Eight Fort Hood soldiers are getting ready for an eight-week long sniper school at Fort Benning, Georgia in the upcoming months.
"When we're out there, we're the eyes and ears of the battlefield where the conventional infantry guys cannot go and doing things that they cannot do because we're a small team," SPC John Lysell said.
A small team expert in movement techniques, target identification and camouflage.
"You don't want to look like anything. You're not trying to look like something, you're trying to look like nothing," SPC Lysell added.
The soldiers apply face paint, put on their ghillie suits and then add leaves and grasses.
"We do 30 percent unnatural vegetation and 70 percent natural vegetation that you're gonna take immediately from your area where you start," SPC Lysell said.
But, as a sniper, they also have to camouflage their rifle.
"There's nothing natural about a rifle, so you know all of the perfect straight lines, the black colors, the perfect circles as far as the bore and the optics, so breaking up those shapes because they just don't occur naturally, and that's a target indicator," SPC Lysell added.
A target indicator is something someone with a trained eye, like an enemy sniper, would be able to spot in an instant.
"Learning the ability to move without being seen really. He's out there with a high powered spotting scope trying to find us and if we can learn to move without being seen at all then we've got a good jump start on our job and a good jump start into sniper school,"CPL William Martin, who is preparing for sniper school, said.
"My class started with about 50 people, and we lost more than half the class. The attrition rate is definitely higher than 50 percent, and that's why we do stuff like we do today, to just have our guys ready," SPC Lysell said.
The soldiers will do this training once a week until they head to Georgia for sniper school.
Copyright 2018 KXXV. All rights reserved.
