Shooter Page 9

  The normally quiet Castillo persisted. “Boss, they’re gonna get hit by this.”

  “No way, they’re out of the danger zone.” I was ready to let Panda take the shot when some unexpected motion down the road caught my eye, and a line of Iraqi prisoners under guard by an escort of Marines came around the curve, moving straight toward the Roland that was our target. When they saw Panda aiming a rocket launcher right at them, the prisoners and Marine guards alike stopped in their tracks. I yelled quickly for everybody to stand down, but coming so close to fucking up royally had left my heart pounding hard. Had I given the order for the Panda Bear to shoot, a lot of people would have died because I had made a stupid mistake.

  After we let the astonished prisoners and guards file safely past, I called in some engineers to blow up the Roland. I had seen enough of that damned gun on a golf cart.

  Snipers are trained to endure extreme fatigue, but it attacks your critical thinking like a live thing, and I cursed myself for carelessness. My body was working faster than my mind, and I recognized that I might be reaching my physical limit. But as the poet Robert Frost wrote, we had miles to go before we slept.

  Rest was not in the cards, and it was not long before I was on the other side of a friendly fire incident, which was no more fun than the first one. The skies were filled with hundreds of warplanes flying attack missions from bases as far away as Missouri and Guam, and low-flying Tomahawk cruise missiles growled in from warships out in the Gulf. Explosions decorated the horizon, and a major fight loomed at the airport. Who could sleep? Who would even want to sleep at such a time?

  While McCoy zipped around the battlefield in his Humvee to oversee the tactical situation, I was up to the brim of my Kevlar helmet helping set up the Main headquarters about three miles from the airport, the sniper rifle at rest while I attended to my other job as company gunny. We created an instant office by parking two command Amtracs back-to-back, flopping down their rear ramps, and throwing a lightproof cover over them, since night had fallen. Radios crackled, maps were unfurled, computers were booted up, and the battalion brain trust got to work in their mobile, claustrophobic dungeon, figuring out what had to happen next to keep this drive alive. We had done severe damage to the 51st Mech, which had been our primary foe, but remnants of the division were still around and were still dangerous. The British were coming up right behind us to take over this space, freeing us to push on up the road, and we were handing over responsibility while fighting was still under way nearby. The planners had a big chore ahead.

  Ragged streaks of bright fire flashed into the darkness all around as our artillery batteries pumped out rounds in preparation for the airport attack, and the concussions of the great cannons shook the ground. Tornados of dust were kicked up by every blast.

  Suddenly there was a loud POP in the nearby sky, followed by numerous smaller pop-pop-pop-pop explosions. Oh, shit. That was the signature firecracker sequence of one of the most lethal artillery rounds in the U.S. arsenal, and if you’re close enough to hear it, you’re already in trouble. The first noise from the incoming 155 mm rounds comes when the warhead opens about fifty meters above the ground and showers out dozens of antipersonnel bomblets, and the following little pops are the cluster bombs detonating upon impact. They can cause incredible damage.

  There is no time to hit the dirt once the firecrackers start, so I closed my eyes and leaned hard against an armored vehicle, trying to meld my skin with its metal armor. Another loud POP followed the first by microseconds, and then another string of fireworks rattled off about 150 yards from where Normy Arias and I were working.

  Our guys were on their radios even before the popping stopped to tell the cannon-cockers not to do that anymore, and we didn’t take any casualties, but a certain junior staff officer was spooked. He thought the Iraqis had our number.

  “They’re bracketing us!” he shouted, running up as Normy and I brushed ourselves off. With the sort of sixth sense about such things that combat veterans have in their bones, both of us had realized instantly that the errant rounds were Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM), which meant they were from American guns that were not really trying to kill us. The danger was already past, and since no one had been hurt, there was really nothing to talk about.

  “No, sir,” Norm replied, going back to work. “They’re not bracketing us.”

  “Yes, they are, First Sergeant.” Officer Bob was adamant that we were all in grave danger.

