Shooter

existed between reporters and warriors.

Richard Engel of the ABC television network, whom we had met earlier in the square, explained the various TV monitors to us, and we watched Marines, Army troops, and officers all over Iraq appearing on various television shows and interviewing with print reporters about the final dash into Baghdad. Engel said ABC was putting together a broadcast that would feature a spread of stars ranging from generals to politicians to pundits, and among them would be Lieutenant Colonel Bryan P. McCoy. The reporter asked if we could join the program, and we figured if it was good enough for Darkside Six, we might as well give it a go, too. It would be a fast way to let our families back home know that we were alive, safe, and in one piece.

Anchorman Peter Jennings in New York ran the show with the sure touch of a lion tamer, and Engel led off our portion by asking how we had ended up in the square. I told him, to his astonishment, that we had received information that the journalists might be held hostage, and we had come in to rescue them. “So the idea was that you were going to seize this hotel and help and get us out, is that correct?” he asked.

We all three had our helmets off but were still festooned with combat gear. We looked good on camera. Bart said, “Until a couple of minutes ago, I still thought there were shots coming out of here, and the Army had fired back a couple of days ago.” Oops. The Army had killed journalists in that particular incident, but Engel let it slide.

The reporter said he saw us roll up into the square, and Casey confirmed we were in the first Humvees. Then Engel turned back to the hostage question, and I replied that things became dicey when the square was flooding with people.

“Yeah, we definitely thought there was something going on,” I said. “There was a guy up on the roof with his laptop. And I had, you know, put him in my scope, looking to see what he was doing. I didn’t know if it was an enemy or not without the use of my scope.” Oops, again. I just admitted that I had almost plugged one of the Jackals. Engel had me confirm that I was a sniper.

“And so, if you thought he had something other than a laptop, that would have been it for him?”

Be nice, I told myself, wishing he would change the subject. “I would have been able to tell. I wouldn’t have to think… you could see it. You can see pretty clearly out of that. So, yeah, I mean, if it was an enemy, we would have dealt with that.” This TV stuff was harder than it looked.

Thankfully, Engel switched to Casey and asked what our job was now.

“The job for tonight will be to make this area secure,” Casey replied. “We’re not exactly sure what happens from here. I know that there are more people that we will have to deal with later, but for tonight, we’ll just make sure that everybody’s safe around here.”

The reporter then asked if we felt safer now and whether we wanted backup support, and Bart sharply observed, “We feel as safe as we felt any other night.”

Casey flipped the question back to Engel. “Do you feel safer now that we’re here?” The reporter acknowledged, “I certainly do.”

I pointed out that we always feel safe when we’re together and that our security cordon was already in place, or else we wouldn’t be standing here talking to him. I didn’t mention we also had a thicket of sniper rifles pointed out of the windows directly upstairs. “Right now we’re completely surrounded by friendlies. I mean, it may seem all nice and dandy up here when we’re talking, but there’s, you know, eight hundred or nine hundred other guys around here with whatever we take to the fight.” Did we feel safe? Damn straight we did.

Jennings broke in to ask if the events of the afternoon meant that the war was over. That one kind of pissed me off. I didn’t believe the war was over at all. “We’re not done yet,” I said. “We’re in a safe environment right now, but we’ll be prepared for whatever happens tomorrow. When the appropriate authority ever says the war is over, then that will be good news.”

We chattered on for a bit more; then our few minutes of fame were over, and we went off to find the Sheraton dining room, where life was slower. The smell of good food was overwhelming, the plates were clean, silverware sparkled on white tablecloths, and the buffet seemed filled to bursting. This is crazy, I thought, three Marines in dirty cammies with helmets under their arms and wearing flak vests, checking out a buffet line. After being on the road for three weeks of combat, we would have been delirious with joy just to have a couple of cheeseburgers or a Philly steak-and-cheese sandwich. This otherwise rather ordinary hotel dining room seemed like a banquet at Versailles to us, and we thoroughly pigged out while the dull whumph of faraway explosions echoed from where engineers were blowing up captured enemy arms around the city.

The night passed quietly, and the only real shooting we heard was a brief duel between CAAT teams from different battalions who stumbled upon each other in the Baghdad darkness. No one was hurt.

Enrico Dagnino, the Italian photographer who had been with us during the ferocious Baghdad Two-Mile attack, came up to our room with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, and that helped complete this slice of paradise. With others on watch, I sipped scotch whiskey and watched the small television set in the corner as the Al Jazeera network gave its tilted version of our triumph, complete with English script rolling across the bottom of the screen that kept referring to us as “invaders.” Unreal.

I stripped down in the bathroom and took a long shower under a nice blend of hot and cold water, letting it gush in gallons onto my head, until I felt as clean and renewed as I ever had in my entire life. I washed out my cammies in the sink and took immense pleasure in not having to put the filthy things back on for a while. Wearing only my shorts, I climbed into the bed and just lay there, enjoying the feeling of being totally safe on the sixteenth floor of a luxury hotel. Although we had let our guard down somewhat, there was always a Marine with a rifle at the door. The only way the bad guys could get us was with a lucky shot of a rocket-propelled grenade, which was highly unlikely.

Our entire team rotated in and out of the room during the night, taking turns guarding the trucks, pulling observation duty, and resting or sleeping, but I didn’t hear them. I stared at the ceiling for a while, and my mind raced with the mad events of a single day. I had been on a killing spree for a week and had started this morning by shooting three people. Then I participated in bringing down the statue of Saddam, was interviewed on a major television network, posted sniper hides in hotel rooms, and had telephoned home to California from the hotel but received no answer, and now lay snug and safe in a comfortable bed. Still, it was too early to rein in my sniper mentality and start the transition back into being a normal human being, because as I had told Peter Jennings, the war wasn’t over yet. Finally, sleep pulled me down like an anchor.

For weeks I had been living in the rude conditions imposed by combat, sometimes catching a few winks sitting up but seldom being able to truly rest. Now I snored away the hours on clean sheets and dined in civilized surroundings. The press corps was over in the Palestine, which was a zoo, but the Sheraton, filled mostly with Iraqis who had left their homes for the safety of the hotel during the war, was as quiet as a library.

We spent four wonderful days in the hotel but knew that it couldn’t last forever. The streets were awash in looting and disorder, there was heavy fighting still going on elsewhere in the county, and even in Baghdad, and our unit was bound to be given new orders soon. But after several days of being able to watch the news on television, I realized that despite the fighting elsewhere, the Iraqis no longer could mount anything that remotely resembled an organized force against us anywhere in this country. If there was any fight left in them, it was up to the fedayeen or the ousted thugs of the Ba’athist regime or the imported foreign fighters, because the regular army had been utterly destroyed.

On April 13, the battalion headquarters moved across town to an eight-story government building. It was no Sheraton, but it had electricity and was so spacious that each of us had a private room, giving us the first true privacy we had experienced since leaving the United States in January.

The new headquarters building was surrounded by a high wall, and just beyond that wall, Baghdad was disintegrating. Everywhere I scanned with my scope and rifle, looting and disorder rampaged on a scale comparable to the war itself. Inevitably, our battalion, an elite combat unit, had to be turned into policemen.

We were not law enforcement personnel. Instead of destroying a heavily armed force of trained enemy soldiers, we were dispatched to run around like rent-a-cops through utterly crazed city streets. Instead of smash-mouth fighting, we were suddenly thrust into opaque security and sustainment operations. The lean-and-mean American