Shooter Page 19

  My bullet hit the running soldier at kidney level. He tumbled down, his death fall tracked by a dark crescent of his blood on the wall. Kidney shots should be taken only as a last resort, since both of the organs have to be destroyed for a quick kill. There were a lot of variables, but this guy didn’t have a hope in hell from the second I first saw him. I couldn’t miss today, and I had to rein in the confidence that grew with every successful shot.

  The hunting had been good so far, but the bridge was the decisive point of this battlefield, not individual soldiers, and we were still a good distance away. We were exhausted by the running and gunning and were sweating like pigs in the heavy MOPP suits as the sun beat down without mercy. Casey decided to get us over to Kilo Company, which was closing on the bridge under vicious enemy fire.

  That meant we had to move across about five hundred yards of uncleared territory, where the chances of getting shot by Iraqis and Americans were about equal. But my rifle could help take that bridge, which was what this day was all about. “Pack up and let’s go,” Casey ordered, and we all took a quick drink of water and staggered to our feet, much like Boston Marathon runners who are all out of gas with Heartbreak Hill looming just ahead. This was where our intense physical conditioning paid off, because we could reach deep and find the extra energy we needed.

  Casey set off at a slow trot; I came next, then the photographer, with Newbern and Tracy in the rear. Everyone knew that getting separated was probably certain death, but putting one foot in front of another was huffing-and-puffing work. Tracy was humping along, cursing, at the back of the line and warning the panting photographer not to quit. “You stop and that fucking old man’ll leave you here,” he said. I heard somebody puke, but we didn’t stop running. I grinned and kept pushing as hard as I could. We were doing the Baghdad Two-Mile at a full gallop.

  We linked up with Kilo, steadily made our way forward, and finally got our first look at the double bridge that was causing so much trouble. It was a mess.

  The Iraqis had blown the supports of the fifty-foot center section of the big bridge and dropped it into the river some ninety feet below. That meant our heavy armor was stuck on this side. The narrow pedestrian bridge was left as the only option, and the Iraqis had blown a hole about ten feet long in the middle of that one, too.

  Since the Abrams tanks couldn’t provide protection up front, grunts would have to storm the damaged bridge. Tomorrow, the Marines of the Bull would attempt the first such dismounted river crossing since World War II, a dangerous daylight assault in which we would be funneled into an easy kill zone, have to patch a path across the gaping hole in the walkway, and all the while be surrounded by steel plates and girders that would send enemy bullets and shrapnel ricocheting all over the place. This would be a dangerous piece of work.

  20

  The Bridge

  The Diyala Bridge was the crown jewel of this fight, for it was the only place anywhere along the entire Tigris River that offered any chance of a crossing. The Marines were on one side, and Baghdad was on the other. We had to get over there in a hurry.

  Bullets were zinging from all around and the sky seemed to be burning as we hustled over to a small building that looked like an old guard shack only fifty meters to the southeast of our end. Gunfire ripped the steel bridge and everything around it, and that had to be brought under control if we were to have any hope of getting across tomorrow. The far end of the bridge seemed little more than piles of rubbish, an empty no-man’s-land that led into clusters of buildings that were interspersed with the spiky tops of palm trees, but a steady beat of gunfire still came from over there. The battalion had already set about pulverizing the area.

  Casey and I and our boys resumed hunting from the flat roof of the guard shack, because from there I could reach all the way over the river to the enemy’s concealed positions. Two more of my snipers, Corporals Doug Carrington and Mike Harding, climbed up over the edge to join us, tripling our long-range firepower. I had assigned them to Kilo Company, and since I was now working on Kilo’s dirt, we were able to team up. We laid down a hurricane of precision fire that scythed through any Iraqi troops we could see across the river.