  “No, sir, they’re not,” Norm repeated, very slowly this time, in his most polite tone. “Those are DPICM rounds. The enemy doesn’t even have DPICM.”

  “How can you be sure that was DPICM?”

  Norm stopped what he was doing. “Sir, I was in artillery for eighteen years. Only one thing makes that sound. Take it from me, those were our own DPICM.”

  Bob stood there for a minute, then hurried away.

  McCoy’s personal promise to his battalion came true. Not only did we utterly destroy the Iraqi 51st Mechanized Division, but we also bagged its commanding general.

  Night means nothing to American combat forces, because our high-tech and thermal-detection gear lets us see through the darkness. Throughout the early witching hours of Saturday morning, the battalion maneuvered closer to the airport and hit it just before first light, killing eight Iraqi tanks and some suicidal infantrymen fighting from bunkers.

  Since I wasn’t involved, I had pulled a cot out of one of the ambulances and tried to get some rest, but my mind could not shut down. I got up when the attack started and walked around, listening to the gunfire and watching the flashes. I felt left out.

  This was a built-up section of the city, and during the four hours it took to plan the attack, I could have easily infiltrated in the darkness, found a snug hide, done some real-time observation, and been in position to support the attack with some good old-fashioned sniping. Enemy soldiers were dying out there, but I hadn’t killed anybody since yesterday. Seemed a waste.

  One of my boys at the airport took out a target with a nice long shot, and if he got one, I could have gotten ten, not because of a vast difference in our shooting skills, but because I had more experience in finding targets. There would have been plenty of work for me, but I missed the boat on this one. I was still the unofficial commander of the sniper platoon and needed to be working with my rifle, not tied down with the Main. An uncomfortable thought nibbled at me: Is this the way it’s going to be?

  Dawn broke with us owning the key bridge across the Shatt al-Basra Canal. We resorted to brute force for the next step and pummeled the remaining airport defenders with sustained artillery barrages, bombardment by the tanks, slashing.50 caliber machine gun fire, and missiles from Cobra helicopters. The grunts moved in to finish the job and had an old-fashioned room-by-room shootout in the Sheraton Hotel, which separated the military and civilian sides of the airport. The Iraqi soldiers, outgunned and outclassed, soon began giving up, walking into the open with their hands up or waving white flags. Those who ran or continued to fight were killed. Our firepower was simply more than they could bear.

  By the middle of the day, the fight was all but over. A dozen civilians who had been caught inside the terminal made their way out to surrender after a morning in hell. Our only casualty was a Marine who was wounded when he tossed a grenade into a room at the Sheraton only to have some metal fragments blow back through the wall and hit his hand.

  About an hour after we took the airport, a bright yellow Nissan Pathfinder sports utility vehicle bearing a white flag of surrender drove onto the airstrip and cautiously approached some guys from India Company. When the four-wheel-drive SUV eased to a stop, a man in a crisp uniform stepped out and identified himself as the commanding general of the 51st Mechanized Division. He had nothing left with which to fight and wished to meet with our commanding officer. The astonished commander of India Company called for Colonel McCoy and suggested, “Darkside Six, this is India Six. You may want to come over h
ere.”

  McCoy was there instantly, and in an oddly formal moment reminiscent of a time when wars were fought by more gentlemanly rules, the Iraqi general politely declared, “I am surrendering to you.” McCoy accepted the surrender and then hustled the general back to higher headquarters for questioning. The Bull had taken a terrific trophy, but there was still some fighting going on.

  By nightfall of March 21, the second day, the shooting was over and the approaches to Basra were secure. We had broken through the main defense cordon, had captured the airport, held three vital bridges across the big canal, and were in position to stiff-arm any resistance that might try to emerge out of Basra.

