Shooter Read online

  The journalists trooped out at the next floor, and we took the elevator on up to the top level of the Palestine, where the doors opened onto an inky black hallway. We flipped on our flashlights, got our guns ready, and checked the rooms but found them to be both empty and unsuitable for our tactical needs. So we rode the rickety elevator back down and went across the street to see if we could do better at the Sheraton Hotel.

  The Sheraton’s elevator was even worse than the one in the Palestine, but the manager took us to the sixteenth floor, where he presented us with a spacious corner room that had beige walls, a nice bed, a desk, two chairs, and a sliding glass door that opened onto a patio with excellent views to the south and west. From windows on the other side of the room, we could double-check the direction being watched by the boys over in the Palestine. We took it, and did not even have to use a credit card.

  In a quick trip back downstairs, we grabbed more weapons, radios, and shower gear from the Humvees and got back up to the sixteenth floor as fast as possible to establish the flashiest urban sniper hide I had ever seen.

  Usually, I am tucked into junk and dirt and trash, but this was a Sheraton hotel! In no time, we created observation posts and security points, made ourselves at home, and happily acknowledged orders to maintain our positions until further notice. I looked at the carpet, the clean walls, the tiled bathroom with running water, the cushy bed, and the patio with its exquisite view of Baghdad and knew there was a nice dining room downstairs. I felt supremely confident that we could handle this tough duty.

  We radioed the teams across the street to coordinate our zones and made accurate range cards of the entire area, drawing diagrams and measuring distances with our lasers to exact points in the neighborhood and down the streets. If we had to shoot, the cards would quicken our reaction time. Then we started an observation log in which we would record what we saw below, since paper is better then memory. For instance, if the same car came by too frequently, we would know to keep an eye on it.

  Casey and I finished the routine by going back over to the Palestine for a final check with the snipers there. We were joined by Bart Greene, our battalion air officer, who wanted to check out the Sheraton’s dining room. That made the Palestine inspection go even faster, and we determined that the boys were set-an armed Marine guarding the door and snipers at the windows, sweeping the streets with sniper scopes and binos. With that routine piece of business done, we got back aboard the elevator and headed for the ground floor and the promise of a steaming buffet of food. We were tired of eating MREs.

  The elevator, however, did not go all the way to the first floor. It stopped at the second, where a wide lobby area opened onto a broad outside veranda that gave clear views of the traffic circle, the big mosque, and the remains of the Saddam statue. We had stumbled into the press nest, where television reporters from around the world made their stand-up reports-Live from Baghdad!! The hot and brilliant beams of dozens of spotlights seared the surroundings, a combined artificial sun that could have lit up a Red Sox night game at Fenway Park.

  The three of us walked out to the big porch where the Jackals were gathered, more than I had ever before seen in one place, and accepted some bottles of ice-cold water. Other than feeling slightly uncomfortable, there was no real problem being around the press types, for the embedded guys and girls plus the band of gypsy Jackals we had inherited early in the war had worked hard to gain our trust and break down the barriers that normally existed between reporters and warriors.

  Richard Engel of the ABC television network, whom we had met earlier in the square, explained the various TV monitors to us, and we watched Marines, Army troops, and officers all over Iraq appearing on various television shows and interviewing with print reporters about the final dash into Baghdad. Engel said ABC was putting together a broadcast that would feature a spread of stars ranging from generals to politicians to pundits, and among them would be Lieutenant Colonel Bryan P. McCoy. The reporter asked if we could join the program, and we figured if it was good enough for Darkside Six, we might as well give it a go, too. It would be a fast way to let our families back home know that we were alive, safe, and in one piece.

  Anchorman Peter Jennings in New York ran the show with the sure touch of a lion tamer, and Engel led off our portion by asking how we had ended up in the square. I told him, to his astonishment, that we had received information that the journalists might be held hostage, and we had come in to rescue them. “So the idea was that you were going to seize this hotel and help and get us out, is that correct?” he asked.

