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  They moved toward a door that would lead them off the roof, so I centered on the closer guy, fired, and put the bullet in the middle of his chest. As he crumpled out of sight, his pal dove for cover before I could jack another round into my rifle. Damn. One got away.

  Three shots, three kills, the fight was still going on, and I was in my zone, testy and irritable. I took a moment to manually reload, putting one in the chamber and four more in the magazine, then went looking for new targets.

  That was when I confronted one of those dreadful do-or-die moments when I was faced with giving an unsuspecting Iraqi civilian a brush with death. Only my training and years of experience in this job, plus Casey’s good sense, kept the guy alive. It would have been so easy to blow him away, knowing that nobody would ask any questions.

  Casey and his security team had dragged me off the Humvee, ignoring my complaints, and took me up to a nearby roof, which put me about fifteen feet off the ground-not really very high, but every foot of altitude increased what I could see, and what I could see, I could control. We were in the center of the city, and streets wheeled out to all points of the compass. Casey posted the boys around the building, then crawled over beside me on the roof and took out his binos for a better look. Things were busy down below; files of yelling Marines were plunging into buildings to clear them and running along the sidewalks to protect the flanks of the big tanks. Instead of being terrified, residents began to venture onto the streets, and they gathered in small crowds once they realized a general bloodletting was not in progress. Soon civilian vehicles were going every which way, taking care to stay out of the sight lines of the tank gunners.

  The amount of activity looked suspicious because it had neither the shape of a brewing conflict nor that of a welcoming committee. Braced solidly on the knee-high wall that edged the roof, I swept the streets below with my scope and came upon an Iraqi man standing rather calmly near a corner exactly 127 yards away, according to the laser range finder that Casey put on him. He was talking to other people moving through the area, and cars would pull up to him, then speed away after an exchange of a few words. We watched that happen over and over, and as I studied him through my scope, I saw the butt of what appeared to be a pistol sticking from his pocket. Casey saw the same thing through the powerful binos.

  Elsewhere around the town, I heard the bark of machine guns, but that did not mean I could just start taking target practice. My task was to take out only legitimate threats, not to blindly murder innocent people, but deciding whom not to shoot isn’t always easy.

  This mystery man was an obvious target, but who was he? I kept him in the crosshairs and rested my finger lightly on the trigger. Was he an enemy commander who had thrown away his uniform and was now working in civilian clothes? Or was he a city councilman, a respected member of the local mosque, or perhaps the mayor? Confused citizens would naturally ask questions of such a person, and if that were the case, shooting him right in the middle of a crowd could seriously damage our cause. That pistol I thought I saw might easily be something else, maybe a wallet. There was too much doubt, so I held my fire, but I kept the rifle on him as sweat burned my eyes. This man was obviously high up the food chain and might be an officer, which would make him a big-time target for me.

  I was so focused that I can still remember his face, the straight black hair and the thick Saddam-like mustache. He wore a light blue long-sleeved shirt, greenish-brown pants, and good shoes that were neither a peasant’s sandals nor a soldier’s military boots. No clues were available from the clothes. They were not spit-and-polish clean and showed some wear, but they seemed like a tailored Armani suit compared to what everyone around him was wearing.

  I was oblivious to everything else, and in my head he had crossed the line from being a man to being a target. I left it to Casey to figure out the bigger picture. If he told me to shoot, I would, and I began to snarl at him to make the damned call before the guy simply walked away.

  The minutes stretched longer, slowly expanding, and several times the sheer fatigue of concentration and the bright sun made me pull away from the scope to blink-something I always hate to do, for it gives a target time to escape. Holding this guy’s life in my hands was the hardest thing I had done since the start of the war.

  My mind reeled as I studied his unhurried chats with passersby, his open stance, and the easy way he was waving his hands. He looked like a leader and acted like a leader. What if he is somebody we want on our side? I pull this trigger and all those people are going to think we murdered him in cold blood. Who the hell are you?

