Unabridged
Written by:
Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin, USMC, and Capt. Casey Kuhlman, USMCR, with Donald A. Davis
The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper
"At another time, on another battlefield, my radio call sign had been 'Gabriel,' because the archangel and I have a lot in common. Legend says Gabriel's trumpet will sound the last judgment. I do the same sort of thing with my rifle...."-from the book
"I never enjoy taking a human life, for only a homicidal maniac would do so. An experienced sniper can hate what he does when he pulls the trigger, but at the same time, he understands the important fact that he is involved in something much larger than himself. I always knew there was a good reason for what I did-if I didn't get him, he would get us-so I put him in the crosshairs and squeezed the trigger without remorse."-from the book
With more than sixty confirmed kills, Jack Coughlin is the Marine Corps' top-ranked sniper. Shooter is his harrowing first-person account of a sniper's life on and off the modern battlefield.
Gunnery Sergeant Jack Coughlin is a divorced father of two who grew up in a wealthy Boston suburb. At the age of nineteen, although he had never even held a gun, he joined the Marines and would spend the next twenty years behind the scope of a long-range precision rifle as a sniper.
In that time, he accumulated one of the most successful sniper records in the Corps, ranging through many of the world's hotspots. During Operation Iraqi Freedom alone, he recorded at least thirty-six kills, thirteen of them in a single twenty-four-hour period.
Now Coughlin has written a highly personal story about his deadly craft, taking readers deep inside an invisible society that is off-limits to outsiders. This is not a heroic battlefield memoir but the careful study of an exceptional man who must keep his sanity while carrying forward one of the deadliest legacies in the U.S. military today. |
