Bernie Goldbach

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

ON THE DAY Donald Trump was shot in my home state of Pennsylvania, I remember several C-141 flights when we took Secret Service teams aboard our aircraft in support of the President of the United States. We often had a comfort pallet like the one in the photo.

Some of the Secret Service teams were CS (Counter Sniper) specialists. They could carry all their gear on our military aircraft. I remember watching one of the guys cleaning his bolt action Remington 700. It had a suppressor on it and he had a box of Winchester 300 Magnum rounds. I once saw that weapon on a firing range and it had a substantial recoil when the sniper was dialing in a target nearly 800 meters away.

Inside our comfort pallets the Secret Service team members would often compare satellite imagery to venues. They would use grease pencils to encircle 100, 200, and 300 yard threat perimeters. Once they knew where they would be positioned they wouldn't have to worry about milling-out their weapons because they would have dialed in their scopes with their range finders and wind analyses.

In the 1980s when I was actively flying these kinds of support missions, I learned about the Minutes of Angle computation used by snipers. A standard rifle has one MOA which means a shooter should expect to get a one inch grouping when 100 yards from a target. An average male target is 25x40 which is a large target.

[Bernie Goldbach has flown more than 3000 flying hours, nearly 1000 of those hours in a C-141.]