  Several times I took up two pounds of slack on the trigger, which only takes three pounds of pressure to fire. Each time I eased off again, in a game of cat and mouse with the mouse unaware that he was being stalked.

  When the man reached into his pocket for the suspicious object that had originally attracted our attention, I tightened the trigger pressure once again. It was a cell phone, and with that, Casey decided that without a positive identification we would pass on this one. I put the rifle down and closed my eyes, panting for breath as if I had just run ten miles. My muscles had been locked in place for so long that I had cramps when I tried to unfold and stand up. The guy would not die by my hand and would never know that two Marines had watched him for fifteen solid minutes, deciding if he would live or die.

  Word came to move out, and we scrambled over the edge of the roof. The Panda made the fifteen-foot drop first, and I carefully dropped my rifle to him, then jumped down. When Casey tried it, a section of the roof broke away beneath his feet and dumped the arm-waving lieutenant unceremoniously onto the dirt. He hit on his back and almost had the wind knocked out of him. The mighty Casey popped right back up, embarrassed, swearing, weapon in hand, looking ready to charge up a mountain. The only bruise was to his ego, as our XO, J-Matt Baker, was laughing his ass off and accused Casey of delaying the mission.

  With the moving firefights and the action, it was easy to push into the back of my mind the fact that ordinary people lived in these homes and buildings. They were just men and women and kids who played no role in the conflict other than enduring the savagery that was passing through their neighborhoods. We had to examine each of them as a potential threat and make a decision, just as I had done with the fellow I didn’t shoot. Most of the time, they were bypassed, minor characters in a great drama, as we stayed locked in on our military mission. Then a little Iraqi girl broke my concentration and sharply reminded me once again of the human side of war.

  Casey and I were to take a patrol deeper into the city and were briefing the rest of our boys when an older guy walked up and asked if he could go along. “Who the fuck are you?” I demanded.

  F. J. “Bing” West introduced himself, said he was from the Marine Warfighting Lab, and added that he had permission from the top dogs to roam the battlefield, giving advice and taking notes.

  That did not make me happy. This was a combat patrol, and having some think-tank weenie along, particularly one of his age, only added to the things that I would have to worry about. “I don’t care about their permission,” I said. “They’re not leading this patrol.”

  West smiled at my stubbornness and said, “I was at Hue in Vietnam.” That made me feel a bit stupid. This guy had been in one of the biggest urban battles of the Vietnam War, and I learned later that West had also been an assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon. The guy had more credibility than I could ever ask for, so not only did I put him on the team, I offered him a pistol to carry. He refused.

  “If we have some contact, you may need it to protect yourself,” I said.

  “Do your job right, sniper, and we won’t have to worry about my safety,” West replied. After the war, Bing West and retired Marine Major General Ray Smith, a walking legend in the Corps, would write The March Up, one of the definitive books on the conflict in Iraq.

  But in the Marines, it is unseemly to give anyone too much respect, so we dubbed West and Smith “t
he Muppets.” For the rest of the war, I would occasionally see them riding around the battlefield, a couple of real Marines easily distinguishable by their confiscated vehicle: the yellow SUV that had once been the property of the defeated general of the 51st Mechanized Division back in Basra.

  The patrol set out with the Panda Bear on point, Casey at the rear, and me in the middle with our Muppet and five other Marines. Since bullets follow walls, we kept about three feet away from the sandy buildings and moved very deliberately. Not fast, but safe. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

  About twenty minutes later, we found a multistory house with a high roof from which I could increase my view, and Chief Warrant Officer Steve Blandford, one of our translators, approached a man standing behind a metal gate. The man, in his midthirties, agreed to let us go up and swung open the gate in the five-foot-high wall that surrounded the house. Although we had permission, we all remained combat wary, because we did not know who else might be behind that door. We left some of the guys outside for security while Casey, the Panda, Blandford, and I went in.

