I would have played it the rest of the deployment. If I’d done that, it might explain why I am actually pretty good at the game now.
If I had taken it.
I got on the .300 Win Mag in late afternoon. The city I was looking out at was brownish-yellow and gray, almost as if everything was shaded the light sepia of an old photograph. Many, though not all, of the buildings were made of bricks or covered with stucco in this same color. The stones and roadways were gray. A fine mist of desert dust seemed to hover over the houses. There were trees and other vegetation, but the overall landscape looked like a collection of dully painted boxes in the desert.
Most of the buildings were squat houses, two stories high, occasionally three or four. Minarets or prayer towers poked out of the grayness at irregular intervals. There were mosque domes scattered around—here a green egg flanked by a dozen smaller eggs, there a white turnip glinting white in the sinking sun.
The buildings were packed in tight, the streets almost geometrical in their grid pattern. There were walls everywhere. The city had already been at war for some time, and there was plenty of rubble not only around the edges but in the main thoroughfares. Dead ahead of me but out of view was the infamous bridge where the insurgents had desecrated the bodies of the Blackwater contractors half a year earlier. The bridge spanned the Euphrates, which flowed in an inverted V just south of my position.
My immediate concern was a set of railroad tracks about eight hundred yards from the building. There was a berm and a train trestle over the highway south of me. To the east, on my left as I looked out the window, the train line ran to a switching yard and station outside the main part of the city.
The Marine assault would sweep across the tracks, driving down and into an area from the Euphrates to a highway at the eastern end of the city, marked by a cloverleaf. This was an area roughly three and one-third miles wide; the plan was to move about a mile and a half deep to Iraqi Route 10 by November 10, a little less than three days. That might not seem like a lot—most Marines can probably walk that far in a half hour—but the path lay through a rat’s nest of booby-trapped streets and past heavily armed houses. Not only did the Marines expect to be fighting literally house to house and block to block, but they also realized that things would probably get worse as they went. You push the rats from one hole and they congregate in the next. Sooner or later, they run out of places to run.
Looking out the window, I was anxious for the battle to start. I wanted a target. I wanted to shoot someone.
I didn’t have to wait all that long.
From the building, I had a prime view across to the railroad tracks and the berm, and then beyond that into the city.
I started getting kills soon after I got on the gun. Most were back in the area near the city. Insurgents would move into that area, trying to get into position to attack or maybe spy on the Marines. They were about eight hundred meters away, across the railroad tracks and below the berm, so probably, in their mind, they couldn’t be seen and were safe.
They were badly mistaken.
I’ve already described what it felt like to take my first sniper shot; there may have been some hesitation in the back of my mind, an almost unconscious question:
But the rules of engagement were clear, and there was no doubt the man in my scope was an enemy. It wasn’t just the fact he was armed and maneuvering toward the Marines’ positions, though those were the important points for the ROEs. Civilians had been warned not to stay in the city, and while obviously not everyone had been able to escape, only small handfuls of innocents remained. The males of fighting age and sound minds within the city limits were almost all bad guys. They thought they were going to kick us out, just as they supposedly had kicked out the Marines in April.
After the first kill, the others come easy. I don’t have to psych myself up, or do anything special mentally—I look through the scope, get my target in the crosshairs, and kill my enemy before he kills one of my people.
I got three that day; Ray got two.
I would keep both eyes open while I was on the scope. With right eye looking through the scope, my left eye could still see the rest of the city. It gave me better situational awareness.
With Kilo
As the Marines moved into the city, they soon reached a position where we could no longer cover them from the apartment towers. We came down, ready for the next phase—working in the city itself.
I was assigned to Kilo Company, helping the Marine units on the western side of the city. They were the first wave of the assault, sweeping down block by block. Another company would come in behind them, securing the area and making sure that none of the insurgents snuck back in behind them. The idea was to clear Fallujah out, block by block.
The properties in this part of the city, as in many Iraqi cities, were walled off from their neighbors by thick brick and stucco walls. There were always nooks and crannies for insurgents to hide in. The backyards, usually flat with hard dirt or even cement, were rectangular mazes. It was a dry, dusty place, even with the river nearby. Most of the houses didn’t have running water; the water supply would be on the roof.
I worked with Marine snipers for several days during the first week or so of that phase of the assault. For much of the time I was paired with two Marine snipers and a JTAC, a SEAL who could call in air strikes. There would also be a few support guys, Marines who would provide security and occasionally help out with different tasks. These were Marines who wanted to be snipers; after their deployment, they were hoping to ship out to the Marine sniper school.
Every morning would start with about twenty minutes of what we called “fires”—mortars, artillery, bombs, missiles, rockets—it amounted to a hell of a lot of ordnance being dumped on key enemy positions. The fire would take out ammo caches or dumps, or soften up spots where we thought we’d have a lot of resistance. Black funnels of smoke would rise in the distance, caches hit by the bombings; the ground and air would rumble with secondary explosions.
At first, we were behind the Marine advance. But it didn’t take long before I realized we could do a better job by getting ahead of the squad on the ground. It gave us a better position, allowing us to surprise any insurgents who tried rallying to the ground unit.
It also gave us a hell of a lot more action. So we started taking houses to use as hides.
Once the bottom of the house was cleared, I’d run up the stairs from the top floor to the roof, emerging in the small shack that typically sheltered the entrance to the roof. Sure the roof was clear, I’d move over to the wall at the edge, get my bearings, and set up a position. Usually there would be something on the roof I could use—a chair or rugs—to make things more comfortable; if not, there was always something downstairs. I’d switched back to the Mk-11, realizing that most of my shots would be relatively close, because of the way the city was laid out. The weapon was more convenient than the Win Mag, and at these ranges just as deadly.
Meanwhile, the Marines on the ground would work down the street, usually side to side, clearing the houses. Once they reached a point where we could no longer cover them well, we’d move up and take a new spot, and the process would start over again.
Generally, we shot from roofs. They gave the best view and were often already equipped with chairs and the like. Most in the city were ringed by low-rise walls that provided protection when the enemy shot back. Plus, using the roofs allowed us to move quickly; the assault wouldn’t wait for us to take our time getting in position.
If the roof was no good, we would shoot from the upper story, usually out of a window. Once in a while, we would have to blow a sniper hole in the side of a wall to set up a firing position. That was rare, though; we didn’t want to draw more attention to our position by setting off an explosion, even if it was relatively small. (The holes
