I HAD NO idea how much passing the sniper course would change how I was perceived by my old company.
I returned to my Bravo Company, 5 Platoon (which is where I was posted after battle school) in December of 2001. Because it was close to Christmas, a lot of soldiers had returned home for the holidays, so the base was fairly empty. And since I lived close to Petawawa, I didn’t take much time off. One day, I was sitting in the company office, which is usually reserved for people with higher rankings than mine, but since most of the base was deserted, I figured I could get away with hanging out there and I might actually see a few people. Usually, as a corporal, I stayed in the platoon area and visited the offices only when I was directly invited.
I walked into the office and the atmosphere was surprisingly welcoming. Sergeants and officers suddenly treated me differently, as if I had moved up a rank. They no longer greeted me with doubt cloaked in formality: “Hello, Corporal Mitic.” Now it was more like “Hey Jody! How are you?”
A handful of senior staff were shooting the breeze and I grabbed a seat alongside them. They were discussing how they needed a couple of lower-ranking guys to do some grunt work. It wasn’t anything demeaning, just something nobody wanted to do, something best completed by a couple of privates and a corporal. Since it was the holidays and the place was almost deserted, the pickings were pretty slim.
I was waiting for them to put the task on me. Sure enough, a fairly new officer piped up. “What about Mitic? He’s a corporal and he’s sitting right here. Why can’t he do it?”
Everybody stared at her as if she had just made a major mistake.
“Look,” I said, “I know you’re having a hard time finding someone to do the job. I’ll take care of it.”
One of the sergeants said, “Are you sure? You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“You know what, I’m kind of bored anyway,” I said. “I’ll go grab a couple of guys from the maintenance area. We’ll get it done.”
As I left those offices and set out to get the job done, I realized that I might still be Corporal Jody Mitic in name, but sniper training had just opened up a whole new world to me. It was flattering to be treated as an equal of the officers in the room, even though they all outranked me.
•
Shortly after New Year’s, we held our annual winter training exercises. I learned that I was going to be a section 2IC, or second-in-command, for my group’s training drills. Considering I had no formal leadership training, this was a pretty big responsibility. The first part of the exercise was a recce mission to stake out a target that would later be attacked. I was a little surprised when the higher-ups said, “Mitic, grab a couple of people and recce this site for us. Then let us know your findings.”
I took three soldiers and we did a recce of an area that was being occupied by a pretend enemy force. We did it in the snow in the middle of the day, came back and shared our intelligence. The next day, after the recce, I was talking to the soldiers who were playing the enemy force.
“What? When did you recce us?” one of them asked me.
“Yesterday,” I said. “Around noon. You didn’t notice our tracks in the snow?”
“No. We had no idea. Good recce!”
In most cases, if you navigate for the recce team that stakes out a target, you also navigate for the platoon in the subsequent attack. That’s SOP—standard operating procedure. But when it was time to lead our platoon on the mock attack, one of the master corporals in our section—a guy known for questionable decisions and for his outstanding ability to get lost—stood up and said, “Actually, I’m going to lead this mission.” I was stunned. This guy hadn’t been part of the recce team that scouted out the position, so how was he going to know where to go?
“Mitic, you will be in charge of left flank security,” I was told. It was bad enough that someone else was going to navigate for the platoon after I had done all the recce work, but it was adding salt to the wound that I was put on left flank instead of being with the main assault group. Normally, if someone was leading other than the head of the recce mission, at least the new navigator would have the recce leader by his side so he could help guide the group forward.
When I’d done the recce the day before, my fellow soldier Crystal had been on the team. She was now paired with me on left flank.
“Does this make sense to you?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said.
As we set out, the problems became apparent right away.
“Crystal,” I whispered once we were out in the field, “do you recognize this area?”
“No, I don’t,” she replied.
“That’s because we never came this way yesterday,” I said. “And this isn’t the route we planned for the attack.”
Crystal and I were so far back in the group it would have been impossible for us to alert the leaders that they were totally off track. We were not equipped with radios, so we had no way to communicate with the platoon commander. We were walking in the wrong direction, and not just a little bit—kilometres in the wrong direction, in the snow, in the dark.
About thirty minutes later, we did a long halt, where everybody stopped and gathered in a circle. The leadership huddled in the middle to discuss the next move. Crystal and I were on the sidelines and couldn’t hear what was said.
