About twenty minutes later, we found a multistory house with a high roof from which I could increase my view, and Chief Warrant Officer Steve Blandford, one of our translators, approached a man standing behind a metal gate. The man, in his midthirties, agreed to let us go up and swung open the gate in the five-foot-high wall that surrounded the house. Although we had permission, we all remained combat wary, because we did not know who else might be behind that door. We left some of the guys outside for security while Casey, the Panda, Blandford, and I went in.
The place was modest, but the furniture was clean, although old. Colorful plates flashed brightly in a china closet, and a small piano was against one wall. Grandpa, in a long robe, was seated in the main room, and Grandma showed only a mild interest in the four Marines who were moving through her home, carrying weapons. Three kids played on wide rugs in the cool dimness, and a big-eyed little girl looked at me with a smile that could break a heart. The impulse was to lay down my weapon and comfort her, knowing she was disturbed by the big foreign men with guns in her home. I could almost see the same look on the faces of my own daughters in a similar situation, and I know I would want the soldier to be gentle with my children.
We did a tactical sweep as we went along, checking out a kitchen at the rear and a couple of bedrooms with mattresses on rug-covered floors. The family had been warned by Saddam’s henchmen that Marines slaughter everyone they see, but they were treating us like neighbors. They made welcoming gestures, and although they spoke a language I didn’t understand, their attitude was totally friendly. Amid that kindness, we had to fight our emotions to remain alert.
We went out the rear door and then up a stairwell to the roof. I did a brief visual check of the surrounding area but found nothing of interest, so we retraced our steps.
I could not help feeling that we were intruding into a private sanctuary. These good people were not frightened and were obviously glad we had arrived in Afak; they acted if they truly had been liberated. I thought about the men I had killed earlier that day and persuaded myself to believe they had bullied this and other families for years. I wanted to tell them not to worry, because I had smoke-checked some of the neighborhood thugs and those bad guys wouldn’t be coming back, but I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t.
On the way out, I paused a moment to reach down and pat the head of the little girl in the living room. It was my first feel-good moment of the war, and it made me homesick. I was happy to leave those people in peace and said a quick and private prayer that they would stay safe. But when I stepped back into the sunlight, I had my warrior face back on.
Our engineers had cleared the bridge at the eastern edge of town, and it was time to move out.
13
It was only a little after ten o’clock in the morning. I had already killed three enemy soldiers that day and was on the road to another fight. In the old days, a sniper never moved this fast.
I was back in my little nest aboard the armored Humvee, with my boots braced in the cargo nets to keep me from being thrown off if the Panda Bear made a sharp turn or one of his jaw-breaking sudden stops. Our backpacks, lashed to the outside of the truck, gave me a false sense of security, as if those little bits of cloth were going to stop a round. I did not feel invincible but was confident as we dashed down Route 17 toward our next target town, a place called Al Budayr. Things were going well, and I was right where I wanted to be.
We hit the village fast and hard, with Cobra helicopters taking out some antiaircraft artillery and the CAATs cutting off the escape routes. While an infantry company halted on the outskirts of town to give supporting fire, McCoy took an armored spearhead straight downtown.
Casey and I paused to plant the Main headquarters safely outside of the city, then sped into town, where civilians in a shabby open-air market watched as the Panda Bear skidded to a halt. Our tanks and Amtracs were parked with their heavy guns pointed down every street and alley.
“You’re late,” McCoy growled as I climbed down. He was pacing near his command truck, talking into his radio. Saddam Hussein smiled benevolently at us from a large, tattered poster, and sunlight glittered off empty brass shell casings all over the pavement.
“How’s that, boss?” I asked.
“I just dropped a
“Sounds like you’re getting slow,” I said with a smirk, dishing back some of his earlier sarcasm.
“How so?” McCoy rose to the bait.
“You let a few get away.”
He chuckled. “Remember I’m shooting with iron sights here. Not everybody has a scope.”
“Don’t hate me because I’m good, boss. I’ll glass the area and see if I can clean up your trash.”
“Yeah. Do that.” Our game continued.
The colonel’s Humvee was in the middle of the square, a great location for me, so I climbed onto the hood and wiggled into a shooting position. I braced against the windshield, and the machine gunner in the turret pointed to where they had last seen the enemy troops. This was an incredible change in the way snipers worked; instead of being disguised or hidden in the dirt and the dark, I was sprawled out on the truck in broad daylight smack in the middle of the town square. Being visible to the enemy had ceased being a factor, because this was not a clandestine mission, and I was just one Marine among many involved in this fight.
I did a systematic search starting about twenty yards in front of me, scanning from one side of the street to the other, from the roofs to the ground. Civilians continually moved through the sight of my scope, and I had to decide the fate of each individual then and there. Was he a threat or not? The midday sun glared from the buildings and paved streets, but I could not stop working just because my eye felt like it was about to fall out.
After about fifteen minutes, I found something in a second-story window of what looked like an old fortress, and I fastened onto it. What had been just a moving shadow solidified into the dark image of an Iraqi soldier with an AK-47.1 made a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) on the distance and dialed 430 yards into the scope, slowed my breathing, took up my trigger slack, and waited for his next move. This guy was already dead but just didn’t know it yet. When he moved more fully into the window to point his rifle at the Marines in the street below, I smoke-checked him where he stood, and the big round kicked him back into the room. Only then did I take out the range finder and laser the window, which was exactly 441 yards away, almost exactly a quarter of a mile.
“Coughlin!” McCoy barked, looking up from his radio. “Stop shooting my targets and get out of my sandbox. Go find your own place to shoot.”
I ignored him and glassed the area a bit longer to be sure there were no more threats, then politely obeyed and walked off, satisfied that I had one-upped the Boss.
I found Casey around the corner setting up protection for an Intelligence and Psychological Operations (Psy Ops) team that was using giant loudspeakers to blast recorded messages in Arabic, urging civilians to cooperate with the Americans and not to be afraid.
The technique worked all too well, because a growing crowd pressed in around them, wanting to voice complaints and point out suspicious people and settle some personal grudges. It looked like the bar scene from
By now, my sniper cover was completely blown, and I was walking around town with my rifle in my arms, as out in the open as a door-to-door magazine salesman. It made no difference at all on this new type of battleground.
Nearby, a tin awning hanging out from the wall of a shabby shop dropped a rectangle of shade over a battered white wooden bench, and I took advantage of the moment to escape the hot direct sun. A half dozen Iraqi men sat on a nearby stoop, smoking cigarettes and watching me closely, jabbering excitedly and pointing to the big sniper rifle and its scope. I nodded a greeting to them, and they nodded back.
Talk about being exposed.
I got back to work by putting my boot on the bench, then brought up my rifle, rested the fatty part of the back
