Shock Factor (38 page)

Seventy yards up the street from the original mortar pit, Buchholz watched a number of Mahdi fighters bolt from what looked like a prefabricated you might find on a Stateside construction project. It was surrounded by a wall of tires, and he could make out several militiamen using them as cover.

Buchholz lased the tire wall. Seven hundred yards. He settled his reticle on an insurgent and fired. The HEAPI flew into the tire wall, blowing rubber in all directions. He fired again. His target still stood, and Darren had no idea where the HEAPI round had gone. He cursed himself and tried again. The Mahdi seemed unconcerned, which meant the .50 cal round had not impacted anywhere near him.

“What the hell? I'm not that bad of a shot,” Darren said to himself.

It was a moment that underscored the importance of the two-man team approach to sniping. With so many enemy fighters in the open, Darren was dealing with an overwhelming environment. They were panicked, dashing in all directions. Unarmed kids were in the mix as well. Before settling on a target, Buchholz first had to positively identify the man as an enemy fighter. The only way to do that was to confirm whether that man carried a weapon or not. With the Mahdi moving around so fast through a neighborhood with plenty of walls, parked vehicles, buildings, and other concealment, this was no easy task.

After acquiring a target, Buck had to run the ballistic calculations alone. Change the scope settings, or “DOPE on the Scope,” and assess the windage himself. When he missed, he had to figure out why and where his shot had gone so he could get on target. In the middle of a madhouse firefight, these complicated steps are best split between two men.

With Trimble gone, Buck was on his own. He pulled the trigger again. Missed again. Enraged, he suddenly realized why. He'd taken his first shot at 625 yards. Now he was trying to smoke-check a Mahdi militiaman at 700.

Through the ringing in his ears, he heard one of the other scouts shout, “Buck, you're low! You're low.”

He didn't have time to redial the scope. He took his best guess, put the crosshairs a few mils above his target, and fired once more. The Mahdi Militiaman exploded.

The shot restored Buck's confidence. He swung the Barrett toward the prefab building just in time to see more men with guns emerging from it. Darren took them down one after another, then walked his fire through the prefab's thin walls until nobody else emerged.

He reloaded, paused, and took the time to put the proper DOPE on his scope. He dialed it in to eight hundred yards and went back to work on more distant targets now. His scope had a minute of angle for every hundred yards. At this range, if his aim was off by one inch, the error would be magnified eightfold and result in a missed target.

Buck didn't miss.

Several insurgents tried to take cover behind a cement mixer. Buchholz hit one with his Barrett. The bullet tore the man apart and sprayed the one next to him with gore. Stunned by what just happened, the man froze. Here was a case study of the Shock Factor at play. The sudden sight of his buddy blowing apart left the Mahdi fighter paralyzed. One minute the man had been running beside his friend, the next his feet melded to the asphalt as he stared at what the HEAPI round had done. His brain could not process that magnitude of trauma within the short time he had left.

He still hadn't moved when Trimble talked Tyson Bumgardner onto him. Tyson's 240 swept across the cement mixer, chewed up the wall behind it, and knocked the stricken militiaman out of his shoes.

Within moments, the street started to look like the set of an apocalyptic horror film,
The Walking Dead
without the zombies. Torn and bloody corpses lay sprawled in gruesome poses. Severed limbs and chunks of bodies littered the scene. A few wounded Mahdi mewled for help in Arabic.

Tyson pushed the 240 to its limits. He ran out of ammunition, called for more and began shouting at the enemy. When the barrel grew red-hot, he swapped it out with another and kept shooting. Brass cartridges bounced off the floor and fell into his shirt sleeves, badly burning his forearms. He never let up on the trigger.

Later, he recalled, “I remember hitting packs of Mahdi looking the wrong way, fully exposing themselves to our fire. I remember watching some of them explode and spray all over. Sometimes others would get caught by multiple ropes of machine gun fire from our converging tracers and get decimated.”

Yet as fast as the scouts took them out, scores of Mahdi armed with AKs, machine guns, and rocket launchers joined the fight. At first, they had no idea the origins of the American fire. They shot back wildly in all directions. Some dove for cover if the incoming had been coming from the north instead of the southwest. This left them totally exposed, and they died without ever figuring out their mistake.

