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  Shooter

  Jack Coughlin

  The Autobiography of the Top-ranked Marine Sniper

  A non fiction book

  With more than sixty confirmed kills, Jack Coughlin is the Marine Corps' top-ranked sniper. Shooter is his harrowing first-person account of a sniper's life on and off the modern battlefield.Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin is a divorced father of two who grew up in a wealthy Boston suburb. At the age of nineteen, although he had never even held a gun, he joined the Marines and would spend the next twenty years behind the scope of a long-range precision rifle as a sniper.In that time he accumulated one of the most successful sniper records in the Corps, ranging through many of the world's hotspots. During Operation Iraqi Freedom alone, he recorded at least thirty-six kills, thirteen of them in a single twenty-four-hour period.Now Coughlin has written a highly personal story about his deadly craft, taking readers deep inside an invisible society that is off-limits to outsiders. This is not a heroic battlefield memoir, but the careful study of an exceptional man who must keep his sanity while carrying forward one of the deadliest legacies in the U.S. military today.

  Jack Coughlin

  Shooter

  © 2005

  SHOOTER

  The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper

  Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin, USMC, and Capt. Casey Kuhlman, USMCR

  with Donald A. Davis

  To our families and to the Corps

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book contains the personal stories of two individuals, but it took magnificent efforts from many people to complete. We owe great debts to them all.

  First, we would like to thank our agent, Jim Hornfischer, who believed in the project, and in us, from the minute we sent him the proposal. Without his sage advice, steady hand, and extraordinary knowledge of the book world, this project would never have been created. He is our agent for a career. Thank you.

  Our writer, Don Davis, molded our original manuscript into a wonderful story. More than that, Don gave us graduate degrees in both writing and in the business of writing. Thanks to you and Robin for your professionalism and way with words.

  There are many people at St. Martin’s Press to thank. John Murphy also believed in the book from the beginning and maneuvered it through some tough publishing wickets. Our editor, Charlie Spicer, was magnificent in offering cogent editorial insights and showed us the proper path when things got tough. Joe Cleemann, Joe Rinaldi, Henry Kaufman, India Cooper, Keith Hayes, and many others all worked hard to turn our dreams into reality.

  Our brothers in the United States Marine Corps deserve special salutes. To list all of their names would require an encyclopedia, but let it be said that the authors had the honor to stand on the shoulders of giants. We admire you all.

  As our former commander, Colonel Bryan McCoy, taught us, you can never achieve great things without believing in what you are trying to accomplish. Darkside Six made believers out of us. Special thanks also go to Sergeant Major Dave Howell, Major Matt Baker, and Major Martin “Crawdad” Wetteraurer. And thanks to our small team of warriors who stayed with us as we roamed around Iraq and kept our asses alive-Daniel Tracy, Jerry Marsh, Luis Castillo, Dustin Campbell, Clint Newbern, and the Panda Bear, Orlando Fuentes. We are eternally indebted to all of you. Rest in peace, Mark Evnin.

  To the men of the Bull, you can walk with the pride of knowing that you carried on the Raider legacy. To our peers, our mentors, and those that followed us in the most magical organization we have ever experienced, the Marine Corps, thank you for teaching us, for being our brothers, and for fighting alongside us. And to the scouts and snipers, you are special.

  Most of all, we want to express our love and gratitude to our families and close friends, and we end this with personal notes of dedication to them.

  On the Coughlin side-Cassie and Ashley, you know that you are the lights of my life, and Daddy loves you. Mom, you can rest now. Fm done. I love you. To my sisters Karen, Susan, Kathy, and Mary-beth, you are the best. Darrell and Willie, thanks. Tina and Neil, there in my time of need as always, I love you both. To Boom Boom, the Sox did it, only a year too late for you. I love you, bro. Dad, I love and miss you every day, and I try to be as good a father as you were to me.