  We all three had our helmets off but were still festooned with combat gear. We looked good on camera. Bart said, “Until a couple of minutes ago, I still thought there were shots coming out of here, and the Army had fired back a couple of days ago.” Oops. The Army had killed journalists in that particular incident, but Engel let it slide.

  The reporter said he saw us roll up into the square, and Casey confirmed we were in the first Humvees. Then Engel turned back to the hostage question, and I replied that things became dicey when the square was flooding with people.

  “Yeah, we definitely thought there was something going on,” I said. “There was a guy up on the roof with his laptop. And I had, you know, put him in my scope, looking to see what he was doing. I didn’t know if it was an enemy or not without the use of my scope.” Oops, again. I just admitted that I had almost plugged one of the Jackals. Engel had me confirm that I was a sniper.

  “And so, if you thought he had something other than a laptop, that would have been it for him?”

  Be nice, I told myself, wishing he would change the subject. “I would have been able to tell. I wouldn’t have to think… you could see it. You can see pretty clearly out of that. So, yeah, I mean, if it was an enemy, we would have dealt with that.” This TV stuff was harder than it looked.

  Thankfully, Engel switched to Casey and asked what our job was now.

  “The job for tonight will be to make this area secure,” Casey replied. “We’re not exactly sure what happens from here. I know that there are more people that we will have to deal with later, but for tonight, we’ll just make sure that everybody’s safe around here.”

  The reporter then asked if we felt safer now and whether we wanted backup support, and Bart sharply observed, “We feel as safe as we felt any other night.”

  Casey flipped the question back to Engel. “Do you feel safer now that we’re here?” The reporter acknowledged, “I certainly do.”

  I pointed out that we always feel safe when we’re together and that our security cordon was already in place, or else we wouldn’t be standing here talking to him. I didn’t mention we also had a thicket of sniper rifles pointed out of the windows directly upstairs. “Right now we’re completely surrounded by friendlies. I mean, it may seem all nice and dandy up here when we’re talking, but there’s, you know, eight hundred or nine hundred other guys around here with whatever we take to the fight.” Did we feel safe? Damn straight we did.

  Jennings broke in to ask if the events of the afternoon meant that the war was over. That one kind of pissed me off. I didn’t believe the war was over at all. “We’re not done yet,” I said. “We’re in a safe environment right now, but we’ll be prepared for whatever happens tomorrow. When the appropriate authority ever says the war is over, then that will be good news.”

  We chattered on for a bit more; then our few minutes of fame were over, and we went off to find the Sheraton dining room, where life was slower. The smell of good food was overwhelming, the plates were clean, silverware sparkled on white tablecloths, and the buffet seemed filled to bursting. This is crazy, I thought, three Marines in dirty cammies with helmets under their arms and wearing flak vests, checking out a buffet line. After being on the road for three weeks of combat, we would have been delirious with joy just to have a couple of cheeseburgers or a Philly steak-and-cheese sandwich. This otherwise rather ordinary hotel dining room seemed like a banquet at Versailles
to us, and we thoroughly pigged out while the dull whumph of faraway explosions echoed from where engineers were blowing up captured enemy arms around the city.

  The night passed quietly, and the only real shooting we heard was a brief duel between CAAT teams from different battalions who stumbled upon each other in the Baghdad darkness. No one was hurt.

  Enrico Dagnino, the Italian photographer who had been with us during the ferocious Baghdad Two-Mile attack, came up to our room with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, and that helped complete this slice of paradise. With others on watch, I sipped scotch whiskey and watched the small television set in the corner as the Al Jazeera network gave its tilted version of our triumph, complete with English script rolling across the bottom of the screen that kept referring to us as “invaders.” Unreal.

