A herd of camels, saddled but riderless and separated by the storm from their owners, serenely strolled past at daybreak, their heads held high, haughty princes of this terrible environment.
I had hoped that by being out front, we might bump into some action, because I was feeling hamstrung. Once the battalion caught up with us, we rejoined the Main and continued to roll. Iraq seemed endless, and the odometer on my Humvee was ticking away the miles to Baghdad.
Were we ever going to find some fighting? “Is this what we’re going to be doing for the entire war?” Casey asked me one afternoon, and although I wanted to give him my usual optimistic song and dance, I was having some doubts myself. The days of the war were falling from the calendar at an alarming rate. It wouldn’t last much longer, and I had not been involved in any real fighting, including the dustup back at Basra. In moments of doubt, I wondered if McCoy had forgotten our deal, or had lost confidence in me.
11
There had been a major shake-up in the Pentagon over the past months, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wanting a thorough overhaul of the Army and new strategic thinking, won a decisive victory over the generals. Rumsfeld argued that a relatively small, fast-moving attack force could slice right through the Iraqi defenses and reach Baghdad quickly, making the war short. The generals argued for the more traditional doctrine laid down by Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Desert Storm and the current U.S. secretary of state: the combination of overwhelming force, a specific objective, and a clear exit strategy. Rumsfeld and his civilian deputies outmaneuvered and overruled them, and as a result, this offensive was being carried out with about half the manpower used in Desert Storm. Early in the planning, they had considered using only fifty thousand troops, but since Iraq had a population of twenty-four million people, including more than six million in Baghdad, that one was discarded.
Shortly before the invasion began, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq. He was upbraided by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and retired. Army Secretary Thomas White supported Shinseki and would be fired. Rumsfeld and his acolytes were clearly in control.
But now, their novel war plans were in jeopardy. Moving fast and keeping unrelenting pressure on the enemy meant that the advance could not slow down and that support troops had to keep pace, just the opposite of what was happening. Maps and reports showed the Army was struggling out in the desert, and the big Marine drive along the two big highways was sputtering. The unexpectedly tough enemy opposition, ambushes on convoys, bad weather, the sandstorm, and an increasingly dire fuel and supply situation had the top commanders second- guessing themselves. On television, former generals said the war wasn’t going well because we didn’t have enough troops involved. The whole enterprise had reached a critical point, and the leaders were about to order a three- week halt in place to refit, reorganize, and rethink.
Out in the sand, we were totally unaware of all of the bureaucratic fighting in Washington. I was just hanging around in the desert with Casey and my boys, and all we wanted to do was to get into the fight. Our trucks were packed with everything we needed, and there were Marines as far as we could see, lines of tracked vehicles and trucks and thousands of men, all moving in the same direction.
We were so firmly on the sidelines that except for some local patrols for security, we were snoozing, getting haircuts, doing laundry, cleaning weapons, and servicing the trucks. In fact, from where we stood, we thought the war was going quite well.
More than a week had elapsed since we had invaded Iraq, and my butt was sore from spending so much time bumping along in the passenger seat of my Humvee. I stomped around the sand and bitched out of frustration with being useless in the middle of a war. I was a sniper, and I needed to get into the fight.
About four kilometers directly ahead, the 5th Marine Regiment was bogged down on Route 1 outside of Ad Diwaniyah, a town of about a quarter million people on the central Iraqi plain. Every time the 5th Marines battled through one patch of ambushers, another bunch was waiting for them, and they had been taking casualties for almost two days. We were some four kilometers back and could hear a bit of battle going on,
And about fifty miles to the east, over on Route 7, another regimental-sized Marine unit called Task Force Tarawa had ground to a stop. They were blocked outside of Al Kut, a town where, back in the distant era of World War I, Turkish defenders held up the British drive on Baghdad for 143 days. We couldn’t wait that long, but TF Tarawa, which had been bloodied in An Nasiriyah, was fighting on fumes. They were just about out of everything, and the supply convoys trying to bring up water, ammunition, and fuel were being shot up in the south.
Finally, on Saturday, March 29, my luck changed and we got back into the game. Sergeant Major Dave Howell drove up, unfolded his stocky frame from the Humvee, and took me aside. “John, get your ass over to the command tent,” he said. “We’re getting out of this cluster fuck. They’ve decided to send in the Bull, and the Boss wants you.”
Dave had come out of Force Recon, and although he was the senior enlisted man in the battalion and a trusted tactical adviser to Colonel McCoy, he would always be just a fuckin’ grunt at heart. He loved to go tearing across the battlefield so he could guide a fight, and I had assigned two good snipers, Staff Sergeant Dino Moreno, a dark- haired Italian who had been placed in my slot as the sniper platoon sergeant when I moved over to be the H &S gunny, and Corporal Mark Evnin, a New Englander, to ride shotgun with him. When Howell’s regular Humvee driver decided to become a pacifist just before we went to war, Dave kicked his ass out of the truck and Evnin became the driver. The fourth seat was given to one of our more popular embedded reporters, John Koopman of the
Dave Howell was the only person in the Corps who called me John, instead of Jack, but usually only did so when he was angry, just as my father had done. Now I felt like my surrogate dad had given me a Christmas present. I grabbed Casey and headed for McCoy’s command post.
The new mission would have a totally unexpected result for me. Not only was I finally going to get into the shooting war, but since necessity breeds invention, a flat tire on a Humvee was about to become a stepping-stone to an important new variable in my craft, something that had never been taught in sniper school. My concept of a Mobile Sniper Strike Team, shelved long ago, was about to be reborn. The answer had been right under my nose the whole time.
Radios provided a low grumble of background noise in the large tent as McCoy sketched out his plan with a black grease pen on a whiteboard. Marines were tied down in independent struggles on Route 1 and on Route 7, but a thin east-west road called Highway 17 linked those two main highways. We were to go and capture that road to open a new supply route over to the beleaguered Task Force Tarawa, but the road was dotted with towns and villages, any one of which could be an enemy strongpoint, and we would have to tackle them, one after another. Since it was not in our nature to be passive, McCoy ordered, “Go in like you own the place. We’re going to kick over the beehive and see what comes out.”
McCoy and his staff had come up with a way to counter the Iraqi ambush teams that fired their barrages of rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, from the second row of buildings in a town, not the front row nearest the road on which the convoys were passing. That gave them some extra concealment and cover. So the Boss decided that if those turkeys wanted something to shoot at, we would give it to them.
We would stick a big sword right into the heart of any organized resistance by having our heavy armor bust straight into a town like a penetrating arrowhead. Then the tanks would sit there, intentionally presenting huge targets, begging to be shot at. An Abrams tank can shrug off a hit from a Hellfire missile, so while an RPG may go
While the Iraqi ambushers took potshots at the virtually impenetrable armor, our infantry would hit the first row