  On the Kuhlman side-I send this book to my parents, who supported me while I transformed from a kid to a Marine and back again, and to my brother, Brian: the writer, the therapist, the student. To Joe, Dave, and Jared, my fan club and, more important, my friends.

  And to the Corps, and all the Marines who are still serving-keep the faith, and Semper Fi!

  – Jack Coughlin and Casey Kuhlman

  1

  Touch of an Angel

  At another time, on another battlefield, my radio call sign had been “Gabriel,” because the archangel and I have a lot in common. Legend says Gabriel’s trumpet will sound the last judgment. I do the same sort of thing with my rifle.

  In 1993, I was the sergeant in charge of a Marine sniper section with Task Force Somalia, and on the evening of January 6, General Jack Klimp barked, “Gabriel, the 10th Mountain CP [command post] says they are under attack. Grab a couple of your boys and go check it out.” I took a three-vehicle convoy bristling with machine guns through the north gate of the Mogadishu stadium, turned right for about thirty yards, then hung a sharp left on the 21 October Road, the main drag through the tattered capital of the famine-gripped country. Resting between my knees was a M82A1A Special Application Scoped Rifle (SASR), a.50 caliber beast of a weapon that weighs more than twenty-eight pounds and fires an armor-piercing incendiary tracer bullet that can punch a big hole through a sheet of steel, and an even bigger hole through flimsy flesh.

  Dusk had not yet settled over the city, so the temperature still simmered in the nineties, and children who resembled the walking dead begged for food as we passed. Some three hundred thousand people had already starved to death in Somalia, and many more would die as long as the feuding warlords chose to violently expand their fiefdoms rather than feed and protect their people. When I saw flies crawl on the face of a dead child, it was easy to hate the vicious fighters who were causing such slaughter.

  We called the ragtag militia “Skinnies” and “Sammies.” It is natural for a Marine to denigrate the enemy, because it helps dehumanize them. The Germans were “Krauts” in the big wars, the North Koreans and Chinese were “gooks” in Korea, and in Vietnam the enemy was “Charlie.” We had to call them something and didn’t want to think of them as real people, for that might make us hesitate for a fatal moment. The old saying “Know your enemy” does not apply in such cases, for some things are better left unknown.

  I had alerted my boys to be ready for a fight because once out of the stadium we never knew if someone would shoot at us. There were always snaps of random gunfire sparking around Mogadishu, but the entire route to the command post of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, about a hundred yards off the 21 October, was quiet. The gates of the walled compound swung open as we approached, and we were welcomed by a colonel who apparently had been expecting the whole damned Marine Corps to come charging over the hill. Instead, they got me and about ten other guys.

  The 10th Mountain, a strong division with thousands of combat troops, was spread out all over and beyond Mogadishu and had left only a few security troops to protect their headquarters, in the heart of a city that seethed with unrest. Nevertheless, other than some chipped plaster on the outside walls, I saw no sign that any dangerous firefight had taken place.

  The colonel didn’t know he was dealing with a Marine sergeant, since we never wore rank insignia in combat situations, so he treated me as an equal. He escorted me up to the third floor of the command post building, and I put up a hand to shield my eyes from the glaring sunlight. On
ly six hundred yards away were three long warehouses that our intelligence sources said were packed to the rafters with weapons of the warlords. As long as the guns stayed inside, there was no problem, but if the militiamen decided to come out and play, they would be more than this group of cooks, bakers, and candlestick makers could handle.

  A lot of people were hurrying around those warehouses, busy movement with nothing getting done, for they were not taking things in and out. Every so often, they would steal a glance over at us. Although there had been no more than the occasional harassing shot so far, I believed that these guys were doing more than just passing through the area and that the situation had the potential to worsen. I told the colonel Fd be right back, and my Marines and I sped back to the stadium, racing to beat the approaching darkness.

  General Klimp, the commander of the Marines in Task Force Mogadishu, had been receiving similar reports from other intelligence sources, and by the time I got back to the stadium headquarters, his staff was already laying plans for how to deal with the situation brewing around the warehouses.

