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  McCoy and his staff had come up with a way to counter the Iraqi ambush teams that fired their barrages of rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, from the second row of buildings in a town, not the front row nearest the road on which the convoys were passing. That gave them some extra concealment and cover. So the Boss decided that if those turkeys wanted something to shoot at, we would give it to them.

  We would stick a big sword right into the heart of any organized resistance by having our heavy armor bust straight into a town like a penetrating arrowhead. Then the tanks would sit there, intentionally presenting huge targets, begging to be shot at. An Abrams tank can shrug off a hit from a Hellfire missile, so while an RPG may go bang against its sides, actual damage is usually slight.

  While the Iraqi ambushers took potshots at the virtually impenetrable armor, our infantry would hit the first row of buildings, then attack the ambush teams in the second row and create a wide buffer zone under our control, right in the middle of town. Our fast-moving CAATs and air strikes would seal off the escape routes.

  After McCoy had given his orders, a small group of us gathered around a small table to hear Officer Bob lay down his own interpretation of the plan, which I considered a harebrained scheme that was almost sure to get me killed. Suddenly, I wasn’t happy anymore. Bob said that when the armored column crashed into the hostile and unsecured towns, “I want Coughlin and his spotter to gain access to some high ground to cover the Main.”

  Had I heard him right? “Sir, you want me to go up into a building?” I asked as the other Marines, officers and enlisted men alike, looked over at me. Having snipers up front was one thing, but I would not run a suicide mission.

  “Yes. I want you up on a roof. We’ll stay with the vehicles to provide local security.”

  “Wait a minute. You want me and my spotter to clear a whole fucking building all alone? Just us?” There was stunned silence around the table.

  He nodded dumbly, and I lost it. “Are you fucking crazy? This is a deliberate daylight attack, and every motherfucker in a twelve-mile radius is going to know exactly where we are. Ain’t no fucking way we’re going in there by ourselves.”

  I looked over at the battalion executive officer, Major Matt Baker, to see if he was going to nail me on the spot for insubordination, but J-Matt, a forty-year-old officer who was wickedly intelligent and had the calmness of a Buddhist monk, said nothing. Only a few days earlier, he had banned Bob from even speaking on the radio for issuing conflicting orders that hopelessly snarled one unit. Baker did not interfere, and Bob stood there and took my shouting in his face without a word. What was he going to do, send me to Iraq?

  Casey pulled me aside to ratchet down the situation, and in a matter of minutes, the two of us constructed a beefed-up security squad that would provide cover for me. That was a formula that I could literally live with: machine guns, grenades, and Marines.

  While getting ready to move out, our battalion lost our first Marine, a lance corporal who died when his Humvee flipped into an aqueduct while he was driving around in the darkness to update the codes in command net radios. It’s not good to start the day with a casualty, for such a glitch could screw up the entire timeline, but while his death would be devastating to his family, it could not be allowed to impact the mission. This was war, and war does not stop just because somebody gets killed.

  Our raiding force started moving before first light, working our way through the jumpy 5th Marines outside of Ad Diwaniyah, who were worn out by their own fighting during the past few days. They gave us quiet looks of pity as we passed, like “You’re all gonna die, suckers.”

  At the big highway cloverleaf outside of Ad Diwaniyah, we hung a right onto Route 17 as dawn illuminated big blue and white highway signs spelling out the names of towns that were our targets for the day-Hajil, Afak, and Al Budayr-in both English and Arabic. Tanks were in the lead, followed by Kilo Company, then McCoy with his tactical headquarters team. Casey and I were next, with the armored Main, and were followed by India Company. The CAATs circled the column like protective wolves, leaving triangular flags of dust fluttering in the air behind them.

  I was on the edge of my seat in the armored Humvee, holding my sniper rifle tightly with both hands. We were rolling, and all thoughts except the coming combat were banished. This was where I belonged, and the familiar prebattle calm, almost a serene disconnect from the surrounding world, flowed through my system, energizing and focusing my senses. I became aware of the steady beating of my heart and willed it to slow down, because in a fight I did not want it to vibrate through my body and wobble my scope. A good sniper pulls the trigger at that momentary lull between heartbeats, and it is best not to have your heart thundering like a trip-hammer with excitement.

