Shooter Read online

  Our battalion alone had to keep track of some $19 million worth of gear. The one thing McCoy did not want to run short of was bullets, so it was good that a shooting scrape eventually broke out. While training back in the Stumps during that fiscal year, we were about a million bucks over budget on ammunition. War trumps accounting.

  Despite the work, getting ready on the professional side of the ledger was easy when compared to saying good-bye to my family. It’s the hardest thing any serviceman or woman has to do, for deep in your mind you know that it may be a real good-bye-you might never see them again.

  The evening before I left, I made some special “alone time” with each of my girls. With little Ashley, my younger daughter, who could only comprehend that Daddy was going away again for a while, it was playful and fun. But Cassie had not been immune to the dire news all over the television broadcasts, and although Kim and I tried not to discuss it in front of her, she clearly understood that this time could be different. Cassie knew that I was going to war. She tried to be brave but cried on my shoulder as I held her tightly and promised that everything was going to be fine and that I would be back as soon as I could. Leaving her like that made me feel like shit.

  It was difficult for my wife and I to console each other. Our marriage had always been a roller coaster of highs and lows, and this time turned into one of the lowest lows of all. We owned a horse and a pony that we kept stabled outside of town, and she was worried about how my leaving would affect her plan to attend an upcoming horse show. I felt that my wife viewed this war as an inconvenience, not something that might claim the life of her husband.

  I woke up at one o’clock in the morning, kissed my sleeping wife and children for a final time, got into my jeep, and drove off to begin still another journey to another war. As the house grew small in my rearview mirror, I began to morph from father and husband into my alter ego of remorseless and cold-blooded Marine sniper.

  I joined the advance party and climbed aboard the big birds for the long flight over to Kuwait, which was totally boring and uneventful, other than the grousing about not being able to see the Super Bowl game. We would not be landing to the sound of guns, only to the requirement to get the camp set up for the rest of the troops. When we stepped off the plane, a stiff, chill desert wind whipped us, but other than that, it almost seemed as if we had not really gone anywhere. We lived in a California desert ourselves, so the flat vistas and dry weather were familiar. The weather was only about ten degrees hotter or colder than it was back home.

  The Kuwaitis had been busy. Buses took us to a vast plain some thirty miles south of the Iraqi border, where a city of white canvas tents had been erected for us. The land was virtually flat as far as the eye could see, except for the occasional dune and the great fields of pointy-top tents. It looked as if a giant circus had come to town.

  The drooping tents were the type Bedouin tribesmen had used for centuries in this hot, sandy region, not crisp military style, only ours had wooden floors instead of Persian carpets. Since I was in charge of assigning spaces for everyone in the battalion, I gave myself one of the best and created a private area, walled off by pallets of bottled water and rations, in one corner.

  Everything that had been disassembled back in 29 Palms began arriving and had to be put back together and readied. Once in place, the battalion bulked up with a trade that swapped a company of our riflemen for a company of tanks from the 1st Tanks Battalion. We all watched with awe when the fifteen huge M1A1 battle tanks of Bravo Company rumbled over to live with us. The things are huge! With those and our own assault amphibious vehicles (AAVs), better known as “Amtracs” or just “tracks,” we now had quite an armored punch. Then we added units of engineers, artillery and air-strike spotters, guys who specialized in detecting chemical weapons, the translators and intelligence dudes of the “Human Exploitation Teams,” and miscellaneous other support personnel. All of them came to us eagerly, because getting attached to the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Marines was like being drafted by the New England Patriots. Our job was to move and attack, not hold and pacify, and we had a reputation for getting the job done.

  “You’re all gonna die,” called the skeptics. “No,” we corrected. “We’re going to kill people.”

  Joining the Bull carried a price for these newcomers, however, because we worked them like dogs. It was not unusual for me to storm into a tent before dawn, yelling, “Get the hell up, you sons of bitches!” I would grab some lazy bastard out of the sack and force him outside for an exhausting physical training exercise in full combat gear. The newbies kept waiting for us to lighten up, but we never did, and slowly they adjusted to life in an elite combat unit. We knew that being brilliant in the basics would keep them alive when the shooting began.

  We trained in every conceivable format, and when we learned that our first target in Iraq would be the southern city of Basra, we scripted that battle as if we were planning a Super Bowl, right down to watching Falcon View computer imagery that exactly painted the route to the city. A Dragon Eye unmanned drone gave us real-time aerial pictures until somebody goofed with the automated controls and rammed it into the side of an Amtrac during a training exercise. It seemed that we had everything but the home telephone numbers of the defending soldiers.

  Casey and I worked the troops hard in shooting, moving the convoys, and getting into and out of dangerous dispersal areas on a crowded and shifting battlefield. A sense of urgency seeped into the training, because after months of practice, we were running out of time.

  Chairman Mao Tse-tung wrote that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, but I had found that sometimes it also grew nicely out of a typewriter. While rummaging among the paperwork and personnel problems, I had uncovered a jewel: the Table of Equipment, the bible that spells out who gets what. It specified that the Headquarters and Supply Company was authorized to have several hardback, armored Humvees. It did not say exactly how the vehicles should be allocated, so Casey and I figured that it was best that the company executive officer and gunnery sergeant should each have one for his own use. Who was going to argue? The Humvees were parked outside the tent at that very moment, each with a powerful Mark-19 belt-fed automatic grenade launcher mounted in a turret. Presto, through a little administrative magic, we had firepower and mobility.

