Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper (7 page)

Nine-eleven put an end to my dream for a Mobile Sniper Strike Team, at least for a while, and I didn’t care. Even had it been authorized that day, it still would have taken another year to get off the ground, and now there was a risk that it had become my own personal albatross. We were suddenly planning for war, and I worried that I was going to be left behind, shuffling papers, while a shooting scrape was going on.

I went into a big staff meeting that day where contingency plans were being thrown down, changing hourly as more information arrived. Twenty-nine Palms was never far from alert status anyway, and things started clicking together rapidly. Afghanistan quickly rose to the top of the list of potential targets because it was the home nest of the Taliban, which supported the terrorist network that staged the attacks on America. Out came more maps, more studies, more plans.

In a quieter moment, I cornered Colonel Hummer to make my pitch to get into the fight, but before I could say anything, he told me, “Calm down. You’re going to Afghanistan with us as my chief scout/sniper.” That was just what I wanted to hear.

The Afghanistan campaign started in early October 2001, and Northern Alliance forces supported by U.S. advisers took the capital of Kabul in November. Kandahar, the last stronghold of those Taliban nutcases, fell in December.

Meanwhile, far above our pay grades, another sort of war was being waged within the polished hallways of the Pentagon in Washington. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had come into office in 2001 with a burning desire to restructure the U.S. military into a
more mobile force, and the Army generals were balking at the rapid-deployment scheme. Afghanistan became a laboratory in which each side would try to prove it was right. While some Army Green Berets had helped direct air strikes in the north, and elements of the 10th Mountain Division came over from Uzbekistan to secure two northern airfields, the first regular American combat unit to enter Afghanistan was the Marine Expeditionary Force that flew in from five aircraft carriers parked in the Arabian Sea to capture a southern base on November 25, 2001. They had been parked offshore with everything they needed for a long fight, from armored attack vehicles to water purification facilities. Rumsfeld and his top civilian assistants saw the swift, effective deployment of the Marines as proof of their argument for radical changes. The Army chain of command was not impressed.

Ultimately, the Afghanistan campaign did not involve our regiment. Our job was to get ready for whatever came next, and we set about training like we had never trained before. President Bush, in his State of the Union speech in January 2002, labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an “axis of evil” and accused them of supporting terrorism and having weapons of mass destruction.

When the 3/4 battalion returned home from Okinawa in February, new and secret contingency plans were already showing that the next big strike probably was going to be in Iraq, just the kind of sandbox terrain the Bull knew so well. While the 3/4 had a good idea of where they would be going, I still wasn’t sure that I would be with them, because my regimental assignment left me in limbo while my buddies were preparing to fight.

Then, in early May, I almost had a heart attack when the battalion
got a new commanding officer, none other than my old nemesis Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy. All of those arguments we had had over the mobile sniper teams rose to haunt me, and my spirits sank like a rock. McCoy did not help things by hooking me back into the fold to be the gunnery sergeant for the battalion’s Headquarters and Supply Company. I recoiled at the thought. Me, the combat veteran who wanted nothing more than to be out in front of the action with my sniper rifle, held back as the “Gunny” of the Hotdog and Soda Company, to shepherd those freaks and geeks into making sure all the real warriors had everything needed to fight a war, from rifle ammunition to toilet paper.

The only person who felt as bad as I did was Casey, who arrived back in 29 Palms only to be snatched away from his rifle company and named the H&S executive officer and its interim commander. But he was immediately dispatched to still another school, and I was handling the company on my own.

In reality, being a Marine company gunnery sergeant is a prestigious job and a good position for promotion, and I might have been more than willing to do it—if we had not been heading for war. Now I was frustrated and hated the idea, so I marched over to confront McCoy. His desk was the size of an aircraft carrier, but he was so large that it seemed a perfect fit. Early summer sunlight blasted through the windows as I sat down, wondering just how much damage I might have caused by arguing with him so much during the past months.

“I want some other job, sir, not H&S,” I said. “Anything but H&S.”

“Sorry, Staff Sergeant Coughlin. I need you right where you are,” he said, chomping the cigar.

“I’m a sniper, sir!”

“You’re my H&S Company gunnery sergeant!”

I paused a moment, then played my ace. “Sir, I’ve got enough time in that I can still shift to another battalion.” I was ready to walk, to actually leave the battalion, something I never thought I would say. But if it would get me into the shooting war, I would do it.

McCoy can be something of a Jekyll and Hyde character, and he let his more reasonable side take over rather than giving vent to the warfighter side. He had a job to do, he needed me, and anyway, he already was a step ahead and had plans much different than I had imagined.

“I’ve got an H&S company that doesn’t have a commanding officer right now,” the lieutenant colonel reasoned. “Your executive officer is gone for the Mountain Leaders Course, which leaves the company understrength and leaderless. That means you take over. We’re getting ready for a war, Staff Sergeant, and we both have a lot of work to do. Don’t let your vanity get in the way of what’s really important.”

“But it means that I’ll be back in the rear with the gear when we go over, sir. I can’t do that.” I could almost feel the sniper rifle being taken from my hands.

McCoy blew a big cloud of smoke. “Look, Jack. You work with me here, and get us to Kuwait, and I promise to let you go play when we go to war. I know and respect your abilities as a sniper, and when the bullets start flying, I promise that you are going to shoot people.”

I took the deal.

