"Hey, sir, I know I'm a Bradley Commander, and I'm a senior NCO, maybe even a Platoon Sergeant, but I'd like to chill all that for a bit this deployment and take up sniping."
It doesn't happen.
Also, I was a Bradley crewmember for several years in my enlisted days, and I was in the Infantry for a decade. Who aside from snipers (real ones) and fighter pilots track their kills? When a Bradley destroys a vehicle, the BDA (battle damage assessment) sent up the chain describes the vehicles destroyed and, maybe, a guess as to how many enemy KIA.
” But what really kills the story is his “dabbling” in being a sniper. That makes absolutely no sense.”
Oh, I don’t know. My oldest brother was an occasional sniper in Vietnam. He was assigned to an engineering unit, but was sometimes called on to be the long gun on ambushes. He was also called away to sit on an airport’s roof during the Israeli hostage crisis during the Munich Olympics when he just happened to be stationed there The Army let him use a very nice customized rifle although compared to what they use now, I thought it just looked like a tricked out hunting rifle.