Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper (12 page)

With McCoy pushing hard, our battalion secured bridges into Basra and was maneuvering to take the Basra International Airport.
The trade-off for the brisk advance was that everyone was exhausted by the continual effort. About an hour before dusk, Casey and I and our boys came upon an abandoned “Roland,” an antitank missile launcher mounted on something that looked like a golf cart. The enemy weapon had been forsaken by its operators but was still in usable condition, so we had to destroy it.

Casey took station with his Humvee about a hundred yards to the left, and I was on the ground, looking to the right down a road that made a turn about fifty yards away. I saw that everything was clear and told the Panda to arm an AT4 rocket launcher. He hefted it to his shoulder, aimed, and waited for my command to fire. I was just about to give the order when Luis Castillo, up in the turret of our Humvee, and therefore with a better view, alerted me that shooting the Roland right now might scare “the enemy prisoners.” I thought he meant a group that I knew was safely behind us. “Fuck ’em,” I said.

The normally quiet Castillo persisted. “Boss, they’re gonna get hit by this.”

“No way, they’re out of the danger zone.” I was ready to let Panda take the shot when some unexpected motion down the road caught my eye, and a line of Iraqi prisoners under guard by an escort of Marines came around the curve, moving straight toward the Roland that was our target. When they saw Panda aiming a rocket launcher right at them, the prisoners and Marine guards alike stopped in their tracks. I yelled quickly for everybody to stand down, but coming so close to fucking up royally had left my heart pounding hard. Had I given the order for the Panda Bear to shoot, a lot of people would have died because I had made a stupid mistake.

After we let the astonished prisoners and guards file safely past, I called in some engineers to blow up the Roland. I had seen enough of that damned gun on a golf cart.

Snipers are trained to endure extreme fatigue, but it attacks your critical thinking like a live thing, and I cursed myself for carelessness. My body was working faster than my mind, and I recognized that I might be reaching my physical limit. But as the poet Robert Frost wrote, we had miles to go before we slept.

Rest was not in the cards, and it was not long before I was on the other side of a friendly fire incident, which was no more fun than the first one. The skies were filled with hundreds of warplanes flying attack missions from bases as far away as Missouri and Guam, and low-flying Tomahawk cruise missiles growled in from warships out in the Gulf. Explosions decorated the horizon, and a major fight loomed at the airport. Who could sleep? Who would even want to sleep at such a time?

While McCoy zipped around the battlefield in his Humvee to oversee the tactical situation, I was up to the brim of my Kevlar helmet helping set up the Main headquarters about three miles from the airport, the sniper rifle at rest while I attended to my other job as company gunny. We created an instant office by parking two command Amtracs back-to-back, flopping down their rear ramps, and throwing a lightproof cover over them, since night had fallen. Radios crackled, maps were unfurled, computers were booted up, and the battalion brain trust got to work in their mobile, claustrophobic dungeon, figuring out what had to happen next to keep this drive alive. We had done severe damage to the 51st Mech, which had been our primary foe, but remnants of the division were still around and were still dangerous. The British were coming up right behind us to take over this space, freeing us to push on up the road, and we were handing over responsibility while fighting was still under way nearby. The planners had a big chore ahead.

Ragged streaks of bright fire flashed into the darkness all around as our artillery batteries pumped out rounds in preparation for the airport attack, and the concussions of the great cannons shook the ground. Tornados of dust were kicked up by every blast.

Suddenly there was a loud
POP
in the nearby sky, followed by numerous smaller
pop-pop-pop-pop
explosions. Oh, shit. That was the signature firecracker sequence of one of the most lethal artillery rounds in the U.S. arsenal, and if you’re close enough to hear it, you’re already in trouble. The first noise from the incoming 155 mm rounds comes when the warhead opens about fifty meters above the ground and showers out dozens of antipersonnel bomblets, and the following little
pops
are the cluster bombs detonating upon impact. They can cause incredible damage.

There is no time to hit the dirt once the firecrackers start, so I closed my eyes and leaned hard against an armored vehicle, trying to meld my skin with its metal armor. Another loud
POP
followed the first by microseconds, and then another string of fireworks rattled off about 150 yards from where Normy Arias and I were working.

