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  “Were you really trying to shell your own troops?” I asked the unusually sheepish Casey as he was dusting off.

  He gave the only appropriate response, “Fuck you.” The lieutenant had just endured another embarrassing lesson about how, in combat, even doing the right thing can go wrong.

  Achmed, the murdered donkey, a bullet that almost took off my foot, and Casey’s attack on the rest of us made a weird kind of sense later that evening, when I realized that we had been fighting on April Fool’s Day.

  16

  Have Gun, Will Travel

  We pulled out of the rancid Ad Diwaniyah cloverleaf, which Casey accurately likened to “a camelshit amusement park for flies,” at ten o’clock on the morning of April 2 for another road march that moved us closer to Baghdad. It was another day of just getting into position to fight. All across Iraq, other Coalition troops were doing the same thing. The weather had improved, supplies were flowing, and the ground attack was rolling inexorably forward beneath a sky owned by Coalition warplanes. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Division finally was coming out of the desert through the narrow Karbala Gap and was within sight of the Euphrates River, while the 101st Airborne was finishing off the stubborn resistance in the strategic city of Najaf. On our side of the war, the 5th Marine Regiment was rushing up Highway 1, with our 7th Marines right behind them, and we formed a mighty column of tanks and trucks that stretched for miles over the horizon. It was time-consuming, but we had to reach the enemy before we could kill them.

  The two Marine regiments made a sharp right turn off of Route 1 and onto an intersecting highway, Route 27, and caught the Iraqis flat-footed when we rolled up on the city of An Numaniyah and its important bridges across the Tigris River. Once on the other bank, we would link up with Task Force Tarawa and unify the combat power of the entire 1st Marine Division into a single powerful fist for the final push on Baghdad.

  The steady movement was bringing all of us into the Red Zone, the area around Baghdad in which intelligence analysts predicted Saddam Hussein was most likely to slime us with his chemical and biological weapons. We were aware of the possibility but would not even think of stopping.

  We drove all day, and as I sat and rocked and bumped along in the passenger seat of my Humvee, my thoughts drifted to how wheels were making just the sort of difference I had long envisioned for snipers. Once relegated to stationary hides and holes in the ground, we were now part of a mobile force. Shoot somebody in one town, saddle up, move on to another town, and shoot somebody else. Have gun, will travel.

  Toward evening, Casey and I added a couple of CAATs for extra security to our advance quartering party, broke away from the main column, and raced ahead to find a spot where the battalion could settle down for the night near An Numaniyah. The sounds of a mighty battle, a steady drumbeat of gunfire and explosions that rolled across the desert, greeted us as we approached the first bridge and pulled to the side. Then we received startling new orders from regimental planners who wanted our handful of Humvees and CAATs to drive right through the firefight that was raging around the embattled bridge, cross it, dash through the hostile, uncleared city, and set up camp on the other side of the Tigris. It was a recipe for a suicidal disaster.

  Fortunately, as we were trying to figure out some way to carry out the order without getting everyone killed, our battalion began pulling in, and McCoy was soon standing beside us. He chewed on his big cigar as we gave him the briefing, and he grew quite unhappy to hear how we were supposed to go through a ferocious battle, then drive through a totally unsecured city, and do it in the dark. The colonel grabbed his radio and laid some sharp, unkind words on headquarters about planners who did not take into account the reality of the battlefield.

  At least three times, McCoy said, “I won’t have a Black Hawk Down situation!” Since one of the raps against Darkside Six was that he liked to fight too much, the colonel easily won his point. The battalion would spend the night where it was and attack tomorrow, when conditions would have changed and we could see what the hell we were doing.

  Somehow, Casey squeezed the battalion into an overnight position in a scrubby field about two football fields square, only about 20 percent of the space that normally was required, and I took out a security patrol. Our discoveries underlined the potential enemy strength in the area and confirmed that trying to carry out that idiotic run-for-the-bridge order could have gotten a lot of Marines killed.

