corpses strewn about their scarred city kicked a soccer ball around a desolate field. To these people, we were only the latest conquering army, and they were already getting on with their lives.
Fire from our 155 mm howitzers rumbled overhead in kettledrum staccato to light up any area that the enemy might use to counterattack as we regrouped at the edge of the city, with the armored vehicles lining up at a newly liberated gasoline station to fill their big fuel tanks. Let Saddam pay the bill. About thirty kilometers farther up Route 7, we went into a defensive position beside the road. A lone, abandoned Iraqi 20 mm antiaircraft gun pointed its useless barrel at a sky filled with potential targets as Coalition planes roamed freely, heading north on bomb runs. The ground was covered with the gun’s unfired ammunition.
April 3 had been a very long and dangerous day, and Al Kut had been a dangerous place. Mark Evnin was the only Marine who was killed, but several others were wounded, including a corporal who caught a burst from an enemy machine gun-seven bullets on a diagonal line across his torso from his right hip to his left shoulder. He lived because the ballistic plates in his flak jacked stopped three potentially fatal rounds.
Another casualty was Captain Bryan Lewis, the commander of our Bravo Company tanks. During the opening moments of the battle for the palm grove, an Iraqi soldier managed to put a bullet through Lewis’s left hand before being killed. Lewis never paused in his relentless attack, waited until after the fight to even tell anyone that he was injured, and refused to leave his command and go to the hospital. I looked straight through the hole in his hand and could see daylight on the other side. After a few days, it began to scab over. Lewis was the Man. I recalled how strange it was that, way back in Basra, I had doubted his abilities. Since then, he had repeatedly proven himself to be the ready and reliable leader of our armored spearhead, and by the time he was wounded, he was one tough Marine.
Bravo Company had a warrior for a leader, but not all officers are made of such stuff. For instance, Officer Bob had sent out a patrol of only six men to clear a factory complex about 1,400 meters away from the headquarters-six Marines for a job big enough to require a company, and with no backup force and no one in a protective overwatch position.
Fighting raged nearby when he did it. Just a few minutes earlier, a Harrier fighter jet had dropped a thousand- pound bomb to pulverize some Iraqi troops. Kilo Company infantrymen were on the attack, and a platoon of tanks from Bravo cut down a half dozen silly Iraqi solders who charged the heavily armored Abrams tanks with only AK- 47s. RPG rockets trailing smoky tails whooshed around all morning, hand grenades exploded with deadly
To me it was a dumb and dangerous move, and I went out in a hurry to get the team safely back to our lines. The patrol had found a couple of antiaircraft guns inside one of the buildings, and after checking to be sure no rocket-propelled grenades were in the room, I popped thermite grenades on the big guns.
There had been a shake-up within the beleaguered, slow-moving Task Force Tarawa. Their bravery was never a question to me, but we all knew something was wrong over there, and it came as no surprise when the commander of the 1st Marine Regiment was literally promoted upstairs to fly around the battlefield and coordinate air support. Under its new leaders, the regiment regrouped and got back into the race to Baghdad. So my question was, if they could replace a regimental commander, a full bird colonel, why wouldn’t they fire someone much less important in the grand scheme of things, a screwed-up junior staff officer who I thought was giving stupid people a bad name?
After helping get the Main squared away at our new location, I had some chow, cleaned my rifle, and brought my gun book up to date. The front page is printed with standard cheat-sheet data that helps snipers remember pertinent things about the so-called average man-that he is seventy-two inches tall, the length of his head is ten inches, he is twenty inches across the shoulder, and neck to belly button is a dozen inches. Those details, part of any sniper’s memorized table of algorithms, help determine how best to kill a target. This evening, I was writing around the margins of the green page.
I had smoke-checked two more men that day. I logged the details of those shootings as I normally would, then added them to a special table of results that I had created on the front page. Starting back in Basra, I had written down the numerical sequence of my kills and crossed each number out with a big X. Tonight, I wrote “11” and “12” and crossed them out. The table was not being kept out of grim braggadocio but simply as a practical tool. If I needed to prove in a hurry that I could help an officer whom I did not know, to get permission to intrude into a fight on his dirt, I could just flash that page of the gun book, like a police officer showing a badge, and save a lot of arguing.
Being in double digits meant that I now carried the best number in the sniper platoon, which was just as it should have been. How could I lead the boys if I wasn’t the best among them? Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had hardly begun.
When I finished with the gun book, I settled in to get a few hours of sleep, but the death of Mark Evnin still ate at me. I thought I had stabilized my dangerous emotional seesaw, but when one of my own Marines was killed, it tilted again, and I knew I had to get it back in balance in a hurry.
I was the tough guy, the stone-cold killer who was never bothered by something as absurd as personal feelings. While I freely bitched about many things to anyone, anytime, I had to remain true to my badass character of designated gunslinger. But day after day, I also had to listen to other people’s problems and never really speak of my own. Doing so would be misinterpreted as a sign of weakness, and I had to stay invincible. I had to be there for everyone else, but no one was there for me-certainly not here on the field of battle, and most likely not at home either. As I went to sleep, I again slammed those mental doors shut hard and coiled into my solitary, emotionless, fuck-you-all, don’t-need-anybody mode. The lone gunman felt very damned alone.
The war gave us the morning off the next day, Friday, April 4. Few things are as sweet as a couple of hours of downtime during a combat situation that allow you to put aside the psychological and physical stress for a little while. Most of the regiment’s six thousand men took a break, knowing we would be back in the shit soon enough.
We had our own embedded reporters but also had inherited a gypsy group of newsies along the road, and cool jazz blared from the laptop computers they propped up on the hoods of their SUVs. They were a good group; we called them “the Jackals.” Marine began caging satellite minutes on the Jackals’ phones to make calls back home.
Even doing the mundane rearm and refit jobs felt almost like being on vacation, and we sank comfortably into boring routine. We hauled everything off the trucks and used a broom to sweep out the small dunes of dirt that had accumulated inside the vehicles, so much sand that we could pick it up by the handful. It was everywhere, even in the tightly closed boxes of ammunition. We field-stripped all the weapons to clean off the sand, grime, and carbon, cleaned the belts of machine gun bullets, and polished the optics systems, and we found humor in almost every situation. The lightheartedness masked the fundamental truth of this strange moment-we were all glad we were still alive.
Last, we cleaned our bodies and personal gear and washed our hair beneath warm water spilling from a buddy’s canteen. Two weeks into the war, and we all stank. Casey, who had gotten new boots just before the war began, peeled them off for the first time in days, and his feet smelled like dead rats. Staying clean during a fast- paced war is always a problem, particularly when you’re in a desert that makes you breathe and eat dirt. Once in a while, you might have a quick bucket of water dumped over your head, but you can never have a leisurely soaking, never anything resembling a real bath or shower. In a combat zone, just being able just to take off your boots and socks and air out your feet is a luxury. Everyone had stocked up on baby wipes and used them on faces and feet alike; at least applying moisture and taking away some of the caked-on grit gave you the illusion of being clean. Of course, you paid particular attention to the crotch after taking a dump-a relief not only because it emptied your bowels but because it was a chance to peel away the thick MOPP overalls and let some air into your sweat-soaked bottom.
The break was short. Ahead of us, Route 7 was blocked; the 5th Marines were in a hard fight to get through the city of Al Aziziyah, located at a horseshoe curve of the Tigris River. Our orders were to join them for an attack