Our guys were on their radios even before the popping stopped to tell the cannon-cockers not to do that anymore, and we didn’t take any casualties, but a certain junior staff officer was spooked. He thought the Iraqis had our number.

“They’re bracketing us!” he shouted, running up as Normy and I brushed ourselves off. With the sort of sixth sense about such things that combat veterans have in their bones, both of us had realized instantly that the errant rounds were Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM), which meant they were from American guns that were not really trying to kill us. The danger was already past, and since no one had been hurt, there was really nothing to talk about.

“No, sir,” Norm replied, going back to work. “They’re not bracketing us.”

“Yes, they
are,
First Sergeant.” Officer Bob was adamant that we were all in grave danger.

“No, sir, they’re not,” Norm repeated, very slowly this time, in his most polite tone. “Those are DPICM rounds. The enemy doesn’t even have DPICM.”

“How can you be sure that was DPICM?”

Norm stopped what he was doing. “Sir, I was in artillery for eighteen years. Only one thing makes that sound. Take it from me, those were our own DPICM.”

Bob stood there for a minute, then hurried away.

McCoy’s personal promise to his battalion came true. Not only did we utterly destroy the Iraqi 51st Mechanized Division, but we also bagged its commanding general.

Night means nothing to American combat forces, because our high-tech and thermal-detection gear lets us see through the darkness. Throughout the early witching hours of Saturday morning, the battalion maneuvered closer to the airport and hit it just before first light, killing eight Iraqi tanks and some suicidal infantrymen fighting from bunkers.

Since I wasn’t involved, I had pulled a cot out of one of the ambulances and tried to get some rest, but my mind could not shut down. I got up when the attack started and walked around, listening to the gunfire and watching the flashes. I felt left out.

This was a built-up section of the city, and during the four hours it took to plan the attack, I could have easily infiltrated in the darkness, found a snug hide, done some real-time observation, and been
in position to support the attack with some good old-fashioned sniping. Enemy soldiers were dying out there, but I hadn’t killed anybody since yesterday. Seemed a waste.

One of my boys at the airport took out a target with a nice long shot, and if he got one, I could have gotten ten, not because of a vast difference in our shooting skills, but because I had more experience in finding targets. There would have been plenty of work for me, but I missed the boat on this one. I was still the unofficial commander of the sniper platoon and needed to be working with my rifle, not tied down with the Main. An uncomfortable thought nibbled at me:
Is this the way it’s going to be?

Dawn broke with us owning the key bridge across the Shatt al-Basra Canal. We resorted to brute force for the next step and pummeled the remaining airport defenders with sustained artillery barrages, bombardment by the tanks, slashing .50 caliber machine gun fire, and missiles from Cobra helicopters. The grunts moved in to finish the job and had an old-fashioned room-by-room shootout in the Sheraton Hotel, which separated the military and civilian sides of the airport. The Iraqi soldiers, outgunned and outclassed, soon began giving up, walking into the open with their hands up or waving white flags. Those who ran or continued to fight were killed. Our firepower was simply more than they could bear.

By the middle of the day, the fight was all but over. A dozen civilians who had been caught inside the terminal made their way out to surrender after a morning in hell. Our only casualty was a Marine who was wounded when he tossed a grenade into a room at the Sheraton only to have some metal fragments blow back through the wall and hit his hand.

About an hour after we took the airport, a bright yellow Nissan Pathfinder sports utility vehicle bearing a white flag of surrender
drove onto the airstrip and cautiously approached some guys from India Company. When the four-wheel-drive SUV eased to a stop, a man in a crisp uniform stepped out and identified himself as the commanding general of the 51st Mechanized Division. He had nothing left with which to fight and wished to meet with our commanding officer. The astonished commander of India Company called for Colonel McCoy and suggested, “Darkside Six, this is India Six. You may want to come over here.”

McCoy was there instantly, and in an oddly formal moment reminiscent of a time when wars were fought by more gentlemanly rules, the Iraqi general politely declared, “I am surrendering to you.” McCoy accepted the surrender and then hustled the general back to higher headquarters for questioning. The Bull had taken a terrific trophy, but there was still some fighting going on.

