I centered up on the first target, about a half mile away, and squeezed the trigger, starting the familiar pattern of firing and reloading with machinelike quickness, coming down on another target as soon as I fired a shot.
Seven shots for four targets is a terrible ratio for a sniper, but of all the shooting I did in this war, I considered this the best. The fluid battlefield was cluttered, visibility was terrible, it was hard to read firing lines, the targets were moving quickly and at crazy angles, and I had no trained observer to call the shots or targets. It was slapstick sniping at its best, and I loved it. I had literally shot away the lingering shadow of guilt from the bridge.
When the bunker complex was cleared, we set up a defensive perimeter a block and a half behind it, brought up the Main and the combat trains, and settled in for the evening.
Casey and I shared some MREs and tried to guess what might still be ahead. After the ambush today, we knew there were plenty of bad guys left out there who did not intend to let us go strolling through downtown Baghdad. Tomorrow morning, the entire city could be rising up against us, and we all again had visions of
But I had been in Somalia and knew there were huge differences between the two places. This was not Mogadishu, and we could handle this town. We had a veteran battalion supported by other aggressive Marine and Army units and all the air power we might need. “Not this time,” I told Casey. “Not us. They fuck with the Bull and they get the horns.” I slept well that night, with no visits from any acquaintances at all.
23
The battalion staff had a dawn meeting in a real conference room inside a captured headquarters of the Republican Guard, and Colonel McCoy and his planners spread out maps of the built-up area we were about to enter. The entire 1st Marine Division was now across the Tigris, piling ever more stress upon the reeling Iraqi defenders.
Desertion was decimating the enemy forces, and there was little command and control over whatever remained of the Iraqi army. While the regulars might have packed it in and made a quick return to civilian life, the fedayeen and remnants of the Ba’ath Party militia were still around, and we anticipated that today’s fighting could be as hard as anything we had yet faced.
Red circles on the staff’s plastic map overlays marked important buildings in our zone, but reaching them would be a slow and deliberate process. We might have to clear every building, one by one, to get to our prime objectives, and while such a leapfrog tactic would be effective, it could take forever.
On top of that, disturbing news had come from the Jackals, who told us that they were concerned that their colleagues lodged in the hotels of downtown Baghdad might have been taken hostage by the collapsing Iraqi military. They worried that some journalists might be executed.
While the staff laid out the attack plan, those of us in the Main decided that the bright new morning would be a fine time to wash up and do our laundry. This time we had an opportunity to do a really good scrub instead of the hasty canteen showers and baby-wipe baths that we had endured over the past weeks, and we got busy cleaning our bodies, clothes, and weapons. We stuffed big plastic trash bags into cardboard boxes, then poured laundry powder and water into one and clear water into another and proceeded to scrub. Cans of water were set aside for dousing ourselves in open showers.
That’s how McCoy found us, and since he was as filthy as everyone else, he also deemed washing to be a good idea. We parted to give the colonel some space, and Darkside Six stripped down without hesitation, sloshed water over his head, and wrung out his clothes in the buckets. Marines in the field don’t stand much on ceremony. He was standing buck naked in the middle of a parking lot, dripping wet, when he gave me my next orders.
“From here on out it is going to be pure MOUT,” he told me, referring to the specialized Mobile Operations in Urban Terrain for which we had trained so hard during ProMet. We were going to be knocking on, or down, a lot of Baghdad doors, and he said, “I want you to integrate a Battalion Sniper Operation to support it. You can use all the snipers that you need, but leave some at the company level.” Music to my ears. Sniper teams! I had been waiting the whole war for this.
I expected some pretty nasty fighting downtown, and being able to do some prior planning instead of having to react to the changing battle could put my killers out where we could do the most good. I put on my wet and clammy uniform, which would dry in ten minutes, and took off for the conference room to find out exactly where we were going, how we wanted to get there, and what sort of resistance was expected.
There was nothing in established sniper doctrine to cover such an attack, so I had to wing it as the operations officer showed me the overall plan. Two major roads, separated by a distance that ranged from five hundred to a thousand meters, forked off from the starting point, then came back together, almost in a diamond shape. India and Kilo infantry companies would penetrate the area in their armored Amtracs and Humvees; then their grunts would start clearing the buildings while the Bravo tanks went up a middle road.
I leaned over the maps, calling on the hard-earned lessons of every combat situation I had ever been in, particularly the urban fights, such as in Somalia. I knew how to fight in cities. We could do this.
I first set up a picket fence of observation zones, using three sniper teams, and put other snipers with specific units for close-in support. Using their scout training, the teams would sneak into the planned zone of combat, get to some rooftops, and radio real-time intelligence to the company commander below, call in artillery fire on any strong resistance, and take down any targets of opportunity. Then the infantry companies would plunge through, and when the grunts passed the snipers, my boys would jump back into the lead position.
The goal was to keep at least one team in front of the advancing infantry and provide interlocking fire between the teams. With any luck, this could be a shooting gallery.
The problem was that my sniper teams would have to penetrate uncleared terrain during daylight hours. To overcome this, I would create a stronghold at the initial point of the attack, manned by all three teams, plus a borrowed team and two extra armored Humvees given to us just for this fight. Once the battle was under way, the teams would disperse and start jumping along the front.
As a final detail, I gave myself a bonus by making absolutely certain, through McCoy’s direct orders to me, that Casey would be freed from the confines of the headquarters and at my side during the attack. Bob could not trump us this time. It was not just a gesture of friendship but an added margin of safety for me. Casey was totally familiar with the sniper drill by now, he didn’t panic when under fire, and with his rank and command skills he could deal with other troops on the ground and other unit commanders by radio during a fight. Few people held all of those qualifications.
When I gave the word to my snipers, they smiled. There were targets to be harvested out there today, and they soaked up my confidence. I had a bunch of shooters on my hands, ready to go do their deadly work in this miserable war. By the time the armored vehicles came to life with grumbling engines and the loud clanking of treads began to crunch on pavement, it was all I could do to hold them in check. They all wanted to shoot somebody.
We took our four Humvees up to the line of departure, the same overpass from which I been shooting the previous day. From there we could see our target building, a tall structure about three hundred yards away, on the left-hand side of the road.
We took off like rabbits for it at the same time, threw a loose cordon of Marines around the building, cleared the stairwell, and got to the roof, where we posted a man at the door to prevent any surprise visitors. I took the northwest corner, Dino Moreno settled into the northeast section, and Sergeant Roger Lima and his spotter covered the blind spots between us. Casey set up the radios and at exactly 9:11 in the morning told the battalion we were in position. Sergeant Major Dave Howell came up to our roof to get an overview of the battlefield.
The grunts moved into the zone and hit the first row of multistory buildings with a bang, but they found little of
