Shooter Read online

  The final night of March was one of the most miserable points of the war for us, for the flies became absolutely unbearable. Marines looked as if they were having fits, flailing their arms over their heads as they swatted the flies while creepy little bug feet walked on their necks and snacked on their skin. Some men put on the full MOPP gear for protection.

  We looked forward to morning, when we could attack the city, preferring battle to the purgatory of that stinking cloverleaf.

  15

  April Fool’s Day

  A sniper usually sees the face of his target. Although that target may be a thousand yards away, with the scope on my rifle it is as if I can reach out and touch him with my fingertips. While targets look like human beings, they remain targets, and there is no personal attachment whatsoever. Feeling a personal kinship of any sort risks having second thoughts. So it came as a shock when I met someone whom I had shot not once, but twice, and had seen him fall. Normally, that would mean that particular target was very dead. However, that was not the case with my friend Achmed, the only man I ever shot who lived through the experience.

  April 1 was the twelfth day of the war, and we launched our attack on Ad Diwaniyah, leaving the cloverleaf shortly after daylight, with the tanks in the lead and two companies of infantry fanning out in support. Despite all of the noise we made, we still caught the Iraqis by surprise. Some of the enemy soldiers were still resting among the date palm groves in snug holes in which they had placed rugs and carpeting. Others were having breakfast in their mud huts, and we would later find warm food and cups of tea still on tables, with canteens and helmets and weapons nearby. Just because our predecessors in the area, the 5th Marines, had not gone in after them, they thought they were safe from us, too. Big mistake. We were the Bull.

  When our tanks came highballing down the road, an Iraqi lookout jumped from his observation post and ran like hell to warn his friends, but a flash of machine gun fire cut him down after just a few steps. In minutes, our artillery went psycho and rained explosives on the enemy positions. Tank cannons, TOW missiles, heavy machine guns, and that most lethal weapon of all, the Marine infantryman, joined the fight, and gunfire lit the dark, hazy sky of the early morning. The Marines tore through bunkers, trench lines, and palm trees and shot any Iraqi soldier who tried to resist. As usual, the fedayeen ran away before things got heavy.

  I was again atop my truck, and after five minutes of scoping out the mud huts on the outskirts of the city, I spotted an enemy rifleman fighting from a foxhole exactly 286 meters to the south. Easy shot, so I smoke-checked him, bam, and he was dead, his body twitching for a few more moments while his internal systems shut down. I noted the time, 7:47 A.M., on a green page of my sniper’s log and got back to work. The place was as noisy as a steel factory; rocket-propelled grenades whooshed through the morning air and detonated on impact, and our tanks answered with volleys from their big main guns, heavy rounds that moved at a mile per second and seemed to lift the earth where they struck.

  My second kill of the day was nothing less than a quick-draw showdown. We were taking Ad Diwaniyah block by block against bitter opposition, and the Panda drove us deeper into the urban area, bringing our Humvee to a halt near a group of Marines who were advancing through a cluster of huts. An Iraqi soldier suddenly appeared from between two buildings right beside the road, his weapon at the ready with the butt stock to his shoulder and the barrel pointed slightly down. I had just gotten out of the truck and was in the same basic position. This was no faraway target but a man standing only about seventy-five yards away, point-blank range for my sniper rifle. He hesitated for a moment, perhaps startled by all of the Marines in the area, and then, too late, his eyes locked on mine. That brief flicker of uncertainty cost him his life. I killed him before he could get off a shot. In such situations, only an amateur would dawdle. Professionals shoot.

  As the front line advanced, the Panda moved us cautiously forward another few hundred yards to a bridge that curved to the right, arcing over another road that led into the dark heart of the besieged town. Our guys were already fighting at the other end of the span, and I was to help control this end and block any flanking movement.

  I went back onto our Humvee and anchored myself into the now-familiar solid prone shooting position to get a better look at a group of scruffy mud and cinder-block buildings that lined an area studded with palm trees. I slowly glassed the rooftops, doorways, windows, and alleys, the four places where death likes to hide in towns and cities.

