Shooter Page 8
In the revised plan, 1st Tanks still led the way, but then the heavy combat power of armor and infantry belonging to our battalion would follow right after them. The support train of 1st Tanks would be next in line, and our own support train would then enter Iraq. It was a complex battlefield attack choreography in which hundreds of vehicles and thousands of men would weave into one continuous braid.
It took only a few minutes for things to get snarled. Before we could fight this war, we first had to get on the other side of the border, and as the sun rose, its bright redness dimmed to orange by a hanging, shifting curtain of dust kicked up by our advancing vehicles, the single breach grew busier than a bridal-gown sale day in Filene’s Basement back in Boston.
The front echelon of heavy armor made it through without any problem, but then their support trucks ignored the plan, broke into the line one by one, and became tangled within our advancing armor and infantry. Soon everyone was madly dashing simultaneously for the breach. But there was only so much room, and the various hard-charging elements slowed to a crawl, reduced to trudging slowly through about six inches of loose sand. Colonel McCoy was livid with anger. Before even firing a shot, his attack was caught in a desert traffic jam that took about forty-five dusty minutes to unsnarl.
The invasion was exploding forward all across the country, but all I could see was the back end of the truck directly in front of me and sand, sand, and more sand. It hung in the air like a great dirty curtain, clawed at my throat, and went into every crack and crevice of the trucks. My Humvee was at the tail of the battalion main headquarters trucks, which were sandwiched between Kilo and India companies. From there, I could easily fly up to the front or out to the flanks if anything happened, but it meant eating a lot of dust. We pulled down our goggles and wrapped scarves around our faces, feeling like the cowboys who brought up the rear of the herd. When I finally passed through the first berm, I picked up the radio and called out to Casey, “Welcome to Iraq!”
“We’re not there yet, jackass,” was his reply, from the lead truck twenty vehicles ahead. As a precise engineer, he did not count us as technically being on Iraqi soil until we crossed the second berm, not just the first. We got through that one soon enough and put Kuwait in the rearview mirror.
By the time we were through the breach, the tanks up front had skirted what was left of Safwan Hill and were surging north along country roads toward a paved highway that was designated Route Tampa. It was the main road to Basra, and once we reached it, the pure khaki desert gave way to scraggly wintertime brush, and then to more green than I had expected. It looked a lot like 29 Palms in California, only without the mountains. This was our kind of terrain. The Bull could fight here.
Basra, one of the natural gateways into Iraq, lies at the southern edge of a vast marshy area. The fabled Euphrates and Tigris rivers empty into those savannas and then race down the Shatt al-Arab waterway to reach the Persian Gulf. The Caliph Omar, an adviser to the Prophet Mohammed, founded Basra in A.D. 636, and according to legend, it was home port to Sinbad the Sailor. It is even mentioned in The Arabian Nights.
Here and there, a few Iraqis emerged from low-walled mud huts in isolated hamlets of three or four buildings and waved, just as their Mesopotamian ancestors had greeted other invaders over the centuries. The Persians had come through in 539 B.C., and Alexander the Great and his Greeks in 331 B.C., then Muslim Arabs in A.D. 636, the Mongols out of Central Asia in 1258, the Ottoman Turks about three hundred years after that, the British four hundred years later, and the U.S.-led coalition back in 1991. Throw in the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Hittites, and the invasion routes into Iraq are littered with the graves of armies.
Modern-day Basra’s claim to fame was the nearby Rumaylah oil fields, where a thousand wells sprouted like grim desert flowers, plus refineries that had the potential of producing about 140,000 barrels a day. Postwar planning envisioned using the revenue from that oil to pay for rebuilding Iraq.
The city, with a population of almost 1.4 million, was Iraq’s major port; it had an international airport, and rail lines reached out from it to other cities in the region. As an oil and petrochemicals center, a transportation hub, and the second-largest city in Iraq, Basra was the biggest target outside of Baghdad itself.
Our job was to blunt any attempt to reinforce the defense of the oil fields. While we slammed the 51st, and possibly the Medina, other U.S. and British Marines were assigned to take the vast tract of oil wells. We sailed on, through lowlands that steadily became more populated; dirt roads careered every which way, and long pipelines reached across the sand. The place looked like a Texas oil patch.
“All Darkside units, this is Darkside Six! Gas-Gas-Gas!”
McCoy’s chemical detection alarm had been triggered, and his radio call again had us grabbing our masks. Although we had neither heard nor seen anything unusual, we were on the turf of the infamous Ali Hassan al-Majid, the merciless butcher known to the outside world as “Chemical Ali.” Square-faced, with a Brillo-pad mustache, Ali was the first cousin of Saddam Hussein and the maniac responsible for killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, having murdered Kurds in the north and Shi’ites in the south with equal enthusiasm. He coldly laid waste to 280 villages with deadly gas, with the intention of killing every man, woman, child, plant, and animal in them. Ali was now the governor of southern Iraq, and we knew that if anyone would launch the most poisonous substances known to man against us, Chemical Ali was the guy.
The warning turned out to be another false alarm, but it was a sobering reminder that this was no joyride.