  Colonel McCoy was telling a newspaper reporter about then, “Coughlin’s got seven or eight already, and he’s still at it.” Actually, I had brought down a witnessed and confirmed kill count of ten that day and possibly more. A kill must be confirmed for us to claim it, but when the action is fast and furious, the numbers become meaningless, because the overall mission is what is important. In such a case, as soon as we take a shot, we change our focus to a new threat and may never know what happened to the earlier target. We may think we have a kill, but the battle has moved on, so we aren’t sure because we do not go searching to verify them. We can make an educated guess that it was a sure kill, or that the guy would probably bleed out, but there are too many variables in the equation. We don’t have the time, inclination, or mission to check them all out. The shot itself would be recorded, but not a definite result.

  The battle finally petered out late in the afternoon, and orders came down that nobody was going across the bridge tonight because of its damaged condition. Engineers would check out its structural integrity after dark.

  Naturally, Officer Bob picked the lull in the battle to order Casey and me back to the Main headquarters. The Kilo Company commander protested that McCoy had given us to his command, and he needed snipers up front, where the action was hot. We had to control that bridge. After a lot of back-and-forth, a compromise was reached: I would stay at the bridge, but Casey would go back to hold Bob’s hand and would send the Panda Bear and the turret gunners, Marsh and Castillo, forward to relieve Tracy and Newbern. Griping every step of the way, knowing the Main was safe and under control without him, Casey returned to headquarters just as the sun was going down.

  Darkness fell quickly, bringing an end to the hellish heat, but our day’s work wasn’t quite over. A Javelin missile team with advanced thermal optics joined us at the shack, and our little rooftop bristled with firepower. We were given the job of not allowing anyone to approach our positions or cause further damage to the bridge overnight, and we thought we could control it easily. Only a fool would try coming over the bridge to attack the hundreds of Marines who were gathering during the dark hours.

  But about ten o’clock that night, somebody yelled a warning, and I went to full alert, jamming the gun into my shoulder. Everybody on the roof did the same and stared into the night. A crazy hajji was sneaking toward us after somehow evading everyone’s notice. He had already crawled almost three-quarters of the way across the bridge before being spotted and was only seventy-five yards away when I locked my scope on his creeping shadow and saw that he was carrying something in his right hand. Suicide bomber, I thought, and instantly pulled the trigger. My bullet ripped a hole through the right side of his chest.

  It was a sure kill, but then things went psycho. A roar of rifle fire thundered around us, machine guns joined in, and more and more bullets thunked into and around the corpse on the bridge as fire discipline broke down among the tired and edgy Marines, who had just endured a full day of intense combat. In about two seconds, at least twenty-five bullets peppered the poor bastard, and I heard a splash as whatever he had carried fell into the river.

  That breakdown in discipline was not good, but I was too tired to worry about it. In fact, I was totally exhausted. There were plenty of people on the rooftop now to stand guard, so I wiped the man I had just killed from my mind, turned over on my back, laid my rifle on my chest, and went to sleep to a lullaby of artillery rounds that rumbled overhead and detonated dully along the far bank.

  The horizon was already yellow with the first light of a rising sun on April 6, the eighteenth day of the war, when I awoke to a discordant devil’s chorus of war noise. Individual Marines pumped rifle shots across the canal, a couple of tanks were booming with their 120 mm cannon, and artillery and mortars thumped out a steady harassmen
t barrage. Enemy small-arms fire, RPGs, and mortars were still rattling back at us. Combat reveille for another day in the Corps.

  I rubbed my overworked eyes, which still burned from all the sweat of yesterday, then bitched at the boys for letting me sleep so long, although I was privately grateful that they had done so. I felt rested, safe and cozy in my little corner of the world. The skeletal bridge across the canal remained empty but for the bullet-riddled body of the foolish Iraqi who had tried to sneak up on us last night. While I slept, someone had bestowed the macabre name of “Ach-dead” on the corpse on the bridge. Over in the forbidden zone, a car burned like a torch, and a curtain of thick dust and smoke swirled above the buildings.

  Looking around, I realized that something was different. Overnight, permission had been given to change out of the filthy MOPP outfits that we had not taken off for three straight weeks, and everybody but the guys with me on the roof was walking around in brown-patterned desert camouflage battle dress. Good Lord, did they look comfortable. An attack by chemical or biological weapons was unlikely this close to Baghdad, and a real problem had developed with heat exhaustion among the troops working in the heavy suits beneath the blazingly hot sun. Changing clothes had never sounded so good, so the Panda and I climbed down from the guard shack and headed over to where the Kilo Company headquarters track was parked in a broad courtyard, safely out of the line of direct fire from the Iraqis on the other side of the river.