  Casey and I escorted senior officers of our battalion and our replacement unit, the 1st Fusiliers of the British 7th Armored Brigade, the famed Desert Rats, on a tour of the vital points of the quiet battlefield. All night long, their companies moved in and took over from our units. Having come up the marshy Al Faw peninsula and battled for the oil fields, the Brits were more than capable of taking over and were tasked to conquer Basra itself.

  Kipling once wrote how a cheap bullet fired by the lowest enemy soldier can erase an important officer, and as a sniper, I love taking out the big guys on the other team. The leaders are not supposed to take chances, but nobody could put a leash on McCoy, and he stumbled into doing something foolish in all of the excitement.

  As I sat on the hood of his Humvee and ate my dinner of MREs-Meals Ready to Eat-that night, the colonel ducked out from under the tent of the Main headquarters, took a seat on an ammunition crate across from me, and lit one of his big cigars. We were developing a habit of getting together after a battle to compare thoughts on what had gone down, both right and wrong. He looked tired, not having had any sleep since Kuwait, but his spirits were buoyed by the two good days of work his Marines had turned in. “So, how’d you do?” he asked pleasantly, preparing me for a special ration of shit.

  “I only got two, boss,” I said, lighting a cigarette and describing the ambush of the Main. The man soaked up information of all sorts, and every piece of battlefield data helped him clarify the overall puzzle, so he listened to me describe working as a sniper in a shifting combat environment.

  McCoy nodded, then grinned, a crease of white teeth through a dust-caked face. “I got a tank,” he announced. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  McCoy and his driver, driving off the road to let some of our armor rumble by, had found an Iraqi T-55 tank dug into the sand, with only the turret, its big cannon, and a machine gun showing above ground. The colonel decided to attack it. With his radio operator, he checked out the surrounding trenches, then climbed aboard the tank and yanked on the turret hatches, which were locked from the inside. Frustrated, they ran back to their armored Humvee and opened up with their rifles and machine gun. The bullets just bounced off the steel hide of the monster, so McCoy ran back to the tank again and flung a fragmentation grenade at it, then ran back to cover again. Finally, he got out of the way, and one of our Abrams tanks popped a high-explosive round into the Iraqi tank with a volcanic detonation.

  It was a stupid thing for a commanding officer to do, but now I know that he had another purpose in mind rather than killing a piece of Iraqi armor that may or may not have had a crew inside. With that little adventure, McCoy solidified his credentials within the battalion as Darkside Six, the tank-eating commander, our own Darth Vader, and as word spread, his Marines puffed up with pride at the Old Man’s audacity.

  I was pissed. This guy was the heart of the baddest Marine battalion on the planet, and he had placed himself at great risk. For what? I was steaming, and I sat there on his Humvee and bitched at him that he was paid to lead and to think, not to go throwing grenades. What if he had been smoke-checked by some hajji soldier?

  He just laughed, unapologetic. I stormed away from him, trailed by his booming laugh. In the middle of a freakin’ war, was I supposed to be having some kind of weird competition with Darkside Six?

  God, we were tired, but we plunged into hours of getting the battalion refueled and rearmed, and what normally was a totally routine job became complicated and dangerous at almost every step. Men who had been up for at least forty-eight hours were moving like zombies as they handled enough gasoline, ammunition, and explosives to destroy us all. We could do it because our totally realistic training had drummed the pure routine of these very jobs deep into our minds and muscles.

  Then we were told to push ahead. Rest would come as soon as we reached our next dispersal area. Casey and I again were to lead the way with the advance quartering party, so we herded our vehicles together in a tight group, and instead of sleeping, we hit the road at 2:30 on Sunday morning, March 23. As we pulled away from Basra, bright flares of artificial light danced in the darkness over the city, and streaks of tracer fire arced into the smoky sky.

  The roadside was littered with discarded Iraqi uniforms and weapons thrown away as the enemy soldiers vanished back into the city to become instant civilians. We passed the burned-out hulks of armored vehicles, but there was no gruesome carpet of maimed and shredded bodies. As our British friends noted, it was not an untidy battlefield. The fight had been a good sparring session to get our feet wet, but this was not the battle royal we were expecting.

