Shooter Page 23

  It was a scene from another world. The ancient blue-tiled dome of the Shahid Mosque glittered behind us, and anchoring two corners of the square were the modern Palestine and Sheraton hotels, both twenty stories tall and separated by a street. The Euphrates River was only about five hundred meters away, and a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein loomed thirty feet high, the right arm raised as if in reluctant welcome. A decorative fountain held little water. We were in full battle gear, lying in a park in the middle of a traffic circle, and I was looking down the barrel of my sniper rifle for possible threats while civilians walked nearby and stood around watching us, like spectators at an odd sporting event.

  The city was in turmoil, a ragged end to a smooth war. The airport had been captured, thunder runs had subdued fierce resistance in the army sector, a Republican Guard barracks was on fire, Iraqi government buildings were now ours, the Bull had arrived, the Bravo tanks were parked in the center of the city, and a Marine sniper team-Casey and me-lay waiting and battle-alert in the grass, ready to smoke-check anyone who was a danger to our arriving Marines.

  Once the foreign civilians in the hotels saw the American helmets and uniforms, they took to the streets in a human wave-private citizens, the foreign press, a horde of photographers, and even some antiwar protesters. Television cameramen zoomed in on our position.

  Within moments, the streets began to fall into chaos, and the looting began, further complicating the job of trying to pick anyone who might be a threat out of the faces in this shifting crowd of humanity. This was like being on the field during a Super Bowl, trying to find a face in the stadium crowd, and I had to suppress every sense that I had to keep from being distracted, for nobody had blown a whistle and declared, “War over!” I submerged my emotions and depended on my experience and reflexes. As far as I was concerned, we were still fighting.

  Up on the roof of the Palestine, I saw a man pacing back and forth and looking down over the square. The silhouette was dark against the bright cobalt sky, and I could not make out details, but based on our past experience with other roof-prowlers, I had to consider him a potential threat. Sniper? He sat down. He had something in his hands, and I steadied up on him in my scope and asked Casey, “See the guy on top of the roof?”

  “Got him,” Casey replied, focusing his binos.

  “What’s he up to?” A crowd surged around us, curious about the two Marines in the grass, one with a scoped rifle and the other working a big pair of binos.

  “He has something in his hands.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” I took up a pound of pressure on the trigger. “But what is it?” Whoever he was up there was only two pounds of finger pressure from catching a bullet.

  “Hard to tell. Tough angle.”

  As Casey spoke, the man turned. Luckily for his mother, the suspicious “weapon” was a laptop computer. I immediately swept my rifle away from the luckiest journalist in Baghdad, who apparently had gone to the roof to get better satellite reception.

  The crowd thickened around us. Reporters and photographers ventured closer, curious about our warlike presence. I could hear the cameras clicking and actually had to wait for some of them to get the hell out of my line of fire. Some Jackals are born without brains.

  There was no overt resistance, and in fact everyone seemed to be celebrating, but we nevertheless kept our war paint on. I had already killed three men that morning, and chances were good that I would have to do in some more before this day was done. I didn’t want to smoke-check some dude in the middle of a block party, but if he looked like a threat, I would do so in a heartbeat.

  Civilians were crowded into Firdos Square, whooping and hollering, but our tanks weren’t parked out there as exhibits. Their cannons were loaded and ready to blow something apart, and none of McCoy’s Marines were letting down our defenses. Bravo Company worked roughly to cordon off the area, and the India grunts hustled inside the hotels to clear the rooms. The situation, a by-the-book military operation going on in the middle of a carnival, had gone beyond bizarre and become the sort of experience American soldiers must have encountered in liberating European cities during World War II. It is difficult and dangerous to step instantly from the days of fighting into a warm sea of people who are ready to celebrate the end of combat that is not yet at an end.

  We understood the sounds of victory. It was what we had longed for throughout the war, and the shouts rolled comfortably over us. Finally, we had come to the place where we were being welcomed as liberators.

