Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper (17 page)

“How so?” McCoy rose to the bait.

“You let a few get away.”

He chuckled. “Remember I’m shooting with iron sights here. Not everybody has a scope.”

“Don’t hate me because I’m good, boss. I’ll glass the area and see if I can clean up your trash.”

“Yeah. Do that.” Our game continued.

The colonel’s Humvee was in the middle of the square, a great location for me, so I climbed onto the hood and wiggled into a shooting position. I braced against the windshield, and the machine gunner in the turret pointed to where they had last seen the enemy troops. This was an incredible change in the way snipers worked; instead of being disguised or hidden in the dirt and the dark, I was sprawled out on the truck in broad daylight smack in the middle of the town square. Being visible to the enemy had ceased being a factor, because this was not a clandestine mission, and I was just one Marine among many involved in this fight.

I did a systematic search starting about twenty yards in front of
me, scanning from one side of the street to the other, from the roofs to the ground. Civilians continually moved through the sight of my scope, and I had to decide the fate of each individual then and there. Was he a threat or not? The midday sun glared from the buildings and paved streets, but I could not stop working just because my eye felt like it was about to fall out.

After about fifteen minutes, I found something in a second-story window of what looked like an old fortress, and I fastened onto it. What had been just a moving shadow solidified into the dark image of an Iraqi soldier with an AK-47.1 made a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) on the distance and dialed 430 yards into the scope, slowed my breathing, took up my trigger slack, and waited for his next move. This guy was already dead but just didn’t know it yet. When he moved more fully into the window to point his rifle at the Marines in the street below, I smoke-checked him where he stood, and the big round kicked him back into the room. Only then did I take out the range finder and laser the window, which was exactly 441 yards away, almost exactly a quarter of a mile.

“Coughlin!” McCoy barked, looking up from his radio. “Stop shooting my targets and get out of my sandbox. Go find your own place to shoot.”

I ignored him and glassed the area a bit longer to be sure there were no more threats, then politely obeyed and walked off, satisfied that I had one-upped the Boss.

I found Casey around the corner setting up protection for an Intelligence and Psychological Operations (Psy Ops) team that was using giant loudspeakers to blast recorded messages in Arabic, urging civilians to cooperate with the Americans and not to be afraid.

The technique worked all too well, because a growing crowd pressed in around them, wanting to voice complaints and point out suspicious people and settle some personal grudges. It looked like the bar scene from
Star Wars.
There was nothing that I could do to help, or wanted to.

By now, my sniper cover was completely blown, and I was walking around town with my rifle in my arms, as out in the open as a door-to-door magazine salesman. It made no difference at all on this new type of battleground.

Nearby, a tin awning hanging out from the wall of a shabby shop dropped a rectangle of shade over a battered white wooden bench, and I took advantage of the moment to escape the hot direct sun. A half dozen Iraqi men sat on a nearby stoop, smoking cigarettes and watching me closely, jabbering excitedly and pointing to the big sniper rifle and its scope. I nodded a greeting to them, and they nodded back.

Talk about being exposed.

I got back to work by putting my boot on the bench, then brought up my rifle, rested the fatty part of the back of my bicep on my knee, and leaned forward into a good tight position. I made certain there was no bone-on-bone contact, such as elbow to kneecap; that might feel solid, but it is an unstable platform because of slippage. The way I was knotted up, I controlled all of my movements. I glassed the area and visually got to know who was out in the street, scoping out every new person who appeared. After a while, confident that it was under control, I lowered the rifle and sat on the bench, taking only occasional looks through the scope at the street scene if something caught my interest. Periodically I would check out my little fan club on the nearby stoop, and they watched me right back.

Our prime rule during training is to become part of your surroundings, to stay hidden, and never expose yourself. Stealth is
everything. On some missions, I had worn the traditional ghillie suit, a camouflage trick handed down over the generations from Scots gamekeepers, who invented them to make counting game and catching poachers easier. Vegetation plucked from local plants is pushed into burlap netting sewn all over an old fatigue uniform, and the irregular strips and leaves totally break up the human outline to help the sniper vanish into the background. Sniper training requires that you be able to sneak up within two hundred yards of spotters with binoculars and fire a blank round without being seen. Wearing my ghillie suit, I was the invisible man.