The massive American military juggernaut was beginning to stir, and although our powerful 3/4 battalion was but one of the players, we trained as if we were the only unit involved. Our lives depended on it. The early plans called for a fast-moving war in Iraq, which meant our Headquarters and Supply people would move right along with the front line and sometimes would be in the midst of the shooting. So by early August 2002, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein warned that any attackers would “carry their coffins on their backs,” we were well along the road to turning our freaks and geeks into a team of fighters.

Marines are taught from their earliest days that their rifle is their most treasured possession, for they stake their lives on it, and they become so intimate with the weapon that they can take it apart and put it back together blindfolded, and do so with precision. Then they progress up the chain of arms to become equally adept with a bewildering armory of other weapon systems—from the M249 SAW (a light machine gun) to the M203, M9, SMAW, M240G, AT4, Javelin and TOW missiles, and hand grenades. A Marine loves to pull a trigger.

That had become our baseline assumption when Casey returned
from the Mountain Leaders Course and joined First Sergeant Norm Arias and me in getting the Headquarters and Supply Company ready for combat. You should never go to war with anyone who cannot cover your back, and having someone you trust around during a firefight provides a sense of peace unknown in the normal course of life.

Our men were supposed to be Marines, not secretaries, although they
were
secretaries. And truck drivers. And mechanics. And radio operators. We laid out training packages that demanded they could use their specialized skills when on those jobs but also could stay alive in a combat environment.

A small tactical headquarters team, the “Tac,” would move at the front to direct the fight and would be closely followed by the “Main” headquarters, which was linked to the higher commands and other units, controlled the medical evacuation procedures, and did the battle planning. Then came the “combat trains” of supplies and backups needed to keep the whole thing rolling. The best way to stall a military attack is to destroy the leadership, communications, and logistics, which meant that our H&S Company, which had all three, was prime meat.

We sent nine of the guys off to school to learn how to handle the heavy machine guns, and our drivers were drilled in how to get in and out of their trucks while under fire. If someone bitched about sweating while we were training out in the 29 Palms desert, Sergeant Arias jumped on them, barking, “Quit whining like little bitches! Get your warrior hat on and get ready to kick some ass. You’re going to be right up front, and you’ve got to protect yourselves.” When Normy speaks, people listen. He is a tough little Filipino with a stocky body sculpted by weight lifting, and his dark eyes can be filled with humor or malice, depending upon what he thinks of you.
There is little nuance with Normy, and he can be as intimidating as hell. Iraq would prove that he was exactly right about the dangers, because the country’s long and empty roads became fertile killing grounds for guerrillas who ambushed American convoys with roadside bombs that tore apart both trucks and bodies. We wanted to be sure that our Marines knew how to fight back.

The bureaucracy worked against us, since every hour we had our guys training was exactly equal to an hour taken away from their specialties. A delicate balancing act was necessary to weigh their vital support jobs against the need to polish the skills that would keep them alive long enough to do those jobs. By the time we were done, the 228 Marines of H&S were fully competent trigger pullers.

In the final months of 2002, everyone became familiar with the dreaded term “weapons of mass destruction,” and we stepped up the training needed to meet the threats posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological agents. There was no doubt in my own mind that Hussein, who had used poisons to quell a rebellion among his own people, would also use them against us.

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Vice President Dick Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August. A few weeks later, President Bush challenged the United Nations to confront what he said was a “grave and gathering danger” by giving Hussein a final deadline to abandon his WMDs. If Hussein did not comply, the president warned, the United States was prepared to act, alone if necessary.

Iraq responded by offering to allow UN weapons inspectors unconditional access to suspected weapons sites, but Washington dismissed the offer as merely another stalling “tactic that will fail.” The
Bush administration sought quick congressional action on a resolution that authorized U.S. military action against Iraq.

On November 8, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441, which demanded that Iraq disarm. In early December, Iraq delivered to the UN a monstrous twelve-thousand-page document that stated the country had no WMDs nor any current programs to develop them. A week later, while the massive document was still being analyzed, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the press, “We said at the very beginning that we approached it with skepticism, and the information I have received so far is that skepticism is well-founded. There are problems with the declaration.”

To me, all of the political crossfire meant only that war was by now a virtual certainty and that it was drawing closer. We received our deployment orders to Kuwait over the Christmas holidays.

Following a leader you do not personally trust in wartime can be as frightening as facing WMDs, so it was too bad that we had a junior staff officer that I shall try to forget for the rest of my life.

I’ll call this guy “Officer Bob,” and his greatest talent seemed to be an ability to get lost, even while using a global satellite-positioning device. This was not someone we wanted leading our convoys across a battlefield, but there he was, talking loud, nodding his head, and constantly needing somebody to hold his hand. We determined that the best way to get things done was to make sure Bob was not involved.

We had to move the battalion from California to the Middle East, which meant solving a logistics equation that would get us to foreign
soil, ready to fight. Everything from tanks and missiles to sunglasses and tubes of sunscreen and lip balm was going over, and precise instructions preceded every single item. An identifying dog tag was to be tied into the laces of each soldier’s left boot. Not the right boot, but the left. Private Smith was issued an M-16 with a specific serial number, and there were thousands of privates just like Smith. Overheated computers spat out reams of rosters and lists, and we added little things such as baby wipes, which help clean sand off our faces, among other things, and funnels to prevent life-sustaining water from spilling while being poured.