We had encountered only some occasional mischief from the Iraqis so far, and by the time the distant skyline of Basra rose out of the flat landscape, the intelligence guys had determined that the fearsome Medina Division was nowhere about. Then things began to get serious.
Rocket-propelled grenades swooshed past the lead tanks, and minor fighting sprang up with some enemy soldiers who were trying to blow up an oil well. They did not last long under withering fire from the armored column.
We soon what we found what we had come for, the 51st Mech, and we set about destroying it. Our Abrams tanks opened up with their 120 mm main guns on enemy tanks, which returned fire, and the Amtracs and artillery were engaging whatever they could find. The deep-throated anvil chorus of explosions was joined by the stutter of heavy machine guns and the thump of grenades. Cobra helicopters viciously roared in with rockets and guns to attack targets we could not see.
The sky was black with smoke as we moved our Humvees among burning hulks of freshly destroyed enemy tanks and armored vehicles. Our tanks were bellowing thunder only about a hundred meters to the west, TOW wire-guided missiles pounded a target fifty meters to the east, and the nearby explosions convulsed the air, shook the ground, and made concrete buildings vibrate like tuning forks.
Casey and I temporarily parked the main battalion headquarters’ trucks about six hundred yards to the rear of the major fighting and then drove forward in our Humvees to find a more permanent site. Before leaving, we gave Officer Bob firm instructions to hold there until we came back to get them. But as the battle moved forward, and Normy was away for a moment to check on a problem, Bob decided to push the Main up another two hundred meters, and suddenly the thin-skinned trucks, containing the incredibly valuable men who ran the brain of the battalion, and their important communications equipment, came under fire.
“Hotel Seven! Hotel Seven! They’re firing at me! I need you back here!” My radio call sign was no longer “Gabriel” but “Hotel Seven,” and the panicky words of Officer Bob cut through the crashing of battle. People, tanks, and armored vehicles were getting smoke-checked all around us, and now the Main was under attack! The Panda Bear, driving my Humvee, stomped the accelerator, and we roared away to find Bob, with me yelling for Casey on the radio, although I knew that the surrounding noise might prevent him from hearing me. I stripped the sniper rifle out of the drag bag and checked the loads.
Bob saw us and pointed to one of the multistory buildings. I braced against the front hood of the big vehicle, leaned into the stock of my rifle, brought the scope to my right eye, and dialed the focus ring until the blocky oil refinery building stood out in sharp relief. Somewhere over there were the guys who were spraying the Main, and I could change this ambush in a hurry by taking out whoever was behind their machine gun. It would only take one shot, but first I had to find him.
Panda made a laser check for the range from our position to the building: “Nine hundred and eleven yards, boss.” That distance was almost perfect, because my M40A1 bolt-action rifle was zeroed at a thousand yards-the length often football fields. I adjusted the elevation fine-tune ring on the scope to nine plus one, which would make the bullet strike exactly 915 yards away, almost exactly the distance to the refinery. A thread of dark smoke drifted by, telling me that the wind was no more than three miles an hour, and therefore not a factor. There is an intricate formula to accurately determining windage and elevation, but any good sniper can solve the equations in his head.
I did a hasty search because time was being measured in the rattle of machine gun fire; bullets pinged off of rocks and the road and kicked up gouts of sand. Sooner or later, this guy was going to get lucky and hit somebody. I started at the bottom left-hand corner of the building and went straight up to the roofline, so crisp in the bright sunlight that it seemed almost painted against the smoky morning sky. Then I scanned back down to ground level, where some thick bushes were clumped in a tangled mass, and that’s where I found possibly the stupidest man in the Iraqi army. He was hiding behind a thick bush and firing with an RPK light machine gun.
He thought he was safe. At that distance, he was invisible to the naked eye, and the bushes and light obscured any muzzle flash. But through my scope, he appeared in full color, as if on my private television set, although this TV had crosshairs with tiny mil dots along the axes for adjustments. He wore a green field uniform that blended well in his shadowy hideaway. He had a thick mustache. The huge battle raging around us no longer mattered to me, for he and I were now in a special zone, all by ourselves.
The soldier had made an elemental mistake by confusing concealment with cover, assuming that being hidden in the shadows protected him from a bullet. Leaves and twigs cannot do that. Two seconds after I locked the crosshairs on him, I took a breath, partially exhaled, and gently squeezed the trigger. Almost instantly, my 173-grain round of Lake City Match ammunition exploded in his chest, and he spun around and was thrown backward as if slammed by an invisible baseball bat. He was dead, my first kill of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
A sudden movement caught my attention three stories above him, and the Panda Bear saw it, too. Someone had ducked back behind a wall. “That one’s gone,” said the Panda, examining the position with powerful binos.
“Nah. He’ll be back.” Part of my job is to study human nature. It’s like playing poker; if I know what the other guy is likely to do, such as blinking when he is dealt a pair of aces, I own him. Everyone has the flaw of curiosity. “He’ll want to see what his buddy downstairs is doing.” Without removing my eye from the scope, I focused to the edge of the wall where the mystery soldier had last been seen and remained locked in a solid shooting position. I used the thumb and two fingers of my right hand to work the bolt, eject the spent cartridge, and reload a fresh round.
