From: Rusty�Bullethole, [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Times Magazine - 9.9.00 "Lesson one - go for their eyes" America's gun law debate is one that divides the nation - and while it's possible for a civilian to enrol in a school for snipers, and learn execution tactics from an expert, there seems little chance of a ceasefire report by david wallis Tom Fitzpatrick, a burly, tattooed ex-Marine, had long regretted not qualifying for the corps' elite sniper unit. The programme, which trains soldiers to fire a bullet into an enemy's brain from more than a mile away, excludes smokers such as Fitzpatrick. Instead, the military taught him to install telephones. But several years later, Fitzpatrick, now a 30-year-old telephone repairman in Omaha, Nebraska, found a way to unlock his inner killer. He enrolled in "Basic Counter Sniper", a five-day course on deadly force offered by the Storm Mountain Training Centre. Getting into this Oxford for assassins in West Virginia's Allegheny Mountains was no problem. Fitzpatrick paid tuition of $495 (not including tax or ammunition) and furnished Storm Mountain with a background check and a reference letter from his minister (who happens to be his wife's best friend). Then he and a buddy piled their gear into a rented Dodge Durango and drove 1,100 miles to Storm Mountain's 208-acre compound. Detective Brian Vice of the Moss Point, Mississippi Police Department faced greater obstacles. The mayor of Moss Point judged the five-day course an extravagance. But Vice, 31, who looks like a young Clark Gable, stuck to his guns, appealing to the town's aldermen. He successfully argued that Moss Point, facing increased violent crime, needed a trained sharpshooter and that the tuition money was anyway already in a police education fund. On a rainy Monday morning Fitzpatrick, Vice and five other warrior wannabes gather in Storm Mountain's classroom for orientation. A copy of the sniper creed hangs on a panelled wall. One stanza reads: "This is our rifle... This rifle is our best friend. It is our life:" While many Americans may profess a fondness for firearms, treating their guns like family dogs, snipers tend to humanise, even romanticise their rifles. They buy presents for their gun - a new scope, a new stock. They clean them nightly, and gently and regularly polish the parts. Beneath the just-following-orders demeanour, when they discuss their deadly discipline they betray palpable passion. "Being able to send a projectile down range and knowing that I can hit what I'm aiming at consistently is an art... a way to express myself;" says Danny Basso, a Storm Mountain graduate who volunteers as an assistant instructor when not running his landscaping business. Lounging in the back of the classroom, wearing camouflage pants and a huntergreen T-shirt that reads, "Silent Souls Inflict 308 Holes"; Basso says: "A lot of the guys into sniping are exmilitary who miss the camaraderie and being around people who have the same pride as themselves." At exactly 0900, each student introduces himself and reveals his motivation for taking the course. Matt Domyancic, a former air force cadet, dreams of joining the FBI; Quinn Sieber, a stocky firearms instructor from the Wisconsin State Patrol, plans to pass on sharpshooting skills to his cadets; Fitzpatrick's pal, Paul Circo, a mild-mannered fellow with scant firearms experience wants to "prove something" to himself. A shaggy-haired software designer mumbles something about honing his shooting skills. And an emergency medical technician (EMT) from Florida says he just wants an out-of-the-ordinary vacation. After the 12-Steps-like introductions, Storm Mountain headmaster Rod Ryan marches to a lectern with a "No Whining" sign. A decorated former army sniper and member of Washington DC's SWAT team, Ryan opened the school in 1995 with classes such as Security Profiling Terrorism Awareness II and Advanced Submachine Gun. His mission: "To help keep police and military guys alive." Most of his clients, however, are civilians. Ryan, who brags that he could teach "a monkey" to shoot, offers no excuses for teaching civilians how to kill: "I'm a firm believer that if you are not a criminal, you have the rights described in our Constitution." Self-described "pro-gunners" defend firearms ownership by citing the Constitution. The Second Amendment grants the right to bear arms, but whether America's founding fathers, who lived through a brutal war fought on their soil, intended for telephone repairman to wield highpowered rifles legally is another question. But not in this classroom. Ryan launches his lesson by reviewing sniper history, which in the US dates back to the Civil War (the British Army had established a sharpshooting "Rifle Brigade"; the 95th Regiment of Foot, by 1800). Although snipers rarely operate alone these days, working in tandem with the "spotter'; who calculates the distance to the target and the wind velocity (a breeze can alter a bullet's trajectory), they've developed a lone-wolf image, a sneaky predator that picks off sheep in the middle of the night. Storm Mountain frets so much about the sniper's embattled reputation that it added the prefix "counter" to the course's title. "The press labels every nut with a gun a sniper;' says Kent Gooch, a former army firearms instructor who teaches with Ryan. "Most of us take great offence at that connotation. This is an honourable profession," he argues, as photos of James Earl Ray (Martin Luther King's murderer) and Lee Harvey Oswald (President John F. Kennedy's assassin) flash behind him on a projection screen. The instructors devote much of the four-hour lesson to sniper strategies. "If you guys ever come across a woman who is a hostage taker, do not cut her any slack," says Ryan. "A woman will make a decision and by God she is going to stick to it." And... "Make your first shot count. Go for the ear - the Mafia has been doing it for years, no mess. Personally, I like the eyes. It's a soft entry point." To execute the enemy efficiently, Ryan hails the "head shot': He recommends aiming for the medulla oblongata, a chestnutsized part of the brain located at the top of the spinal cord. "With a head