the steel walls of the Amtrac. I was heading back to see J-Matt Baker to protest when a coded radio call broke through.
“Nightingale!” That single code word meant that Marines were down and urgent medical evacuation was needed. It was also my ticket out to the fight. Casey and I and our boys jumped into the Humvees to provide security for an ambulance Amtrac on a two-minute sprint to the front edge of the battle. We wove through debris on the road and past smoking hulks of enemy T-62 tanks in which ammunition was still cooking off in booming explosions. A CAAT came screaming back, and its commander said it was carrying out the wounded men. We cut the ambulance free to return while we kept going to the fight. Although I didn’t know it at the time, lying in the CAAT was a badly wounded Mark Evnin, the eager kid from Vermont who had been my spotter only two days before when we took out that sniper on the bus in Ad Diwaniyah. He would die before I even knew he was hit.
The palm grove was alive with action, but the thick dust, flashes of fire, and flying debris made it impossible to distinguish who was who, so we pulled to a stop and I climbed atop the Humvee. Since the tanks and grunts were already at work among the trees, I glassed over to the right and found that the north side of the battle zone seemed open for a flank attack on the Marines. I lasered some ranges and yelled down that we would be staying in this spot for a while, so Casey spread the boys out in a protective cordon. The radio squawked annoyingly: Officer Bob, telling us to return to his position. We ignored him.
I lay there, still as a corpse, with my eyeball becoming part of the scope, magnifying my world in multiples. A mirage down the way tipped me about wind conditions, and I adjusted the setting, then scanned the empty streets and worked my view up to the rooftops. Accumulating knowledge of repeated behavior is a prime reason for keeping sniper logbooks. Ours had taught us that the Iraqis liked to hang out near those little doorways that exit onto the rooftops, so I gave extra attention to every one of those that I found.
Only three minutes into my search, one of them slowly opened, and an Iraqi soldier stepped out, carrying an RPK light machine gun. I let him peek out a bit more as I adjusted the rifle to a distance of 461 yards and dialed another bit of windage onto the scope. This guy knew what he was doing and was being careful, deliberately taking his time before stepping into the open, but his caution was not enough to save him. I already had my crosshairs centered on his chest. I had no intention of letting him come close to shooting.
The mathematics of the battlefield, time, motion, distance, weather conditions, and angle and speed of the bullet merged into smooth calculations that I did in my head, without really thinking about it. Do this sort of thing long enough and those factors blend together.
Exhale, slow pull of one-two-three pounds of pressure on the trigger, and my rifle fired and bucked comfortably into my shoulder with the recoil. I was concentrating so hard that I barely heard the gunshot, but the round took the soldier dead center, and I saw a hole open eight inches below his throat. The force of impact threw him back down the stairs, leaving the door swinging slowly on its hinges.
Bob continued badgering us to return immediately. “Tell him we’re busy killing people,” Casey instructed his radio operator.
I slid my scope around some other buildings, down to ground level again, and along a street that ran perpendicular to our position. About a quarter mile away, several people were peeking around a distant corner.
By this time, Officer Bob was furious and gave us a direct order over the radio to come back immediately. Casey tried to tell him that we were actively engaging targets on a threatened flank, but Bob replied with another order that gave us no choice but to leave. It meant that we were giving the enemy a wide avenue of approach.
We got lucky, because another good sniper, Sergeant Eric Meeks, showed up within minutes, recognized the threat, and took over the position. Over the next few minutes, Meeks took down another RPG gunner and four more Iraqi riflemen, effectively shutting down the street. But there had been a window of two to three minutes when the approach had been unguarded. Next time, we vowed, we would not be so obedient. If Officer Bob wanted us, he would have to come get us.
Back at the Main, I was stunned to learn that Mark Envin was one of the wounded Marines we had gone out to retrieve.
When the fight had broken out in the grove of date palms, Sergeant Major Dave Howell directed his Humvee to roar in close so he could direct the advancing grunts. AK-47 bullets were zinging about, and an RPG erupted from a trench line only six feet from the road, so they stopped their truck, and Howell got out of his Humvee with a grenade launcher in his hands. Evnin, the driver, jumped out right beside him. Dino Moreno also got into a shooting position. The job I had assigned them was to protect Howell, even in the teeth of enemy fire, and that’s exactly what they did until one of the enemy bullets burrowed beneath Mark’s flak jacket and tore through his femoral artery. Howell tried to stanch the flow of blood while Moreno gave covering fire, and Evnin looked up at Howell and wisecracked, “Look at this, asshole. You got me shot!”
My boy had lost a lot of blood before they could get him onto a medical evacuation helicopter, a big twin- rotored Chinook. He died in that bird before it reached the aid station.
It shook me. He was not the first, nor would he be the last, of our battalion to die, but Mark was the only man in my entire career to die directly under my command. I almost felt as if I had been the one to pull the trigger on him.
As much as I was trying to banish emotion from my thoughts, I couldn’t, and a lot of guilt was added to the load. I had selected Mark for the platoon and spent hours and hours with him over the past two years, coaching him on how to realize his dream of being a sniper. War requires compromises, and when the fool who had been the sergeant major’s original driver chickened out before the war, I had thought nothing of letting Evnin take over that driving job in addition to being Dino Moreno’s spotter. So Mark was killed taking the place of a coward.
His death had a sharp impact on our tight little sniper community. We are used to dealing death, not absorbing it. A couple of my snipers who had been working with the tank battalion at Al Kut had come clanking back down the road after the fight, and Corporal Sean Dunn jumped down from a tank and asked me, “Who got hit?”
When I told him, Dunn, who had been Mark’s best friend and had gone through school with him, almost collapsed. Standing beside that scarred road, I held the big Marine in my arms while his tears painted muddy paths down his dirty cheeks.
All the while, I wondered what would have happened if I had been able to get into the fight earlier. Could I have saved the boy? I believed the death was my fault, for I had ordered Mark into that assignment, and now I would just have to live with the terrible result. War really, really sucks. Mark was part of my family, and I will miss him.
17
We were finished with Al Kut by 2:54 in the afternoon and began to withdraw, completely changing direction in order to rejoin the push toward Baghdad, only a hundred miles to the northwest. Explosions boomed in the distance as captured caches of enemy ammunition and weapons were blown up. Our part of the fight was done, and the Marines of Task Force Tarawa could clean up the rest. We had helped kick the butts of the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard, and now it was time to leave.
The road out, which had been empty on our way into Al Kut, was now lined with Iraqi civilians, some waving and giving thumbs-ups while others just stared with baleful eyes. They had known a battle was coming, so they had closed their shops and left their homes until the fighting was done, and now they were reappearing to see what was left. Looters were already stripping destroyed vehicles. Kids obviously untroubled by the bloody and torn