  A makeshift barricade had been thrown across the road less than a mile beyond the cloverleaf, a hodgepodge of big rocks and metal junk that provided cover for some Iraqi militiamen manning a group of technicals, those ubiquitous third-world weapons that are just pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in the beds. Those jackasses might scare the locals, but they were nothing more than an inconvenience to us.

  Our tanks smashed through the barricade without slowing down, and the big, bad militia technicals scurried away like cowrardly cockroaches-but not fast enough as our guys opened fire. Within minutes, the steaming carcasses of a couple of pickups, and the corpses of their drivers and gunners, dotted the roadside.

  Just beyond the barricade, on the left side of the highway, was a string of low-walled houses, a village so small that it wasn’t even on the map. We named it Bonus Town. Empty desert surrounded the place, giving it a Martian-colony look. Although it was too tiny for a full assault, we had to take care of it, so our entire column pulled off the road. The tanks went into a covering position, the snouts of their big cannon swinging from doorway to doorway, while the CAATs zoomed about the outskirts to seal off any exit. Then the rear ramps of the Amtracs were dropped, and the grunts hustled out for a house-to-house check.

  I climbed from my Humvee, and Casey fanned the security unit out around me as I laid the rifle across the hood to steady it, and glassed the area through the scope. Dun-colored homes that were not much more than stacks of mud building blocks moved past my rifle in quick montage, and I examined a few civilians, plus some dogs, cats, goats, and chickens. Everyone else apparently had abandoned their homes until things settled down. Fortunately, no one fired a shot at us, for had they done so, we would have returned a thousand. After thirty minutes, the place was clear and we got ready to move on.

  I was disappointed that Bonus Town had been so easy and that, once again, I had not been a factor. Was I ever going to find some way to earn my salary? But there were bigger places just down the road, where there had to be some soldiers, paramilitaries, fedayeen guerrillas, and other guys with guns, and I wanted a piece of those clowns.

  As I walked around the Humvee to continue toward what was sure to be a fight, I found a glittering four-inch-long piece of metal sticking out of the right rear tire, which had gone as flat as a dirty penny on a railroad track. I filled the desert air with my entire vocabulary of obscene words, and other Marines actually laughed at me as they saddled up to head for the next village. I had been taken out of the war again, this time by a fucking flat tire!

  We could not fix the tire on the road, for while we had plenty of combat stuff, spare tires were few and far between in the Marine Corps. The Army had plenty, but we didn’t. We were stuck and could neither hold up the advance nor stay where we were alone, so we had to head back to the safety of the cloverleaf, six hundred long yards away. I watched with dismay as the armored column set off to attack the next village; then my Humvee headed back to the big intersection, bumping along on the steel tire rim, and Casey’s truck followed to provide security.

  As the gap between the raiding force and ourselves got wider, Route 17 immediately grew dangerous. That stretch of road, only recently so totally under our control, was turning back i
nto bad-guy country right before my eyes. If we didn’t sit on it, we didn’t own it. The bad guys could easily reemerge and assemble another roadblock, plant a roadside bomb, or prepare an ambush. An officer’s voice came on the radio, telling us not to try to rejoin the column because it would be too dangerous. Casey turned him off.

  But when we reached the cloverleaf, we got the full NASCAR pit crew treatment from the men of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, who seemed to have been waiting their whole lives to change that tire. They stripped one off of a destroyed Humvee, and with captains and first sergeants working side by side with corporals, they got that tire on in record time. It went flat, too.

  While I paced nervously, they wrestled still another one onto our limping Humvee, and that one also went flat.

  If we wanted to get into the fight, we had to come up with a Plan B, so we decided to leave my truck and stack everyone into Casey’s single Humvee. We replaced Casey’s driver, Corporal Baby, with the Panda Bear and were about ready to roll when I counted noses. We had too many people.

