Generation Kill - Evan Wright [52]
Beneath it all, Sutherby is basically a family man. He and his wife have four kids of their own and provide foster care to as many abused and neglected children. “I enjoy my family,” he says. In fact, he calls his M-40 sniper rifle “Lila,” which stands for “Little Angel,” his nickname for his youngest daughter.
Sutherby and Lila get their first kill at about three o’clock in the afternoon. While nearby Marines in Alpha pour fire into buildings and windows across the river, where they think there are enemy gunmen, Sutherby and his spotter observe an Iraqi man in what they describe as “black pajamas,” behaving suspiciously in an alley. He’s about 400 yards distant (for some reason, while the rest of the Corps is metric, snipers still do everything in yards), and he seems to be watching the Marines through a pair of binoculars.
Sutherby and his spotter crouch behind a low brick wall. He props Lila on a sandbag for stabilization and watches the Iraqi in black pajamas for a good ten minutes. Every time mortars boom on the Marines’ side of the river, the Iraqi steps out in the alley. On his last trip out, Sutherby takes a chest shot.
Sutherby seldom gets to see the results of his work. As soon as he takes the shot, the recoil jiggles his scope, blurring his vision. But his spotter, a twenty-two-year-old, Corporal David Raby from Nashville, Tennessee, sees the man go down. A minute later another Iraqi steps into the same alley with a pair of binoculars, perhaps even those from the man Sutherby just shot. He takes out the second guy with another chest shot.
After another hour, Sutherby and Raby see a man in an alley who has binoculars and a cell phone or radio. He is 500 yards away, and more careful than the first two. He appears every fifteen minutes or so, popping his head out from around a corner. Sutherby and Raby are forced to wait half an hour until the guy lingers long enough to get a clean shot. By this time, Sutherby’s eyes are fatigued. He rests on Lila’s stock, with his eyelids closed, until Raby says, “Sutherby! You see him?”
Sutherby opens his eyes and kills the man. It’s a perfect head shot. In fact, Sutherby has the rare satisfaction of seeing the kill. The man’s hands jerk up to his face while he tumbles forward.
Sutherby doesn’t think about much in the way of philosophical or spiritual matters when he’s killing people. The only things going through his mind are “shot geometry, yardage, wind.” After his third kill, however, he does take pleasure in noting a marked decline in enemy mortar fire.
BY FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON, the smoke and dust are so thick, our position by the bridge at Nasiriyah is engulfed in a sort of permanent twilight. Finally, after being absent for the past two hours, helicopter gunships—both Cobras and Hueys—show up. They nose down over a palm grove across the road, taking passes with rockets and machine guns, spitting out white smoke trails and red tracer streaks. Fireballs bloom from the trees below. The 20mm machine guns fired by the Cobras are beyond loud—you can feel the buzzing sound they make deep in your chest. The Hueys, which are shaped like tadpoles, fire lighter machine guns operated by door gunners. You’ve seen Hueys in just about every Vietnam War movie ever made, as they were a staple of the U.S. military in that conflict. Seeing them now, flying over the flaming palm grove, it suddenly feels like we’ve stumbled onto the set of Apocalypse Now.
As if on cue, Person leans out the window of his Humvee and starts singing a Creedence Clearwater Revival song, a Vietnam anthem. Then he stops abruptly. “This