about eight hundred and fifty yards from our position. Anyone approaching our positions would be watched but not considered a true threat until he reached that point. We quickly noticed that the curve in the road was at the top of a slight downward grade, so gravity and the physics of momentum would conspire to pull a vehicle toward us. It was another reason to be careful in choosing our targets.
Almost as soon as I had my rifle pointed down the street, a white Toyota truck appeared about nine hundred yards away, and through my scope I saw that the driver wore a green military tunic. A second uniformed man stood in the bed of the truck, with a pistol in his belt and an AK-47 in his hand. No doubt about these guys, and they looked as if they were scouting us. The truck came closer, and I told Doug Carrington to take out the guy in back while I tended to the driver. When the truck reached four hundred yards, we did a short count and our sniper rifles barked as one. The driver slumped dead over his steering wheel, and Carrington knocked the passenger out of the back. The truck lurched to a stop.
More Marines were pouring over the bridge, which meant more rifles were pointing down the roads and machine guns were set up. The buildup had the potential for big trouble, because Iraqi radio stations were off the air, traffic cops had vanished, and there was no way to spread the word to civilians to stay the hell away from our bridge. Surely they knew of the ferocious fighting of the previous day and had heard the continuous shelling. But traffic continued to flow around the distant suburban area, with unwary civilian drivers passing faraway intersections as if going to work or to the store. Others were obviously just trying to leave town.
Another vehicle appeared at the top of the rise, came toward us, and showed no sign of slowing down. At about eight hundred yards, I put a round into the engine block, but instead of stopping, the car actually sped up! Marines around me, thinking of suicide bombers, opened up with a tremendous volume of fire; the driver was killed, and his car was riddled with holes. The passenger door came open, and a man about fifty years old got out and staggered away, moving clumsily, until he was dropped a few feet from the car. He was later found to have a pistol in his belt, but the driver was clean.
I grew concerned with all of the shooting going on. The snap of our sniper rifles firing at specific targets seemed to be signaling a general barrage of gunfire from the grunts. They were shooting just because we were shooting, just as everyone had opened up on poor Ach-dead on the bridge last night. Fire discipline was breaking down in a confusing situation.
Our attack was by no means complete, for although we had taken the bridge and were not advancing any farther today, we had to hold what we had captured. We had pushed the enemy out of his prepared positions but were still clearing the area and knew that those soldiers had to have gone somewhere, for we had not found enough bodies to account for them all. Were we facing a massive counterattack? Were suicide bombers going to come at us in cars and trucks? What about an ambush? The factor of uncertainty in such a supercharged atmosphere rose higher than the hundred-degree temperature.
I had a bunch of trained snipers with big scopes on their rifles, ideal for this kind of work, so I found the Kilo executive officer, and he agreed to let us use our advanced optics beyond a new trigger line. We would eyeball whoever was coming down the road and stop their vehicles by putting bullets into engines and tires. Anything that came closer would be free game for the grunts. That might get us out of what could easily become a shootout, with the possibility of civilians being caught in the middle. But communications in a war zone are always chancy, and not everybody had a radio, so the word did not reach all of the Marines who were still crossing the bridge and enlarging the defensive perimeter.
Another car came over the crest of the road. Carrington and I watched until it reached six hundred yards, still on the sniper side of the line, and then we shot the engine block. The vehicle didn’t slow down at all but seemed to accelerate. There were two Iraqis inside, both wearing dark clothing, and although we couldn’t be certain, we had no choice, because the car kept coming. I took the driver and Carrington zeroed on the passenger, and once again we fired together and killed them both. The car chugged a few times, veered to the side of the road, and gave up, but once again a slashing outburst of Marine fire savaged the vehicle and the people inside. I watched through my scope as bullets punctured shiny holes in the painted doors, blew out the tires, shattered the windows into webs of glass, and made the already-dead bodies jump.
“Godammit!” I yelled. “Stop shooting! Stop it! Let us do this!” We had already done the job, and the thunder of infantry fire that sliced up the vehicle was totally unnecessary. I yelled for the grunts to cease fire, but even that took time, until the shooting finally eased with a ripple effect, like a wave in a stadium crowd. One guy would stop firing only when the guy next to him stopped. This was terrible.
I heard the Kilo XO shouting down the line, “Let the snipers deal with the civilian vehicles!”
But all of the Marines had to be suspicious about the cars and trucks coming toward them, some even accelerating after the snipers shot them. These kids had been carefully trained for months to add their power to the violent supremacy of an attack, and that’s just what they were doing. No one was going to let a truck that might be packed with explosives and driven by a suicidal madman get through and blow up in the middle of our lines.
The death toll began to mount out there, and the strain was growing intolerable. It was the worst possible time for anyone to come down that road, and everybody who tried it during the first hour after we crossed the bridge was writing his own obituary.
A fat guy in a white shirt, all by himself, came flying toward us in a pickup, and we blew him away. There was an AK-47 on the seat beside him. Good kill.
Ten minutes later, it all changed in the blink of an eye, and in the swirling fog of war, the inevitable tragedy emerged in the form of a blue Kia minivan that came over the hump of the hill. I decided to engage it as far away as possible. Carrington, Moreno, and I all fired into the engine block, but once again the motor kept running and the built-up momentum pulled it along.
I could see the people moving inside, both in the front seat and in the rear compartment. They didn’t seem to be military, for the driver and the passenger were in street clothes, and I could see no weapons, although that did not mean no weapons were in there. Who knew what was packed in the big cargo space? The van kept coming, now accelerating down the grade, and although I prayed for the damned thing to just stop, it eventually reached the trigger line and entered the kill box.
The Marines legitimately opened up on it, and a typhoon of bullets pummeled the van. I couldn’t remove my eye from the scope and watched these innocent people die as rifle fire flashed and flared all around me. A middle-aged man and woman in the back of the van somehow lived through that hell of gunfire and spent the night hiding among the dead members of their family before crawling out the next morning with their hands raised.
Suddenly, I was present, but I wasn’t really there at all. I snapped from the emotional overload, something I had never before experienced and did not believe was possible. My body began to react automatically to its years of training, but my mind totally disengaged from the awful scenes unfolding in front of me as people kept coming. Innocents were dying, and I was stuck right in the front row with a huge spyglass, not only watching the butchery in magnified detail but also participating in it, up close and personal. I was still a sniper, but I just wasn’t home.
I don’t remember all of the cars and trucks that were dealt with that day. A mother and father driving a big Mercedes were shot to death, but their little girl, clutching a teddy bear in the backseat, survived. I have no recollection of that bloody moment, nor of much else after the incident with the van.
There was no way for us to go into that uncleared area to help without exposing ourselves to getting killed, for Iraqi soldiers up that road were still shooting at us. Neither was there any way to set up warning signs or barriers, so Iraqis continued to come to the bridge, and they continued to die.
It did not come to a stop, because it could not, until our defensive perimeter was set. There was no way to separate the sheep from the wolves.
I could not count, and did not want to know, how many people I had killed in the past two days. My logbook would just have to wait, and it would never be complete. I don’t remember when, and I don’t remember how, but once the perimeter was firmly in place, I picked up my big rifle and walked away, back across that damned bridge, as lifeless as a zombie, not knowing or caring where I would end up. I was consumed in the totally unfamiliar world of a waking nightmare, and my only thought was a faith-shaken prayer.
