Shooter Read online

  That’s how McCoy found us, and since he was as filthy as everyone else, he also deemed washing to be a good idea. We parted to give the colonel some space, and Darkside Six stripped down without hesitation, sloshed water over his head, and wrung out his clothes in the buckets. Marines in the field don’t stand much on ceremony. He was standing buck naked in the middle of a parking lot, dripping wet, when he gave me my next orders.

  “From here on out it is going to be pure MOUT,” he told me, referring to the specialized Mobile Operations in Urban Terrain for which we had trained so hard during ProMet. We were going to be knocking on, or down, a lot of Baghdad doors, and he said, “I want you to integrate a Battalion Sniper Operation to support it. You can use all the snipers that you need, but leave some at the company level.” Music to my ears. Sniper teams! I had been waiting the whole war for this.

  I expected some pretty nasty fighting downtown, and being able to do some prior planning instead of having to react to the changing battle could put my killers out where we could do the most good. I put on my wet and clammy uniform, which would dry in ten minutes, and took off for the conference room to find out exactly where we were going, how we wanted to get there, and what sort of resistance was expected.

  There was nothing in established sniper doctrine to cover such an attack, so I had to wing it as the operations officer showed me the overall plan. Two major roads, separated by a distance that ranged from five hundred to a thousand meters, forked off from the starting point, then came back together, almost in a diamond shape. India and Kilo infantry companies would penetrate the area in their armored Amtracs and Humvees; then their grunts would start clearing the buildings while the Bravo tanks went up a middle road.

  I leaned over the maps, calling on the hard-earned lessons of every combat situation I had ever been in, particularly the urban fights, such as in Somalia. I knew how to fight in cities. We could do this.

  I first set up a picket fence of observation zones, using three sniper teams, and put other snipers with specific units for close-in support. Using their scout training, the teams would sneak into the planned zone of combat, get to some rooftops, and radio real-time intelligence to the company commander below, call in artillery fire on any strong resistance, and take down any targets of opportunity. Then the infantry companies would plunge through, and when the grunts passed the snipers, my boys would jump back into the lead position.

  The goal was to keep at least one team in front of the advancing infantry and provide interlocking fire between the teams. With any luck, this could be a shooting gallery.

  The problem was that my sniper teams would have to penetrate uncleared terrain during daylight hours. To overcome this, I would create a stronghold at the initial point of the attack, manned by all three teams, plus a borrowed team and two extra armored Humvees given to us just for this fight. Once the battle was under way, the teams would disperse and start jumping along the front.

  As a final detail, I gave myself a bonus by making absolutely certain, through McCoy’s direct orders to me, that Casey would be freed from the confines of the headquarters and at my side during the attack. Bob could not trump us this time. It was not just a gesture of friendship but an added margin of safety for me. Casey was totally familiar with the sniper drill by now, he didn’t panic when under fire, and with his rank and command skills he could deal with other troops on the ground and other unit commanders by radio during a fight. Few people held all of those qualifications.

  When I gave the word to my snipers, they smiled. There were targets to be harvested out there today, and they soaked up my confidence. I had a bunch of shooters on my hands, ready to go do their deadly work in this miserable war. By the time the armored vehicles came to life with grumbling engines and the loud clanking of treads began to crunch on pavement, it was all I could do to hold them in check. They all wanted to shoot somebody.

  We took our four Humvees up to the line of departure, the same overpass from which I been shooting the previous day. From there we could see our target building, a tall structure about three hundred yards away, on the left-hand side of the road.

  We took off like rabbits for it at the same time, threw a loose cordon of Marines around the building, cleared the stairwell, and got to the roof, where we posted a man at the door to prevent any surprise visitors. I took the northwest corner, Dino Moreno settled into the northeast section, and Sergeant Roger Lima and his spotter covered the blind spots between us. Casey set up the radios and at exactly 9:11 in the morning told the battalion we were in position. Sergeant Major Dave Howell came up to our roof to get an overview of the battlefield.

  The grunts moved into the zone and hit the first row of multistory buildings with a bang, but they found little of interest and no resistance. The city was eerily quiet, but I would not allow myself to believe that the enemy had just run away, so I swept my scope across the rooftops and the roads and the windows of lines of apartment buildings.

  After forty-five suspenseful minutes, Casey said that the battalion intel guys were reporting that a dark Mercedes carrying some Ba’ath Party officials was heading our way. Almost at the same moment, I saw the dark green Mercedes, containing three Iraqi men, move cautiously into my area, stopping and starting, almost as if the occupants were peeping around corners. Suspicious, yes, but a danger? The windows of the fine motorcar were rolled up, indicating these dudes were riding around in air-conditioned comfort. With the scope locked on, I could see that both passengers had AK-47s, and that was enough for me, so I adjusted for a high-angle shot. The Mercedes, although only 170 yards away, would be a tricky piece of work, since I was about eight stories above the target.

