

The Mark 5 pair, the 3.6x – 18x in the foreground, and the 5x – 25x in the background.ĭuring the recent explosion in growth within the precision shooting community, Leupold was concentrating on a lot of defense contracts producing scopes that truly defying what was once thought to be impossible with regards to optical systems with the Mk 8 CQBSS, and the Mk 6 3x-18x. That scope still lives at Leupold as a testimony to the durability of Leupold products, and it still held zero. The rifle scope undoubtedly saved his life, as the piece of fragmentation was about 1” long with the diameter of a pencil and the optic kept that fragmentation from hitting him. One of my platoon mates’ Leupold took a direct hit from a piece of mortar fragmentation while he was carrying the rifle in a movement to contact. That proved to be an excellent decision as those replacements never lost zero, even after some horrific and serious run-ins with IED’s and indirect fire. My platoon was fortunate enough to receive a bunch of funding for updated gear for that deployment, and we elected to purchase 8x Leupold Mark 4 4.5x – 14x scopes to replace the tired and long since unreliable Unertl 10x scope that lived on our M40 A3’s.

Fast forward to the year 2004 as I stepped off on a combat deployment to Iraq. That scope still tracks true, and is bombproof, in the literal sense. I still have that scope to this day, and I’ve since swapped the reticle to a TMR and changed out the MOA turrets to Milradian based adjustments. I bought my first serious precision rifle immediately after graduating sniper school way back in 1999, and on top of that rifle was the venerable Mark 4 3.5x – 10x with M1 turrets.