  I had readily surrendered my plan for a fast-moving sniper force a year and a half before, on 9/11, and thought the idea was dead. But now that we were within a stone’s throw of war, I realized that I had all of the ingredients at my fingertips: my shooters, some good wheels, and a battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel McCoy, who believed in the concept. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place with the steady development of Casey. In the old days, a sniper was never to be directly exposed to the enemy, but my plan was to be right up front with the crashing strong fist of the 3/4. I would need protection so I could concentrate on my job. Casey had my trust, plus the rank, the desire, and the ability to grab some Marines by their collars and not only get me to the hot hinge of battle but to protect my ass while I worked. By forcing me to take this job, Bryan McCoy had given me everything I wanted.

  The familiar crack of high-powered precision rifles was music to my ears as I took both my personal M-16 and my sniper rifle out to Target Range Ripper, which actually was just a big mound of dirt about a thousand yards to the left of our camp. As the company gunnery sergeant, I had been so busy training others that I had not gotten much personal shooting time, and I needed a final turn on the range to zero my scope to my eye for the terrain and climate we were in. I squeezed off enough shots to satisfy myself that everything was perfect, then took a walk down the firing line.

  The rest of the battalion sniper platoon was also zeroing their weapons, and for one last time, I looked over this stable of thoroughbred studs. Although many had only high school diplomas, the instructors at Scout/Sniper School had challenged their intellects by cramming into their heads such arcane but important subjects as advanced ballistic
s (mathematics), cardiopulmonary functions (anatomy and biology), air density (meteorology), and enough data to send an advanced college student running to the nearest bar for relief. Unless our guys sucked the lessons into their very souls, they would not become snipers.

  They learn that the surface of a pond is much more than that, for it is a plane separating two mediums, air and water, and creates a mirage so that a stick protruding above that surface appears bent when it really is not. How will that affect your view of the target? What happens to your shot pattern if there is not perfect concentricity in the bore of your barrel? What is the formula to compute your range to the target, and how much lead do you give a moving target, regardless of the target’s speed, range, or weapon caliber? Which way does the bullet go when you shoot through glass? All that and much, much more was drilled into them. And that was just to teach them how to shoot the damned rifle!

  The scouting and stalking side of the business is just as difficult to learn. One myth that gets debunked along the way is that it is unsporting, even downright un-American, to shoot an adversary in the back. Snipers will pull the trigger on an unsuspecting enemy in a heartbeat.

  When I became the company gunny, I handed off the sniper platoon to other leaders, but although the snipers were no longer under my direct command for their daily tasks, they were still mine, and I would participate in or make every major decision involving them. They were always coming by to ask questions, and everybody knew that when the shooting started, I would be carrying my sniper rifle.

  I demanded more from them than just textbook learning and shooting skills. They would be distributed in teams throughout the battalion, and the lives of other Marines would depend on them. Were they ready? Hell, yeah. They were confident, tough, and itching to fight. A few of the arrogant little bastards even thought they could outshoot me.

  My M40A1 sniper rifle lay in pieces before me on my poncho as I gave it still another thorough cleaning. In the Marines, you always take care of your own weapon, and I would never trust someone else with the job, because my life might depend on the task. It was a mechanical marvel, from the Pachmayr recoil pad on the McMillan fiberglass and epoxy stock to the modified Winchester Model 70 trigger guard, to the Remington 700 receiver, and the Atkinson heavy, free-floating barrel, all topped off with the 10-power Unertl scope that makes a target a thousand yards away seem to be right next to my eyeball. The package weighs fourteen and a half pounds, and it is my long arm of justice. It is a common misconception that we work with just one weapon until death do us part, but gone are the days of Davy Crockett and his Kentucky long rifle at the Alamo. This rifle just happened to be the one I would be using for a while, and the armorer had adjusted it to perfectly fit my grasp, so I treated it kindly.

  I was tired, but feeling good after calling home and talking to my kids, for their girlish chatter lifted my spirits. The babysitter said my wife was at school, where she was working toward a doctoral degree, and I paid her absence no mind. I was receiving a lot of letters and packages from friends and family and figured the low volume of correspondence from her was because she was simply overwhelmed taking care of the girls, running the house, working, and going to school. Being a Marine wife is not easy.

  Casey ducked into my cubbyhole on a bitterly cold night in early March 2003 as a hard wind beat against the sturdy Bedouin tent. He heated up some Spam on the little propane stove, grabbed some lukewarm coffee, and settled in for a bullshit session while I cleaned my disassembled rifle, up to my elbows in gun oil, patches, and rags. He was thoroughly capable in his job, although Officer Bob frustrated him almost to the point of mutiny. A couple of times I had to stop the staff guy from trying to replace Lieutenant Kuhlman, carefully explaining that we needed someone who knew what the hell he was doing to take this unit into combat.