  Shooting from such an angle makes a bullet hit below the point of aim, while shooting through glass will cause the bullet to rise. I had spent the idle time lasering ranges on various points in my zone and doing calculations in the gun book, and since snipers have formulas for everything, there was no real mystery to work out. I already had the dope figured and dialed it into the scope so the rifle would adjust the path of the bullet, which would change several times. This wasn’t skeet shooting.

  I lined up on the rear window of the moving target as it headed north, then fired. The bullet crashed through the glass to smoke-check the guy in the backseat right between the shoulder blades, only four inches above my aim point. Not bad for a high-angle, glass-stressed shot on a moving target in a combat zone. The Mercedes accelerated out of the area with the passenger in the backseat slumped over dead.

  Downstairs, the grunts were charging hard and fast into the warren of apartment buildings, shops, and homes, under the watch of curious, not hostile, Iraqi civilians. A civilian car turned a corner and braked to a hasty stop when the driver found himself looking down the big barrel of an Abrams tank cannon and a Humvee’s heavy machine gun. He shifted into reverse and sped away, and no one fired. We were pushing, but no one seemed to be pushing back, and the stillness of the battlefield bothered me. Where are they?

  At 10:20 A.M., I spotted a guy on a distant roof and lased the distance at 1,025 meters, almost three-quarters of a mile away. Being up high, I had a clear sight line on him and the AK-47 he held. He was an amateur sniper hunting Marines from a rooftop, so he had to go. I did not think for a moment about him being another human being with a family, and in fact didn’t really think about him as a person at all. He was a threat who had stepped into my world, and those would be the last steps he ever took. I calculated the wind to be about three minutes left, tweaked the scope, and brought the crosshairs to his belly, right about where his navel would be, so if my bullet drifted either up or down, there would still be plenty of target area. I fired and watched as the big bullet covered the distance in an instant and struck the soldier in his right chest with terrific force. The impact yanked him around in a pirouette; he dropped his weapon, fell over, and didn’t get up.

  Casey scanned his binos back to our north, the area in which I had shot the Mercedes, and saw on
e of the CAAT teams in a fight. They had taken some fire from a large field alongside the road and had called in mortars to suppress the enemy and opened up with their own chattering machine gun. They were justified in returning fire, but there was no way they could have seen exactly who they were shooting at, and vehicles of all sorts fled the area. “Oh, my God!” Casey shouted, and grabbed his microphone. One of the vehicles under fire was a van filled with a family. “CAAT Two, Hotel Five!” Casey barked, identifying himself to the CAAT commander. “Those are civilian vehicles you are engaging, and they have women and children in them. Stand down!”

  The CAAT machine gun stopped immediately, and Casey watched with relief as women and children jumped from the van; then other civilians emerged from other cars, confused and scared, with their hands up. From his rooftop vantage point, from which he could see more than the guys on the ground, he had probably prevented a slaughter.

  There were still threats in the area, and we had to be careful, not foolish. After another fifteen minutes of slow scope movement, I found a target, a uniformed soldier with an RPG launcher on his shoulder, in the third window from the left on the fourth floor of an apartment building. I checked my range card-exactly 427 yards northeast of our position. It was in Dino’s zone, but he didn’t have the angle, and I had a clean shot, so I killed the dude with a round dead center in his chest.

  The battle was now advancing quickly through the streets, and it was time for us to move if we wanted to get out front. The India Company commander radioed that he could see a tall building a few miles away, which he believed to be a major hotel that towered over everything around it. “If we can get snipers up there, they should be able to see a long, long way,” he said. From my rooftop perch, I could see that it was too far away for us to reach anytime soon, but we had to find another position.

  We took off down the stairs and emerged from the dark interior into a battle that was still going on around us. Dave Howell took two snipers and went to link up with the moving tactical headquarters, while Casey, the Panda, and I headed for another tall structure, accompanied by four other Marines who had joined us.

  We broke into a large industrial structure that had huge locker rooms on each floor and headed for the top. It was seven stories tall, but when the Panda and I got up to the roof, we found it was worthless as an overview site. While downstairs, there was no way to know that bigger buildings nearby blocked all of the sight lines on the roof. “Shit,” I exclaimed. “We can’t stay here.”

  Casey had lagged behind to establish rear security for us and was trying to make sense of a storm of radio traffic. The battalion was running into occasional hot spots, but there was no organized opposition truly worth the name. We met him about halfway up the stairs as we were running back down, and I yelled, “You took me to the wrong building, fucker!”

  “What?” Casey replied incredulously. “This is the one we pointed to back at the other building. Jackass.” Not exactly proper military courtesy, but the exchange of information was perfect.

  “No, it isn’t. This is the wrong one, so get me to the right one.” I was hot. Time was wasting.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? There isn’t a better-looking place anywhere around here.” It was a moot point, because we were already leaving, running down the stairs and arguing as we went. We burst through the door yelling, “Coming out!” and the harsh Iraqi sun, well into the morning sky by now, slammed our eyes.

