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LINCOLN, Neb. – A two-person Nebraska Army National Guard sniper team shot their way to a national title, Dec. 13, when they placed first at the 54th Winston P. Wilson Sniper Championship, held Dec. 6-13 at the Fort Chaffee Joint Maneuver Training Center in Barling Arkansas.
In winning the title, Nebraska’s Staff Sgt. Marc Cruz and Sgt. Chance Baumann – infantrymen who serve in the sniper section of the Lincoln-based Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 2-134th Infantry (Airborne) – outshot similar teams from the Michigan and Iowa National Guard enroute to the championship.
“I can’t even describe the feeling. It was bittersweet,” said Baumann, a native of Beatrice, Nebraska, who works as a utility lineman for Kinetic Windstream in civilian life. “I was just like, ‘Wow… our training that we do on drill weekends and outside of drill weekends really paid off. All the hard work that we put in to be here paid off.’”
Cruz agreed. A native of Long Island, New York, who joined the Guard in roughly 2017 after serving several years in the Marines, Cruz said that winning a championship was an amazing and satisfying experience.
“Being able to take (the title) and bring it home to the unit and Nebraska… that felt pretty good,” Cruz said.
This was the first time that Cruz and Baumann competed at the annual sniper matches, which tests sniper skills and weapons systems in a simulated battle environment. According to the match organizers, this year’s competition was designed to test National Guard snipers’ physical endurance, mental focus and teamwork as they navigated through “complex environments while engaging targets under pressure.”
These scenarios included such events as sprinting up a hill, climbing to the top of three-story building and engaging 10 camouflaged targets through a window. It also included a stalking exercise where the Soldiers spent hours attempting to navigate through a challenging course without being seen and then correctly identifying a target through their scopes.
During one event called the CasEvac -- short for casualty evacuation – Cruz said the sniper teams were tested in a variety of skills they may need in a combat environment.
Here, Cruz – who works as an Omaha Fire Department firefighter paramedic in civilian life – and Baumann had to run to a simulated casualty and then drag the mannequin to cover where Cruz performed lifesaving first aid while Baumann defended their position.
“They had a live-bleed mannequin there that you had to put a tourniquet on correctly to stop the bleeding,” Cruz said. “So, as Bauman was shooting targets, I applied the tourniquet. And then once I was done, I engaged some additional targets with my pistol.”
The entire scenario was tremendously taxing, Cruz said, but also extremely realistic.
“The (matches) were very military-oriented, which I like,” Cruz said, “unlike some other matches, which are more speed shooting and things like this. Here, every stage had a different theme and those themes, for the most part, were designed to simulate something that you might encounter in a combat situation.”
According to the Nebraska Soldiers, this year’s title hunt began months earlier during numerous sniper training sessions. Baumann said this included countless hours spent honing their sniper skills near Jackson, Nebraska, where their unit’s sniper section chief, Staff Sgt. Tim Grover, owns and operates “Rev-Tac” range.
“We were really blessed to be able to go up there on drill weekends and off drill weekends and just train,” said Baumann.
Grover, who currently serves as the Nebraska National Guard state sniper training chief, said the two Soldiers were excellent students. “They put in the work, both during drill weekends and on their own time. They really committed themselves to becoming the best snipers that they could possibly be.”
“The thing that set these two Soldiers apart, however, was that we had hammered the fundamentals into them for years, but shifted gears to focus on unorthodox shooting positions, rapid target engagements and target detection over the last two years,” said Grover, a veteran of several past Winston P. Wilson Sniper Championships competitions. “And when they competed, they utilized the most up-to-date shooting techniques, something that the traditional Army doctrine won't teach you."
For example, Grover said, when most teams chose to shoot from the prone, “my guys were shooting standing off a tripod where they could quickly find and engage targets...because they've trained that way.”
While training with Grover, Cruz and Baumann said they focused hard on perfecting the many different skills that snipers rely on, such as precision shooting, stalking, communication, problem-solving and the building of trust. Soon, after many months of hard, realistic training, the idea that they might be ready to compete with the National Guard’s best sniper teams was born.
Still, being new to the Winston P. Wilson matches, doubts persisted.
“On our drive down (to Fort Chaffee), we were telling each other that we’d never done this before, so we would be super happy if we made the top ten, and we would be really surprised if we made the top five,” Baumann said.
Cruz said Grover, who served as the team’s coach during the matches, was instrumental in helping them maintain focus throughout the multi-day competition. This included conducting pre- and-post match briefings, while also taking some of the burdens off the Soldiers.
“He brought us our equipment. He made food for us. He was always in the conversation to make sure we were squared away,” Baumann said. “If we didn’t have a coach, I don’t think we would have done as well as we did.”
Coaching, said Grover, is extremely important during competitions like the Winston P. Wilson. “The guys with coaches always do better than the teams that don’t have coaches,” Grover said. By taking many of the burdens off of the team, he added, the snipers are able to better focus on simply competing. “Many hands make work easier.”
Cruz said this included helping limit the stress by keeping the daily scores away from the two Nebraskans after the first day’s success led to a second day marred by mistakes.
“On the second morning, we just made a lot of silly mistakes,” said Cruz. “I think we were feeling the pressure of being in the top three after the first day’s events and we wanted to stay up there. So that night we went back and said, ‘Let’s just do the best we can and we’re not even going to think about the scores… we’re just going to roll with it.”’
“After that, the pressure just kind of came off a bit,” he added. “So, we told our coach, ‘Hey, if you know the score, keep it to yourself. We don’t want to know.’”
Cruz said Grover complied so well that even when he mentioned before the award ceremony that he thought that Nebraska might have won, he didn’t tell them that they were ahead by nearly 50 points, or the equivalent of a single event’s total possible score.
“In most of the events, the total amount of points you could receive was 50,” Cruz said. “So, to be ahead by 50 points… we had no idea we had done that well.”
Grover said the two Nebraska Soldiers performed well under monumental pressure.
“They were really underdogs going into this competition. Neither of them had competed in the event before, so they really didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “That’s why I am so extremely proud of them. They understood the mission. They performed well under the extreme pressure. And they really stepped up.”
Following the award ceremony, Cruz and Baumann reflected on the achievement. Both said the entire competition was an awesome and humbling experience where they had the opportunity to meet with some of the nation’s best sniper teams, share ideas and learn new skills.
“It was a pretty awesome experience,” Cruz said. “And we couldn’t have done it without our coach, and our unit, which trusted us enough to give us the time we needed to train and the faith that we were training the right way.”
“This title is really for all of them.”
(Editor’s Note: Some of the information contained in this article was taken from a National Guard Marksmanship Center news release.)
| Date Taken: | 12.19.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 12.20.2024 10:31 |
| Story ID: | 488077 |
| Location: | LINCOLN, NEBRASKA, US |
| Web Views: | 149 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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