Snipers. What do movies and pop culture misrepresent about your job? Being a sniper

essentially boils down to your being incredibly uncomfortable at all times. You should learn

to love being cold, wet, and generally having an overall terrible quality of life while you're

operating. Firstly, physically getting to the objective is absolutely brutal

and is probably the worst part of the job. Often you'll be laden down with about 200 pounds of gear

and specialized equipment, including water, food, ammo, weapons, and radios or batteries, which you'll

have to carry silently through the night for several miles in the worst

terrain you can find before you even get to the office to work. Once you spend however many

hours or days suffering while getting there, you'll have to set up a hide site for your team.

There are a ton of variations on splitting up hide sites or different hide styles that you may

feel compelled to use depending

on the situation. You'll probably want to get your hide built and loaded before the sun comes up,

or you're going to have a bad time. Most media portrays snipers as working alone or in pairs at

most, but real-world sniper teams are usually six to eight guys switching out team roles for the duration of the mission.

Certain aspects of team composition and equipment will vary from branch to branch and between units,

but most teams should include a team leader, assistant team leader, someone with a heavy weapon, a radio operator,

a corpsman slash medic, and a slackman or flex spot.

Unless your team leader is terrible and doesn't train his guys, everyone in the team should

confidently be able to take over anyone else's job at any point and continue operating.

Everyone should also know how to use every weapon in the team, regardless of their own assigned

billet. Other shooters and spotters can be added if you need more bodies, but the general goal is to

maintain as smaller footprint as possible out in the landscape. Often we'd be at the team leader's

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