Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [109]
Our entire team rotated in and out of the room during the night, taking turns guarding the trucks, pulling observation duty, and resting or sleeping, but I didn’t hear them. I stared at the ceiling for a while, and my mind raced with the mad events of a single day. I had been on a killing spree for a week and had started this morning by shooting three people. Then I participated in bringing down the statue of Saddam, was interviewed on a major television network, posted sniper hides in hotel rooms, and had telephoned home to California from the hotel but received no answer, and now lay snug and safe in a comfortable bed. Still, it was too early to rein in my sniper mentality and start the transition back into being a normal human being, because as I had told Peter Jennings, the war wasn’t over yet. Finally, sleep pulled me down like an anchor.
For weeks I had been living in the rude conditions imposed by combat, sometimes catching a few winks sitting up but seldom being able to truly rest. Now I snored away the hours on clean sheets and dined in civilized surroundings. The press corps was over in the Palestine, which was a zoo, but the Sheraton, filled mostly with Iraqis who had left their homes for the safety of the hotel during the war, was as quiet as a library.
We spent four wonderful days in the hotel but knew that it couldn’t last forever. The streets were awash in looting and disorder, there was heavy fighting still going on elsewhere in the county, and even in Baghdad, and our unit was bound to be given new orders soon. But after several days of being able to watch the news on television, I realized that despite the fighting elsewhere, the Iraqis no longer could mount anything that remotely resembled an organized force against us anywhere in this country. If there was any fight left in them, it was up to the fedayeen or the ousted thugs of the Ba’athist regime or the imported foreign fighters, because the regular army had been utterly destroyed.
On April 13, the battalion headquarters moved across town to an eight-story government building. It was no Sheraton, but it had electricity and was so spacious that each of us had a private room, giving us the first true privacy we had experienced since leaving the United States in January.
The new headquarters building was surrounded by a high wall, and just beyond that wall, Baghdad was disintegrating. Everywhere I scanned with my scope and rifle, looting and disorder rampaged on a scale comparable to the war itself. Inevitably, our battalion, an elite combat unit, had to be turned into policemen.
We were not law enforcement personnel. Instead of destroying a heavily armed force of trained enemy soldiers, we were dispatched to run around like rent-a-cops through utterly crazed city streets. Instead of smash-mouth fighting, we were suddenly thrust into opaque security and sustainment operations. The lean-and-mean American military force that had raced through Iraq did not have enough people to put a policeman on every corner in every city in Iraq. And the powers that be had not expected this swift and total disintegration of civil order, nor that it would last as long as it did.
The Iraqis were tearing up everything, constantly fucking with each other, settling old blood feuds and defending their homes and families. Most of the time, we could watch from afar, for it was impossible for us to intervene in all of the flashpoints of violence that were usually one-on-ones being