the grunts below. My spotter looked quickly at the range card we had sketched earlier, saw that the window was exactly 623 yards away, and called the shot. “Target One-Alpha 623!” he called, and three snipers put the guy just a little above the crosshairs of their scopes to allow for a bit of an arc at that distance. We all fired at the same instant, and the guy was torn apart when our three rounds simultaneously exploded into his chest, shoulder, and stomach. The grunts rushed in to clear those buildings, and another cease-fire was ordered.
I pushed in a fresh five-round clip and scanned the area carefully. A tall, strangely well-groomed man was on the balcony of a nearby building, waving to militiamen gathered below. I locked onto him but, under the rules of engagement, did not fire, since he was not a direct threat and the men below were only milling about. A “technical,” a truck with a machine gun mounted on the back, drove up, and gunmen congregated around it. I didn’t know whether this guy was a warlord, but he sure seemed to be organizing a counterattack. I reported the situation and was told that if the gate to that compound opened, I was to take him out.
People around the man began pointing and gesturing my way, and when the man on the balcony turned, he saw a big SASR rifle and the large eye of my telescope pointing straight at his nose. He dropped his hands slowly and went inside, leaving the men in the courtyard below as a leaderless mob. This fight was over.
The 10th Mountain compound had a mess tent, and the cooks, bless their hearts, had been busy at their stoves while the fighting raged outside the walls. After the long night in the rain and the ferocious battle, my boys and I were starved, and I loaded a plate with potatoes, eggs, and some awesome links of sausage. We had stood down, but my adrenaline was still pumping and my combat senses were still sharp. The taste buds were wide-awake, and I shoveled in the food. My fellow snipers and I yelled insults at each other, and everything was in vivid color.
The colonel who had welcomed me came into the tent. He was one of those big dudes, a six-foot-something who looked sharp in his creased battle-dress uniform with a pistol on his hip. He swaggered to our table and looked with disdain at the stack of food disappearing into me, a man who had just finished killing a bunch of people. “How can you sit here and eat like this?” he asked.
“I’m fucking hungry,” I replied, detecting a problem. A hush settled over the mess tent.
“Well,” said the colonel with a rather theatrical sigh, “I guess that’s the difference between us.”
I stand five-nine and weigh 165, but I never back down from bullies. I rose from the bench and moved into his personal space. “No. The difference between us is that I don’t squeal for help when somebody shoots at me.”
The colonel huffed, and his eyeballs bulged with surprise. “Who the fuck are you, anyway? What’s your rank?” He still had no clue, pulling this chickenshit routine right after we had saved his ass.
I had been through too many fights in too many places on this planet to take any shit from this guy, colonel or no. Hell, he had probably been shuffling papers at his desk a few nights ago when I was out on foot patrol in the rain with the French Foreign Legion. “My name is Gabriel,” I said, smirking. My senses were quivering again, my muscles tense. I knew my boys had my back if an Army-Marine brawl erupted. “And my rank is none of your damned business. You got a problem, take it up with General Klimp.”
The first sergeant stepped between us before anyone threw a punch. The colonel left, we finished our meal and returned through quiet streets to the stadium. Instead of chewing me out, General Klimp signed the papers awarding me a Navy-Marine Corps Commendation Medal for my work that day.
The Army colonel had been wrong to believe that snipers, who are specially trained for years not to let emotion get in the way of the job, do not have human responses. We just don’t let anyone see them.
It was later that evening when my body, exhausted from the lack of sleep and the exertions of the day, told me it was time to be alone. I found a shadowy storage room deep beneath the stadium, sat on a wooden crate, and allowed myself a private, two-minute nervous breakdown. During combat, I never doubt what I am doing, but it does get to me later, and I shook like a leaf as I sat there and reviewed the carnage I had caused that day.
There had been a lot of shooting out there, but I carried the big gun, and I had put holes in tanks, technicals, armored vehicles, and people. I was credited with eight confirmed kills and probably got more than that, but numbers never matter. I remembered each target vividly, seeing them again just as I had with my scope when I blew away their last moment of life. These regular little sessions with myself are as close as I come to thinking of the enemy as individual human beings who might have families and dreams and identities of their own. Today, they were trying to kill Americans, so I had no choice but to do my job before they could do theirs.
I was not wallowing in some trough of melancholy or depression, for these moments are merely chances to let my brain catch up with what my trigger finger has been doing. After a few minutes, the shaking subsided, and with my self-examination done, I got my shit together and went back to work.
2
Time passes slowly in a sniper hide as you lie totally silent, sometimes for days, except for a periodic whispered radio check, and are bedeviled by bugs, hunger, thirst, and weather. While your partner is on watch, your thoughts can drift, and I spent many idle hours thinking about the odd track that brought me to whatever hole in the ground I was occupying at the moment. A rock and baseball had a lot to do with it.
I was born on January 12, 1966, into a 100 percent Irish family. Home was a three-story, six-bedroom colonial house located in a neighborhood of similar homes in a nice area of Waltham, Massachusetts, about twenty miles from downtown Boston. I lived there from the time I came home from the hospital until I left to join the Marines nineteen years later.
I had four sisters, all of whom were older than I, and every time one of them would marry and move out, I would be bumped up to a larger bedroom. Mom had her hands full taking care of us.
One thing that set our house apart was that it would change colors periodically, for my father was a painting contractor. I remember waiting on the glassed-in porch for him to come home (at the time, the house was yellow, with brown trim) and running outside when his green work truck came into the driveway, covered with ladders, filled with buckets and brushes, and smelling of paint and turpentine. His work clothes were a splatter of small rainbows.
My parents were a perfect fit among the other couples who had moved into the changing neighborhood, all of them young blue-collar types who had worked hard in their early years of marriage, had families, and were now taking newer, bolder steps into the world, everyone intent on taking life to the next level. One neighbor bought a heating oil business, and a plumber set up his own shop, but my dad took a different path.
Had he wanted to, he probably could have continued to build his contracting business, but his passion was not business and house painting. He was into books and history. I recall seeing my father in a chair, reading, many times at night, after another noisy dinner in which we all got a say in the conversation. He eventually went back to school and got his degrees, then moved into teaching.
His legacies to me were not vague ideas from academia though. They came from those hard years as a painter when he had postponed his teaching dream to support his family through sweat and toil. I was shown, not told, the workingman’s belief in hard labor, never giving up, valuing the family, and meeting your responsibilities. He was my hero.
I was not one of those aw-shucks country boys who learned to shoot before he learned to walk. My father did not even own a gun, and we never went hunting together. In fact, I never fired a rifle before joining the Marine Corps, and I still do not hunt animals. I am not against the sport; I just see no thrill, or challenge, in shooting an animal. Once you hunt men, nothing else can compare.
Growing up in an urban area taught me priceless street survival skills, and I learned how to be aggressive and protect myself at a young age. Some of the sternest lessons came from my sisters, who kept locking me out of the house when they were supposed to be babysitting me, because, they claimed, I was a pest. I used my outside time on sports and became a pretty fair athlete, with quick reflexes honed through hours of climbing trees and chasing balls and hockey pucks. When I looked up during a ball game, I would usually see at least one of my parents watching.
Coming home from school one day, I wandered into a rock fight between older kids, and a sharp stone smashed into my eye socket and knocked me unconscious. I awoke in the hospital, blind in my right eye because so many