  First, there was an L-shaped bunker complex on the perimeter that was packed with weapons of all kinds, including antiaircraft guns. The Iraqis had left in such a hurry that the little stoves they used to cook food were still burning. We collected and stacked about seventy AK-47s, fifteen light machine guns, four heavy machine guns, thirty-five RPG launchers, and four 90 mm antitank recoilless rifles. Once the pile was arranged, an Amtrac rolled over the weapons to crush them.

  Then we found pastures of antipersonnel and antitank mines that had been planted around the area in which we had set up camp. The danger from the mines was so great that the Marines who had been in their vehicles all day could not even get out and walk around to stretch their legs. Our vehicles were tightly coiled inside the circle of mines so they protected us instead of the guys who laid them in the first place.

  But the major cause of nerves that night was the knowledge that we at last had hit the Red Zone and were facing the threat of WMDs. Headquarters said that if we were hit, the new conditions “would make the advance significantly more difficult.” No shit.

  Sure enough, word was flashed to us that night that our intel boys had intercepted an Iraqi radio transmission ordering commanders in our area to release chemical weapons. That got our attention in a hurry, and I quickly checked our brood of caged pigeons. Little Bastard and Botulism had not yet keeled over dead, but this was no time to take chances. It wasn’t a drill.

  We expected the real thing to be dumped on us at any moment, so we buttoned up our MOPP suits and scrambled to wiggle our feet into those terrible rubber boots. If the worst happened and we received incoming rounds, we would pull on the matching rubber gloves and the bug-eyed masks and be 100 percent protected from chemical munitions.

  The boots were awful and quickly raised blisters on our feet. After sweating it out for thirty minutes while trying to work, I checked the pigeons again. They were still strutting, so the air was good. Colonel McCoy, who was just as clumsy in his boots as the rest of us, finally let us take them off rather than stumble around like a bunch of drunks. The full MOPP gear impeded our ability to fight, so we chose to live with the threat and carry on as usual. If hit, we would scramble to suit up. Meanwhile, if we died, we died.

  We fell asleep to the sound of gunfire at the bridge, awoke to barking volleys of artillery, and rolled out though the carpet of debris left behind by the 5th Marines’ fight for the bridge. Dead Iraqi defenders lay about in grotesque positions as we drove cautiously through the city, where shifting columns of dark smoke from burning buildings darkened the morning sky. Our little quartering party never would have survived that fight alone.

  A few miles from the Tigris River, we dropped our light-skinned vehicles and gathered the armor to head south and attack Al Kut, a port and market center that was the site of another important bridge. The intel guys warned us that the enemy had a significant number of well-trained and well-equipped troops in the city, including elements of the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard, so we had a green light to be “liberal” in our application of firepower.

  That put it mildly, because we were about to pound the hell out of them, using everything but brass knuckles and switchblade knives. As we bore down on the city along one side of the Tigris, another battalion shadowed us on the far side, and Task Force Tarawa was pushing up from the south. The combination locked the paramilitaries and Republican Guard troops into defensive positions, so we battened down the hatches and jumped on the bad guys in what developed into our biggest firefight of the war thus far.

  Am
erican planes slashed in overhead and smashed Iraqi tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and antiaircraft guns, and about a company’s worth of infantrymen who were hidden in a thick grove of trees northeast of our position. The deafening explosions of bombs weighing a thousand pounds shook the ground as if giants were running around, and debris, trees, and dirt were flung into the air. A staccato of secondary explosions followed and lasted for twenty minutes. When the dust settled, a major threat to our flank had been obliterated.

  Our Bravo tanks charged over the bridge and into a fight with more Iraqi tanks, cannons blazing only twenty yards apart, as we penetrated deeper into the western outskirts of the town. Enemy tanks and armored vehicles were hidden behind corners and would pop out to take easy shots and quickly pull back. Bravo kept attacking, and the grunts of Kilo Company piled out of their Amtracs and dove into a sprawling grove of date palms, where enemy bullets chipped trees around the ears of the advancing Marines. The CAATs swept out north and south to add their missiles and machine guns to the fray, while India Company hit clusters of buildings the Bravo tanks had bypassed.