Now I wasn’t hiding at all but rode atop a truck and operated openly within a congested urban environment. In such plain view, I was the subject of an animated conversation among the six men who had started talking at me. I warmed to these guys and even traded cigarettes with one, but I never trusted them for a second. Who knew if a weapon might appear from beneath one of those long robes?

“Hey, dude,” I called out to Casey after glassing the area again. “Look at this. I’m dominating an entire avenue of approach, just me, from a park bench, like on a Sunday afternoon.” I felt like an eight-hundred-pound gorilla with a gun.

Later that afternoon, with Al Budayr in our hands, we went looking for information.

Marines blew a hole in a wall to get into the local police station, where they released prisoners and picked up notebooks filled with information and photographs. A cache of weapons was found in a schoolroom.

When the regional headquarters of Saddam’s political machine, the hated Ba’ath Party, was discovered, Casey and I accompanied
Steve Blandford, the same smart chief warrant officer who had worked with us in the unexpected visit inside the Iraqi home an hour earlier, into the two-story lime-green building. It turned out to be a gold mine of intelligence, for it was packed with more logbooks than we could count, and Casey even retrieved the appointment and address books from the mayor’s office. Account ledgers noted payments and names. A detailed sketch of the town’s defensive positions, no more than a few weeks old and frequently modified, was discovered. Beneath the empty eyes on the posters of Saddam that were in every room, we hauled away a trove of information about his corrupt and savage government.

After we left, a certain junior officer decided to bring in a squad and secure the building. Corporal Dustin Campbell, who had helped me spot targets in Afak, was moving stealthily from room to room with another Marine when they heard glass breaking and the noise of someone walking. They went to full alert and set up shooting positions to take out the clumsy enemy solider they thought was blundering toward them. A window crashed nearby, and they tensed for the confrontation—but it was Officer Bob who suddenly walked into their sights. He had gotten separated and was entertaining himself by throwing rocks through windowpanes like some adolescent prankster.

Our mission to open Route 17 as a supply corridor between the isolated major Marine units was a total success, and we had crashed through Bonus Town, Hajil, Afak, and now Al Budayr, four towns with an estimated combined population of over two hundred thousand people. By moving aggressively and quickly, our tanks, the Amtracs,
armored Humvees, and about seven hundred Marines simply ran over those little towns. Taking them aggressively had minimized casualties all around. Our audacious use of force and surprise became known as the Afak Drill, and most of the bad guys chose to run rather than face us.

However, the success of a single unit did not mean the entire war was going well. We had crossed the border from Kuwait into Iraq nine days ago, and despite making major advances, by March 29 things were not moving with the lightning speed that had been envisioned and was needed. The Army was having serious problems out in the desert, Basra still defied the British, and exposed supply convoys were raw meat for guerrilla attacks. With the Marines, our tanks were only just beginning to roll with the needed resupply vehicles over to Task Force Tarawa, and the 5th Marine Regiment was still bogged down in back of us, at Diwaniyah. Our raids along Route 17 had been successful, but the offensive was falling days behind schedule.

Snipers are always looking for an edge, because we don’t like to fight fair. So when Casey found me that evening after things had calmed down, I was recording my day’s work in my sniper’s logbook. I now had six kills since the start of the war, and I added specific notes about the weather conditions, the range, directions of the targets, windage, and a few other things. Racking up the new kills did not make me feel proud. Snipers hate what ultimately happens when we pull the trigger, but we understand that we are important fixtures in something much larger than ourselves. Out of professional habit, I entered my observations and results in the logbook. Over time, when we compare those notes, the books can reveal patterns of enemy behavior and highlight their mistakes, so we can kill more of them.