  The walk was only about twenty yards, but for the first time, I noticed the dreadful condition of the city through which we had fought. Yesterday, I had been much too busy to register any impressions, and the fight had unfolded in a sameness of monochrome brown. Now it looked like some scene out of a Hollywood war epic, only this was for real. Garbage littered the street, the acrid taste of smoke and cordite hung in the air, and because food was rotting in the shops and nearby homes, the city smelled like a barnyard. The bodies of animals and enemy soldiers decomposing in the heat added to the awful odor. Bullets had carved crude holes and scars in the walls, and broken glass crunched beneath my boots.

  I found Lieutenant Colonel McCoy standing beside his Humvee, where he had been having a frontline conference with the regimental boss, Colonel Steve Hummer, and Major General James N. Mattis, the commander of the 1st Marine Division. A single lucky Iraqi artillery shell could have decapitated our leadership, but the day’s mission was of such importance that the big boys had come down to eyeball it.

  When Mattis and Hummer went off to talk to some of the troops who would make the river crossing, McCoy gave me a quick information dump and said there would be no repeat of what happened the previous day, when at Officer Bob’s direction I had missed the opening of the fight. No lollygagging behind the line today. He told me to take my snipers across with the assault troops and set up shop on the far side of the river. He looked at his watch and said we would begin in twenty minutes. That gave me just enough time to get out of the MOPP suit and back to the shack.

  As we spoke, Casey had driven up with our trucks, which contained our clothes, and parked only about fifty yards away. Panda and I were soon peeling away the squishy MOPP suits that clung to us like a crude fungus. The simple act of putting on clean desert cammies gave us the feeling of being reborn, and I felt as though I were donning an Armani suit.

  We joked with Casey and some of the other guys as we changed, and they assembled packs with enough ammunition and supplies to keep us going for another full day. Meanwhile, the tempo of Marine artillery and mortars firing in support of the coming mission increased, switching from sporadic harassment fire to a thorough preparation barrage of the area that we were about to attack. Huge shells tore through the sky with the sound of ripping linen and exploded among the buildings and the palm grove beyond the bridge.

  The volleys of artillery suddenly drew return fire from some hidden Iraqi guns, a salvo that reportedly was triggered by an order from an Iraqi general using a cell phone. Everything changed in an instant. The Iraqi artillery, which had been quiet all night, was shooting back. That made me finish changing my clothes boot-camp fast. I was snapping on my flak jacket when three shells came down toward us and someone yelled, “Incoming!”

  There was no time to react, other than to realize that this was going to be close. To this day, no one has been able to explain whether the devastating artillery rounds came from enemy or friendly guns.

  BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!!! In quick succession, three big shells exploded around us. One hit on the riverbank about fifty yards away with a horrendous roar and blew a great gout of dirt and debris into the air. The second hit to the left of the nearby Kilo command Amtrac, and the third slammed directly onto the vehicle.

  A thunderous explosion created a powerful rush of air that darkened the area, shrapnel slashed and rang about, and the concussion hammered the surrounding buildings. Marines were knocked down like rows of dominoes as a column of fire flew out of the rear of the Amtrac, along with the ripped bodies of the two guys who had been inside, smashed radios, maps, packs, and debris colored by a spray of burning oil and hot blood. All of us who had felt safe within the high walls of the compound now felt like mice trapped in a box, with nowhere to hide.

  A thick overhead power line snapped with whiplash force and cracked Casey on the arm and sent him sprawling, stunned, into the dirt. He shook it off, caught his breath in the swirling dark smoke, and, unsure of what had knocked him to the ground, slapped his hands across his body, searching for the gooey sensation of blood. There was none, and he got back on his feet and roared off in his Humvee to bring up an ambulance and emergency medical teams.