Kyle moved off to help SSG Paul, and Tyson swapped out barrels. Heaps of spent brass lay around his gun, and he took a second to sweep them out of his way with his forearms. In seconds, he returned to the fight, unleashing long bursts on the enemy below.

The scouts made the most of the chaos, killing the enemy with ruthless efficiency. Time and again, as their ranks were bloodied, the militiamen would freeze in terror. The Shock Factor at play once again. They died paralyzed with fright.

Somebody finally spotted the American position, thanks to the tracer bullets fired by the platoon's machine guns. At first, only a few stray rounds struck the skeletal building. One bullet pinged into an I-beam over Sergeant Bumgardner's head. Slowly, the incoming grew more accurate.

“We were already way above a maximum sustained rate of fire for the platoon,” Bumgardner later said, “and in those split seconds I wasn't engaging, I was desperately looking for men to shoot because the incoming was getting heavier all the time. We were not panicked. We just understood our situation was very precarious.”

The machine gunners tore through all their available belts, leaving the 240s surrounded by piping-hot brass shell casings. Buchholz aimed and fired his Barrett as quickly as possible, reloading every time he drained his ten-round magazine. Paul did the same. They finally had a target-rich environment, but they'd caught a tiger by the tail. There were so many targets that if they didn't kill or drive them off, the platoon could be in for some serious trouble.

Lieutenant Boyce grabbed his radio and called for an artillery-fire mission. When he gave the coordinates, the Arkansas brigade balked at the idea of dropping howitzer shells on such a densely populated Baghdad neighborhood. Not only would the civilian casualties be high, but the Americans would have to pay the surviving homeowners for the damage the shells inflicted on their domiciles. The Arkansans said no to both. Without the firepower, Boyce's men would have to deal with the threat on their own.

The Mahdi fighters were slowly getting organized now. Most had taken cover behind cars, walls, and the corners of the dilapidated houses in the area. Brave ones would pop up every few seconds to send a few bullets at the Americans. Though Paul, Bumgardner, Albert, and Buchholz had killed most of the mortar crews, new insurgents had back filled them, reinforcing those positions. They were in the pits now, dropping rounds into tubes. The snipers went to work taking them out as the machine gunners swept the streets.

The engagement area originally consisted of about a block and a half of west Sadr City. Now, as more insurgents arrived, Boyce could see muzzle flashes all over the neighborhood. The platoon started taking flanking fire from the right as even more fighters joined the fray. But unlike my situation in Somalia back in 1993 when we had a pair of Super Cobra gunships on our shoulders, the Guardsmen couldn't get their promised backup.

Even without help, they elected to fight it out.

With the machine guns almost out of ammunition, Sergeant Randy Mitts scampered down the half-completed stairwell to grab more from the Humvees parked behind the building. At the trucks, he joined Andy Hellman, who had been guarding the rigs. Mitts told him what he needed. Together, they began grabbing ammo boxes. Just as they got to work, a mortar round exploded inside the skyscraper's perimeter. The shrapnel splash laced the building, tearing apart scaffolding and showering the Humvees with debris.

Arms loaded with eight boxes—sixteen hundred rounds of 7.62mm belted ammo, the two scouts sprinted back upstairs to get the machine guns back into the fight. When they arrived, the amount of incoming fire had swelled significantly. Most everyone had flattened themselves against the floorboards to present as small a target as possible.

Bum saw them coming and shouted to Randy to bring him his body armor. He'd left his Kevlar vest in a room deeper inside the building, and had been in the fight without protection from Buck's first shot.

Boyce kept trying to get more firepower from brigade, but that was a lost cause. He radioed Patrol Base Volunteer and reported the situation. A platoon of New York National Guardsmen attached to 2–162 was standing by, and Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson ordered them to Boyce's aid. As they launched through Patrol Base Volunteer's back gate, the Mahdi slowly gained the upper hand on the scouts. Sheer weight of numbers gave them fire superiority.

