited so many youngsters in Kevin’s town, he joined the Irish Army and became a sniper, taking a path toward America where he would end up in a Special Forces unit doing what he said he was born to do. “I’ve got sniping in my blood.”

Mohamed Uthman, a 5-foot, 2-inch tall enemy sniper took the lives of five American soldiers in the space of 30 minutes in 2007.  He killed one from the rooftop of a house, which blew up when a trip wire was activated by members of a platoon who went in to snatch him. Uthman, who was identified quickly after his killings by the “Bird Dogs,” a group of Iraqi locals who secretly worked for the U.S. unit in an area southeast of Baghdad, later was killed in an airstrike.