Both went through the Army Sniper School at Fort Benning, Ga., a month apart. They also went through the Air National Guard-run countersniper school at Camp Joseph T. Robinson, Ark.
But it’s the five-week course at the elite Army school that makes them valuable to the group. They learned advanced marksmanship skills, to measure wind effects and estimate the range to targets. They also learned to detect, track and stalk targets, counter-stalking and camouflage. And they learned to select sites for, and set up, forward-listening and observation posts, also mastering how to stay undetected in them.
That gives the contingency group commander an option on how to best use the snipers. The commander can keep them at the airfield to beef up force protection or provide countersniper fire — or send them to patrol nearby ridgelines. The long-range patrols, which can last a few days, are to find bad guys with the shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. These weapons can threaten aircraft from as far away as six miles.
“We patrol well past the front lines, so we can take out a target well before it can threaten our aircraft or people,” Knoll said. “We have to keep a sharp eye open all the time.”
Once on the hunt, the longer the shot, the farther away snipers are from trouble. So Knoll and Jones spend hours at the shooting range firing and mastering their M-24 sniper rifles. It’s a military modification of the Remington 700 hunting rifle.
“We practice as a team, so we know how each other works,” Jones said.
The teamwork paid off at the Army school, where snipers must fire from 400 to 600 rounds at targets ranging from 12-inches to 20-inches in height. They shoot from various distances and under different situations. Sometimes they knew the distance to the target and sometimes not. And they must hit moving targets during the day and at night.
To pass each phase, snipers must hit 14 targets. Knoll and Jones did better.
“We hit 18 or 19 targets consistently,” Jones said. “We pride ourselves in being good shots.”
Both have hit targets at more than 1,000 yards. But at Bashur, neither Knoll nor Jones took a shot. They continued to train and went on long patrols, but they didn’t go on a real operation. They wished otherwise.
They did have some excitement though. Knoll and Jones — and 18 other group airmen — parachuted into Bashur with 1,000 paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade from Vicenza, Italy. The soldiers secured the perimeter while the airmen secured the runway and established air operations.
It was a historic jump, and 14 of the Air Force jumpers were security forces. The airmen were the Air Force’s first-ever conventional forces to parachute into a combat zone. And the huge C-17s that dropped them were on their first combat parachute mission.
“We’d just come home from a deployment and had four days to repack to stage for the jump into Bashur,” Jones said. “It was exciting, though we didn’t know what threat to expect.”
Luckily, a real Iraqi threat never materialized. Still, Knoll and Jones cleaned their rifles and maintained their Ghillie suits, adorning them with bits of rags, strings and local plants to blend in with the countryside.
They worked around the clock — up to their necks in the security forces jobs they’d trained to do. But they weren’t disappointed.
“When I found out I was jumping into Iraq, I was stoked,” Jones said. “I couldn’t wait to get to Iraq and do my job. And that’s just what I did.”
Knoll was confident he and Jones could take to the mountains to stalk an enemy. But when that didn’t happen, they continued their force protection job.
“That was our main concern, anyway,” Knoll said. “But if they needed us as snipers, we’re ready to eliminate any threat that might pop up.”