Still, I had a hunch what was going down. I turned to Crystal and said, “Watch this.”
Right on cue, I heard a crunching of footsteps through the snow and the master corporal called out.
“Hey Mitic! Mitic, buddy. Come on over here.”
I went over to the huddle to confer with the leadership group. “Hey guys, what’s going on?” I was playing dumb.
“Where are we?” the master corporal asked.
On the ground in front of the group was a map of the area. “This is where we are right now,” I said, pointing to a spot way off course. “And this is where we want to be,” I added, pointing out our intended destination on the other side of the map.
“So, um . . . How about if Mitic helps with the final approach to the attack area,” the master corporal suggested.
“Yeah, of course. No problem.” I tried to hide my I-told-you-so smile. “Just one question. Didn’t you see the tracks in the snow from yesterday? Those were my tracks. Why didn’t you just follow those?”
“Oh, we didn’t realize those were yours,” the master corporal said. “I guess we got a little turned around.”
And with that, I took over the navigation role I should have had from the beginning. I would navigate the platoon out to the site and then the master corporal would take over when the attack phase started.
I got us back on the position. But when it came time for the master corporal to break out his blue glow stick, which was the signal for us to deploy troops to their spots for the attack, he had a problem. “Oh shit, oh shit,” he kept repeating.
“So what’s the matter?” I asked dryly.
“Oh nothing,” he said. But it was clear what had happened. He was checking his pockets, his rucksack—everywhere—but he couldn’t find the glow stick. “Why don’t you go up and alert the platoon commander that we’re all set,” he said.
So off I went to the platoon commander. As soon as she saw me, she asked, “What happened to the glow-stick plan?”
“I don’t know,” I responded. “But here’s your position to launch the attack.”
As I stood there, I looked back over at the master corporal, who was waving a penlight at us. The platoon commander gave me a questioning look, which I avoided while grinning.
The whole episode reminded me that sometimes in the army ranks, those in charge of missions and exercises aren’t necessarily the best qualified. There’s always 10 percent of soldiers at every level and rank who will leave you wondering how they ever completed basic training and managed to make their way up the chain of command.
Not long after the winter exercises, a massive reorganization of companies got under way. This is a fairly common practice in the Armed Forces, with troops shifted around every couple of years. Some of the guys from Bravo Company could move over to Alpha Company, which might send some of their guys over to Foxtrot Company, and so on. At the same time, the unit kept a core base of people in each company, to maintain some stability. I was put into the sniper section with my colleague Dave.
This was exactly what I was hoping for, since my ultimate goal was to be deployed overseas as a sniper in the war on terror. There is a certain amount of “cool guy” factor that goes along with officially being part of the sniper section. Suddenly my input mattered when it came to strategic decisions, and senior staff started to seek out my counsel. Commanders who want a sniper team treat snipers differently. And the snipers don’t actually take orders from the company commander; snipers are there in roles of support, not subservience. Commanders can make suggestions to the team, but ultimately, the team tells the commander what their capabilities are. If a company commander says the plan is to attack a village, the snipers’ job is to come up with the best plan to support the operation of that mission. And as a sniper, you have more “operational freedom,” which puts you in control of a lot of your decisions.
•
Shortly after joining the sniper section, I competed in something called CFSAC, the Canadian Forces Small Arms Concentration. This is a series of shooting competitions held annually at the Connaught Range, where I had done some of my sniper training. We kept our marksman skills sharp by shooting thousands and thousands of practice rounds in the spring and summer of 2002. We used all kinds of firearms—pistols, assault rifles, machine guns. Snipers tend to shoot at least twice a month, at least a hundred rounds each time. People don’t often realize how physically demanding shooting is. But we prepared as much as we could for the competition, and the extra practice was welcomed.
At the CFSAC competition, our four-person sniper team got the best aggregate score, and I came away with the top tyro award for best new shooter (“tyro” meaning novice in army speak). We came back to Petawawa feeling pretty good about ourselves and our shooting ability.
