That was going to have to do for a while.
IT BEGINS
On the evening of November 7, I squeezed into a Marine amtrac with a dozen Marines and a few SEALs, all keyed up for battle. The big armored vehicle rumbled to life, and slowly moved toward the head of a ma.s.sive procession of armor heading out of camp and north of the city, into the open desert.
We sat knee to knee on benches facing each other in the bare-bones interior. A third row had been squeezed into the middle of the compartment. The AAV-7A1 wasn"t exactly a stretch limo; you might try not to crowd out the guys on either side of you, but there was only so much you could do. Tight wasn"t the word. Thankfully, just about everyone inside with me had showered recently.
At first, it was cold-this was November, and to a Texas boy it felt like deep winter-but within a few minutes the heater was choking us and we had to ask them to crank it down. I put my ruck down on the floor. With my Mk-11 propped between my legs and my helmet on the b.u.t.t, I had a makeshift pillow. I tried to nap as we moved. Close your eyes, and time moves faster.
I didn"t get all that much sleep. Every so often I glanced toward the slit windows in the rear door, but I couldn"t see past the guys sitting there. That wasn"t much of a loss-all they could see was the rest of the procession, a haze of dust, and a few patches of empty desert. We"d been practicing with the Marines for about a week, going over everything from getting in and out of their vehicles to figuring out exactly what sort of charges we would use to blow sniper holes through buildings. In between we"d worked on radio coms and general strategy, exchanged ideas about how to provide the best cover for the squads we"d be accompanying, and made a dozen tentative tactical decisions, such as deciding whether it would be generally better to shoot from the top floor or the one right below.
Now we were ready, but as often happens in the military, we were in hurry-up-and-wait mode. The tracked vehicles drove us up north of Fallujah, then stopped.
We sat there for what seemed like hours. Every muscle in my body cramped. Finally someone decided we could drop the ramp and stretch a bit. I unfolded myself from the bench and went out to shoot the s.h.i.t with some of the other SEALs nearby.
Finally, just before daybreak, we loaded back up and began trundling toward the edge of the city. There was maximum adrenaline inside that tin can on treads. We were ready to get it on.
Our destination was an apartment complex overlooking the northwestern corner of the city. Roughly eight hundred yards from the start of the city proper, the buildings had a perfect view of the area where our Marines were going to launch their a.s.sault-an excellent location for snipers. All we had to do was take it.
"Five minutes!" yelled one of the NCOs.
I hooked one arm through my ruck and got a good grip on my gun.
The amtrac jerked to a halt. The rear ramp slammed down and I leapt out with the others, running toward a small grove with some trees and rocks for cover. I moved quickly-I wasn"t afraid of getting shot as much as I was of being run over by one of the armada that had ferried us here. The mammoth amtracs didn"t look like they"d stop for anybody.
I hit the dirt, got the ruck next to me, and began scanning the building, watching for anything suspicious. I worked my eyes around the windows and the surrounding area, expecting all the while to be shot at. The Marines, meanwhile, poured out their vehicles. Besides the tracked personnel carriers there were Hummers and tanks and dozens of support vehicles. The Marines just kept coming, swarming over the complex.
They started kicking in doors. I couldn"t hear much, just the loud echoes of the shotguns they used to blow out the locks. The Marines detained a few women who had been outside, but otherwise the yard around the building was vacant.
My eyes never stopped moving. I scanned constantly, trying to find something.
Our radio guy came over and set up nearby. He was monitoring the Marine progress as they worked up through the apartment building, securing it. The few inhabitants they found inside had to be taken out and moved to safety. There was no resistance inside-if there were insurgents, they"d either gotten out when they saw us coming, or they pretended now that they were loyal Iraqis and friends of the U.S.
The Marines ended up moving about 250 civilians from the complex, a fraction of what they had been told to expect. Each one was questioned first. a.s.suming they hadn"t fired a weapon recently (the Marines did gunpowder checks), weren"t on a wanted list, or were not otherwise suspicious, the head of each family was given $300 and told they had to leave. According to one of the Marine officers, they were allowed to go back to their apartments, take what they needed, and leave.
(A few known insurgents were captured and detained in the operation.)
While we were on the berm watching the city, we were also watching warily for an Iraqi sniper known as Mustafa. From the reports we heard, Mustafa was an Olympics marksman who was using his skills against Americans and Iraqi police and soldiers. Several videos had been made and posted, boasting of his ability.
I never saw him, but other snipers later killed an Iraqi sniper we think was him.
TO THE APARTMENTS
"All right," said our radio guy finally. "They want us inside."
I ran from the trees to the apartment complex, where a SEAL lieutenant was organizing the overwatches. He had a map of the city and showed us where the a.s.sault was going to take place the next day.
"We need to cover this area here, here, and here," he said. "Y"all go find a room to do it."