By nightfall of March 21, the second day, the shooting was over and the approaches to Basra were secure. We had broken through the main defense cordon, had captured the airport, held three vital bridges across the big canal, and were in position to stiff-arm any resistance that might try to emerge out of Basra.

Casey and I escorted senior officers of our battalion and our replacement unit, the 1st Fusiliers of the British 7th Armored Brigade, the famed Desert Rats, on a tour of the vital points of the quiet battlefield. All night long, their companies moved in and took over from our units. Having come up the marshy Al Faw peninsula and battled for the oil fields, the Brits were more than capable of taking over and were tasked to conquer Basra itself.

Kipling once wrote how a cheap bullet fired by the lowest enemy soldier can erase an important officer, and as a sniper, I love taking
out the big guys on the other team. The leaders are not supposed to take chances, but nobody could put a leash on McCoy, and he stumbled into doing something foolish in all of the excitement.

As I sat on the hood of his Humvee and ate my dinner of MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—that night, the colonel ducked out from under the tent of the Main headquarters, took a seat on an ammunition crate across from me, and lit one of his big cigars. We were developing a habit of getting together after a battle to compare thoughts on what had gone down, both right and wrong. He looked tired, not having had any sleep since Kuwait, but his spirits were buoyed by the two good days of work his Marines had turned in. “So, how’d you do?” he asked pleasantly, preparing me for a special ration of shit.

“I only got two, boss,” I said, lighting a cigarette and describing the ambush of the Main. The man soaked up information of all sorts, and every piece of battlefield data helped him clarify the overall puzzle, so he listened to me describe working as a sniper in a shifting combat environment.

McCoy nodded, then grinned, a crease of white teeth through a dust-caked face. “I got a tank,” he announced. “Pretty cool, huh?”

McCoy and his driver, driving off the road to let some of our armor rumble by, had found an Iraqi T-55 tank dug into the sand, with only the turret, its big cannon, and a machine gun showing above ground. The colonel decided to attack it. With his radio operator, he checked out the surrounding trenches, then climbed aboard the tank and yanked on the turret hatches, which were locked from the inside. Frustrated, they ran back to their armored Humvee and opened up with their rifles and machine gun. The bullets just bounced off the steel hide of the monster, so McCoy ran back to the tank again and flung a fragmentation grenade at it, then ran back to cover again. Finally, he got out of the way, and one of our Abrams
tanks popped a high-explosive round into the Iraqi tank with a volcanic detonation.

It was a stupid thing for a commanding officer to do, but now I know that he had another purpose in mind rather than killing a piece of Iraqi armor that may or may not have had a crew inside. With that little adventure, McCoy solidified his credentials within the battalion as Darkside Six, the tank-eating commander, our own Darth Vader, and as word spread, his Marines puffed up with pride at the Old Man’s audacity.

I was pissed. This guy was the heart of the baddest Marine battalion on the planet, and he had placed himself at great risk. For what? I was steaming, and I sat there on his Humvee and bitched at him that he was paid to lead and to think, not to go throwing grenades. What if he had been smoke-checked by some
hajji
soldier?

He just laughed, unapologetic. I stormed away from him, trailed by his booming laugh. In the middle of a freakin’ war, was I supposed to be having some kind of weird competition with Darkside Six?

God, we were tired, but we plunged into hours of getting the battalion refueled and rearmed, and what normally was a totally routine job became complicated and dangerous at almost every step. Men who had been up for at least forty-eight hours were moving like zombies as they handled enough gasoline, ammunition, and explosives to destroy us all. We could do it because our totally realistic training had drummed the pure routine of these very jobs deep into our minds and muscles.

Then we were told to push ahead. Rest would come as soon as we reached our next dispersal area. Casey and I again were to lead the way with the advance quartering party, so we herded our vehicles
together in a tight group, and instead of sleeping, we hit the road at 2:30 on Sunday morning, March 23. As we pulled away from Basra, bright flares of artificial light danced in the darkness over the city, and streaks of tracer fire arced into the smoky sky.