  The temperature was a mild seventy-eight degrees, but the rising sun had taken on its normal fierce brightness and bounced off the light-colored walls with such intensity that it was like staring into high-beam headlights.

  Suddenly, three targets wearing green uniforms and carrying AK-47 rifles broke from cover and ran full speed from right to left. These were straight-up soldiers, not civilians, and I kept my scope on them as palm trees danced through my field of vision, blocking my view. The Bear did a laser range-check on the buildings where the men were heading: about 470 yards. A mirage shimmered from right to left, telling me that a slight wind was moving across the battlefield, and I fine-tuned an adjustment to compensate.

  I had kept the crosshairs on them while dialing the scope, and when one paused at the corner of a building, at two minutes before ten o’clock in the morning, I put my crosshairs on his chest and squeezed the trigger. Targets rarely remain still in combat, however, and he moved at the last moment, spoiling a perfect shot. Instead of a center-mass hit, my bullet went through his throat, and the impact catapulted him back into the street.

  Then came Achmed. I had just jacked another round into the chamber and was continuing to scan the area when he dashed from cover, running away but still carrying his rifle. Since I have no compunction about shooting a man in the back, I instantly fired and put a bullet in him. Somehow, perhaps just with forward momentum, he kept running, so I shot him again, and this time he went down and rolled out of view.

  “I can’t believe I missed,” I told Panda.

  “You didn’t miss the second time, boss. I saw him go down,” the Bear confirmed. I spent another ten minutes searching for the third soldier, who had vanished.

  A little later, things quieted down and we got back into the Humvee and moved out, with me complaining the whole time. “I had the crosshairs right on that sucker. I had him! How could he have kept going?” It was unsettling, and I knew that my fellow Marines would soon be riding me about it-“Coughlin missed!” McCoy would have a field day with this. It was a major fuckup.

  We were taking a break back at the Main when a rogue RPG whooshed overhead, which was enough to convince Officer Bob that the headquarters was under attack. I yelled for him to calm down, but his frenzy startled one of the Amtrac machine gunners, who opened up with a full automatic burst and thoroughly killed a nearby donkey. I scrambled to get things back in order, and J-Matt Baker, the battalion XO, gave the donkey’s bewildered owner some rations as payment.

  Casey and I went forward again, and I found two of my snipers, Corporal Mark Evnin and Sergeant Dino Moreno, standing alongside Master Sergeant Bob Johnson from Bravo Tanks, studying the wrecked hulk of a civilian bus about a half mile to the northwest. Smoke oozed from the blown-out windows.

  “Somebody’s over there, boss,” Evnin told me. “Been getting some occasional fire. Maybe they’re in the bus.”

  Top Johnson figured three Marine snipers were more than enough to handle whoever was in the bus, so he went back to his tanks, leaving us with a succinct instruction: “Kill ’em.”

  I climbed on the nearest Humvee and glassed the smoking carcass of the bus. For the first time in the war, I was working with fellow snipers, and we lapsed into the arcane sniper-spotter dialogue. Moreno was glassing an adjoining area, and Evnin acted as the spotter for both of us.

  After three minutes of searching specific sectors, being patient and waiting for a mistake, I saw a shadow shift in the bus, and then the o
utline of a rifle appeared, an enemy sniper rising up for a shot. We had lased the bus at exactly 817 yards, more than eight football fields away.

  “Mark,” I said softly to Evnin, “I think I have movement in the bus, in the left third of the target zone.”

  Evnin swung his powerful scope around and responded, “I see the bus.”

  “Third of the way down, from back to front, left side, fifth seat, window side.”

  “I see it.”

  “Does he have a weapon?” I asked for confirmation that I wasn’t looking at a civilian.

  “Sure does.”

  “What’s the wind?”

  “Three minutes left.”

  “Elevation?”

  “Eight plus one.” The conversation was brief, automatic, emotionless, professional. Moreno kept watch on the surrounding area, undistracted by our discovery.

