Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper (13 page)

The roadside was littered with discarded Iraqi uniforms and weapons thrown away as the enemy soldiers vanished back into the city to become instant civilians. We passed the burned-out hulks of armored vehicles, but there was no gruesome carpet of maimed and shredded bodies. As our British friends noted, it was not an untidy battlefield. The fight had been a good sparring session to get our feet wet, but this was not the battle royal we were expecting.

That fight would fall to the British, and it would be another two weeks before they could enter the city, where many of the same Iraqi soldiers who had vanished at our approach had reappeared to fight alongside Saddam loyalists and fanatical fedayeen guerrillas. Vice President Dick Cheney had pledged, “We will be welcomed as liberators,” but Basra remained an untamed hornets’ nest, with the million-plus residents of the city hiding in their homes, waiting to see how it all turned out. Twelve years earlier, after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, they had responded to a call for revolt by President George H. W. Bush, only to have Saddam crush their rebellion with his usual cruel tactics and put Chemical Ali in charge. This time, the citizens were understandably wary.

Everyone was familiar with the visions of Iraqi soldiers surrendering en masse during Operation Desert Storm, but that was not happening this time. We had a real shooting war on our hands.

The danger was not confined to the rapidly shifting front line. With every turn of our wheels that moved us deeper into Iraq, the supply lines reaching all the way back to Kuwait became more stretched out and vulnerable. Enemy troops and irregular forces started chewing on those exposed convoys and slowed the vital river of ammunition, water, food, and fuel needed to maintain the forward momentum across the entire front.

Far behind us, hard fighting was going on in the important port town of Umm Qsar, which had been expected to fall like a ripe apple, and the British had stalled outside of a hostile Basra. To the west, the Army’s V Corps out in the desert was encountering heavy resistance around Najaf, and an entire squadron of Apache helicopters of the 101st Airborne would be shot up during a night raid close to Karbala. Plans for a two-front strategy crumbled when Turkey refused to let the sixteen thousand troops of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division cross its territory to enter Iraq from the north.

Iraq is as big as California, though, so what was happening in one section often was not even noticed elsewhere, just as a car wreck in Los Angeles is unknown in San Francisco. The sudden developments in other flashpoints of fighting would not have been good news, had we known about it, but we didn’t, so we kept moving. After Basra, our own battalion had to go hunting for the war.

We were part of an overall dash by the 1st Marine Division toward Baghdad, and we soon passed the junction where Route 8, the main highway running northwest out of Kuwait, split into Iraq’s two major highways, Routes 1 and 7, almost parallel corridors that would take us all the way to the capital. For us, things had been going well. We were trained to be nimble and move swiftly, and we were carrying enough of our own supplies to fight for several days, so despite shortages elsewhere, slowdowns, and ambushes, the advance, from where we sat, still had the shape of the proverbial irresistible force that had not yet met an object that could not be moved. We were making bold, breathtaking jumps forward into enemy territory, and lines of tanks, armored vehicles, Humvees, and trucks of every sort were thundering along the wide roads and through the untracked desert. Speed was our rule. Use your wheels.

It was still Sunday, March 23, the same day we had pulled out of Basra, and although we were exhausted, sleep was still not in the cards. The bright daylight seared our weary eyes by the time we pulled into a dispersal area some thirty kilometers east of the city of An Nasiriyah, a tangled sprawl of buildings and three hundred thousand residents near the southern end of Route 7.

Another Marine unit was tasked to go into the city and capture two bridges, and when they did, they crashed headlong into an unexpectedly strong force of Iraqi paramilitaries and fanatical fedayeen guerrillas who locked them into a blazing gunfight. The enemy
hid among civilians, so casualties among average citizens rose steadily during what became a bloody Sunday for both sides. The bridges eventually were captured, but at the cost of twenty-nine dead Marines and an unknown number of Iraqi casualties. Nobody had expected such fierce resistance.

Even before the Marines went in, an eighteen-truck supply convoy of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed when the drivers, exhausted after almost thirty-six straight hours on the road, somehow blundered into An Nasiriyah. Eleven of the soldiers were killed and seven more taken prisoner, including nineteen-year-old Private First Class Jessica Lynch from West Virginia.

