from my thoughts; life slowed down and became a black-and-white movie. The mechanics of the craft had taken over my body and the rifle was now part of me, as my mind whirred with permutations, calculations, and scraps of knowledge picked up doing this job in many places over the years. Things automatically fell into their proper places without my even realizing that I was thinking about them.
We joined some of the India guys atop a good building, and I settled in and spent five minutes glassing the new surroundings. The scope jarred to a sudden stop, as if it had a mind of its own. Four hundred and seventy-five yards away, a middle-aged man wearing a red beret and shoulder boards on his clean uniform stood at ease between a couple of buildings.
In the American military structure, we are trained to react even at the lowest levels, so if an officer goes down, someone else immediately takes over. The Iraqi army was structured so that no one automatically assumed the responsibilities of a fallen leader.
He was ready to fight, with a pistol on his hip and an AKM, the cut-down version of an AK-47, in his hands, but the only thing he was going to be doing now was dying. Without hesitation, I popped a round through his chest. It flew out of his back, and the bloodstained officer fell face first into the roadway. He would never issue another order, and if you cut off the head of a snake, the whole reptile dies. More confusion.
Two minutes later, I saw an Iraqi soldier jogging down a street and estimated the distance at slightly more than three football fields. A moving target requires new math for speed and distance; such shots have a minimum 90 percent success rate, so I decided to take it. I aimed at a point on a wall ahead of the guy and when he jogged across a specific dot engraved on the lens of my scope, I squeezed the trigger smoothly. The conscious mind can focus only on one thing at a time, and I was watching the runner, but my body was simultaneously making sure that I did not lose trigger control in my rush to take this target. The trigger must be pulled back exactly straight, because any side pressure can affect the flight of the shot ever so slightly, enough to cause a miss. A sniper learns to pull the trigger straight back, every time, so he can hold the necessary sight alignment.
My bullet hit the running soldier at kidney level. He tumbled down, his death fall tracked by a dark crescent of his blood on the wall. Kidney shots should be taken only as a last resort, since both of the organs have to be destroyed for a quick kill. There were a lot of variables, but this guy didn’t have a hope in hell from the second I first saw him. I couldn’t miss today, and I had to rein in the confidence that grew with every successful shot.
The hunting had been good so far, but the bridge was the decisive point of this battlefield, not individual soldiers, and we were still a good distance away. We were exhausted by the running and gunning and were sweating like pigs in the heavy MOPP suits as the sun beat down without mercy. Casey decided to get us over to Kilo Company, which was closing on the bridge under vicious enemy fire.
That meant we had to move across about five hundred yards of uncleared territory, where the chances of getting shot by Iraqis and Americans were about equal. But my rifle could help take that bridge, which was what this day was all about. “Pack up and let’s go,” Casey ordered, and we all took a quick drink of water and staggered to our feet, much like Boston Marathon runners who are all out of gas with Heartbreak Hill looming just ahead. This was where our intense physical conditioning paid off, because we could reach deep and find the extra energy we needed.
Casey set off at a slow trot; I came next, then the photographer, with Newbern and Tracy in the rear. Everyone knew that getting separated was probably certain death, but putting one foot in front of another was huffing-and- puffing work. Tracy was humping along, cursing, at the back of the line and warning the panting photographer not to quit. “You stop and that fucking old man’ll leave you here,” he said. I heard somebody puke, but we didn’t stop running. I grinned and kept pushing as hard as I could. We were doing the Baghdad Two-Mile at a full gallop.
We linked up with Kilo, steadily made our way forward, and finally got our first look at the double bridge that was causing so much trouble. It was a mess.
The Iraqis had blown the supports of the fifty-foot center section of the big bridge and dropped it into the river some ninety feet below. That meant our heavy armor was stuck on this side. The narrow pedestrian bridge was left as the only option, and the Iraqis had blown a hole about ten feet long in the middle of that one, too.
Since the Abrams tanks couldn’t provide protection up front, grunts would have to storm the damaged bridge. Tomorrow, the Marines of the Bull would attempt the first such dismounted river crossing since World War II, a dangerous daylight assault in which we would be funneled into an easy kill zone, have to patch a path across the gaping hole in the walkway, and all the while be surrounded by steel plates and girders that would send enemy bullets and shrapnel ricocheting all over the place. This would be a dangerous piece of work.
20
The Diyala Bridge was the crown jewel of this fight, for it was the only place anywhere along the entire Tigris River that offered any chance of a crossing. The Marines were on one side, and Baghdad was on the other. We had to get over there in a hurry.
Bullets were zinging from all around and the sky seemed to be burning as we hustled over to a small building that looked like an old guard shack only fifty meters to the southeast of our end. Gunfire ripped the steel bridge and everything around it, and that had to be brought under control if we were to have any hope of getting across tomorrow. The far end of the bridge seemed little more than piles of rubbish, an empty no-man’s-land that led into clusters of buildings that were interspersed with the spiky tops of palm trees, but a steady beat of gunfire still came from over there. The battalion had already set about pulverizing the area.
Casey and I and our boys resumed hunting from the flat roof of the guard shack, because from there I could reach all the way over the river to the enemy’s concealed positions. Two more of my snipers, Corporals Doug Carrington and Mike Harding, climbed up over the edge to join us, tripling our long-range firepower. I had assigned them to Kilo Company, and since I was now working on Kilo’s dirt, we were able to team up. We laid down a hurricane of precision fire that scythed through any Iraqi troops we could see across the river.
Colonel McCoy was telling a newspaper reporter about then, “Coughlin’s got seven or eight already, and he’s still at it.” Actually, I had brought down a witnessed and confirmed kill count of ten that day and possibly more. A kill must be confirmed for us to claim it, but when the action is fast and furious, the numbers become meaningless, because the overall mission is what is important. In such a case, as soon as we take a shot, we change our focus to a new threat and may never know what happened to the earlier target. We may think we have a kill, but the battle has moved on, so we aren’t sure because we do not go searching to verify them. We can make an educated guess that it was a sure kill, or that the guy would probably bleed out, but there are too many variables in the equation. We don’t have the time, inclination, or mission to check them all out. The shot itself would be recorded, but not a definite result.
The battle finally petered out late in the afternoon, and orders came down that nobody was going across the bridge tonight because of its damaged condition. Engineers would check out its structural integrity after dark.
Naturally, Officer Bob picked the lull in the battle to order Casey and me back to the Main headquarters. The Kilo Company commander protested that McCoy had given us to his command, and he needed snipers up front, where the action was hot. We had to control that bridge. After a lot of back-and-forth, a compromise was reached: I would stay at the bridge, but Casey would go back to hold Bob’s hand and would send the Panda Bear and the turret gunners, Marsh and Castillo, forward to relieve Tracy and Newbern. Griping every step of the way, knowing the Main was safe and under control without him, Casey returned to headquarters just as the sun was going down.
Darkness fell quickly, bringing an end to the hellish heat, but our day’s work wasn’t quite over. A Javelin missile team with advanced thermal optics joined us at the shack, and our little rooftop bristled with firepower. We were given the job of not allowing anyone to approach our positions or cause further damage to the bridge overnight, and we thought we could control it easily. Only a fool would try coming over the bridge to attack the hundreds of Marines who were gathering during the dark hours.
But about ten o’clock that night, somebody yelled a warning, and I went to full alert, jamming the gun into my
