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Excerpt from THE COMMANDOS:
The Inside Story of America's Secret Soldiers

These were the Army's most professional soldiers, and their most flexible. They weren't green recruits still growing up. They were mature warriors, many of them family men - who had volunteered for Special Forces and this type of hazardous duty....

The team began picking off soldiers. Balwanz directed the fire like a surveyor marking spots on land. Five of the eight men on the team were expert snipers. With the telescopic sights atop their M-16s, they could kill a man 500 yards away. The Iraqis didn't have that range or accuracy with their AK-47s. The snipers began to drop them before they could get close enough to make their shots count.

The soldiers nearer to the team fared even worse. Balwanz and Hopkins carried the Heckler and Koch MP-5 machine guns, perfect for close-quarter battle with infrared laser sights fitted on them. In just the first ten minutes of fighting, the eight Green Berets had managed to coldly and methodically kill about forty soldiers. That halted the enemy advance and forced the Iraqis to hug the ground.