He gave us a building and off we went. I"d been paired with a sniper I"d met during BUD/S, Ray. (I"ve used the name to protect his ident.i.ty.)
Ray is a big-time gun nut. Loves guns, and knows "em real well. I"m not sure how good a shot he is, but he"s probably forgotten more than I know about rifles.
We hadn"t seen each other for years, but from what I remembered from BUD/S I figured we"d get along all right. You want to feel confident the guy you"re working with is someone you can rely on-after all, you are literally trusting him with your life.
A Ranger we called Ranger Molloy had been shepherding our rifles and some gear with us in a Hummer. He came up and gave me my .300 Win Mag. The rifle"s extra distance over the Mk-11 would be handy once I found a good hide to shoot from.
Running up the stairs, I sorted the situation out in my head. I knew what side of the building I wanted to be on, and roughly where I wanted to be. When I reached the top-I"d decided I wanted to shoot from a room rather than the roof-I started walking through the hall, scanning for an apartment that had the right view. Going inside, I looked for one with furniture I could use to set up.
To me, the home I was in was just another part of the battlefield. The apartments and everything in them were just things to be used to accomplish our goal-clearing the city.
Snipers need to either lie down or sit for a long period of time, so I needed to find furniture that would let me do that as comfortably as possible. You also need something to rest your rifle on. In this case, I was going to be shooting out of the windows, so I needed to be elevated. As I searched through the apartment, I found a room that had a baby crib in it. It was a rare find, and one I could put to good use.
Ray and I took it and flipped it over. That gave us a base. Then we pulled the door of the room off its hinges and put it on top. We now had a stable platform to work on.
Most Iraqis don"t sleep on beds; they use bedrolls, thick mats, or blankets that are put directly on the floor. We found a few of them and laid them out on the door. That made a semi-comfortable, elevated bed to lie on while working the gun. A rolled mat gave us a place to rest the end of our guns on.
We opened the window and were ready to shoot.
We decided we"d work three hours on, three hours off, rotating back and forth. Ray took the first watch.
I started rummaging through the complex to see if I could find any cool s.h.i.t-money, guns, explosives. The only thing I found worth acquisitioning was a handheld Tiger Woods golf game.
Not that I was authorized to take it, or even did take it, officially. If I had taken it, I would have played it the rest of the deployment. If I"d done that, it might explain why I am actually pretty good at the game now.
If I had taken it.
I got on the .300 Win Mag in late afternoon. The city I was looking out at was brownish-yellow and gray, almost as if everything was shaded the light sepia of an old photograph. Many, though not all, of the buildings were made of bricks or covered with stucco in this same color. The stones and roadways were gray. A fine mist of desert dust seemed to hover over the houses. There were trees and other vegetation, but the overall landscape looked like a collection of dully painted boxes in the desert.
Most of the buildings were squat houses, two stories high, occasionally three or four. Minarets or prayer towers poked out of the grayness at irregular intervals. There were mosque domes scattered around-here a green egg flanked by a dozen smaller eggs, there a white turnip glinting white in the sinking sun.
The buildings were packed in tight, the streets almost geometrical in their grid pattern. There were walls everywhere. The city had already been at war for some time, and there was plenty of rubble not only around the edges but in the main thoroughfares. Dead ahead of me but out of view was the infamous bridge where the insurgents had desecrated the bodies of the Blackwater contractors half a year earlier. The bridge spanned the Euphrates, which flowed in an inverted V just south of my position.
My immediate concern was a set of railroad tracks about eight hundred yards from the building. There was a berm and a train trestle over the highway south of me. To the east, on my left as I looked out the window, the train line ran to a switching yard and station outside the main part of the city.
The Marine a.s.sault would sweep across the tracks, driving down and into an area from the Euphrates to a highway at the eastern end of the city, marked by a cloverleaf. This was an area roughly three and one-third miles wide; the plan was to move about a mile and a half deep to Iraqi Route 10 by November 10, a little less than three days. That might not seem like a lot-most Marines can probably walk that far in a half hour-but the path lay through a rat"s nest of b.o.o.by-trapped streets and past heavily armed houses. Not only did the Marines expect to be fighting literally house to house and block to block, but they also realized that things would probably get worse as they went. You push the rats from one hole and they congregate in the next. Sooner or later, they run out of places to run.
Looking out the window, I was anxious for the battle to start. I wanted a target. I wanted to shoot someone.
I didn"t have to wait all that long.
From the building, I had a prime view across to the railroad tracks and the berm, and then beyond that into the city.
I started getting kills soon after I got on the gun. Most were back in the area near the city. Insurgents would move into that area, trying to get into position to attack or maybe spy on the Marines. They were about eight hundred meters away, across the railroad tracks and below the berm, so probably, in their mind, they couldn"t be seen and were safe.
They were badly mistaken.