Later that year, I was sent to Gagetown, New Brunswick, for a couple of events at the military base. First, along with other snipers in training, I did a trial for a new rifle—a .338 Lapua magnum to replace the .308 one. We were given ten different brands to try out, and we were asked for our feedback on which ones we liked and which ones we didn’t. These rifles had adjustable scopes and were totally different from the ones we normally used. Our favourite was a gun called the Timberwolf, made by a Canadian company in Winnipeg.
One of the highlights of that trip was meeting Rob Furlong, who was a new legend in the sniper community. He had just returned home from Afghanistan, where, during Operation Anaconda, he set the world record for the farthest sniper kill using a .50-calibre sniper rifle called the Tac-50. Furlong had a confirmed sniper kill at a distance of 2430 metres. Ironically, a few years later, Furlong’s record would be broken by a British soldier using the .338 magnum that we were then testing in New Brunswick.
A couple of months later, I competed in the International Sniper Competition, at Fort Benning, Georgia. This event is highly regarded in the community and brings together some of the best snipers in the world. That year was an especially significant one, because the war in Afghanistan was escalating and many snipers at the competition had a lot of recent operational experience. I was keen to listen to their stories and get tips from experienced people in the field. It was like any other networking conference in the high-tech or marketing world, except our group was a bunch of highly trained gunmen.
•
Things were fairly quiet for me after I returned home from that trip. I had just purchased my first home and decided to move off the base for the first time. My house was in a tiny town called Chalk River, situated between the base and the town of Deep River. The population of Chalk River was about five hundred people, and at least half of them were military.
The house was spacious enough for me, but it would soon become a place for two. I had been dating a woman for a couple of years. She and I had met on St. Patrick’s Day in 2001 and we had been a fairly steady item ever since. A few weeks after I bought my house, she moved in. She was very focused on one goal—getting married and having four kids by the time she was twenty-five. We talked about this, of course. I expressed that I was focused on my military career and that I wasn’t sure getting married and having a few kids was on my short-term radar.
Nonetheless, she stayed with me, even though there wasn’t much for her to do in a tiny town like Chalk River. She was going to school, but even when she was finished, the job opportunities in this area were going to be extremely limited. And if I was deployed on a mission overseas, what would she do? I had a sinking feeling that me and this town wouldn’t be good enough for her in the long term.
One day, she wanted me to go on a drive with her out to a nearby lake. “Do we really have to?” I asked. I had no interest in heading outside on a cold and windy day.
“Yes, we do,” she said.
We got in the car and drove to the lake. Then we walked down to the shore. The weather was unpleasant, which prompted me to ask, “What are we doing here?”
She didn’t have an answer for me, and I could tell that something was going on with her. We got back into the car and had an awkward drive home.
When we arrived, I went to the bedroom to change. Before I could even get dressed, she pulled me out to the living room. She sat me on the couch and said, “Will you marry me?”
It took a few moments for that question to sink in. I was absolutely floored that not only had my girlfriend just proposed to me, she’d done so while I was buck-naked!
Suddenly the trip to the lake made a whole lot of sense. She had wanted to ask me there but got too nervous when the moment arrived. Apparently she had no hesitation popping the question while I was in the buff in the living room, though.
I said to her, “Before we get married, I have a few conditions. I don’t want us carrying any debt, so I want to get some things paid off first. Also, I think we need to figure out our career paths. I don’t want your whole life to revolve around my schedule with the army.”
She was okay with these conditions, so we had a loose engagement, until the time when I would buy her a ring and propose more formally. But then I had a great idea. “Instead of an engagement ring,” I said, “why don’t I get you something way cooler, like a motorcycle or a personalized gun?”
“I don’t want a fucking gun,” she said. “I want a wedding ring!”
Oh well. We could have added a whole new meaning to “shotgun wedding.”
We were cruising along in our relationship into the spring of 2003. We still hadn’t set a wedding date, but there was another date on the calendar that was looming even larger. The Canadian government was looking to increase its presence in Afghanistan and word was that a new deployment would happen shortly. When the orders for my deployment came through, I suggested to my girlfriend that maybe she should consider going back to Brampton to live with her family for six months instead of being so isolated in Chalk River.
“No,” she said. “I’ll wait for you in our home.” Since we were engaged, she felt like this was where her life was.
But neither of us knew then that I would come back from my first tour in Afghanistan a changed man. What we both would come to learn is that I couldn’t marry her, because in my heart I was already married—to the army.