  Marines were everywhere, pushing through a confusing battlefield. Our plan was falling apart because of the lack of resistance, but why argue with success? We caught up with McCoy, who was receiving piecemeal fragments of official orders and adjusting to those frags as the battalion surged like the undertow pulling along a beach and sweeping everything before it. He called in the flanking companies to orient the battalion toward a technical university and the headquarters of the Iraqi air force.

  I had his attention for only a moment and asked, “Sir, the battle’s moving too fast, and our objectives are changing by the minute. Can you give me any idea of what’s up next? Where you want us to go?”

  “I know, I know,” he replied, not even looking up as he studied his maps of downtown Baghdad and put his finger on one grid square. “We’re going to take out this air force headquarters compound… right here. Find yourself somewhere to support that attack.”

  Casey marked the grids on his own map, and our Humvees raced through the tangled streets of the city, trying to get in front of our highballing mechanized battalion. Burning cars belched smoke, and the bodies of some dead dudes lay scattered about. To support the unfolding attack, we had to get into position before it was launched. That was the whole point of a mobile sniper team, but it meant driving headlong into the dangerous abyss of an urban environment.

  The morning had been one of steady, small fights, and the intelligence officers thought the air force compound might be the first real stronghold of the day. Even as we whizzed through the streets, down canyons of uncleared Iraqi buildings with average citizens waving at us from windows, while we kept watch for the barrels of guns to appear from those same windows, Casey heard another call on the radio. The India Company commander wanted to know if his troops should proceed to a hotel that he had mentioned earlier. He was told to stand by, because that objective was not in our zone of operations.

  We came up behind the air force compound, parked around a corner, and darted into an apartment building across the street. This was much too close for normal sniper work, but this was not a normal day, and there wasn’t much choice. Casey, the Panda, and I ran through a short, narrow alley and, with fingers on triggers, burst through the doorway. Inside, we cleared the stairwell and approached the door that would lead to the roof, where I could set up shop for the attacking force that was already on the way.

  But the door was locked, with another one of those damned Iraqi padlocks that are apparently made with some secret formula by people from Mars, because they are unearthly secure. I shook it, hit it, cursed it, and shot it three times, with one of the ricochet bullets nearly taking off my toe, then gave up. The roof wasn’t going to happen. I really do want to buy stock in that company. Casey found a big window for me instead, and I got into it with the Panda protecting my ass while Casey tuned in the chattering radio to stay up with what was going on.

  The orders had changed again. At twelve minutes past noon, McCoy was told to forget about the air force headquarters and charge straight into the very heart of Baghdad. The big building that had been spotted by the India Company commander was the Palestine Hotel, where journalists and civilians might be held hostage, and it had suddenly been put into our zone of operations. The Bull was told to go and get it.

  Overall, our battalion was to provide security for a number of key downtown buildings, including the embassies of Japan, Germany, the Vatican, Indonesia, and Poland, and the Palestine, Sheraton, and Baghdad hotels. The Army had gone through the area the previous day and, thinking they were taking fire from one of the hotels, had by mistake killed a photographer on a rooftop with a camera on his shoulder and shot up some rooms. But the Jackals who rode with us were urging us to hurry, worried that their colleagues might become targets of revenge by the fedayeen, looters, or enraged Iraqi militia types.

  I knew nothing of the fresh developments. I had locked myself, physically and mentally, into a great position to support the attack that I expected to hit the air force compound. I calmly glassed the sprawl of empty buildings, looking for somebody to shoot, ready to fight a battle that had already been called off.

  “Hey!” Casey yelled up the staircase. “Come on! We’re leaving!”

  I was aggravated. “But I have a good view from here!” I had survived a reckless drive through the city streets, run through the alley, gotten up the stairs, and met the padlock and was in a perfect shooting position. Now I had to go?

  Casey brooked no argument, and the edge of his tone got through to me. “We have to go, man. Right n
ow. I’ll meet you at the truck.”

  “Where are we going?” I was already unfolding my arms and legs, shaking out the cramps, keeping a firm grip on the rifle and moving carefully to avoid smacking it against the walls.

  “Downtown, dude. To some hotels,” he called back over his shoulder. We ran for the trucks.

  24

  Our Iwo Jima Moment

  It was April 9, Day 21 of the war, and Baghdad was falling.

  Our Humvees roared through a traffic circle and blew past intersections, sailing on the belief that if we moved fast enough the bad guys would not have time to react. The plan to use our speed for security worked a little too well, because the good guys did not have time to react either. Casey looked into his side mirror and saw that the vehicles charging up the street right behind us were the Abrams tanks of Bravo Company. They were supposed to be in the lead, not us. Once again, we found ourselves amid the tanks in a combat zone, so we backed off and let two of the big guys rumble by before jumping back in line and tagging along behind them.

  Baghdad passed in a blur, and with our view partially blocked by the bulk of the tanks, we were surprised when we broke into the clear and found ourselves in the center of a big plaza known as Firdos Square. Panda slid to a stop, and I dove to the grass, brought the scope to my eye, and started glassing for threats. Casey told our drivers to integrate into the Bravo defenses and then joined me on the long lawn.