  Casey and I brought in the Tac and Main headquarters, and I watched with breathtaking eagerness as heavy fire slashed out from the palm grove where the enemy troops were dug in. The radio blurted calls for assistance from the battle commanders, and I grabbed my sniper rifle but Officer Bob suddenly appeared and refused to let me leave. “I need you back here,” he insisted.

  “I’m not your personal fucking bodyguard!” I shouted, but I got no response.

  There was a war erupting just up the road. Up there, the big guns of the tanks were hammering away, heavy machine guns were stuttering, Marine grunts were yelling and running and shooting, tankers were calling for more infantry support, enemy fire was astonishingly heavy. Down here, Officer Bob strolled back and forth, safe behind the steel walls of the Amtrac. I was heading back to see J-Matt Baker to protest when a coded radio call broke through.

  “Nightingale!” That single code word meant that Marines were down and urgent medical evacuation was needed. It was also my ticket out to the fight. Casey and I and our boys jumped into the Humvees to provide security for an ambulance Amtrac on a two-minute sprint to the front edge of the battle. We wove through debris on the road and past smoking hulks of enemy T-62 tanks in which ammunition was still cooking off in booming explosions. A CAAT came screaming back, and its commander said it was carrying out the wounded men. We cut the ambulance free to return while we kept going to the fight. Although I didn’t know it at the time, lying in the CAAT was a badly wounded Mark Evnin, the eager kid from Vermont who had been my spotter only two days before when we took out that sniper on the bus in Ad Diwaniyah. He would die before I even knew he was hit.

  The palm grove was alive with action, but the thick dust, flashes of fire, and flying debris made it impossible to distinguish who was who, so we pulled to a stop and I climbed atop the Humvee. Since the tanks and grunts were already at work among the trees, I glassed over to the right and found that the north side of the battle zone seemed open for a flank attack on the Marines. I lasered some ranges and yelled down that we would be staying in this spot for a while, so Casey spread the boys out in a protective cordon. The radio squawked annoyingly: Officer Bob, telling us to return to his position. We ignored him.

  I lay there, still as a corpse, with my eyeball becoming part of the scope, magnifying my world in multiples. A mirage down the way tipped me about wind conditions, and I adjusted the setting, then scanned the empty streets and worked my view up to the rooftops. Accumulating knowledge of repeated behavior is a prime reason for keeping sniper logbooks. Ours had taught us that the Iraqis liked to hang out near those little doorways that exit onto the rooftops, so I gave extra attention to every one of those that I found.

  Only three minutes into my search, one of them slowly opened, and an Iraqi soldier stepped out, carrying an RPK light machine gun. I let him peek out a bit more as I adjusted the rifle to a distance of 461 yards and dialed another bit of windage onto the scope. This guy knew what he was doing and was being careful, deliberately taking his time before stepping into the open, but his caution was not enough to save him. I already had my crosshairs centered on his chest. I had no intention of letting him come close to shooting.

  The mathematics of the battlefield, time, motion, distance, weather conditions, and angle and speed of the bullet merged into smooth calculations that I did in my head, without really thinking about it. Do this sort of thing long enough and those factors blend together.

  Exhale, slow pull of one-two-three pounds of pressure on the trigger, and my rifle fired and bucked comfortably into my shoulder with the recoil. I was concentrating so hard that I barely heard the gunshot, but the round took the soldier dead center, and I saw a hole open eight inches below his throat. The force of impact threw him back down the stairs, leaving the door swinging slowly on its hinges.

  Bob continued badgering us to return immediately. “Tell him we’re busy killing people,” Casey instructed his radio operator.

