Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper (19 page)

Casey goes over a wall in Az Zafaraniyah.
(Courtesy of Gary Knight)

A column of smoke from an air strike rises on the far side of the Diyala Bridge.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)

The Diyala Bridge, with the body of an Iraqi fighter.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)

The new bridge we built across the Diyala River.
(Courtesy of Gunnery Sergeant R. P. Simpson)

The statue of Saddam Hussein, as seen between U.S. Marines, moments before it is pulled down.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)

Cheering Iraqis gather before the statue falls.
(Courtesy of Staff Sergeant B. R. Bochenski)

Iraqis with Casey’s flag at the base of the fallen statue.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)

Lieutenant Colonel McCoy (center) and Sergeant Major Howell at a memorial service for fallen Marines in Iraq.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan

Jack is presented his Bronze Star by Major J. M. Baker, 29 Palms, California.
(Courtesy of Lance Corporal H. E. Laredo)

As a sniper, you are supposed to be coldhearted and must be able to control yourself, no matter what is going on. But you are still human. If you don’t have feelings and emotions, then you step over the line and are just a psychotic killer. It can be a difficult balancing act.

No one was allowed inside my head while I worked, and I had spent almost twenty years building my invincible gunslinger persona, and I never let my guard down in front of anybody, not even Casey. It was okay for me to bitch about other things, but I always stopped short of exposing any personal feelings.

So although I listened to other people’s problems on a daily basis out in the field, there was really nobody there for me, which was as it should be. Now there probably was no one at home, either. We all have a private room in our soul for our deepest secrets, but I have a whole warehouse down there in which I keep my personal stuff, because I carry so much of it. Since I had no control over what might be happening back home, I put my girls safely on a shelf that was out of harm’s way and turned my growing anger and frustration onto the soldiers of Saddam Hussein, closing off any thoughts other than those directly related to where I was and to my job. Life was easier when my worldview was narrowed to what I could see.

So far in this war I had fired six shots and had six kills, exactly the right ratio. I considered the ill-trained, poorly led soldiers of Iraq to be hamburger in my scope, practically begging me to kill them, and I was more than ready to grant that wish.

Then came the second slice of Sunday-morning bad news, and we learned that the war was about to grind to a dead stop for three full weeks! Coalition forces all across Iraq were to stop in place for a twenty-one-day “operational pause” to refit and secure the exposed
lines of supply. McCoy was summoned to take a helicopter back to regimental headquarters for an official briefing.

We were stunned and almost felt the earth tilting beneath our boots, because we could not understand the reasoning behind the decision. We still had plenty of supplies and had just ripped through four towns in a single day to kick open a vital supply line. So what was the problem? To us, stopping made no sense at all, but orders are orders.

Now we believed that dusty, nowhere Al Budayr on Route 17 was to be our home for the next month, so we planned to go back into the town and set up shop in the old Ba’ath Party offices. McCoy could be the mayor for a while, and we could erase all traces of the Saddam regime. We would saturate the area with patrols for security, maybe reopen schools, get the utilities running, and prove to the locals that the dictator and his men were no longer to be feared.

It was a good hearts-and-minds program, but I found it all to be totally depressing. My boys were trained as scouts and snipers, not carpenters or bricklayers, and we had come to fight, not to occupy. Yes, we wanted to help the people, but we also needed to get on with the real job. Having my boys put down their rifles to do reconstruction work would be like hitching up a thoroughbred racehorse to pull a beer wagon.

And personally, the sooner I finished in Iraq, the sooner I could get back home, and a lot could be happening back there in an extra thirty days, none of it good. I was struggling to keep apart the two phases of my life, the professional and the personal.

Thank God that op-pause nightmare only lasted a few hours.

I was checking the Main’s defenses when Gunnery Sergeant Don Houston came running up with good news. “Jack!” he announced with a big smile. “It’s off!”

“What’s off?”

“The stupid fucking op-pause. I just heard it on the radio.”

“No shit?” I thought he was trying to be funny, and I was in no mood to get excited about a joke.

“No shit, Jack.” He threw a little jab at me, tapping my shoulder. “You get to kill more people tomorrow.” I could almost feel the monkeys jumping off my back.

Immediately we went back to being Marines instead of administrators. We received orders to collect the noncombat battalion units that we had stripped off for the Afak Drills, then move up to the big cloverleaf intersection and prepare to attack into Ad Diwaniyah.

As we returned along Route 17, small groups of civilians emerged from their homes to wave, a hopeful sign that they were beginning to believe that Saddam and his thugs were finally gone and that they could perhaps have a brighter future. I was riding atop the Humvee, with my rifle across my lap, watching them watch us, when among those standing in the crowd outside of Afak I recognized someone: straight black hair, light-blue-and-white-striped shirt, greenish-brown pants, white shoes, and a big mustache. It was the guy who had been down in the street, the man I had come within a kitten’s whisker of killing. He saw me, too, and there was a strange moment of recognition as our eyes locked and he looked at the big sniper rifle. I patted the weapon and gave him a look of “Man, you don’t know how lucky you are.” He returned a look that seemed to say he understood how-close he had come to dying, and then gave a slight nod, perhaps a silent “Thanks for sparing me.”

Over the next twenty-four hours, the 5th Marines pulled out of Ad Diwaniyah, heading farther north. Our first units arrived at the
cloverleaf before their final trucks left, so there was no break in the chain.