amount of collateral damage in the city.)
Air Force AC-130s also helped out with aerial observation from time to time. The big gunships had awesome firepower, though, as it happened, we never called on them to use their howitzers or cannons during this deployment. (Again, they had restrictive ROEs.) Instead, we relied on their night sensors, which gave them a good picture of the battlefield even in the pitch black.
One night we hit a house on a DA while a gunship circled above protectively. While we were going in, they called down and told us that we had a couple of “squirters”—guys running out the back.
I peeled off with a few of my boys and started following in the direction the gunship gave us. It appeared that the insurgents had ducked into a nearby house. I went in, and was met inside by a young man in his early twenties.
“Get down,” I yelled at him, motioning with my gun.
He looked at me blankly. I gestured again, this time pretty emphatically.
“Down! Down!”
He looked at me dumbfounded. I couldn’t tell whether he was planning to attack me or not, and I sure couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t complying. Better safe than sorry—I punched him and slapped him down to the ground.
His mother jumped out from the back, yelling something. By now there were a couple of guys inside with me, including my terp. The interpreter finally got things calmed down and started asking questions. The mother eventually explained that the boy was mentally handicapped, and didn’t understand what I’d been doing. We let him up.
Meanwhile, standing quietly to one side, was a man we thought was the father. But once we settled her concerns about her son, the mother made it clear she didn’t know who the asshole was. It turned out that he had just run in, only pretending to live there. So we had one of our squirters, courtesy of the Air Force.
I suppose I shouldn’t tell that story without giving myself up.
The house where the men ran from was actually the third house we hit that night. I’d led the boys to the first. We were all lined up outside, getting ready to breach in, when our OIC raised his voice.
“Something doesn’t look right,” he said. “I’m not feeling this.”
I craned my head back and glanced around.
“Shit,” I admitted. “I took you all to the wrong house.”
We backed out and went to the right one.
Did I ever hear the end of that?
Rhetorical question.
Twofer
One day we were out on an op near Sunset and another street, which came off on a T intersection. Dauber and I were up on a roof, watching to see what the locals were up to. Dauber had just gone off the gun for a break. As I pulled up my scope, I spotted two guys coming down the street toward me on a moped.
The guy on the back had a backpack. As I was watching, he dropped the backpack into a pothole.
He wasn’t dropping the mail; he was setting an IED.
“Y’all gotta watch this,” I told Dauber, who picked up his binoculars.
I let them get to about 150 yards away before I fired my .300 Win Mag. Dauber, watching through the binos, said it was like a scene from
Two guys with one shot. The taxpayer got good bang for his buck on that one.
The shot ended up being controversial. Because of the IED, the Army sent some people over to the scene. But it took them something like six hours to get there. Traffic backed up, and it was impossible for me, or anyone else, to watch the pothole for the entire time. Further complicating things, the Marines took down a dump truck suspected of being a mobile IED on the same road. Traffic backed up all over the place, and naturally the IED disappeared.
Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been a problem. But a few days earlier we had noticed a pattern: mopeds would ride past a COP a few minutes before and after an attack, obviously scouting the place and then getting intel on the attack. We requested to be cleared hot to shoot anyone on a moped. The request was denied.
The lawyers or someone in the chain of command probably thought I was blowing them off when they heard about my double shot. The JAG—Judge Advocate General, kind of like a military version of a prosecuting attorney— came out and investigated.
Fortunately, there were plenty of witnesses to what had happened. But I still had to answer all the JAG’s questions.
Meanwhile, the insurgents kept using mopeds and gathering intelligence. We watched them closely, and destroyed every parked moped we came across in houses and yards, but that was the most we could do.
Maybe legal expected us to wave and smile for the cameras.
It would have been tough to go and just blatantly shoot people in Iraq. For one thing, there were always plenty of witnesses around. For another, every time I killed someone in Ramadi I had to write a shooter’s statement on it.
No joke.
This was a report, separate from after-action reports, related only to the shots I took and kills I recorded. The information had to be very specific.
I had a little notebook with me, and I’d record the day, the time, details about the person, what he was doing, the round I used, how many shots I took, how far away the target was, and who witnessed the shot. All that went into the report, along with any other special circumstances.
The head shed claimed it was to protect me in case there was ever an investigation for an unjustified kill, but what I think I was really doing was covering the butts of people much further up the chain of command.
We kept a running tally of how many insurgents we shot, even during the worst firefights. One of our officers was always tasked with getting his own details on the shooting; he, in turn, would relay it back by radio. There were plenty of times when I was still engaging insurgents and giving details to LT or another officer at the same time. It got to be such a pain in the ass that one time when the officer came to ask the details on my shot, I told him it was a kid waving at me. It was just a sick joke I made. It was my way of saying, “Fuck off.”
The red tape of war.
I’m not sure how widespread the shooter statements were. For me, the process began during my second deployment when I was working on Haifa Street. In that case, someone else filled them out for me.
I’m pretty sure it was all CYA—cover your ass, or, in this case, cover the top guy’s ass.
We were slaughtering the enemy. In Ramadi, with our kill total becoming astronomical, the statements became mandatory and elaborate. I’d guess that the CO or someone on his staff saw the numbers and said that the lawyers might question what was going on, so let’s protect ourselves.
Great way to fight a war—be prepared to defend yourself for winning.
What a pain in the ass. I’d joke that it wasn’t worth shooting someone. (On the other hand, that’s one way I know exactly how many people I “officially” killed.)