  I fine-tuned my scope to match Evnin’s numbers. “OK. I’ll hold an inch above center chest.”

  “Roger. On scope,” Mark confirmed, holding his spotting scope steady on the bus. My spotter had the target.

  “On target,” I said. The shooter had the target, and everything was in place. I exhaled some breath and tightened on the trigger. I had this sucker as sure as if we were on the practice range. He was as good as dead anyway, for he might somehow live through a meeting with one sniper, but not two, and never three.

  “Fire when ready,” Mark said.

  My rifle barked and my shoulder took the recoil.

  “Hit, center chest, target down,” Evnin reported when the soldier was staggered by the big bullet and fell out of sight. Mark did not lower his scope. “Good shot, boss.”

  “Good windage,” I told him. “Dead on.” That was as high a compliment as one pro would give another. There were no high-fives or end zone celebrations, for we were professionals. We had done what we had been trained to do, so we expected both the cooperation and outcome. We switched back to assisting Moreno scan the rest of the area.

  Inwardly, I was proud of Evnin. Mark was a stocky kid with brownish hair, an eager, happy-go-lucky youngster from Vermont who was hardcore into becoming a sniper. His talent level wasn’t the best, because he had not yet finished sniper school when the war broke out, but he had worked so hard and had such an infectious enthusiasm that when my scout/sniper platoon went to Iraq, he came along with us. He would complete his training when we got back to the States, though it would be odd for a student to have kills to his credit before officially winning the title of sniper.

  As it turned out, that was not to be. Within a few days, Mark Evnin would die in a firefight.

  The battalion had finished with Ad Diwaniyah by lunchtime, having no casualties of our own but killing at least ninety-two Iraqi soldiers and taking another fifty-six as prisoners. The actual butcher’s bill could have easily been three or four times what was reported, but we were intentionally lowballing the numbers, minimizing enemy casualties instead of maximizing them to avoid the Vietnam body-count habit that created unrealistic numbers and expectations.

  Once again back at the Main, I was gulping water and washing some of the thick dust off my skin when a Marine stopped by to tell me the security platoon had picked up some prisoners over in the area by the bridge, including a guy who had been hit by what appeared to be sniper rounds. The Panda and I headed for the prisoner pen and found the wounded man sitting on the ground with his legs crossed and plastic flexcuffs shackling his wrists.

  He was no more than twenty years old, and his cheeks were bare, as if he were just starting to shave. He had taken one bullet in the left arm, and the second had penetrated his back and emerged out of the top of his left breast. Somehow the big slug went through without ripping out his heart or hitting anything major. He was not even bleeding hard.

  I checked the wounds, and they looked about the right size. Was this the guy I had shot? I grabbed a nearby interpreter and asked the boy how he had been wounded. The Iraqi refused to talk, and his dark eyes flashed in anger, but I saw some fright, too. I put on my war face, leaned close to let my own eyes pierce his, shouted a few choice expletives, then had the interpreter ask again. The kid was growing pale, and this time he answered, saying he had been trying to surrender when he was shot. Bullshit. He still had on his boots and had been carrying a rifle while he was running. “Where?” I wanted to know, and he described the area. Same place.

  He said the first bullet hit his left arm and sent him stumbling forward, off balance. Then another shot went through his shoulder. I asked why, if he wanted to give up, he didn’t throw down his rifle and take off his boots. He said if he tried to do that, then his own people would have killed him. I decided to ease up on him. I had the interpreter tell the prisoner that I was the one who had shot him. The Iraqi soldier glanced at my big M40A1 rifle and nodded.

  Weird, conflicting emotions swept over me. I was glad that I had not missed a target, but I was also strangely delighted that this guy had survived. Never had I felt personal responsibility for the safety of an enemy combatant, so this sudden kinship was unexpected, and it was kind of cool.

  The fighting was over for the day, so I didn’t want him to die. I felt he had earned a new lease on life. I called him “Achmed,” because I didn’t know his real name. By doing so, I crossed the invisible line of humanizing my enemy.