  “One minute the Marines are creeping along shot-up neighborhoods, looking to fight Iraqi militia or fedayeen guerrilla fighters,” wrote John Koopman of the San Francisco Chronicle, our embedded reporter, who had become our friend, too. “The next minute they’re in downtown Baghdad, being greeted as conquering heroes. What a difference an hour makes.”

  We repositioned the Humvees and moved to support the grunts from India who were prowling through the Palestine Hotel. We tried to stay focused as jubilant Iraqis surged around us, patting us on the back, hugging and kissing us and handing us small flowers, some of them thanking us in fractured English. Beyond the screen of welcoming Iraqis, more people were running around, looters who were hauling away furniture and everything else imaginable. If it wasn’t nailed down, they stole it. There were no longer any police or law enforcement officers to be found in Baghdad, or anywhere else in Iraq, and that wasn’t our job. We were still looking for the bad guys with guns and explosives.

  Out of the crowd emerged a small group of people who appeared to be European, judging by their white skin, thick accents, and styles of clothing. They were shouting insults at us like “baby-killer” and “murderers” and “assassins.” Venom spilled in a twisted wave of hatred from the so-called human shields, who had entered Iraq to place themselves between the mean American military and the glorious soldiers of Saddam Hussein.

  A middle-aged woman thrust a calendar containing photographs of dead children into my face and screamed, “Look what you did! How could you kill all these innocent children?”

  “And what kind of sick bastard makes a calendar out of them?” I snapped back. She will never know how close I was to punching her, because she triggered memories of the ugly scene back at the bridge. But I pointed out instead that those pictures could not have come from this war, because it had only started three weeks ago, hardly time enough to whip up a best-selling little antiwar calendar. Things started to get volatile.

  Up came a surly group of Iraqi men, some of whom spoke good English, and they surrounded the protesters who were surrounding Casey and me. One man explained that they did not care for these rude people and that he and his friends had decided to beat them to death.

  Now I had to protect the antiwar nutcases, so I tried to give the Iraqi mob a lesson in democracy. “In America, this sort of complaining is called free speech,” I said. “They have a right to say whatever they want to say and should not be punished for expressing their beliefs.”

  “Yes,” said the gang leader. “Yes, America. President Boosh. We will kill them.”

  I looked at him and said, “You don’t understand. This is part of democracy, and you’re going to have to live with it. You can’t go around killing people just because you disagree with their political views. You get to say what you want, and they get to say what they want.”

  The men did not strike anyone, but the intimidated antiwar protesters decided to move along. The peace activists had been saved by a U.S. Marine, one of the very people they hated, from a brutal death at the hands of ordinary Iraqi citizens, whom they thought they were there to defend. Nobody ever said this had to make any sense. I realized that a rational discussion of democracy might be a long way off in Iraq.

  The hotels were pronounced clear, and the fedayeen had not sprung an anticipated ambush, so things slowly came under control from a military point of view, and we relaxed a bit. Maybe I wouldn’t have to kill anybody else today after all. The crowd in the square surged over
to that big statue of Saddam Hussein, a monument to a man who no longer mattered. It had been erected only a year earlier to mark the sixty-fifth birthday of the tyrant, and Iraqi families had been prudent to pose for photographs before the statue. It was now the target of their revenge. They didn’t have the man, but they had his likeness, bigger than life, arrogant even in cast bronze, and were no longer going to let it stand there to dominate their capital. Shoes were thrown at it, and then the clang of rocks hitting metal reverberated off the weathered bronze as the crowd moved closer, yelling and gesturing.

  Reporters and cameramen followed the crowd, and live televised pictures of the action in the square were beamed up to satellites and down to viewers around the world-from the White House, where President Bush watched with Secretary of State Colin Powell, to the tea shops of the Arab world, where viewers sipped afternoon tea in small shops and tuned in the Al Jazeera network. The Washington Post would later observe that what happened next was “either splendid luck or brilliant planning on the part of the military.”