  Ever since arriving at the stadium on the last day of 1992, American forces had been out patrolling the dangerous streets and taking guns away from thugs. The orders were to let them surrender, but dealing with these maniacs one by one was a slow business. Klimp figured that if they were converging on the warehouses, we could bag a bunch at one time, so he gave orders to surround the buildings, not let anyone in or out, and blare a Psy Ops message over loudspeakers throughout the night telling the militias not to fight and to surrender at dawn. With any luck, they would disobey.

  Klimp then told me to establish an overwatch position, and I once more hustled my boys back through the streets and back into the 10th Mountain compound. By the time night fell, I was on the roof with three other snipers, a couple of guys with M-60 machine guns, and a forward air controller, known as the FAC, to coordinate helicopter gunship backup when the ground troops moved in at dawn.

  I found a spot between an air-conditioner duct and the three-foot-high parapet that surrounded the roof and squeezed into a tight sitting position, my boots and butt making a solid three-point stance, elbows on knees and eye to the 10-power Unertl telescope on the big SASR rifle, which rested on a pad across the parapet. I had a marvelous field of view, and the powerful scope brought everything into such sharp relief that I felt I could reach out and physically touch the men moving around the warehouses. Measuring with our laser range finders, we jotted out green range cards to show the exact distance between us and every building, window, and pile of junk behind which an enemy might hide.

  As night finally came about 7:30 P.M., a snipers’ nest manned by some of the best marksmen in the Marines had been created above a potential battlefield. I checked my weapon one more time-one big.50 caliber round in the chamber and five more in my clip-then slipped on my night vision goggles. If something happened, I had no intention of letting it devolve into a fair fight.

  Few things in nature are as punishing as an African storm that tries to convert the parched land into a swamp in only a few hours. The scalding heat of the day vanishes in an instant, it is difficult even to breathe because so much water is falling, and the rain chills the bones and rapidly lowers the body temperature. Just such a storm swept in from the Indian Ocean about an hour after nightfall. Our carefully prepared snipers’ “hide” began to feel more like an icy swimming pool, and we took turns going inside to get a cup of hot coffee and stay dry for a few minutes. One of my boys tore the canvas top from a Humvee and ripped it into crude shelters, but there was no real escape from the pounding rain. We were miserable.

  Worse, the sheets of rain degraded our night vision goggles and left us blind to what was going on around the warehouses, although we could hear people shouting and motors turning over. The Skinnies were making mischief.

  Dawn, the demanded time for surrender, approached. Our missile-carrying Cobra helicopters were inbound, guided by the FAC, who was working the radios beside me. We had not slept at all, and as the rain tapered off, we threw aside the canvas covers and stood to our guns, while our goggles showed blurred images of an incredible scene. A bunch of gunmen were in positions of cover, and the Skinnies had rolled out a couple of T-52 tanks and a big radar-guided antiaircraft weapon, a ZSU-23/4, which had four 23 mm cannons and is known as a “Zeus.” If the choppers arrived on schedule, that thing could blow them out of the sky. “Abort! Abort!” the FAC screamed into his radio handset.

  We had wanted a fight, and it looked like we would get one, but we still gave them a final chance to surrender. As the loudspeakers shouted the warning, I heard General Klimp speaking calmly into my headset. “Gabriel, can you take out that Zeus without hurting anybody else?”

  “Yes,” I replied, forgetting to add “sir.” I was curt because I was busy, firmly locked into a rigid sitting-Indian position with my body square behind the rifle, and with my scope sighted on the ammunition feed tray of the ZSU. If ordered, I would disable the big gun. The Cobras had come to a halt and were hovering just behind our building, their rotor blades thudding like a mad drummer. The Zeus gunner heard them, too, and began cranking his weapon up to aim directly over our rooftop position in order to catch the arriving choppers when they popped into view.