  The Panda was at the wheel, Newbern was inside with the radios, and we definitely needed Jerry Marsh standing behind his Mk-19 automatic grenade launcher. One of the Secret Squirrels from a Human Exploitation Team also was jammed inside, along with Casey, who was in the passenger seat. That meant there was not a place for the final member of the group-me.

  The only place I could figure out to ride was atop the slanted rear deck of the Humvee, so I climbed aboard and braced myself against the packs and gear that hung on the sides. Off we roared, with the CAAT-trained Panda stomping the accelerator for all the speed available from the fuel-injected diesel V8 engine. We had to cover approximately fifteen miles over a dicey road to catch up with the raiders, and this was one of those times that it was better not to ask permission. The answer would have been either “No” or “Are you insane?”

  A Humvee, fifteen feet long and seven feet wide, makes an inviting target, and as the war progressed, they would sustain a high rate of loss. The trucks had not originally been made for use in combat but were supposed to be troop carriers and ambulances. The thin-skinned versions had canvaslike doors, and one of those that I rode in during a shootout back in Somalia picked up twenty-six bullet holes. I definitely preferred this newer type with its sporty seventy-thousand-dollar armor package.

  As we rocketed along Route 17, Casey turned the radio back on to let the assault force know that the vehicle coming up fast behind them was us, not the enemy. Meanwhile, I discovered that my little nest was pretty nice. I was up high, relatively firmly in place, with a machine gunner over my head and a protective detail of Marines inside the vehicle. I pushed with my hands, elbows, knees, and feet, and I found enough points of resistance to convince me that this might be a stable enough platform from which to shoot.

  For the Mobile Sniper Strike Team concept, I had been thinking about putting snipers aboard snazzy specialized vehicles, but those ideas never got off the drawing board. The common Humvee had been right there the whole time, and on the dash down Route 17, I concluded that the boxy truck would do just fine. Eureka! We had wheels, and sniper doctrine changed.

  12

  Decision

  Sometimes, the hardest job of a sniper is not to pull the trigger. In an urban environment, the battlefield is a 360-degree place, with a potential threat around every corner, in every doorway and window, on every rooftop. During a pitched battle in a city, everybody is considered a possible enemy until proven otherwise, and great care must be taken to determine that a target is legitimate. You cannot, as the old dark joke claims, kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out. Professionals don’t work that way, but neither are we in the business of dispensing compassion. So the scariest moments come not when someone is shooting at you but when you have to make a life-or-death decision about a person who may just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Snipers walk that thin line of taking or preserving life every time they put a scope on a target, and some people will never know just how close I have come to shooting them dead.

  Within the hour after the tire change, I was home again, out of the shepherding role and into the fight. I had waited through sandstorms, long road marches, and even that flat tire, but finally I was across the threshold and back in the war. I lay content in my new perch atop the slanted rear deck of the big Humvee, brought my sniper rifle to my cheek, and got ready to shoot.

  The raiders had already finished with the town of Hajil by the time we caught up with them after changing the tire. It had been a pushover. After some sporadic firefights cleared a few pockets of guerrilla opposition, the village elder accepted some rations in trade for a weapons cache, a military radio, information about the other towns down the road, and some posters that identified different types of American vehicles-such as those parked out in the front courtyard with their big guns pointed down the street. Unfortunately, a couple of civilians had been hit during the brief fight and were being evacuated for medical treatment as we rolled by. It is horrible and frustrating when innocent people are killed in a firefight, but I steeled myself against the sight of the blood and bodies, because we could not stop the mission or lose focus. War sucks.

  Ten miles later, we burst into the middle of Afak, a much bigger city of about one hundred thousand residents, where prickly palm trees needled above the ragged, dirt-brown buildings surrounded by low cement block walls.