  Iraqi men shook the statue, beat on it with their fists, and even attacked the base with sledgehammers, but it would not budge. Saddam’s right arm remained defiantly raised over the enraged crowd. Some pieces of metal were gouged out, but the thing remained firmly attached to the high pedestal. The Bravo tankers contributed a rope, and young men climbed up and looped it around the neck of the statue, and the cheering escalated. This was a bit unsettling, but we decided to let it ride and see what happened.

  Suddenly a shot cracked out, and Casey and I dove through the crowd, forcing a path through the uncomprehending civilians, yelling for them to move aside. We were thinking, Ambush! and the idea of a firefight in the park with so many civilians caught between the warring sides was horrific. But the discharged round had been fired accidentally by a Marine, not a fedayeen. We took deep, relieved breaths and made our way back to our trucks, which were parked with the tactical command post.

  While we were gone, an older British gentleman had come up to Jerry Marsh and the Panda, who were guarding our vehicles, and identified himself as a former member of the Special Air Services, an elite arm of the British military. He was in Baghdad working as a news reporter and explained that a few Iraqis had gotten a bit too aggressive with him earlier in the day. This fellow handed Marsh a small Walther pistol and sheepishly mentioned that he had shot the unruly buggers. The day kept getting crazier.

  The damned statue was still there, missing a few chips and pieces but irritatingly insulting everyone by defying all efforts to pull it down. It was time for the Marines to get involved.

  Captain Bryan Lewis, the CO of Bravo Tanks, came over to me, and we pounded each other on the back, spreading the giddiness of the moment. Three weeks ago, I had expressed some doubts about Lewis, but his combat actions and steady leadership had changed my mind so much that now I thought he could probably walk on water. He told me the statue was about to come down, not by muscle power but through the brawn of a massive M88 tank recovery vehicle called a “Hercules.” The irony was enough to make us giggle: A strong machine named Hercules, for the son of Zeus, was going to rip down the statue of the deposed ruler in Baghdad, the home of another ancient civilization. History could be made of worse stuff than a duel of legends.

  The seventy-ton M88 crunched its way to the statue and stretched out a long boom from which a braided steel cable could be attached. The crowd cheered even more, and the world watched.

  Then, in a shocking and totally unexpected development that John Koopman of the Chronicle called a “less than diplomatic move,” a young Marine scampered up the boom and wrapped a bright American flag around the face of Saddam Hussein. The cheers stopped instantly, and an ominous silence dropped over us, followed by a great moan of despair. It was as if buckets of cold water had been thrown onto the crowd.

  Casey was in midgulp, drinking water from his canteen, when he heard the audible sigh of disappointment arise from the crowd, and he turned around and saw the red, white, and blue American flag up where it wasn’t supposed to be. There is always somebody who doesn’t get the word, he thought. Few things would paint us as “conquerors” faster than a Marine putting the Stars and Stripes on Saddam’s head in the middle of Baghdad, under the gaze of an international television audience.

  A pudgy Arab woman reporter wearing a flak vest and Kevlar helmet accosted Casey before he could wipe off his chin. “Take down that flag in the name of Allah and for the Iraqi people!” she shouted.

  Casey paused for only a moment, then spun around, jumped into his truck, burrowed into his pack, and pulled out the rolled-up flag he had liberated as a souvenir a few days before. He leaped back out of the Humvee and was a blur in brown cammies moving fast into the crowd toward the statue, unfurling the Iraqi banner as he went. The colors seemed to glow in the afternoon sunshine.

  Colonel McCoy was exasperated. He had a radio receiver at his ear and was listening to people yell at him about the American flag that had appeared out of nowhere, threatening to unravel the image that had been so carefully cultivated in the past three weeks. He was already under criticism for the episode at the bridge, and now he was staring helplessly at the sort of public relations debacle that could end a career.