We were only a few miles away from An Nasiriyah during the big fight but were not involved in it and didn’t even know about it until later. When our quartering party reached the dispersal area in advance of the battalion, we took a break to air out the vehicles, clean weapons, grab some chow, and wash our hands, feet, and faces. But only fifteen minutes after coming to a halt, Casey got the unexpected call to move out immediately, forcing us to throw our gear back together, gas up, reload the two trucks, and take off for the regimental headquarters. We were about to roll out on a daring and dangerous mission into bad-guy territory and would not see our battalion again for four days.

Gunner Chris Eby, a weathered veteran of twenty-two years in the Corps, was the gruff leader of the regimental quartering party, and he assembled the advance teams of all the battalions to move forward as a single unit and find a place large enough to accommodate all of Regimental Combat Team 7—three combat battalions and the attached engineer, reconnaissance, tank, and artillery units—so
we would all be together for the next push. The Secret Squirrels of the intelligence teams once again thought that they had pinpointed the location of Saddam Hussein’s powerful and elusive Medina Division, and we were going after them. The powerful division, which was said to have perhaps two hundred tanks, hundreds of heavy artillery pieces, and maybe up to ten thousand men, officially was named the “Medina the Luminous Division,” and we intended to illuminate it even more.

Casey and I returned to our trucks after the briefing and told the guys we were about to hit the road again.

“Speed is the thing here,” Casey emphasized.

“Where are we going?” someone asked.

Casey unfolded a map on the hood of his Humvee and explained that we would be going 175 miles farther up the road, to the railroad city of An Numaniyah, where we were to cross the Tigris River. He pointed to a spot and said, “That will put us seventy-five miles from Baghdad.”

He did not have to explain that making a leap of 175 miles through enemy-held territory would be a dangerous undertaking, but looking around at our traveling buddies made the task at least seem possible. This was no lightly armed Jessica Lynch convoy, for we had about thirty hardback Humvees, manned by combat Marines carrying everything from machine guns to antitank missiles and radios that could put us in instant touch with aircraft. Gunner Eby, who drank more coffee than the tasters at Maxwell House, would lead the parade, and he intended to roll right through any enemy ambush with guns blazing and not stop until we were at our destination.

This was no meandering, touristy jaunt through the interesting countryside of the Euphrates Valley, but deadly serious business. We
were trying to lead the regiment into position for a huge fight with one of the major divisions guarding Baghdad.

The weather was perfect for a long Sunday drive, and during the first part of the trip, we barreled along the six-lane highway at about fifty miles per hour, and cool wind blew through the windows. As haggard and sleepless as we were, we had to stay awake and alert, and it was on this stretch of deserted highway that I noticed for the first time that Jerry Marsh, Casey’s gunner, was no ordinary mortal. In my truck, the boys took turns standing in the machine gun turret as we jounced over the long miles. But in Casey’s Humvee, Marsh just stood there, locked in position behind his gun. He would keep that position hour after hour, day after day, with bugs hitting his face and sand grinding his eyes, knowing that if anyone was going to die, it was most likely going to be him. He reminded me of Granny tied into her rocking chair atop the Beverly Hillbillies’ truck. With his exceptional eyesight, it was good to have him up there.

We had made about seventy-five miles when the speed factor vanished at a narrow bridge across the Euphrates River, where we hit a traffic jam of colossal proportions and came to a grinding halt. The sun was setting by the time our turn came to cross, and it took another forty minutes to get over and regroup. The blue canopy of sky changed into soot darkness, so we went to night vision goggles and rolled on into uncharted territory.

The good road gave way to construction as we struck out almost due north, and our speed dropped off dramatically to a maximum of fifteen miles per hour. We were passing fewer and fewer other vehicles, and the fields around us were deserted, eerily dark and quiet. This wasn’t good. Where the hell was everybody? Trigger fingers rested on guns.

Midnight came and went and still we drove, and sleep pulled at
our eyelids. About two o’clock on Monday morning, March 24, one of our tracked vehicles bogged down in a marshy area beside the road. When we stopped to pull out, a heavily camouflaged Marine from a Force Recon platoon materialized out of the surrounding darkness and wanted to know what the hell we were doing up here.

