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Marine Reservist Makes Longest Shot
Featured in GUNS Magazine
May 2005 Issue

Marine sniper Sgt. Herbert B. Hancock

(Fallujah, Iraq) - November 11, 2004

Seen through a 20X spotting scope, terrorists scrambled to deliver another mortar round into the tube. Across the Euphrates River from a concealed rooftop, Marine sniper Sgt. Herbert B. Hancock breathed gently and squeezed the trigger of his 7.62mm M40A3 rifle. The spotter, Cpl. Geoffrey L. Flowers, confirmed the terrorist went down from the shot mere seconds before the next crack of the rifle dropped another. It wasn't the sniper's first kill in Iraq, but it was one for the history books.

"From the information we have, our chief scout sniper has the longest confirmed kill in Iraq so far," said Capt. Shayne McGinty, weapons platoon commander for Company B, 1st Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit. "In Fallujah there were some bad guys firing mortars at us and he took them out from more than 1,000 yards."

"We moved south some more and linked up with some rear elements of our first platoon," remembered Sgt. Hancock USMCR, chief scout sniper, 1/23, and a 35-year-old police officer from Texas. "Then we got up on a building and scanned across the river. We looked out of the spotting scope and saw about three to five insurgents manning a 120mm mortar. We got the coordinated for their position and set up a fire mission. We decided that when the rounds came in that I would engage them with the sniper rifle. We got the splash and there were two standing up looking right at us. One had a black outfit on. I shot and he dropped. Right in front of him another got up on his knees looking to try and find out where we were so I dropped him too. After that our mortars just hammered the position, so we moved around in on them."

"After we had called in indirect fire and after all the adjustments from our mortars, I got the final 8-digit grid coordinates for the enemy mortar position, looked at our own GPS and figured out the distance to the targets we dropped to be 1,050 yards," said Cpl. Flowers, a May 2004 graduate of Scout Sniper School and a college student from Texas.

"This time we were killing terrorism from more than 1,000 yards."

--Cpl. Paul W. Leicht, USMC

The USMC M40A3 Rifle (below)

 

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