  The place was modest, but the furniture was clean, although old. Colorful plates flashed brightly in a china closet, and a small piano was against one wall. Grandpa, in a long robe, was seated in the main room, and Grandma showed only a mild interest in the four Marines who were moving through her home, carrying weapons. Three kids played on wide rugs in the cool dimness, and a big-eyed little girl looked at me with a smile that could break a heart. The impulse was to lay down my weapon and comfort her, knowing she was disturbed by the big foreign men with guns in her home. I could almost see the same look on the faces of my own daughters in a similar situation, and I know I would want the soldier to be gentle with my children.

  We did a tactical sweep as we went along, checking out a kitchen at the rear and a couple of bedrooms with mattresses on rug-covered floors. The family had been warned by Saddam’s henchmen that Marines slaughter everyone they see, but they were treating us like neighbors. They made welcoming gestures, and although they spoke a language I didn’t understand, their attitude was totally friendly. Amid that kindness, we had to fight our emotions to remain alert.

  We went out the rear door and then up a stairwell to the roof. I did a brief visual check of the surrounding area but found nothing of interest, so we retraced our steps.

  I could not help feeling that we were intruding into a private sanctuary. These good people were not frightened and were obviously glad we had arrived in Afak; they acted if they truly had been liberated. I thought about the men I had killed earlier that day and persuaded myself to believe they had bullied this and other families for years. I wanted to tell them not to worry, because I had smoke-checked some of the neighborhood thugs and those bad guys wouldn’t be coming back, but I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t.

  On the way out, I paused a moment to reach down and pat the head of the little girl in the living room. It was my first feel-good moment of the war, and it made me homesick. I was happy to leave those people in peace and said a quick and private prayer that they would stay safe. But when I stepped back into the sunlight, I had my warrior face back on.

  Our engineers had cleared the bridge at the eastern edge of town, and it was time to move out.

  13

  A Bench in a War

  It was only a little after ten o’clock in the morning. I had already killed three enemy soldiers that day and was on the road to another fight. In the old days, a sniper never moved this fast.

  I was back in my little nest aboard the armored Humvee, with my boots braced in the cargo nets to keep me from being thrown off if the Panda Bear made a sharp turn or one of his jaw-breaking sudden stops. Our backpacks, lashed to the outside of the truck, gave me a false sense of security, as if those little bits of cloth were going to stop a round. I did not feel invincible but was confident as we dashed down Route 17 toward our next target town, a place called Al Budayr. Things were going well, and I was right where I wanted to be.

  We hit the village fast and hard, with Cobra helicopters taking out some antiaircraft artillery and the CAATs cutting off the escape routes. While an infantry company halted on the outskirts of town to give supporting fire, McCoy took an armored spearhead straight downtown.

  Casey and I paused to plant the Main headquarters safely outside of the city, then sped into town, where civilians in a shabby open-air market watched as the Panda Bear skidded to a halt. Our tanks and Amtracs were parked with their heavy guns pointed down every street and alley.

  “You’re late,” McCoy growled as I climbed down. He was pacing near his command truck, talking into his radio. Saddam Hussein smiled benevolently at us from a large, tattered poster, and sunlight glittered off empty brass shell casings all over the pavement.

  “How’s that, boss?” I asked.

  “I just dropped a hajji about two hundred yards down there,” the colonel said, pointing down a side road. “I think I hit one or two, but more got away.”

  “Sounds like you’re getting slow,” I said with a smirk, dishing back some of his earlier sarcasm.

  “How so?” McCoy rose to the bait.

  “You let a few get away.”

  He chuckled. “Remember I’m shooting with iron sights here. Not everybody has a scope.”

  “Don’t hate me because I’m good, boss. I’ll glass the area and see if I can clean up your trash.”

  “Yeah. Do that.” Our game continued.

