Long Rifle

When fires raged in the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Joe LeBleu, a native of Brooklyn and a retired U.S. Army Ranger veteran, was in lower Manhattan. On that day he decided to return to active duty. By the time he received an honorable discharge as a Staff Sergeant, paratrooper, and sniper team leader in the 82nd Airborne Division in 2005, he’d become known as “Long Rifle”—for shooting an Iraqi insurgent at 1,100 meters in Fallujah in the fall of 2003. That single shot