  That fight would fall to the British, and it would be another two weeks before they could enter the city, where many of the same Iraqi soldiers who had vanished at our approach had reappeared to fight alongside Saddam loyalists and fanatical fedayeen guerrillas. Vice President Dick Cheney had pledged, “We will be welcomed as liberators,” but Basra remained an untamed hornets’ nest, with the million-plus residents of the city hiding in their homes, waiting to see how it all turned out. Twelve years earlier, after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, they had responded to a call for revolt by President George H. W. Bush, only to have Saddam crush their rebellion with his usual cruel tactics and put Chemical Ali in charge. This time, the citizens were understandably wary.

  10

  Midnight Ride

  Everyone was familiar with the visions of Iraqi soldiers surrendering en masse during Operation Desert Storm, but that was not happening this time. We had a real shooting war on our hands.

  The danger was not confined to the rapidly shifting front line. With every turn of our wheels that moved us deeper into Iraq, the supply lines reaching all the way back to Kuwait became more stretched out and vulnerable. Enemy troops and irregular forces started chewing on those exposed convoys and slowed the vital river of ammunition, water, food, and fuel needed to maintain the forward momentum across the entire front.

  Far behind us, hard fighting was going on in the important port town of Umm Qsar, which had been expected to fall like a ripe apple, and the British had stalled outside of a hostile Basra. To the west, the Army’s V Corps out in the desert was encountering heavy resistance around Najaf, and an entire squadron of Apache helicopters of the 101st Airborne would be shot up during a night raid close to Karbala. Plans for a two-front strategy crumbled when Turkey refused to let the sixteen thousand troops of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division cross its territory to enter Iraq from the north.

  Iraq is as big as California, though, so what was happening in one section often was not even noticed elsewhere, just as a car wreck in Los Angeles is unknown in San Francisco. The sudden developments in other flashpoints of fighting would not have been good news, had we known about it, but we didn’t, so we kept moving. After Basra, our own battalion had to go hunting for the war.

  We were part of an overall dash by the 1st Marine Division toward Baghdad, and we soon passed the junction where Route 8, the main highway running northwest out of Kuwait, split into Iraq’s two major highways, Routes 1 and 7, almost parallel corridors that would take us all the way to the capital. For us, things had been going well. We were trained to be nimble and move swiftly, and we were carrying enough of our own supplies to fight for several days, so despite shortages elsewhere, slowdowns, and ambushes, the advance, from
where we sat, still had the shape of the proverbial irresistible force that had not yet met an object that could not be moved. We were making bold, breathtaking jumps forward into enemy territory, and lines of tanks, armored vehicles, Humvees, and trucks of every sort were thundering along the wide roads and through the untracked desert. Speed was our rule. Use your wheels.

  It was still Sunday, March 23, the same day we had pulled out of Basra, and although we were exhausted, sleep was still not in the cards. The bright daylight seared our weary eyes by the time we pulled into a dispersal area some thirty kilometers east of the city of An Nasiriyah, a tangled sprawl of buildings and three hundred thousand residents near the southern end of Route 7.

  Another Marine unit was tasked to go into the city and capture two bridges, and when they did, they crashed headlong into an unexpectedly strong force of Iraqi paramilitaries and fanatical fedayeen guerrillas who locked them into a blazing gunfight. The enemy hid among civilians, so casualties among average citizens rose steadily during what became a bloody Sunday for both sides. The bridges eventually were captured, but at the cost of twenty-nine dead Marines and an unknown number of Iraqi casualties. Nobody had expected such fierce resistance.

  Even before the Marines went in, an eighteen-truck supply convoy of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed when the drivers, exhausted after almost thirty-six straight hours on the road, somehow blundered into An Nasiriyah. Eleven of the soldiers were killed and seven more taken prisoner, including nineteen-year-old Private First Class Jessica Lynch from West Virginia.