  I slid my scope around some other buildings, down to ground level again, and along a street that ran perpendicular to our position. About a quarter mile away, several people were peeking around a distant corner. Civilians? Troops? I steadied up on the corner for two minutes, using the time to adjust for range and wind, and saw the barrel of an AK-47 poke into the open. The dark-haired soldier holding the weapon leaned forward, exposing only about the upper third of his body. Not much, but enough, and I owned him. I put a bullet through his chest and saw him flop down beside the building. Unseen hands took him by the ankles and pulled his body out of sight.

  By this time, Officer Bob was furious and gave us a direct order over the radio to come back immediately. Casey tried to tell him that we were actively engaging targets on a threatened flank, but Bob replied with another order that gave us no choice but to leave. It meant that we were giving the enemy a wide avenue of approach.

  We got lucky, because another good sniper, Sergeant Eric Meeks, showed up within minutes, recognized the threat, and took over the position. Over the next few minutes, Meeks took down another RPG gunner and four more Iraqi riflemen, effectively shutting down the street. But there had been a window of two to three minutes when the approach had been unguarded. Next time, we vowed, we would not be so obedient. If Officer Bob wanted us, he would have to come get us.

  Back at the Main, I was stunned to learn that Mark Envin was one of the wounded Marines we had gone out to retrieve.

  When the fight had broken out in the grove of date palms, Sergeant Major Dave Howell directed his Humvee to roar in close so he could direct the advancing grunts. AK-47 bullets were zinging about, and an RPG erupted from a trench line only six feet from the road, so they stopped their truck, and Howell got out of his Humvee with a grenade launcher in his hands. Evnin, the driver, jumped out right beside him. Dino Moreno also got into a shooting position. The job I had assigned them was to protect Howell, even in the teeth of enemy fire, and that’s exactly what they did until one of the enemy bullets burrowed beneath Mark’s flak jacket and tore through his femoral artery. Howell tried to stanch the flow of blood while Moreno gave covering fire, and Evnin looked up at Howell and wisecracked, “Look at this, asshole. You got me shot!”

  My boy had lost a lot of blood before they could get him onto a medical evacuation helicopter, a big twin-rotored Chinook. He died in that bird before it reached the aid station.

  It shook me. He was not the first, nor would he be the last, of our battalion to die, but Mark was the only man in my entire career to die directly under my command. I almost felt as if I had been the one to pull the trigger on him.

  As much as I was trying to banish emotion from my thoughts, I couldn’t, and a lot of guilt was added to the load. I had selected Mark for the platoon and spent hours and hours with him over the past two years, coaching him on how to realize his dream of being a sniper. War requires compromises, and when the fool who had
been the sergeant major’s original driver chickened out before the war, I had thought nothing of letting Evnin take over that driving job in addition to being Dino Moreno’s spotter. So Mark was killed taking the place of a coward.

  His death had a sharp impact on our tight little sniper community. We are used to dealing death, not absorbing it. A couple of my snipers who had been working with the tank battalion at Al Kut had come clanking back down the road after the fight, and Corporal Sean Dunn jumped down from a tank and asked me, “Who got hit?”

  When I told him, Dunn, who had been Mark’s best friend and had gone through school with him, almost collapsed. Standing beside that scarred road, I held the big Marine in my arms while his tears painted muddy paths down his dirty cheeks.

  All the while, I wondered what would have happened if I had been able to get into the fight earlier. Could I have saved the boy? I believed the death was my fault, for I had ordered Mark into that assignment, and now I would just have to live with the terrible result. War really, really sucks. Mark was part of my family, and I will miss him.

  17

  Ghostbusters

  We were finished with Al Kut by 2:54 in the afternoon and began to withdraw, completely changing direction in order to rejoin the push toward Baghdad, only a hundred miles to the northwest. Explosions boomed in the distance as captured caches of enemy ammunition and weapons were blown up. Our part of the fight was done, and the Marines of Task Force Tarawa could clean up the rest. We had helped kick the butts of the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard, and now it was time to leave.