Shooter

He pushed the incident from his mind, for it is an accepted fact of war that men die, and a leader must focus on the mission. The best way to help the wounded and remove the danger is to finish off the enemy, and that meant taking that bridge.

The Panda Bear and I hustled down to the guardhouse, and McCoy followed a few minutes later. “Ten minutes,” he told me.

Various media Jackals, who had heard about the plan for a river crossing, had been drifting in since daylight and jostled for position among the grunts. Many of the news types looked dazed after the deadly artillery barrage that had made them eat dirt, too.

Infantry Marines and combat engineers had scavenged the town throughout the night and had gathered a witch’s brew of wooden planks, strips of metal, part of a steel gate, and anything else that they might throw across the hole in the pedestrian bridge. They gathered now, looking like big pack rats carrying their treasure.

We lined up against the walls and waited through a countdown that seemed to take forever. I had a powerful team to take across the river, for our group had grown some more during the morning. I had the Panda and the two snipers who had come over from Kilo, Carrington and Harding. Then, out of nowhere, came still another sniper, Staff Sergeant Dino Moreno, who had been the partner of Mark Evnin. There were few flaws and no weaknesses in this bunch, and a lot of sniper rifles would be going across the river in the first wave. Once across, we would take up positions and let our long guns reach out to help control the captured bridgehead. We could cause a lot of trouble.

Time slowed down again, as if to let me think a bit before going out on a narrow bridge that we fully expected to be swept by enemy fire and the same sort of heavy opposition that we had encountered the day before. A daylight assault on a bridge was dangerous, and I wondered why, in the ultramodern twenty-first century, some bright tactician in a war college had not come up with a better way of doing this.

“Let’s do it,” McCoy said calmly, and Sergeant Major Dave Howell walked out into the middle of the road, yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” From my position beside the protective wall, I helpfully mentioned, “Dave, you’re going to get your ass shot off out there!” He didn’t even look at me, and his example banished any residual fear in the kids, who broke away from their hiding places with a shout of defiance and hit the bridge at a gallop.

The first guys out opened fire to cover Marines and engineers who ran out to fling their loads of sticks and steel across the gaping hole, then fell on their bellies and grabbed loose ends to hold the makeshift patch in place so that no one would fall through. The first assault squad immediately pounded out in single file, ran across the patch, and dashed across the narrow bridge. Other Marines shouted encouragement to spur them, while Dave Howell tried to get them to move more deliberately: “This is a marathon, not a sprint! Don’t bunch up!”

McCoy stepped forward, but Howell wrapped a big hand around the colonel’s arm and stopped him. “We can’t afford to lose you,” the sergeant major ordered his colonel. Then I started to move, but somebody grabbed my uniform and stopped me in my tracks, too. It was McCoy. If he couldn’t go, I couldn’t go. He held tight and growled, “You wait for me.” Howell had hold of the colonel, who had hold of me. As I stood there holding my sniper rifle and feeling like an idiot, more Marines thundered past, and Dino Moreno gave me a puzzled What the hell? look. I nodded for him to take off, and the snipers headed across without me.

After the first platoon and the snipers were on the far shore, sprawled out and shooting, McCoy was allowed to join the assault. Bullets pinged about, but the colonel walked across that bridge like John Wayne coming into a saloon, owning the place. While everyone else was sprinting around him, including photographers who dashed madly around with their cameras, McCoy moved at an almost casual pace, and with his radio handset clasped in one paw, he pulled his radio operator along with him. With his strange idea of fun, McCoy was playing a game within the game, trying to outcool his sergeants, men such as Howell and Courville, and I had no choice but to play along. If he wanted to walk across the damned bridge, then I had to walk, too, when the natural inclination of anyone with a brain was to run like hell.

The colonel is a big man, and his radio operator was also a large dude, so I carefully took a place right behind the two of them and matched the big guys step for step all the way across the broad Diyala Canal, being particularly careful to let them step on that rickety patch covering the hole before I did. When we reached the far side, McCoy looked over and said, “OK. Go have fun.”

I could get on with my war.

21

The Worst Thing

There is a dirty part of war that is seldom discussed. Little is written of it, and much less is said, for no one wants to talk about killing innocent people. By crossing that bridge, we stepped into one such troubled moment, a terrible situation that seemed preordained, with an outcome that was inevitable before it started. No matter how many times you try to turn back the clock, the ugly result remains unchanged. We did not intend to kill civilians, but we did, and we would just have to live with it. We did nothing wrong, but every Marine who was there would be scarred by what happened at the Diyala Canal.

The irregular fedayeen guerillas had taught us, over and over, that just because an Iraqi was not in uniform was no sign that he didn’t want to kill you. Our entire battalion had driven past the smoking remains of an Abrams tank that had been blown apart by a suicide bomber. We had been in brutal combat all day yesterday and had lost Marines to an artillery barrage this morning. Faced with an incredibly tense situation in a zone of ultimate danger, it was almost impossible-even unwise-for the average grunt to hold fire on someone coming steadily closer. Threat or no threat? Guess wrong and you and your buddies are dead.

The bridgehead on the far side of the river looked empty and desolate, as cratered as the dark side of the moon, when we finally got over there. Our gunfire had churned the area into a lumpy field of nothing, overlaid with a frayed carpet of battle junk. Abandoned RPGs and AK-47s lay everywhere, amid torn clothing and lost pictures from destroyed homes, empty fighting holes, and deserted bunkers. Rows of houses, most about two stories tall, and a line of shops occupied the left side of the road. Grunts from Kilo Company charged straight into them, yelling, “Clear!” as they surged from room to room and house to house. India Company veered right and worked their way through a large grove of palm trees that had been a nest for Iraqi troops. Our artillery had wrecked the oasis, but rifle fire still snapped on the morning breeze. Resistance had been light this morning, but we could not take anything for granted, and we pumped rounds into anything that looked like a potential threat.

I gathered my sniper team and went looking for a good position. Only a block from the waterfront, we came across a house tall enough to provide a good view. A big padlock secured the steel gate to the courtyard, and Dino Moreno pulled out his pistol and fired into it five times, each round smacking the padlock with enormous force. It held. I muttered about his lousy aim and opened fire at point-blank range with my own pistol, slamming two more bullets against the stubborn device. It danced, it dented, and the ricocheting rounds sang away, but the lock remained secure. It was the second bulletproof padlock that I had encountered in the war, and I made a mental note to buy stock in the Iraqi padlock company.

Our shots were answered from inside the courtyard by the mournful moooo of a cow, so I climbed up on some debris and looked over into what seemed like a cross between a petting zoo and a butcher shop. Cattle and sheep and goats and chickens milled about in utter confusion, stepping clumsily in and around the blown-away carcasses of other cows and sheep and goats and chickens. The poor beasts had endured a nightlong fusillade, watching their companions explode right next to them; there was blood and gore everywhere, and they were all mad with fright. I took a pass on this building. After killing at least a dozen men yesterday, I had no sympathy to waste on cows, but damn, how can you fight a proper war in a slaughterhouse?

The Marines secured the front ranks of buildings and the palm grove, then pushed on to established defensive positions about five hundred yards from the end of the bridge. My boys found a good high spot that gave us an unobstructed view up the main road, and all four snipers-me, Moreno, Carrington, and Harding-locked in on it. Since we could see clearly for about a thousand yards, we established an invisible “trigger line” on a curve in the road