“Moving north,” Gunner Eby told him.

“You guys know there’s nobody in front of you?” asked the Marine with the blackened face. His team was scattered about at the northernmost edge of the advance, and he said they did not know what was going on farther up the road.

Somehow we had jumped to the lead position of the entire Marine advance and were basically out on our own. That was only a minor concern to Gunner Eby, so he thanked the Recon dude for the information and cranked us up again.

Sleep was quickly forgotten as we moved deeper into the unknown. There were no stars, and we heard helicopters buzzing overhead, heading for targets up ahead. We waited expectantly for a sharp crack of gunfire or the sudden blast of an ambush, but none came.

Eby kept us rolling for two more hours before pulling us to a stop. We were so far out on a limb that we could no longer even see the tree, but both Casey and I argued that we should keep on pushing.
We dont know where everybody else is, but we know where we are, so let’s keep moving!
Gunner Eby rightly ignored us. It was senseless to step much farther into the great void without supporting forces; the last person we had seen was that lone Marine advance scout, and he was now far behind us.

Except for our radios, we were out of contact with any friendly units, isolated and exposed. All of a sudden, those thirty Humvees bristling with weaponry didn’t seem quite as powerful as before. If we were
jumped by a bunch of enemy tanks and troops tonight, we would put up a hell of a fight but stood a good chance of being annihilated.

Nevertheless, I had reached the end of my rope. Our convoy coiled into a defensive position beside the road, and guards were posted, but I passed out in my seat even before my Humvee coasted to a stop. For the first time since Kuwait, I got more than forty-five minutes of shutdown time, and the boys had mercy on an old man and let me sleep.

Fortunately, our luck held and nothing happened while we were parked out there on our own beside the road in the middle of the Iraqi night. I awoke two hours later, at daybreak, to see the Abrams tanks and the Amtracs of the 5th Marines grinding past, which meant the big boys had caught up and we were no longer alone. I got out and stretched, feeling as if I had been asleep in a cushy hotel bed for a week.

Thousands of Marines and hundreds of vehicles were pounding through the red grit in the brilliant light of a clear morning. Gunner Eby received orders from our own regimental headquarters, still far back down the road, to tuck into the 5th Marines column for a while. We got back on the road.

Desert sandstorms are not weather phenomena but evil things that rise up from hell. One of the extra-large variety brewed up and dropped on us on Monday, March 24, and the war came to a halt. The sheer power of the hurricane of dirt made all of our weapons look puny by comparison. When those breezes start to whisper against your ear, you had better take shelter and button up, for you won’t be going anywhere for a while, and you are going to come
out of the experience feeling like sand has been ground into your very soul.

We had begun to feel cocky because of the speed of our midnight ride and believed that the Iraqis could not stop us. We thought that nothing could. We were wrong.

Our convoy was taking a maintenance break when the first gentle breezes began to hum around the vehicles, raising the talcumlike loose sand and swirling it about in small funnels of dirt. The velocity increased, more sand jumped into the air, and visibility fell as dirt colored the sky. Within a few hours the wind was howling, and the giant sandstorm covered everything in the Euphrates River Valley. There was nothing to do but button up and stay put until the storm passed, because telling directions had become impossible.

Our heavy Humvee was being rocked on its springs by the wind, and from my seat in front I couldn’t see a damned thing. I lowered goggles over my eyes and wrapped a thick bandana around my mouth, but it made no difference. Sand seeped into every crevice, including those in my body, and choked me with tiny dunes that piled up at the back of my throat. We shut the trucks tight and stuffed rags into every crack, but the harsh wind, keening at a banshee pitch straight out of a Halloween movie, seemed to push sand right through metal.

Outside it was worse, but a few Marines had to be out there on security patrols, and their exposed flesh was lashed with whips of grainy sand. Risks increased with the bad weather, and all along the line, dreadful accidents happened. A guy fell from an Amtrac and had to lie injured in the swirling storm because medical evacuation was impossible. A tank drove off a bridge and plunged into the Euphrates, drowning its crew, and no one knew about it until the next day. A bulldozer ran over two sleeping men, killing one and severely injuring the other.