  Next, I had Achmed carried to the front of a long line of other wounded Iraqi soldiers at an aid station, and I told the doctor, an old friend, to patch him up. “He’s the only one I’ve ever shot that lived through the experience,” I said, and the doc balked.

  He apparently thought that I wanted to make sure the kid didn’t survive much longer in order to keep my record intact. No, I explained, just the opposite. This new patient was one lucky bastard, so I wanted him to receive special treatment. The interpreter explained to the soldier, “You’re hooked up, man. You’re a celebrity.”

  He began to lose that defiant look. As the doctor removed the shirt, pumped in some anesthetic, and started to work, I stood there, talking quietly to the boy.

  GAS… GAS… GAS!! The dreaded warning roared through the area in a hasty echo of shouts, and Marines dropped whatever they were doing to put on their gas masks. Achmed, flat on his back but not unconscious, grew frightened when we covered our heads with the big hoods and goggles, and we must have looked to him like a bunch of unworldly, blunt-nosed elephants. I called out to the Panda, my words muffled, to bring in one of the masks we had taken off some dead Iraqi officers earlier in the day. He was back in moments and tossed me the mask; I worked it down over Achmed’s face, seeing a look of pure gratitude. The other wounded Iraqis had no protection.

  I removed the mask when the “All clear” was given after the false alarm. When the doctor finished working, the kid was moved to a cot. I knelt beside him and had the interpreter explain that he was going to be all right and that I would be back to see him later and bring him some food. He was woozy but never took his eyes off of me.

  I went back to work at the Main for a while, then grabbed some coffee and rations and returned to the prisoner aid station. Achmed was gone, having been taken by the military police to another prisoner cage in the rear, so I tossed aside the MRE rations and dined instead on fried Spam with my friends. It was disappointing, but it was war.

  After chow, I was briefed on where we were going the next day, cleaned my weapons, and settled in to get some sleep on another cold night in Iraq, banishing Achmed from my mind. He was a onetime thing, and while I was glad that he survived, my job was not to coddle enemy soldiers but to kill them. If we ever faced each other again on a battlefield, I would shoot him again without hesitation.

  I now had ten kills in Iraq. Then there was Achmed, who was blessed and protected by his merciful Allah. Should have been eleven, but things had not been going quite right all day.

  Earlier, I almost got my foot shot off by accident, and Casey almost committed suicide by RPG.

  Gunny Don Houston and I were on pat
rol along a canal when a gunshot snapped out. The round impacted right at my feet, punching up a small column of dirt an inch from my boot.

  “Oops,” said Houston.

  “Oops?” I yelled at my buddy. “What the fuck do you mean, oops?”

  “OK. Oops, sorry.”

  That broke the tension, and I cracked a smile. He had accidentally pulled the trigger on his rifle, but it had been pointed at the ground. I told him to forget it-after all, shit happens in war-but I came out of the incident knowing that I was one lucky sumbitch.

  Meanwhile, Casey and some of the boys had cleaned out a bunker in which they had found a cache of AK-47s, machine guns, plastique explosives, and about fifty rocket-propelled grenades, enough to arm a whole platoon. They stacked the weapons and set about destroying them with a thermite grenade, a big-league weapon that generates as much heat as a welding torch and melts through anything. Casey unwrapped the grenade, then handed it over to a sergeant who wanted to toss it.

  They jogged away when the grenade was thrown, and we heard the quiet pop as the little bomb ignited and began to sizzle through the stacked weapons. Then came a loud BANG and a WHOOSH, and an RPG flew past Casey’s ear and thudded into a nearby sand berm. The intense heat of the thermite grenade was cooking off the pile of live ammo. Casey and the sergeant crawled behind a little mound some farmer had built and hunkered down while more rocket-propelled grenades came to life and went flying. For the next five minutes, the aimless rain of RPGs zoomed about, giving the place the look of a major counterattack-or a carnival. Everyone chewed dirt. Luckily, an RPG must be manually armed in order to detonate on impact, so the actual damage was light.