  As usual, just before combat, life slowed down for me. It is as if a viewer is fast-forwarding a movie and then suddenly clicks to slow motion. My eyesight sharpens; I can hear the slightest sound but can tune it out if it is not important. Even my sense of smell is heightened. I believe that a really good sniper not only has muscle memory developed by years of constant practice but also has some special unknown gene in his body chemistry, because I was operating more on instinct than on training.

  I looked carefully past the feed tray and examined the magnified image of the gunner seated between the two pairs of mounted cannons. He wore a dirty T-shirt and some kind of cutoff trousers, with flip-flop sandals on his feet. I had a good line.

  “Take the shot,” said the general, and I fired, taking the big kick of the recoil as my rifle thundered. The heavy round punched through the metal feed tray, then slammed into the gunner like a bowling ball going a hundred miles an hour. The last I saw of him, he was flipping upside down over the back of the seat, thin legs splayed in the air, and barefoot because he was blown right out of his sandals.

  My shot started the battle and brought an answering blast from another Zeus. Its big rounds chewed at the concrete, green tracers laced the dawn sky, and we dove beneath the parapet for cover. That was only a momentary reaction. My spotter shouted, “You gotta engage or he’ll tear this building apart! Stop him, Jack!” Chunks of cement exploded around us as the quadruple cannon rattled nonstop. I had rolled over like a turtle, still in the cross-legged position, and my spotter grabbed my collar with his left hand to help yank me up straight again.

  Fighting had erupted all around the perimeter of the warehouses, and the din was incredible, but all we were concerned with was that Zeus. I came over the parapet again with that green shit flying all around and shells smashing the building. I opened up at the very center mass of the Zeus, killing this gunner, too, and my armor-piercing bullets tore the weapon apart.

  The tanks were next, and my boys took down every Skinny who tried to climb aboard them. In case anyone was already inside, I reloaded and put three bullets into the hulls where a gunner would be, then three more into the driver’s positions. Our two machine gunners poured fire into the militiamen and around the perimeter; our grunts took care of anyone they saw with a gun. Then I began searching for, and finding, what are called “targets of opportunity.”

  The Marine Cobra helicopters rose up and joined the fight, coming in right over our heads and unleashing a deafening typhoon of missiles, cannon, and snarling machine gun fire on the warehouses. Their rotor blasts threatened to tear us off the building, and their spent brass showered down on us, steaming hot. Then a couple of Marine tanks lumbered into the area and added even mo
re firepower. The cease-fire command came only about four minutes after I had made the first shot, and the absolutely devastated area fell silent. Flames ate at the warehouses, and columns of smoke blackened the morning sky.

  Then, off to the right, another Skinny with an RPK light machine gun jumped into a window and opened up on the grunts below. My spotter looked quickly at the range card we had sketched earlier, saw that the window was exactly 623 yards away, and called the shot. “Target One-Alpha 623!” he called, and three snipers put the guy just a little above the crosshairs of their scopes to allow for a bit of an arc at that distance. We all fired at the same instant, and the guy was torn apart when our three rounds simultaneously exploded into his chest, shoulder, and stomach. The grunts rushed in to clear those buildings, and another cease-fire was ordered.

  I pushed in a fresh five-round clip and scanned the area carefully. A tall, strangely well-groomed man was on the balcony of a nearby building, waving to militiamen gathered below. I locked onto him but, under the rules of engagement, did not fire, since he was not a direct threat and the men below were only milling about. A “technical,” a truck with a machine gun mounted on the back, drove up, and gunmen congregated around it. I didn’t know whether this guy was a warlord, but he sure seemed to be organizing a counterattack. I reported the situation and was told that if the gate to that compound opened, I was to take him out.

  People around the man began pointing and gesturing my way, and when the man on the balcony turned, he saw a big SASR rifle and the large eye of my telescope pointing straight at his nose. He dropped his hands slowly and went inside, leaving the men in the courtyard below as a leaderless mob. This fight was over.