A group of prisoners huddled beside the narrow road and watched us work. They had not been searched since giving up and were not really guarded, except for being under the gun of every passing Marine. When I took out the machine gunner, they probably thought they had made the right decision in surrendering. The thunder of the overall battle-tanks and missiles and artillery-had not diminished, but that was not my concern. My scope did not move, and the edge of the building remained so sharp that I could have counted the bugs crawling on it.
“He got away clean, boss,” said the Panda, keeping his binos on the same spot. “He ain’t coming back.”
“Oh, he’s still up there, Bear. Curiosity kills.” I increased the pressure on the trigger, taking up about two of the three pounds needed to fire, and slowed my breathing, confident that another of Saddam’s soldiers was about to make an appearance. I felt, more than saw, the picture in my scope change, as if a cushion of air were being displaced, and a man’s head came slowly around the corner. Ear, cheek, eye, nose. I fired, and his head snapped back sharply as he was blown off the building.
Game over. With those two shots, the ambush of the Main was done.
We had been in Iraq less than a day and it already seemed like a lifetime, for no one had gotten any real rest since leaving Camp Ripper. The night before, a Hellfire missile zoomed in and exploded against an Abrams tank, wounding several crewmen-our first casualties of the war-and no one slept after that. The sleep deprivation combined with the exhaustion of battle was pushing us to a ragged edge, and I was getting surly.
In combat, my sole purpose is to kill the enemy, and I will not tolerate half measures on a battlefield. Violent supremacy works just fine for me. This was the first time that Casey and most of my other Marines had seen me with my real war face on, and they were startled by the sharp change in my attitude, which was totally focused and almost unreasoningly critical.
My mood was not improved when I heard a strange exchange of words on the Tac-1 radio net. The commanding officer of the Bravo Tanks Company that had been attached to our battalion was talking to Colonel McCoy, who had expected those tanks to be at a certain spot on the map. They had not shown up.
“Bravo Six. Darkside Six. What’s taking you so long?” McCoy wanted to know.
“We’ve got some infantry trying to decide if they want to surrender,” responded Captain Bryan Lewis, Bravo Six.
“What do you mean?” McCoy sounded as confused as I was.
“We’re seeing if they want to surrender.”
I was ready to go find Lewis’s tank and kick his ass. We were here to kill the Iraqi soldiers, not let them take their time deciding whether or not to fight! Thousands of leaflets had been dropped onto Iraqi troop positions that had been very specific about exactly how they should capitulate: drop their guns, put their hands up, and walk toward us. In my opinion, if they did not do it exactly that way, then fuck them, and boom, boom, boom, for they remained a threat. This captain of our tankers had some Iraqi soldiers in his sights but was not shooting them. I told Casey that there are no second chances in combat and wondered aloud if Lewis had the right stuff. “The guy’s a fucking coward if he won’t engage,” I growled.
“Jeez, Jack, give him a chance,” Casey told me. “You’re not up there with Tanks, and you don’t know what’s going on.”
Of course he was right, but I was in no mood to cut anybody slack, particularly officers, even if they had been in ferocious combat most of the day. Most of my anger had nothing to do with Lewis or his tanks, and, in fact, I grew to admire Lewis’s skill as a warrior. I was mad because I wasn’t in the fight.
9
Left Out
Few things are more mind-numbing and worrisome than a strike of “friendly fire,” in which your own troops or noncombatants somehow become the targets of fire from your own side. The trigger in such incidents is never pulled to inflict such harm, but war scrambles reality, and at the end of Day 1, March 20, 2003,1 almost killed a whole bunch of people by accident, then almost got killed myself in a separate incident. On either end, friendly fire is never fun.
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The invasion of Iraq was roaring ahead with astonishing speed, and our 5th Marines and British Royal Marines captured the Rumaylah oil fields virtually intact. A few rolling columns of red and orange fire rose out of the wrecked metal of the destroyed wells and sent thick black smoke ballooning into the sky, but the defending Iraqis somehow had been caught so off guard that they were able to blow up only nine wells before they were killed or ran away. There would be no repeat of the ecological disaster of the 1991 war, and the backbone of the Iraqi economy, the second-largest oil reserves in the world, was in Coalition hands.
With McCoy pushing hard, our battalion secured bridges into Basra and was maneuvering to take the Basra International Airport. The trade-off for the brisk advance was that everyone was exhausted by the continual effort. About an hour before dusk, Casey and I and our boys came upon an abandoned “Roland,” an antitank missile launcher mounted on something that looked like a golf cart. The enemy weapon had been forsaken by its operators but was still in usable condition, so we had to destroy it.
Casey took station with his Humvee about a hundred yards to the left, and I was on the ground, looking to the right down a road that made a turn about fifty yards away. I saw that everything was clear and told the Panda to arm an AT4 rocket launcher. He hefted it to his shoulder, aimed, and waited for my command to fire. I was just about to give the order when Luis Castillo, up in the turret of our Humvee, and therefore with a better view, alerted me that shooting the Roland right now might scare “the enemy prisoners.” I thought he meant a group that I knew was safely behind us. “Fuck ’em,” I said.