We shared some food—packages of nasty MREs. Casey was as excited as a pup, having been in the middle of some firefights, and he was clearly over the hump of worrying whether he could measure up as a combat Marine. “Is this all there is?” he asked. “I want more! Gimme more!”

“You want to fall off another roof?”

“Asshole. You know what I mean.”

He said that about two dozen prisoners had been captured that day and that maybe twenty bad guys had been killed. Ever the engineer, he pointed out, “You got four of the twenty today, Jack. Twenty-percent of the total for the whole battalion. Not bad.”

I put away the logbook and told him that I felt as if I had finally been taken off the leash and that I was happy to be contributing to the fight, able to see some shit and do some shit. There was no telling what was going to happen next, but I sensed target-rich environments ahead. “If this keeps up, I’m going to come out of this with some hellacious numbers.”

Life had been a lot simpler many years ago, when I first joined the Corps and was pulling duty as a crossing guard at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Simpler, but nowhere near as interesting.

That night, we decided that we no longer wanted to go into battle with Casey’s driver, Corporal Baby, because he had not measured up to our standards. That would not do, so we picked Corporal Dustin Campbell as his replacement. Campbell was one of the best riflemen in the company and had impressed me with his exceptional eyesight and courage during the recent fighting.

Campbell’s only problem was that he talked back to his superiors, which made him an even more natural fit for our team. Evervone
recognized that Casey and I were in charge, but we encouraged what might be termed a free-flowing exchange of views. It not only taught the boys to be mentally quick, but if a guy could not hold up under our verbal abuse and dish it right back, how the hell was he going to stand up to somebody trying to kill him?

“I don’t know how to do this,” Campbell protested the first time we put him behind the wheel of the Humvee. “I’m just a small-town boy from Mississippi!”

Lieutenant Casey Kuhlman, a product of intense Marine Corps leadership training on how to deal sensitively with the concerns of his men, told Campbell to just shut the fuck up and drive.

Sunday, March 30, began with a brilliant sunrise and bad news from home. We had bedded down outside of Al Budayr after the long day of fighting on Saturday, and the memory of the smiling little Iraqi girl I had touched on the head had lingered with me overnight. The thought made me homesick. I missed my family.

As dawn broke, I went to find Paperboy—John Koopman, our embedded newspaper reporter from the
San Francisco Chronicle—
who had been receiving periodic e-mails for me on his laptop. All my sisters and their families, my mom, my mother-in-law, my kids, and my friends had sent warm messages, but there had been nothing from Kim.

Paperboy said there were no e-mails for me today, but he lent me the satellite telephone that he used to file his stories, and I stepped away to find some privacy as I dialed my home number far, far away. The call all the way from the battle zone to our house in 29 Palms went through without a problem, an amazing feat of technology, but the telephone was answered by the babysitter. Kim was once again away at school, she said. Cassie and Ashley filled me in on what was happening in school and at day care, and their happy
voices were sounds from a different planet, a balm to me in troubled times. The babysitter sounded flustered, though, falling all over herself with apologies that my wife was not at home. The connection terminated with a forlorn little
beep.
I returned the phone to Koopman and walked off to find a quiet piece of desert.

Smack in the middle of the thousands of men of the 1st Marine Division, I felt isolated and alone, as if I were the only person out there on the desert sands. I had called home six times since I left California, and my wife had been there twice. I’d had more conversations with the babysitter than with her.

Then I thought about the time difference. California is eleven hours behind Iraq, so since it was about 6:30
A.M
. on Sunday where I was standing, it would be 5:30
P.M
. Saturday at home. Suddenly I realized that the babysitter had said my wife was at school, but I knew she didn’t have any classes on Saturday night! Why wasn’t she home with the kids? Was she out at a happy hour with some other teachers? Was she off at a library? Or was it something else? Shivers went up my spine. To me the word “wife” no longer seemed a term of endearment, home was on the far side of the world, and there was nothing I could do at the moment about the obviously out-of-whack domestic situation.