  But then some young Iraqi men saw what Casey was bringing forward, snatched the flag from his hands, and before you could blink, the American flag was removed from the statue, and the flag of Iraq took its place. The crowd resumed the cheers, particularly when they recognized the flag’s pre-Gulf War vintage.

  “Where the hell did that thing come from?” a bewildered McCoy asked me.

  He didn’t need to know the details, so I lied. “A local worker back in Kuwait gave it to us, boss. Saddam killed his family, and he asked us to fly it in Baghdad.”

  He looked at me, his brows scrunched. I looked back, my eyes filled with honesty and innocence, and walked away to congratulate Casey on saving the world.

  A cable from the M88 was tied around the statue’s hips, until a voice of reason pointed out that if the steel cable broke, it might snap back and kill a bunch of celebrating Iraqis on a television broadcast being seen around the globe. That would not be a good way to follow the flag fiasco, so a chain was rigged instead and looped like a noose around the neck.

  It was clear that this would be the instant symbol of the end of this war and would carry the same momentous impact as the Berlin Wall being torn down. For Marines, the image had only one equal, the famous flag raising on Mount Suribachi during World War II, the moment that defines the Corps. This would be our Iwo Jima moment.

  The M88 Hercules fired up its big engine and jerked forward. The statue came down. When it hit the ground, the Iraqi crowd went bananas; they spat on the prone figure and whacked it with their fists and sandals. Somehow they decapitated that huge metal statue with their bare hands and then used our chain to drag the bouncing head around the streets. The once invincible dictator, Saddam Hussein, had been toppled and now was just another Humpty Dumpty who had a great fall.

  25

  The Urban Hide

  From the start, we had aimed to take Baghdad, and now we had it, but it was not turning out to be the complete victory for which we had hoped. We had lifted the tyrant’s boot, but as the Americans moved in, civil authority disappeared and chaos filled the vacuum. The fall of the statue was the symbolic, not the actual, end of the war against Saddam Hussein. It also marked the beginning of surprisingly unstable conditions around Iraq that soon began to look like still another war.

  Marines are trained to fight, and I had anticipated that we would be in Baghdad just long enough to hand it over to some sort of special Iraqi or Coalition occupation force. That would free us to move upcountry and knock heads with lingering organized Iraqi resistance in strongholds such as Tikrit and the Sunni Triangle. Instead, we collided with urgent, widespread, and sustained unrest within the capital city and, by default, became an occupation force.

  Even as the sta
tue was coming down, our battalion spread out to protect the hotels, the hospitals, several embassies, a bus station, the Red Cross center, and some government ministry buildings. Gangs of looters roamed everywhere, and thieves had stripped some of those places totally bare by the time we arrived.

  Amid such increasing turmoil, the managers of the big hotels back in Firdos Square were happy to have the Marines around and eagerly gave permission for us to establish observation posts in rooms high in their buildings. We didn’t really need permission, but it was polite to ask, and it was wise of them to comply, for we were the only real protection they had.

  Casey and I stashed our Humvees in the valet parking area, closed off the street, posted guards, went up to the eighteenth floor of the Palestine Hotel, and entered the broad room that had been converted from a bar and lounge area into a ministudio. From here, Saddam’s peculiar minister of information, Baghdad Bob, had regularly announced his fanciful hallucinations that the Americans were losing the war. Standing at the windows, I had a panoramic view of the traffic circle below and the ranks of apartment buildings that marched away to the north-northeast. We planted a pair of sniper teams squarely on what once had been the departed government spokesman’s private turf.

  To check out another room that was up even higher, a polite concierge ushered Casey and me aboard a cranky elevator, which was crowded with a bunch of reporters wearing Gucci-type military gear, flak vests, and helmets. I had spent my entire career as a sniper trying to be as invisible as possible, intentionally shunning the press and staying deep in the shadows, but in Iraq, it was impossible to keep a low profile. We said hello, but I felt peculiar about being in their midst. They had cameras and laptop computers. We had guns. They had deadlines to meet. We still had a war.