Buchholz's Barrett roared again and again. The horrifying effects of his weapon scattered body parts and gore as his bullets blew humans to fragments. Often, such scenes would break an enemy's will to resist. In this case, the opposite happened. The more victims Buchholz's rifle claimed, the more enraged and determined the insurgent militia became.

A deeper report echoed from the streets above the din of full-auto AK-47 bursts. The snipers recognized it right away as a Dragunov, a Soviet-built scoped rifle used by enemy snipers. It seemed to be coming from the right flank, but none of the men could locate the shooter.

An enemy sniper is the worst foe an American sniper can face. Trained for stealth, accuracy, concealment, and patience, they can pin, disrupt, shock, and kill just as effectively as our men can. This is why they automatically become our highest priority targets when encountered on the battlefield.

Whoever had the Dragunov was good. He had located and maneuvered on the Oregon snipers, then found a concealed position on the platoon's flank. Though forced by the battlefield geography to shoot from a lower elevation than his targets, which gave him a difficult shot, his bullets kept coming uncomfortably close to Boyce's men.

The scouts searched frantically for his hide, but could not see a telltale muzzle flash or brief flare of sunlight reflecting off a scope. All they could do was keep low and pray that the guy on the other end would make a mistake. He was too good to make a mistake. Despite their efforts, the scouts failed to locate the enemy sniper. Tyson thought that the shooter must have been near the Iraqi Police checkpoint at Martyr's Monument. That made him remember the Dragunov they'd seen there.

Could the shooter have been an Iraqi cop? It was possible; they knew the scouts were there. But there was no way to be confirm that suspicion. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded a story below them. The building shook from the impact. Machine guns raked the partially finished ceiling overhead. If this got any worse, they could be pinned and trapped in place. The Mahdi might even assault the building, overrunning the small detachment below guarding the platoon's vehicles. The scouts needed the New York boys, but the inexperienced lieutenant leading that platoon got lost in Baghdad's mazelike streets. Boyce tried to talk him to the building, but that only seemed to confuse him more. The situation was growing desperate.

Bumgardner reloaded his 240 machine gun with a fresh belt given to him by Mitts and Hellman. With Kyle helping Paul, Tyson asked Andy to spot for him. Hellman moved beside him just as the Dragunov boomed; its bullet slammed into an I-beam next to Andy. He dropped to a knee and returned fire with his carbine, kneeling beside Bumgardner's left shoulder. The enemy sniper fired again, this time narrowly missing Kyle Trimble.

Bits of ceiling tiles and other debris rained down on the platoon as bullets and rockets swept the building. Without artillery or air support and with their reinforcements roaming around lost somewhere to the west, Boyce could either withdraw or stick it out. Withdrawing under such heavy incoming fire seemed a ticket to disaster. The platoon would be exposed while the men sprinted down the open stairwell, and they would not be able to keep much suppressing fire on the Mahdi as they pulled out.

Boyce didn't want to make that play unless he had no other alternative. They'd stick it out and hope that the New Yorkers would turn the tide back in their favor. If they showed up.

Meanwhile, the platoon needed every man in the fight to try and wrest fire superiority back from the Mahdi. Lieutenant Boyce knelt beside Sergeant Paul and pulled another M24 to his shoulder. Though not a qualified sniper, Boyce had trained extensively on both the M24 and the Barrett since joining the platoon. Sergeant Maries and the other snipers had tutored him well. On the ranges back at Fort Hood, he'd demonstrated uncanny marksmanship.

Through the scope, he could see Mahdi militiamen, dressed all in black with green arm or headbands bounding through the neighborhood below. He settled his scope on the prefab building seven hundred yards away. He dialed in the range, adjusted for the slight summer breeze, and glassed the ramshackle compound. An RPG man stepped out of the prefab, catching Boyce's attention. He slid his crosshairs over the man. Finger on the trigger, he began to put pressure on it.

He hesitated.

Though Boyce came from a military family, he had no intention of making a career out of the Army. He'd joined to do his part for his country, and he'd wanted the infantry because it was the one arm that all other elements of the service supported. Yet he was a gentle human being with a deep streak of altruism and compassion. He yearned to go to medical school and become a surgeon.

Now, instead of saving lives, he was about to take one.