Reading List?

[ssgross]

I started reading "Long Shot", by Azad Cudi. It's an autobiography of a Kurdish marksman in the fight against ISIS. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but some of the combat descriptions have left me confused. For example, in the opening battle he states he was using an M16, with a thermal scope - doesn't indicate the model but I assume the US furnished his rifle and optics, so maybe something like the ATN PVS14-4, which is 1x. He writes he was making precision shots at 550m, at night - head shots, and one shot on a leg sticking out. Hmmm. the AN/PAS-13 would be more believable at 5x or 10x I think. I have no personal experience with either.
After a few shots, he says the rifle jammed requiring him to get out a cleaning rod and he "pushed the bullet out". Then it jams again, "closed my eyes and exhaled. Keeping my eyes closed, as we had been trained, I picked up the gun, removed the magazine, detached the stock ,..." and describes how he completely disassembled, reassembled, and decided there was nothing wrong with the rifle - in a reported 2 minutes and with his eyes closed...in combat.
Jams a third time, only this time he hears "the faint twang of a loose wire coil" and decides that the magazine spring and follower are loose, broken, or otherwise faulty. Swaps magazine and all is well. Hmm. He was very precise in recording his round count - 16 rounds fired before the first jam, with the last 3 trigger pulls on burst, and using 30 rd magazines. (16 rounds assuming failure to feed. If the last round on burst jammed - then the 16th round was pushed out with his cleaning rod."
So far, my impression is it reads a lot like a Tristan Jones book - https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...356-story.html. Maybe he had a ghost writer that should have been fired. I will say that the prose surrounding the combat description is quite good, well written and vivid.
I'll keep reading, hoping my first impression is wrong. Maybe I'm too harsh, relying on my own experiences too much for comparison.