Assignment For English 101

Snipers
By Jesse Fox
Information from HowStuffWorks.com
When most people hear the word “sniper” they think someone who has a scope on his gun, sits back behind the action, and picks off the enemy one by one. There is a lot more to this job than anyone realizes. So what is the sniper’s job?
Believe it or not, his main job is not killing. In most cases his main job is reconnaissance, because snipers are trained to be “Masters of Stealth.” They can go behind enemy lines and report on the size and location without being detected. Snipers have to be very patient; sometimes they have to wait in certain places for hours, and sometimes even days.
A sniper almost never does his job alone. Accompanying him is his “spotter”. The spotter stays next to the sniper and tells him the range of the target, the direction and speed of the wind, the angle of the shot, and many other things that are essential to getting the “perfect shot”. Along with helping the sniper shoot, the spotter is there to protect the sniper from close range attack. “The spotter is usually armed with an M-4 or M-16.” One of the best sniper rifles is an M-21 and it usually costs from eight to twelve thousand dollars, the right kind of rifle in the right hands can be shot accurately from over a mile away.
I think probably one of the coolest parts of the sniper is the “Ghillie Suit”. What is a ghillie suit? That’s a ghillie suit; they help the sniper stay invisible to enemy eyes.
One way the military trains their snipers is by taking them to a grassy field and playing a game called “stalk”. In this game, the snipers start at one end of the field, and the instructors at the other end 1,000 meters away up on a hill. In this game, the snipers have to make their way to within 150 meters of the instructors before making their shot (they fire blanks). The sniper then has to move to a different spot and shoot again, to make sure they are actually shooting at the right target. The snipers read numbers on a piece of paper that the instructor is holding. The instructors have radios, and they use those to try and communicate the locations of the snipers to people called “walkers” down on the field. If you are spotted by a walker you fail the game.
I think being a sniper would be a really cool job, but as you have heard today, it takes a lot more than most think.