shot, they [the target] won't even fart," says Ryan. "The body's electrical system shuts right down." Ryan sometimes sounds as if he's preparing troops for battle rather than enabling adults to play army with longrange rifles and live ammo. "I don't want to hear in the news that you didn't take the head shot. If you can't take the head shot, get out of this business," he says. Later he says: "You must look at this as a job. It is a dirty job. People don't want to clean toilets either. But they do - not that human beings are toilets." Over lunch, cold MREs (meals ready to eat) that look and smell like dog food, Fitzpatrick explains the allure of the sniper lifestyle. In the Marines, he says, "I wanted to be the Rambo, the lone soldier. I'm better in a small team than a large one. That's why I like sniping; it's just you and the spotter. I don't like to rely on people:' Conversation turns to a chilling training video. In slow-motion, sharpshooters are seen blowing the head off a bank robber who had nudged the muzzle of his pistol into the Adam's apple of a terrified hostage. Some students wonder whether they have the stomach to take the head shot, but not Fitzpatrick:"I have lots of confirmed kills on animals -elk, deer, prairie dogs. When I first started hunting, I had remorse. I don't any more. I think I could look at a human target like a deer with a gun in its hands." Vice nearly gags on a wad of chewing tobacco. Unlike the others, he knows what it feels like to shoot another human being. A few years ago he was working undercover when a drug dealer put a gun to his head. "I looked him right in the eyes;' he says "you can tell everything from the eyes. He broke [eye contact] and I fired first. The only reason I'm here right now is because of a gun, so I guess my kinship with firearms is a little stronger than most." Turning this platoon of plebes into sharpshooters vexes Ryan; during the next three days most students fumble in the field. On the firing range, the instructors rattle several snipers by screaming in their ears while they try to blast out the brains of a paper thug: "Sniper, are you on that target? What's the range? Green light! Take the head shot. You are taking too long. There's a snake on your back. Is that your grandfather's rifle you're shooting? What the hell was that? Was that a head shot? Why the f"""''' did you shoot?" "Stalking'; the art of sneaking up on a target, also confounds the cadets, who must belly-crawl through the rattlesnakeinfested woods, evade detection and fire two blanks at instructors at least 100 yards away. To blend in with the bush, the students wear gillie suits. These hooded camouflage cassocks are covered in shredded, stringy mesh and adorned with leaves, shrubbery and wild flowers. The men also smear camouflage make-up on their faces. Few accomplish their objective without being spotted. "This is not a long-range rifle class. This is a f''''"" sniper course;' Ryan fumes. "Look, two friends of mine were killed in Somalia. I cannot lower my standards." Vice often earns the wrath of instructors for insubordination. Disobeying orders, he helps less capable students survive a stalk, an exercise meant to test each man's mettle (no woman has ever taken the class). "I was a Boy Scout, but I was no boy scout. Always in trouble," he says with a chuckle. "The one thing I gain from this is the knowledge and self-confidence to take a person that's not that familiar with a rifle, focus in on him and help him to achieve what needs to be done." As the temperature climbs above 80F, even Vice feels fatigued. He greedily sucks on his canteen, heeding Ryan's repeated warning to drink plenty of water:"Some of you will fall to heat casualty. You will get an intravenous drip, maybe two." The policy stems from an incident a few years ago when a student had heat stroke. "He remains in a coma;' says Ryan. When Fitzpatrick complains of a headache after a gruelling two-hour hike, Ryan prescribes a mandatory saline solution drip. "This is tougher than boot camp;" Fitzpatrick gripes as the EMT from Florida jabs a needle into his forearm. On the final exam, Fitzpatrick falls during the graded stalk, damaging the "Super Sniper" scope on his Savage .308 calibre rifle. He hits only 20 per cent of the man-shaped metal targets during the crucial live-fire test. Only he and his pal Circo fail the course, earning none-too consoling "Certificates of Attendance". "I used to want to be a sniper, but after what I've been through, I don't know if I could survive three days on a stalk;' says a crestfallen Fitzpatrick. Despite his disappointment, he says the course improved his outlook on life. "It made me mentally stronger;" he says later from his home in Omaha, where he is training to compete in a bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred ultimate fighting exhibition. "When people hooked up wires wrong at work, I used to get irate. But I made mistakes at sniper school that really affected me. Now, if I showed someone something once and they didn't get it, I'd show them again and again. I think patience comes from the stalk, when you work and work to get in position for that one shot:' In hindsight, Vice also considers the course beneficial: "I knew how to use a weapon, but I didn't know the tactics for deploying it." Still, Vice questions the wisdom of allowing civilians to take a course "with one purpose and one purpose only: killing a human being". "There were only two cops in class," he says. "We learnt something and took that back to the law-enforcement community. And the odds of five others taking that information and doing something illegal are astronomically low. But in a perfect world, civilians shouldn't be there." Fitzpatrick may not be a civilian much longer. Vice invited him to apply for a position with the Moss Point Police Department. "I'd love to do police work," says Fitzpatrick. "Then there'll be two snipers in Moss Point. I just have to go back to school and get my certificate." Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________________________________________________ T O P I C A The Email You Want. http://www.topica.com/t/16 Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics
