Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper (29 page)

Ten minutes later, it all changed in the blink of an eye, and in the
swirling fog of war, the inevitable tragedy emerged in the form of a blue Kia minivan that came over the hump of the hill. I decided to engage it as far away as possible. Carrington, Moreno, and I all fired into the engine block, but once again the motor kept running and the built-up momentum pulled it along.
Who are you people?
I screamed in my head.
What are you doing? Who the hell drives toward people who are shooting at them? Dont you know there is a goddamn war going on?
It was impossible to comprehend, impossible to stop, and I watched the van roll forward.

I could see the people moving inside, both in the front seat and in the rear compartment. They didn’t seem to be military, for the driver and the passenger were in street clothes, and I could see no weapons, although that did not mean no weapons were in there. Who knew what was packed in the big cargo space? The van kept coming, now accelerating down the grade, and although I prayed for the damned thing to just stop, it eventually reached the trigger line and entered the kill box.

The Marines legitimately opened up on it, and a typhoon of bullets pummeled the van. I couldn’t remove my eye from the scope and watched these innocent people die as rifle fire flashed and flared all around me. A middle-aged man and woman in the back of the van somehow lived through that hell of gunfire and spent the night hiding among the dead members of their family before crawling out the next morning with their hands raised.

Suddenly, I was present, but I wasn’t really there at all. I snapped from the emotional overload, something I had never before experienced and did not believe was possible. My body began to react automatically to its years of training, but my mind totally disengaged from the awful
scenes unfolding in front of me as people kept coming. Innocents were dying, and I was stuck right in the front row with a huge spyglass, not only watching the butchery in magnified detail but also participating in it, up close and personal. I was still a sniper, but I just wasn’t home.

I don’t remember all of the cars and trucks that were dealt with that day. A mother and father driving a big Mercedes were shot to death, but their little girl, clutching a teddy bear in the backseat, survived. I have no recollection of that bloody moment, nor of much else after the incident with the van.

There was no way for us to go into that uncleared area to help without exposing ourselves to getting killed, for Iraqi soldiers up that road were still shooting at us. Neither was there any way to set up warning signs or barriers, so Iraqis continued to come to the bridge, and they continued to die.

It did not come to a stop, because it could not, until our defensive perimeter was set. There was no way to separate the sheep from the wolves.

I could not count, and did not want to know, how many people I had killed in the past two days. My logbook would just have to wait, and it would never be complete. I don’t remember when, and I don’t remember how, but once the perimeter was firmly in place, I picked up my big rifle and walked away, back across that damned bridge, as lifeless as a zombie, not knowing or caring where I would end up. I was consumed in the totally unfamiliar world of a waking nightmare, and my only thought was a faith-shaken prayer.
Oh, my God, what have we done?

Such incidents always happen in war, and they weigh heavily upon the warrior, for although he has done nothing wrong, he will carry
the guilt and replay those images in his head for the rest of his life. And the legacy of not being able to discuss such terrible things has been passed down through generations of fighting men and women in many wars. You can’t write home to Mom about it; you would never intimately whisper such gory details to anyone you love, nor discuss it philosophically with your friends over a beer back in the civilian world. How can anyone who wasn’t there possibly understand? So it sucks at your soul like some private leech.

I was in such a daze that I did not even realize that the Panda Bear had fallen in step alongside as we trudged away from the kill box of the roadblock, back across the bridge, past the little guard shack where we had spent the previous night, past the blown-away Amtrac in the courtyard, back down the road, and out of the city, walking around advancing vehicles and men, until we finally reached the Main. We walked more than four kilometers, and I don’t remember a single step. The Panda steered me to our trucks, where I finally could rest, get some food and water, and begin to awaken, at least enough to realize that I was totally exhausted and covered in thick dirt.

Casey took a hard look at me, as if he were a doctor, realizing that something dreadful had happened up there. He would later tell me that he barely recognized me when I came stumbling into camp, but he remained silent, knowing I wasn’t ready to talk. My psyche, not my body, had been wounded, and I only said, “Dude, that was the worst thing I have ever seen. I haven’t been this mad in a long, long time.”

He was surprised by the emotion, because almost the only reactions he had ever seen from me had been confidence in my job and satisfaction when a difficult shot had been particularly well placed. I had always been considered to be the coldhearted killer, but I had been doing a hell of a lot of killing.

It would take several days before I could tell even my closest buddy what had happened, but during that interval, the media discovered the incident at the bridge, and everybody around the world soon was properly aghast at the carnage. It had been terrible to participate in it, but the firestorm of publicity was almost as bad. Insulting speculation and wild guessing ruled the day. The Jackals and their cameramen saw only the aftermath, not the actual event. They interviewed other people who also weren’t there, and a couple who were, and knitted together stories that made us look like ill-trained, uncaring, trigger-happy gunmen. They even talked about us slaughtering people on a bus, although there had been no bus.

As skilled as those writers might be, they weren’t there when the shit was coming down! They really didn’t know what they were talking about, but there is a grim old saying in the news business: “Never let facts stand in the way of a good story.” Photographs of the destroyed vehicles and dead people brought on a shitstorm of criticism from officials who were even more distant from the battlefield, some of whom were just playing cover-your-ass politics. The controversy increased until there was even a threat that Colonel McCoy might have to stand trial for war crimes. What total bullshit.

It was all a distraction from the true focus of the mission, and the most important point seemed to have become lost in the drama. We had fought our way to the heavily defended Diyala Bridge, captured it, and crossed it, and that long, curving, bloody road on the far bank would lead us straight into the heart of Baghdad.

Wasn’t that why we were here?

Moments of history are built on seemingly minor points, and it was fortunate for the Marine Corps, and for the United States of America, that Lieutenant Casey Kuhlman was sitting around the Main headquarters, doing nothing, on Tuesday, April 8. Everywhere else in Iraq, the war was blasting ahead with incredible momentum. It seemed to be leaving Casey behind, and he was big-league pissed off.

Far down south, the British 7th Armored Brigade finally entered Basra. United States Army troops had begun launching heavily armored probes called “thunder runs” out of the Baghdad airport and into the southwest section of the tangled metropolis and were met by intense enemy fire. American Marines were building more and more temporary bridges across the Tigris River and steadily putting more men and vehicles on the other side. The noose was closing on Baghdad, and the Iraqis no longer had any illusions about winning this war.

Our battalion had crossed the Tigris overnight on a pontoon bridge laid parallel to the blown Diyala span. The darkness was impenetrable; Baghdad was blacked out, and we could not turn on any
vehicle lights because they would pinpoint our positions. Casey, wearing night vision glasses, led our headquarters unit over in that pitch blackness, and every other vehicle lined up behind his Humvee, without radio communication. If he had gone over the edge of that narrow bridge, we probably all would have followed. We had drilled this follow-the-leader routine for weeks, and now, when it required a dangerous river crossing, he made the job automatic and quick. By the time dawn broke on April 8, the entire 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, was completely within the Baghdad city limits. The Bull had arrived.

I had spent the intervening hours pulling myself together, comfortable among my buddies in the Main, where no questions were asked. After cleaning up, getting some chow and some sleep, and gaining the alone time needed to sort out my feelings, my spirits steadily improved. The awful events at the bridgehead faded into memories and shuffled away to their proper places deep within my brain, going into one of those private rooms where I could close the door on them. It was getting crowded in there.

I knew that I had to get back on track in a hurry, because if I kept acting weird, a spotlight of suspicion would swing toward me. There was still a war on, and I was a shooter and a leader, so feeling sorry for myself or letting a series of terrible events beat me down simply was not an option. If I let on that my confidence was shaken, it would spread like a virus among those around me, and I would not let that happen. Impossible.

I had stripped down my sniper rifle and cleaned it carefully, becoming lost in the muscle-memory routine of the rag and gun oil, and slowly was able to pull myself back from the abyss, with the
promise to never venture so near that edge again. All that the incident at the bridge really proved was that I was human, just like everybody else.

Once we were across the Tigris, the Main headquarters was set up in the prickly palm grove, which put me almost right back where I had started the previous day. I felt no guilt now, no doubt—nothing but a renewed determination to get on with the job. What was done was done. That other stuff was yesterday.

I hunted up Colonel McCoy to iron out the situation with Officer Bob.

“So what’s on your mind?” the colonel asked.

“I just wanted to find out what’s going to happen next so we don’t have a breakdown in communication like in the last attack when you had to scream into the radio to find me.” I took a deep, frustrated breath. “Bob told me today that from now on I’m strictly staying with the Main. I just want to see if that’s what you want.” By going over the staff officer’s head to talk directly with McCoy, I was close to insubordination, but this issue had to be settled.

McCoy had bigger things to worry about than this shit, and I knew it, but he growled, “I’ll take care of it. You just get your stuff ready. We’re going to check out what we think is a chemical factory. You follow me, and if we make contact, get to work. Be ready to go in twenty minutes.” The boss gave me a slap on the back, and I walked off to prepare for the patrol.

The colonel was as good as his word, but it was a devil’s bargain. I was going back into the fight, but Casey had to stay behind again, which meant that I was losing my security blanket. As much as I disliked that decision, it was neither illogical nor unexpected, for Casey
had proven invaluable. His experience level had soared since the start of the war, and he was always busy, whether searching an Iraqi armory with enough weapons to equip a battalion or using his engineering training to help lay down those important new bridges. Such things win wars, and the battalion honchos expressed confidence in him.

Casey was blind to that; he just wanted to get back to the fighting. “I’m sick of being pissed off,” he wrote in his journal. “I am just depressed … a monkey could do this job. I’m a glorified taxi driver. I would be the happiest man alive if I had a rifle platoon right now.” Having had a taste of fire, he wanted more, and he considered anything less than a shooting battle to be a bullshit mission.

By splitting us up, Officer Bob had checkmated the development of my sniper team. We had already proven to other combat leaders how effective we were working together, but it had made no difference to Bob. He wanted both of us left behind but settled for Casey. When I broke the news that he was being quarantined, Casey just shook his head and said nothing at all, but it was easy enough to read the anger and disappointment in his thoughts. I left with the main body for the attack a few minutes later while Casey told his boys to stand down and pulled his truck out of the assault position.

That same day, with the Main and Tac HQs established and guiding the battle that was developing up the road, a couple of large Iraqi BM-21 rockets came howling into the area and exploded nearby. As usual, Officer Bob went bananas, got on his radio, and started yelling gibberish at the senior officers in the Tac, who were only a few yards away and knew as well as he what had just happened. Bob said that everybody had to pack up and move, although no one had
been hurt and our counterbattery radar had already pinpointed the launch site and was guiding planes to attack and shut it down. Bob was ignored, but the incident spurred Casey to get out of the man’s presence and find something useful to do.

One of the Secret Squirrels, an intelligence officer, told him that an abandoned antiaircraft missile launch site had been found nearby, and he wanted to check it out. Instead of assigning a grunt to provide an armed escort, Casey grabbed his rifle and went along to do the job himself. They came upon a carefully built position containing another of those huge French-built Roland antiair missile launchers, a state-of-the-art piece of defensive equipment, but useless because its operators had abandoned it. While the Squirrel rummaged through the trashed position, Casey found a discarded Iraqi flag: three broad stripes—red, white, and black—with three big green stars in the middle of the white one. It was not a new flag, and the colors had been dulled by time and exposure to the hot sun.