  “I hate everybody and everything,” Casey declared. “I hate Bob. I hate this fucking country.” Everybody hated Kuwait.

  He was a kindred spirit, and I recognized his jumpiness as nothing more than a case of prebattle jitters. After months of training and tense expectation, he wanted to get into it, to see how he stacked up as a combat Marine, but he wanted to be leading a rifle platoon, not babysitting Bob. I knew he would do fine, but Casey would reach that conclusion only after enduring his trial by fire. It’s always a one-man graduation ceremony.

  “You need a day away. Go down to Doha and get a hamburger.” Camp Doha is a rear-area paradise that had been established near Kuwait City during the last Gulf War and then was built up with millions of U.S. dollars. Between the shopping mall and the restaurants, you can get anything you want at Doha. It was not like life at the front.

  I had my boots off because my feet were always itching. Outside our little office, Casey and I observed military courtesy and addressed each other by our ranks, officer and enlisted man, but in private, it was Jack and Casey, an equality that is not unusual among Marines.

  “A properly trained monkey can do my job,” Casey complained.

  “A properly trained monkey is doing your job, asshole,” I said. He didn’t smile. “Cheer up. We’ll be going soon.”

  “Why do you think that? The politics still suck. If we go, we risk our credibility as a player in international diplomacy. If we don’t go, we risk our credibility as a military powerhouse. We got a hundred thousand Americans sitting out here and we’re at a standstill.”

  We are not robots, and with newspapers, radios going constantly, laptop computers with Internet access, and telephone calls back home, everyone had been keeping up on the latest developments. We also received classified information that the media did not. We knew exactly what was going on. The rhetoric for war had risen in intensity, and the belief that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction was universal among our leaders. The White House spelled out that we faced twenty-five thousand liters of anthrax, thirty-eight thousand liters of botulinum toxin, enough material to produce five hundred tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve gas, and mobile biological weapons labs. But the time for high-level discussions was over, for the command structure of the United States had all but made the decision to send us over the line along with a “coalition of the willing.” Our job was not to question our orders but to carry them out.

  My personal viewpoint had only hardened since the terrible attacks on the United States on September 11.1 wanted to hunt down and kill every terrorist I could find, to make them pay tenfold for what they had done, so they would think twice before trying it again. I considered Iraq a logical target in the war on terror and believed that by fighting in someone else’s house, we would occupy their interest and their focus. It would be better to fight the terrorists in Iraq than in Boston. I make no claim to be a national security expert, although I know how it works better than most people. While I don’t make policy, I implement it by stepping onto the battlefield. It’s what I get paid to do, and I was ready to do it.

  “Oh, we’re going,” I told Casey. “Even as we speak, Officer Bob is getting all soldierly by watching Gladiator over in the movie tent, and he’s reading a Tom Clancy book.”

  The wind thumped the canvas tent, cold and steady, and armored vehicles growled by outside, on their way to some night exercise. “What if we don’t really get into the big fight?” Casey asked. “The Army gets to take Baghdad, and if we get held up in Basra, I don’t want to be stuck in the rear.”

  “Not to worry. The Army may get the first bite at that apple, and the more people we have killing things, the better. Don’t sweat it, you’re going to see plenty of action.” I put down the cleaning cloth and gun oil for a moment and looked over at my eager friend. He still wasn’t convinced.

  “But don’t believe all that stuff about being welcomed by kids tossing flowers and herds of Iraqi soldiers surrendering,” I said. “Everyone knows what’s at stake this time, and they are going to fight. We’re going to have to fight in Basra, then with the Republican Guard, with those fedayeen crazies, and guerrillas in every l
ittle ten-cent town all the way to Baghdad, and then within the city itself. We will win, but it’s going to cost us. This is going to be a bloody business.” I had been here before and knew from hard-won experience that the game plan goes to hell when the first shot in fired. Some of my Marines would not be coming back. I just didn’t know how many, or who.

  7

  Safwan Hill

  “My idea of a fair fight is clubbing baby seals!” Lieutenant Colonel McCoy, whose radio call sign was appropriately “Darkside Six,” was atop an Amtrac, giving some final fighting words to his battalion as they stood beneath a broiling midday sun at Camp Ripper on March 17, 2003. “We’re going to slaughter the 51st Mechanized Division!” he said, balled fists on his hips. “We’re going to kill them! We’re going to make an example out of them!”

  He confirmed that our part of the war would start by attacking Basra, the second largest city in Iraq, and the intelligence guys predicted that an entire division of the Iraqi army would be waiting in our path. Thousands of enemy infantry troops, supported by a couple of hundred tanks and armored vehicles galore, had spent months preparing for our arrival. We would be outnumbered maybe eight to one. Some may have wondered just how our single battalion was going to demolish a full division all by our lonesome, so McCoy explained that the enemy had no idea how we were coming at them. How the other guys had planned and trained did not matter because this was going to be our kind of fight-a one-sided, nasty, eye-gouging, kick-in-the-nuts, bullet-in-the-ear, smash-mouth Marine-style brawl, and he promised that we would stomp their asses right into the sand. Fight fair when outnumbered eight to one? Fuck that. “We will hit them with everything we have,” McCoy said.