Once we were out in the field, we followed him across some farmland on a narrow path that led to a pipe across a path of mud. I was at the back at the group, one of the last to come across the pipe. As I stepped off, I sunk right through the mud and into crap up to my knee. The mud was actually just a thin crust atop a deep pool of sewage.
It stunk even worse than Iraq usually stunk.
“Tommy,” I yelled, “I’m going to whip your ass as soon as we get to the house.”
We pushed on to the house. I was still in the rear. We cleared the house and, once all the snipers were deployed, I went to find Tommy and give him the thrashing I’d promised.
Tommy was already paying for his sins: when I found him downstairs, he was hooked up to an IV and puking his brains out. He had fallen into the muck and was completely covered with shit. He was sick for a day, and he smelled for a week.
Every article of clothing he’d been wearing was disposed of, probably by a hazmat unit.
Served him right.
I spent somewhere between two and three months in the villages. I had roughly twenty confirmed kills while I was there. The action on any particular op could be fierce; it could also be slow. There was no predicting.
Most of the houses we took over belonged to families who at least pretended to be neutral; I’d guess that the majority of them hated the insurgents for causing trouble and would have been even happier than we were to have the bad guys leave. But there were exceptions, and we were plenty frustrated when we couldn’t do anything about it.
We went into one house and saw police uniforms. We knew instantly that the owner was muj—the insurgents were stealing uniforms and using them to disguise themselves in attacks.
Of course he gave us a BS line about having just gotten a job as a part-time police officer—something he’d mysteriously forgotten to mention when we first interrogated him.
We called it back to the Army, gave them the information, and asked what to do.
They had no intelligence on the guy. In the end, they decided the uniforms weren’t evidence of anything.
We were told to turn him loose. So we did.
It gave us something to think about every time we heard of an attack by insurgents dressed as policemen, over the next few weeks.
Extracted
One night we entered another village and took over a house at the edge of some large open fields, including one used for soccer. We set up without a problem, surveying the village and preparing for any trouble we might face in the morning.
The tempo of the ops had slowed quite a bit over the past week or two; it looked as if things were slacking down, at least for us. I started thinking about going back west and rejoining my platoon.
I set up in a room on the second floor with LT. We had an Army sniper and his spotter in the room next to us, and a bunch of guys on the roof. I’d taken the .338 Lapua with me, figuring that most of my shots would be on the long side, since we were on the edge of the village. With the area around us quiet, I started scanning out farther, to the next village, a little more than a mile away.
At some point I saw a one-story house with someone moving on the roof. It was about 2,100 yards away, and even with a twenty-five power scope I couldn’t make out much more than an outline. I studied the person, but at that point he didn’t seem to have a weapon, or at least he wasn’t showing it. His back was to me, so I could watch him, but he couldn’t see me. I thought he was suspicious, but he wasn’t doing anything dangerous, so I let him be.
A little while later an Army convoy came down the road beyond the other village, heading in the direction of the COP we had staged out of. As it got closer, the man on the roof raised a weapon to his shoulder. Now the outline was clear: he had a rocket launcher, and he was aiming it at Americans.
We had no way of calling the convoy directly—to this day I don’t know exactly who they were, except that they were Army. But I put my scope on him and fired, hoping to at least scare him off with the shot or maybe warn the convoy.
At 2,100 yards, plus a little change, it would take a lot of luck to hit him.
A lot of luck.
Maybe the way I jerked the trigger to the right adjusted for the wind. Maybe gravity shifted and put that bullet right where it had to be. Maybe I was just the luckiest son of a bitch in Iraq. Whatever—I watched through my scope as the shot hit the Iraqi, who tumbled over the wall to the ground.
“Wow,” I muttered.
“You dumb lucky fucker,” said LT.
Twenty-one hundred yards. The shot amazes me even now. It was a straight-up luck shot; no way one shot should have gotten him.
But it did. It was my longest confirmed kill in Iraq, even longer than that shot in Fallujah.
The convoy started reacting, probably unaware of how close they’d come to getting lit up. I went back to scanning for bad guys.
As the day went on, we started taking fire from AKs and rocket-propelled grenades. The conflict ratcheted up quickly. The RPGs began tearing holes in the loose concrete or adobe walls, breaking through and starting fires.
We decided it was time to leave and called for extraction:
We waited, continuing the firefight and ducking the insurgents’ growing spray of bullets. Finally, the relief force reported that it was five hundred yards away, on the other side of the soccer field.
That was as close as they were getting.
A pair of Army Hummers blew through the village and appeared at the doors, but they couldn’t take all of us. The rest of us started to run for the RG-33s.
Someone threw a smoke grenade, I guess with the thought that it would cover our retreat. All it really did was make it impossible for us to see. (The grenades should be used to screen movement; you run behind the smoke. In this case, we had to run through it.) We ran from the house, through the cloud of smoke, ducking bullets and dodging into the open field.
It was like a scene from a movie. Bullets sprayed and plinked into the dirt.
The guy next to me fell. I thought he’d been hit. I stopped, but before I could grab him, he jumped to his feet—he’d only tripped.
“I’m good! I’m good!” he yelled.
Together we continued toward the trucks, bullets and turf flying everywhere. Finally, we reached the trucks. I jumped into the back of one of the RG-33s. As I caught my breath, bullets splashed against one of the bulletproof windows on the side, spiderwebbing the glass.
A few days later, I was westward-bound, back to Delta Platoon. The transfer I’d asked for earlier was granted.
The timing was good. Things were starting to get to me. The stress had been building. Little did I know it was going to get a lot worse, even as the fighting got a lot less.