  I stripped down in the bathroom and took a long shower under a nice blend of hot and cold water, letting it gush in gallons onto my head, until I felt as clean and renewed as I ever had in my entire life. I washed out my cammies in the sink and took immense pleasure in not having to put the filthy things back on for a while. Wearing only my shorts, I climbed into the bed and just lay there, enjoying the feeling of being totally safe on the sixteenth floor of a luxury hotel. Although we had let our guard down somewhat, there was always a Marine with a rifle at the door. The only way the bad guys could get us was with a lucky shot of a rocket-propelled grenade, which was highly unlikely.

  Our entire team rotated in and out of the room during the night, taking turns guarding the trucks, pulling observation duty, and resting or sleeping, but I didn’t hear them. I stared at the ceiling for a while, and my mind raced with the mad events of a single day. I had been on a killing spree for a week and had started this morning by shooting three people. Then I participated in bringing down the statue of Saddam, was interviewed on a major television network, posted sniper hides in hotel rooms, and had telephoned home to California from the hotel but received no answer, and now lay snug and safe in a comfortable bed. Still, it was too early to rein in my sniper mentality and start the transition back into being a normal human being, because as I had told Peter Jennings, the war wasn’t over yet. Finally, sleep pulled me down like an anchor.

  For weeks I had been living in the rude conditions imposed by combat, sometimes catching a few winks sitting up but seldom being able to truly rest. Now I snored away the hours on clean sheets and dined in civilized surroundings. The press corps was over in the Palestine, which was a zoo, but the Sheraton, filled mostly with Iraqis who had left their homes for the safety of the hotel during the war, was as quiet as a library.

  We spent four wonderful days in the hotel but knew that it couldn’t last forever. The streets were awash in looting and disorder, there was heavy fighting still going on elsewhere in the county, and even in Baghdad, and our unit was bound to be given new orders soon. But after several days of being able to watch the news on television, I realized that despite the fighting elsewhere, the Iraqis no longer could mount anything that remotely resembled an organized force against us anywhere in this country. If there was any fight left in them, it was up to the fedayeen or the ousted thugs of the Ba’athist regime or the imported foreign fighters, because the regular army had been utterly destroyed.

  On April 13, the battalion headquarters moved across town to an eight-story government building. It was no Sheraton, but it had electricity and was so spacious that each of us had a private room, giving us the first true privacy we had experienced since leaving the United States in January.

  The new headquarters building was surrounded by a high wall, and just beyond that wall, Baghdad was disintegrating. Everywhere I scanned with my scope and rifle, looting and disorder rampaged on a scale comparable to the war itself. Inevitably, our battalion, an elite combat unit, had to be turned into policemen.

  We were not law enforcement personnel. Instead of destroying a heavily armed force of trained enemy soldiers, we were dispatched to run around like rent-a-cops through utterly crazed city streets. Instead of smash-mouth fighting, we were suddenly thrust into opaque security and sustainment operations. The lean-and-mean American military force that had raced through Iraq did not have enough people to put a policeman on every corner in every city in Iraq. And the powers that be had not expected this swift and total disintegration of civil order, nor that it would last as long as it did.

  The Iraqis were tearing up everything, constantly fucking with each other, settling old blood feuds and defending their homes and families. Most of the time, we could watch from afar, for it was impossible for us to intervene in all of the flashpoints of violence that were usually one-on-ones being fought by civilians who were going at each other for reasons we found incomprehensible.

  They were shooting from passing cars and from buildings. I might see a confrontation through my scope but could not stop it. Had it been plain old South Los Angeles-style gang warfare, I could have busted caps on a few gangbangers to control the situation, but we were not the ones to sort out this ongoing mess, because we could not get the whole story of who was right and who was wrong.

  A call would come in to headquarters, and off we would roar away to some crime scene, armed to the teeth and singing our version of the theme song from the Cops television show-“Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?” When we weren’t off playing cops, our teams escorted staff officers to meetings elsewhere in the city, for it was still too dangerous to go out there alone or unarmed. The lovely and languid moments of liberation had not lasted very long, and now hardly a minute passed without the sound of a random gunshot.

