of my bicep on my knee, and leaned forward into a good tight position. I made certain there was no bone-on-bone contact, such as elbow to kneecap; that might feel solid, but it is an unstable platform because of slippage. The way I was knotted up, I controlled all of my movements. I glassed the area and visually got to know who was out in the street, scoping out every new person who appeared. After a while, confident that it was under control, I lowered the rifle and sat on the bench, taking only occasional looks through the scope at the street scene if something caught my interest. Periodically I would check out my little fan club on the nearby stoop, and they watched me right back.
Our prime rule during training is to become part of your surroundings, to stay hidden, and never expose yourself. Stealth is everything. On some missions, I had worn the traditional ghillie suit, a camouflage trick handed down over the generations from Scots gamekeepers, who invented them to make counting game and catching poachers easier. Vegetation plucked from local plants is pushed into burlap netting sewn all over an old fatigue uniform, and the irregular strips and leaves totally break up the human outline to help the sniper vanish into the background. Sniper training requires that you be able to sneak up within two hundred yards of spotters with binoculars and fire a blank round without being seen. Wearing my ghillie suit, I was the invisible man.
Now I wasn’t hiding at all but rode atop a truck and operated openly within a congested urban environment. In such plain view, I was the subject of an animated conversation among the six men who had started talking at me. I warmed to these guys and even traded cigarettes with one, but I never trusted them for a second. Who knew if a weapon might appear from beneath one of those long robes?
“Hey, dude,” I called out to Casey after glassing the area again. “Look at this. I’m dominating an entire avenue of approach, just me, from a park bench, like on a Sunday afternoon.” I felt like an eight-hundred-pound gorilla with a gun.
Later that afternoon, with Al Budayr in our hands, we went looking for information.
Marines blew a hole in a wall to get into the local police station, where they released prisoners and picked up notebooks filled with information and photographs. A cache of weapons was found in a schoolroom.
When the regional headquarters of Saddam’s political machine, the hated Ba’ath Party, was discovered, Casey and I accompanied Steve Blandford, the same smart chief warrant officer who had worked with us in the unexpected visit inside the Iraqi home an hour earlier, into the two-story lime-green building. It turned out to be a gold mine of intelligence, for it was packed with more logbooks than we could count, and Casey even retrieved the appointment and address books from the mayor’s office. Account ledgers noted payments and names. A detailed sketch of the town’s defensive positions, no more than a few weeks old and frequently modified, was discovered. Beneath the empty eyes on the posters of Saddam that were in every room, we hauled away a trove of information about his corrupt and savage government.
After we left, a certain junior officer decided to bring in a squad and secure the building. Corporal Dustin Campbell, who had helped me spot targets in Afak, was moving stealthily from room to room with another Marine when they heard glass breaking and the noise of someone walking. They went to full alert and set up shooting positions to take out the clumsy enemy solider they thought was blundering toward them. A window crashed nearby, and they tensed for the confrontation-but it was Officer Bob who suddenly walked into their sights. He had gotten separated and was entertaining himself by throwing rocks through windowpanes like some adolescent prankster.
Our mission to open Route 17 as a supply corridor between the isolated major Marine units was a total success, and we had crashed through Bonus Town, Hajil, Afak, and now Al Budayr, four towns with an estimated combined population of over two hundred thousand people. By moving aggressively and quickly, our tanks, the Amtracs, armored Humvees, and about seven hundred Marines simply ran over those little towns. Taking them aggressively had minimized casualties all around. Our audacious use of force and surprise became known as the Afak Drill, and most of the bad guys chose to run rather than face us.
However, the success of a single unit did not mean the entire war was going well. We had crossed the border from Kuwait into Iraq nine days ago, and despite making major advances, by March 29 things were not moving with the lightning speed that had been envisioned and was needed. The Army was having serious problems out in the desert, Basra still defied the British, and exposed supply convoys were raw meat for guerrilla attacks. With the Marines, our tanks were only just beginning to roll with the needed resupply vehicles over to Task Force Tarawa, and the 5th Marine Regiment was still bogged down in back of us, at Diwaniyah. Our raids along Route 17 had been successful, but the offensive was falling days behind schedule.
Snipers are always looking for an edge, because we don’t like to fight fair. So when Casey found me that evening after things had calmed down, I was recording my day’s work in my sniper’s logbook. I now had six kills since the start of the war, and I added specific notes about the weather conditions, the range, directions of the targets, windage, and a few other things. Racking up the new kills did not make me feel proud. Snipers hate what ultimately happens when we pull the trigger, but we understand that we are important fixtures in something much larger than ourselves. Out of professional habit, I entered my observations and results in the logbook. Over time, when we compare those notes, the books can reveal patterns of enemy behavior and highlight their mistakes, so we can kill more of them.
We shared some food-packages of nasty MREs. Casey was as excited as a pup, having been in the middle of some firefights, and he was clearly over the hump of worrying whether he could measure up as a combat Marine. “Is this all there is?” he asked. “I want more! Gimme more!”
“You want to fall off another roof?”
“Asshole. You know what I mean.”
He said that about two dozen prisoners had been captured that day and that maybe twenty bad guys had been killed. Ever the engineer, he pointed out, “You got four of the twenty today, Jack. Twenty-percent of the total for the whole battalion. Not bad.”
I put away the logbook and told him that I felt as if I had finally been taken off the leash and that I was happy to be contributing to the fight, able to see some shit and do some shit. There was no telling what was going to happen next, but I sensed target-rich environments ahead. “If this keeps up, I’m going to come out of this with some hellacious numbers.”
Life had been a lot simpler many years ago, when I first joined the Corps and was pulling duty as a crossing guard at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Simpler, but nowhere near as interesting.
That night, we decided that we no longer wanted to go into battle with Casey’s driver, Corporal Baby, because he had not measured up to our standards. That would not do, so we picked Corporal Dustin Campbell as his replacement. Campbell was one of the best riflemen in the company and had impressed me with his exceptional eyesight and courage during the recent fighting.
Campbell’s only problem was that he talked back to his superiors, which made him an even more natural fit for our team. Evervone recognized that Casey and I were in charge, but we encouraged what might be termed a free- flowing exchange of views. It not only taught the boys to be mentally quick, but if a guy could not hold up under our verbal abuse and dish it right back, how the hell was he going to stand up to somebody trying to kill him?
“I don’t know how to do this,” Campbell protested the first time we put him behind the wheel of the Humvee. “I’m just a small-town boy from Mississippi!”
Lieutenant Casey Kuhlman, a product of intense Marine Corps leadership training on how to deal sensitively with the concerns of his men, told Campbell to just shut the fuck up and drive.
14
Sunday, March 30, began with a brilliant sunrise and bad news from home. We had bedded down outside of Al Budayr after the long day of fighting on Saturday, and the memory of the smiling little Iraqi girl I had touched on the