  The Panda Bear and I had ducked away from the blast and, shielded by the tall sides of our armored Humvee, were unharmed other than being thoroughly rattled and disoriented. Screams of wounded men mixed with calls for “Corpsman up!” When I looked over at the smoking ruin of the Kilo command track, I thought Colonel McCoy was dead. We had been standing right beside it, talking, only a moment before.

  Through the smoke, fire, and chaos, my pal Gunnery Sergeant Jean-Paul Courville, the Ragin’ Cajun, came across the courtyard. He stands a shade under six feet tall, his blond hair is cut short, and his 175 pounds are nothing but solid, lean muscle. When we had first met several months ago, Courville had just finished a stint as a basic training drill instructor and looked like a Marine television commercial. “Hello, Gunny,” I had said. “It’s ‘Gunnery Sergeant,’ ” he corrected. “Fuck you,” I replied. After that we got along fine.

  After seeing the devastating explosion, Courville, in an astonishing display of calmness and courage amid mayhem and confusion, already was getting things under control. He got corpsmen busy treating the wounded, assigned priorities on who was to be evacuated, then personally ducked into the still-burning Amtrac and hauled out live ammunition, rockets and bullets that were in danger of exploding from the heat. My personal negative feelings about everything French do not extend to Courville, who is without question a ripped stud of a gunnery sergeant. Anyway, he’s from Louisiana, not Paris.

  Then I heard a shout-McCoy’s voice! He had walked to the other side of a wall just before the shell hit and had survived the explosion. Two of his Marines were dead and three had been wounded, but the colonel yelled, “This doesn’t change anything!”

  He pushed the incident from his mind, for it is an accepted fact of war that men die, and a leader must focus on the mission. The best way to help the wounded and remove the danger is to finish off the enemy, and that meant taking that bridge.

  The Panda Bear and I hustled down to the guardhouse, and McCoy followed a few minutes later. “Ten minutes,” he told me.

  Various media Jackals, who had heard about the plan for a river crossing, had been drifting in since daylight and jostled for position among the grunts. Many of the news types looked dazed after the deadly artillery barrage that had made them eat dirt, too.

  Infantry Marines and combat engineers had scavenged the town throughout t
he night and had gathered a witch’s brew of wooden planks, strips of metal, part of a steel gate, and anything else that they might throw across the hole in the pedestrian bridge. They gathered now, looking like big pack rats carrying their treasure.

  We lined up against the walls and waited through a countdown that seemed to take forever. I had a powerful team to take across the river, for our group had grown some more during the morning. I had the Panda and the two snipers who had come over from Kilo, Carrington and Harding. Then, out of nowhere, came still another sniper, Staff Sergeant Dino Moreno, who had been the partner of Mark Evnin. There were few flaws and no weaknesses in this bunch, and a lot of sniper rifles would be going across the river in the first wave. Once across, we would take up positions and let our long guns reach out to help control the captured bridgehead. We could cause a lot of trouble.

  Time slowed down again, as if to let me think a bit before going out on a narrow bridge that we fully expected to be swept by enemy fire and the same sort of heavy opposition that we had encountered the day before. A daylight assault on a bridge was dangerous, and I wondered why, in the ultramodern twenty-first century, some bright tactician in a war college had not come up with a better way of doing this.

  “Let’s do it,” McCoy said calmly, and Sergeant Major Dave Howell walked out into the middle of the road, yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” From my position beside the protective wall, I helpfully mentioned, “Dave, you’re going to get your ass shot off out there!” He didn’t even look at me, and his example banished any residual fear in the kids, who broke away from their hiding places with a shout of defiance and hit the bridge at a gallop.

  The first guys out opened fire to cover Marines and engineers who ran out to fling their loads of sticks and steel across the gaping hole, then fell on their bellies and grabbed loose ends to hold the makeshift patch in place so that no one would fall through. The first assault squad immediately pounded out in single file, ran across the patch, and dashed across the narrow bridge. Other Marines shouted encouragement to spur them, while Dave Howell tried to get them to move more deliberately: “This is a marathon, not a sprint! Don’t bunch up!”