  The city’s policemen began returning to work on April 14, but the streets remained wild. Casey and his boys were tagged to make one of the first joint patrols with Iraqi forces, and they set out in a strange convoy with a German television crew, a New York Times reporter, and an Iraqi police team led by a cunning officer who spoke marginal English and was named Mohammed. Two quick little Korean-made cars carried the cops, and eight Marines followed in two heavy Humvees.

  At a bank that was being robbed, the brakes were slammed on and all four vehicles skidded to a stop in a cloud of smoke that billowed out of the doorway while yellow and orange flames danced inside. A man emerged, sputtering and choking, through the smoke, and Casey told his boys to keep some rifles on the potential thief, but he leaned back against the fender of his truck to let the Iraqi police handle it.

  The cops grabbed the pudgy, middle-aged guy and began yelling in Arabic; then Mohammed threw him face first to the ground, where the screaming Iraqi police immediately began stomping the hell out of him. The yelling and action drew a crowd and left Casey with a problem: If he stopped the beating, it would be obvious to the cops, onlookers, and victim alike that the Americans were really the ones who were in charge. That wasn’t the theme for this war, because we had ostensibly gone in there to free the Iraqis and return their government to its citizens and let them run it as they saw fit. But if Casey did nothing, the press was going to report that Coalition forces stood by idly and watched a man being murdered. It was the sort of ambiguous situation that was all too common around Baghdad every day.

  Mohammed, tired after his exertions, stepped away from the thief to let his boys continue their brutal interrogation, and Casey motioned him over. While the cop made his way through the throng, Casey rested his hand on the pistol hanging in a holster on his right hip and lightly drummed his fingers on the butt of the weapon to draw Mohammed’s attention. It was the only time during the war that Casey was happy that Iraqi people liked to stand very close to the person with whom they were speaking. Keeping a smile on his face, Casey spoke in a quiet, calm, and slow voice, so only Mohammed could hear. “If you or your boys beat someone else like that today, I’ll put a bullet in the back of your head before you can throw the second kick.” Mohammed looked hard at the big Marine, and Casey’s eyes did not waver. The cop nodded in understanding, and they quickly hauled the guy away
to the police station. It was another lesson in street democracy.

  Meanwhile, I was assigned to a Force Recon platoon that went after high-value targets and large robberies, and with my background, I got up to speed in a hurry on their special tactics. The unit was officially called “Broadsword,” but on the street it was known as “Baghdad SWAT.” If the mission was special, they called for us.

  On an early call, we headed into the ruined financial district of Baghdad, and while the troops moved in, I set up in a position of cover. A bunch of Iraqis came running from a building with their hands filled with Iraqi currency, and we stopped four of them, one of whom was a middle-aged man who stubbornly refused to take his hands from his pockets. He was only five feet from me, and I was well within my rights to shoot him dead, for he might have a weapon or grenade in the deep pockets of his baggy robe. I handed off my rifle and took out my pistol, and he pulled back, plunging his hands even deeper into his pockets, so I whipped the side of his head, forced him to the pavement, twisted his arms, and then yanked his hands out, arrest style. All the fool had in his pockets were some ten-thousand-dinar bills. He had risked his life rather than show other Iraqis that he was carrying a large wad of money that was becoming more worthless by the day.

  On April 15, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Baghdad SWAT was sent to the Central Bank of Baghdad, which was being robbed once again and was ablaze when we arrived. A platoon from India Company cordoned off the area; then our assault force plunged through the smoke to clear the huge building. I climbed atop my Humvee, which had become my standard support position, and was searching window by window and door by door when I picked up some movement on the second story of a neighboring building, near a ladder. A guy with an AK-47 was creeping up on our guys in the swirling smoke that had made him almost invisible. “Almost” isn’t good enough. I set up on him at only 168 yards through the rolling cloud and dropped him cold with two quick shots.