Generation Kill - Evan Wright [51]
But before he can take any action, three mortars explode nearby on the western side of the structure. The Iraqi disappears as Scott and his men take cover. Then rounds slam into the ground all around them. Scott’s men try shooting. His M-4 jams on a double feed—two rounds stuck in the chamber—and a SAW gunner’s weapon also malfunctions, popping off just one round at a time. Another gunner on his team succeeds in laying down a steady bead of fire.
About this time they notice that all the red tracers streaming in at them are coming from the west, where Marines from Task Force Tarawa are hunkered down. The mini-firefight is Marines shooting at Marines.
Scott’s men stop shooting, as do the Marines firing at them in the distance. In his diary that night, Scott writes a considerably more concise and less florid entry than his previous ones: “Combat was not what I expected. How we all made it out without a scratch is beyond me.”
IN ADDITION TO THE PROBLEM of friendly fire, Patterson’s Alpha Company snipers on the riverfront are dealing with the ambiguities of guerrilla war, not covered in the Marine Rules of Engagement. The ROE under which the Marines operate are quite naturally based on the assumption that legitimate targets are people armed with weapons. The problem is Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes who are armed not with guns but with cell phones, walkie-talkies and binoculars. These men, it is believed by the Marines, are serving as forward observers for the mortars being dropped into their positions.
Mortars are a weapon of choice for the Iraqis. A mortar is a rocket-propelled bomb that is launched from a tube that’s about a meter long. The mortar rocket itself is about the size and shape of a bowling pin. It fires out of the tube almost straight up, then arcs down and explodes—anywhere from one to six kilometers away. Even the smaller mortars used by the Iraqis will, when they hit, scoop out about a meter-wide hole in the ground and spray shrapnel for twenty-five meters in all directions. A direct hit from a mortar can disable the biggest American tank, or blow the fuck out of a Humvee.
Since mortars are small and light, they can be moved around easily and fired from rooftops, trenches, alleys, even from the backs of pickup trucks. Even better from the enemy’s standpoint, you can’t tell which direction they’re being fired from. They might be five kilometers away in a trench behind a house or an apartment block.
But since mortar crews are so far away and usually out of sight, they rely on forward observers. These characters tend to hang out near Marine positions with binoculars, cell phones or radios. They watch where the mortars are landing and call back to the guys shooting them to tell them how to adjust their fire. Those who appear to be observers in Nasiriyah are unarmed, dressed in civilian clothes and blend in with the population.
During the first hour by the river, Marine snipers had to request permission up the chain of command to get “cleared hot” to shoot suspected forward observers. Killing unarmed civilians is a dicey issue, but eventually the Marine snipers are given permission to take out Iraqis with binoculars or cell phones on the other side of the river.
Marine snipers work in two-man teams, a shooter and a spotter. One of the best teams in Alpha Company is led by thirty-nine-year-old Sergeant Ken Sutherby, originally from Michigan. Sutherby looks and talks exactly the way you’d expect a Marine sniper to. He is tall and gaunt, with unblinking, pale-blue eyes, and speaks in a dry, almost airless voice. His laconic mannerisms are no doubt reinforced by the fact that Sutherby is slightly hearing impaired. He carefully scrutinizes anyone speaking to him in case he misses a word. When you get to know him, he emerges as something of a character, like a vaguely improbable figure in an Elmore Leonard crime novel.
Sutherby