  The colonel’s Humvee was in the middle of the square, a great location for me, so I climbed onto the hood and wiggled into a shooting position. I braced against the windshield, and the machine gunner in the turret pointed to where they had last seen the enemy troops. This was an incredible change in the way snipers worked; instead of being disguised or hidden in the dirt and the dark, I was sprawled out on the truck in broad daylight smack in the middle of the town square. Being visible to the enemy had ceased being a factor, because this was not a clandestine mission, and I was just one Marine among many involved in this fight.

  I did a systematic search starting about twenty yards in front of me, scanning from one side of the street to the other, from the roofs to the ground. Civilians continually moved through the sight of my scope, and I had to decide the fate of each individual then and there. Was he a threat or not? The midday sun glared from the buildings and paved streets, but I could not stop working just because my eye felt like it was about to fall out.

  After about fifteen minutes, I found something in a second-story window of what looked like an old fortress, and I fastened onto it. What had been just a moving shadow solidified into the dark image of an Iraqi soldier with an AK-47.1 made a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) on the distance and dialed 430 yards into the scope, slowed my breathing, took up my trigger slack, and waited for his next move. This guy was already dead but just didn’t know it yet. When he moved more fully into the window to point his rifle at the Marines in the street below, I smoke-checked him where he stood, and the big round kicked him back into the room. Only then did I take out the range finder and laser the window, which was exactly 441 yards away, almost exactly a quarter of a mile.

  “Coughlin!” McCoy barked, looking up from his radio. “Stop shooting my targets and get out of my sandbox. Go find your own place to shoot.”

  I ignored him and glassed the area a bit longer to be sure there were no more threats, then politely obeyed and walked off, satisfied that I had one-upped the Boss.

  I found Casey around the corner setting up protection for an Intelligence and Psychological Operations (Psy Ops) team that was using giant loudspeakers to blast recorded messages in Arabic, urging civilians to cooperate with the Americans and not to be afraid.

  The technique worked all too well, because a growing crowd pressed in around them, wanting to voice complaints and point out suspicious people and settle some personal grudges. It looked like the bar scene from Star Wars. There was nothing that I could do to help, or wanted to.

  By now, my sn
iper cover was completely blown, and I was walking around town with my rifle in my arms, as out in the open as a door-to-door magazine salesman. It made no difference at all on this new type of battleground.

  Nearby, a tin awning hanging out from the wall of a shabby shop dropped a rectangle of shade over a battered white wooden bench, and I took advantage of the moment to escape the hot direct sun. A half dozen Iraqi men sat on a nearby stoop, smoking cigarettes and watching me closely, jabbering excitedly and pointing to the big sniper rifle and its scope. I nodded a greeting to them, and they nodded back.

  Talk about being exposed.

  I got back to work by putting my boot on the bench, then brought up my rifle, rested the fatty part of the back of my bicep on my knee, and leaned forward into a good tight position. I made certain there was no bone-on-bone contact, such as elbow to kneecap; that might feel solid, but it is an unstable platform because of slippage. The way I was knotted up, I controlled all of my movements. I glassed the area and visually got to know who was out in the street, scoping out every new person who appeared. After a while, confident that it was under control, I lowered the rifle and sat on the bench, taking only occasional looks through the scope at the street scene if something caught my interest. Periodically I would check out my little fan club on the nearby stoop, and they watched me right back.

  Our prime rule during training is to become part of your surroundings, to stay hidden, and never expose yourself. Stealth is everything. On some missions, I had worn the traditional ghillie suit, a camouflage trick handed down over the generations from Scots gamekeepers, who invented them to make counting game and catching poachers easier. Vegetation plucked from local plants is pushed into burlap netting sewn all over an old fatigue uniform, and the irregular strips and leaves totally break up the human outline to help the sniper vanish into the background. Sniper training requires that you be able to sneak up within two hundred yards of spotters with binoculars and fire a blank round without being seen. Wearing my ghillie suit, I was the invisible man.