  Armored units normally avoid such narrow streets, for once inside those corridors, mobility is lost and the advantage can go over to the rocket-propelled grenades of the enemy. This time, though, we threw so much muscle into the town that the buildings shook. Abrams tanks weighing seventy tons rumbled across a bridge built to handle only automobile and truck traffic, and the rest of us followed in an armored convoy. As soon as we hit downtown, the Amtracs dropped their rear ramps and the grunts poured out to secure the nearest buildings. I heard the familiar sound of gunfire. The Iraqi soldiers and fedayeen paramilitaries were fighting back.

  Our Humvee came in right behind the tactical headquarters, and Casey had the boys spill from the truck and fan out for security. I stayed in place atop the Humvee and locked into a tight shooting position, with my boots braced against the combat packs that hung around the edge of the truck. My breathing slowed, my movements were smooth and economical, and I put my mind totally at ease as I swept my scope over the rooftops, windows, and doorways of the brown buildings.

  Almost immediately, I spotted motion in a third-story window about two hundred yards away. Two men were setting up an RPK light machine gun with a two-hundred-round drum of 7.62 mm bullets and pointing it toward the tactical headquarters, which was easily identifiable by the forest of radio aerials. About a third of the machine gun barrel was already sticking out of the shadowy window by the time I found them, and if they opened up on the Tac, it would be a turkey shoot and Marines would die. I knew the Marine who was in the turret of the Tac headquarters Amtrac, unaware that an enemy machine gunner was about to open up on him, but if I yelled a warning, the Iraqis would start firing. I had to act.

  The two Iraqi soldiers were crowded so closely together in the window that I could not tell which one was the actual gunner, but it didn’t really matter, because both of them had to die. I did a quick laser range check, brought my rifle to a stop, and saw the dimness change into a complete outline as I dialed in exactly 212 yards. They looked like the old cartoon characters Mutt and Jeff, one tall and one short. I framed Jeff, the little guy on the left, and squeezed the trigger. Boom! My bullet went in two inches below his heart, and the soldier’s knees buckled and he slumped over, dead, exactly where he had stood, wedged between the second man and the edge of the window. Shit. Wrong guy.

  When the first one went down, I could see that the other soldier was the real gunner and was about ready to open fire. But instead of shooting or jumping aside to safety, Mutt delayed for a fatal moment to look down at his fallen buddy, as if to ask, “What happened to you? You’ve got
an unsightly hole in your chest.” Then he compounded his mistake by turning his attention away from the Tac to look for me, the guy who had shot his friend. That gave me a small pause for the cause, time enough to manipulate the bolt of my rifle, see the spent cartridge pop out, and slide a new one in. I knew the windage and range were accurate, so I locked the crosshairs on the right side of his neck. What are you looking at, asshole? He was totally ignorant of his precarious position, standing perfectly still for a sniper, so I again squeezed the trigger and this time watched as the bullet exploded from my rifle with a muzzle velocity of more than 2,550 feet per second. It slammed the soldier completely around, a sure-kill shot, and his machine gun toppled back inside the room. The entire episode of taking out Mutt and Jeff had lasted no more than three seconds.

  The loud echoes of my shots bounced around the walls, and the Marine in the Tac turret yelled, “We’re taking fire!” Casey shouted back that those had been my shots and told him not to open fire.

  Over the noise, I heard McCoy asking loudly and sarcastically whether I was killing anybody or just shooting for the hell of it. Even with a fight going on, the sonofabitch would not pass up a chance to rag on me.

  I stayed right where I was, locked into position and glassing the other buildings. Mutt and Jeff were already history, worthy of no more thought whatsoever.

  Seven minutes later, a sharp-eyed corporal called out, “Staff Sar’nt! I got some people on a roof a little more than two blocks away.”

  I followed his directions and shifted my aim up to the roof of a three-story building where two figures were moving behind a low wall. That gave them a substantial height advantage, since I was still on the truck and could only see above their thighs. That was enough, because they loomed large in my scope. One was in an Arab headdress, the other wore a scarf over his face, and both carried weapons, which meant they were fedayeen and definitely up to no good. I had them cold.